White Washing Guilt

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1990: IIT KGP:

White Washing Guilt

Prof V Radhakrishnan from Palghat was a dear friend of mine. He was one of the most widely-read gents and had a fund of jokes, both green and yellow, and a hilarious way of telling them.

And he could never suffer fools gladly and had a caustic way of silencing them.

During my father's times there was this rather prevalent custom in our families of marrying one's sister's daughter if she was of a suitable age. 

Because she belonged to a different gotra.

Dr HNA was once ridiculing this South Indian custom. He was from Bikaner, Rajasthan (where they strangle their girl children as soon as they are born, and their widows undergo unwilling sati abolished in Bengal by Raja Ramamohan Roy a couple of centuries ago :)

Once Dr HNA was bursting out laughing:

"How can I marry my sister's daughter? HOW CAN I? She is like MY own daughter!"

Prof VR came back at once thus:

"I didn't know incest is so prevalent in Rajasthan!"

Dr HNA's face fell and that was the end of his taunts...

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And later on I was living in Qrs C1-97, a huge bungalow with a huge hall, two bedrooms, kitchen, front verandah; all with a sky high ceiling no broom could reach.

And every five years or so the free compulsory white-washing ritual was on.

One fine evening the contractor along with his supervisor and two laborers would arrive and announce:

"Tomorrow is the due date for white-washing your Qrs "

Which meant that the supervisor would arrive early next morning with his two laborers, upset everything in the house...furniture, book shelves, kitchen shelves; and dawdle for the next eight duty hours and would go away leaving us to pick up the ruins and clean the floors, mirrors, electric boxes, and the droppings on the tables, chairs and sofas...a veritable mess.

And I would have to take leave to aid and comfort my wife. And miss my lecture classes, a thing I hated to do.

And I would ask the contractor to come on a Sunday and he would spit out his betel juice aside and say that Sundays are compulsory holidays for laborers in our Marxist regime.

And I would wait out and allure the supervisor with private payment if he could bring four competent laborers and finish the entire job of white-washing, cleaning, rearranging the furniture...all in four hours while I would be relaxing with my wife under the backyard mango tree.

And after much haggling the supervisor's bill would come to a whopping Rs 700, which I could ill afford being perennially hard up.

During one of those trying seasons, it was the beginning of the ten-day Durga Puja holidays when the campus would be deserted...the Bengali families traveling out on their Leave Travel Allowance to far off places. But we South Indians would stay put since our home-travel would alone consume four days in trains. And all the students except those preparing for the Inter-IIT Sports Meet would also leave.

...And I was walking pensively to the campus post office to drop a letter into the narrow mouth of the huge red box grounded on the post office front yard.

And I found to my delight a number of hundred rupee notes lying scattered one after the other on the approach road to the red giant.

And I counted and found that they were all of Rs 700...

And I pocketed them sensing that they were god-sent on my white-washing mission. 

But I was racked with a guilty conscience...

Just then I found Prof VR walking up to the post box. And I explained to him my quandary. 

And he came up with this sage counsel:

"Why should you feel guilty? After all the money is meant for white-washing a government bungalow...not your own house. You may be leaving that Qrs for another anytime soon and you won't be taking those whitened walls with you but leave them to your successor. The sloppy gent who lost his cash was on his way to this post box. So he will be returning (if he likes) to this post box looking for his lost cash. So all you have to do is to scribble a message on a piece of paper in small letters and paste it at the bottom of this post box. 

The legend on the paper should read:

'Person who lost his cash may get it back upon visiting Qrs C1-97 within two days after quoting the numbers on his/her currency notes correctly.' "

...Rest is silence, as Hamlet said...

:)

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