Mock Fights

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Mock Fights


A childhood friend visits a newly-weds’ tiny home, with a bedroll in his armpit, as an unbidden guest. He gets a warm welcome and shows no signs of quitting even after a week.

The shy couple hatch a plan: In the wee hours of the next morning the husband would beat up his wife who will cry loud and hoarse. The plan works wonders. The guest in the next room packs up his bedroll and quietly leaves without as much as a bye-bye.

The couple rejoice: husband boasting how wonderfully he pretended to beat his wife, and wife boasting how wonderfully she acted crying buckets.

And then the guest returns with his bedroll, he boasting how wonderfully he pretended to go away! (Story from ‘Chandamama’ circa 1955)

When I was a kid, we rented a house in our small town Down South. There was no power, the weather was always warm, and everyone slept out in the open. None of our family could sleep the first few nights: a loud and terrific family row would break out on opposite sides of the lane and would go on till daybreak, enacted by four families at either end of it. By and by we learned that the two ends of the lane housed resident traders; and this was their charming way of keeping awake by turns to hold marauding thieves at bay.

Our Faculty Hostel in the 1960s had a suave Manager, and an ebullient Bearer who went slightly ‘high’ from time to time. Whenever the Bearer was tipsy in the Dining Room, the Manager was summoned. He would barge in and scold the Bearer in lamentable curses, and the Bearer would retort cheekily. The Manager would then push the Bearer out and threaten to sack him on the spot; upon which, kindly freshers would plead with the Manager to show mercy on the Bearer and let him off with a stern warning. The Drama would be staged at regular intervals. The older residents were wiser and hardly intervened. The show between the two chums would go on; And on, much like Laurel & Hardy.

And then there was this young Lecturer. Within weeks of joining, he sailed forth and deliberately picked up needless quarrels with the Heads of all Service Sections. The day after his tantrum, he would go back and apologize in public handsomely, citing language barrier, culture divide, home sickness, and food habits; and charm them all with tall tales, jokes, free cigarettes and palmistry. In the couple of years of his short stay he got things done which we never could in a decade; and got a fond farewell.

My matchless Ph. D. guide, a world-renowned wizard in Theoretical Physics, but a novice in worldly affairs, somehow convinced himself that I could neither speak nor follow Bengali. So, he always spoke to me in chaste English. But his wife knew that I could not only follow but also blabber in Bengali with a ghastly southern accent.

This confusion often led to distress when I was in their Drawing Room working with him. Suddenly some personal domestic query would float across his mind and he would summon his wife and seek clarification. She would politely postpone the answer despite his repeated avowals that I knew no Bengali. I would then excuse myself and go out for a smoke and a cup of tea before returning.

A few days before they left the Campus for good upon his retirement, I happened to enter their Drawing Room to report the outcome of an errand that he entrusted to me. And found him and his wife in the midst of a heated debate about their mode of travel to Calcutta. I tried to excuse myself but he insisted that I sit still.

At one point he suggested to her in Bengali that all members of their family could travel to Cal in the truck they hired for transport of their luggage, for togetherness, and safety of the luggage. That was the last straw: Mrs Professor so lost her sublime cool that I was quivering in fear. A few long moments after she retreated haughtily into her Bedroom, he summarized and translated to me their discussion, with a straight face in one brief and naughty sentence:

"There seems to be some hitch with my plans of travel".