He lived on the cusp of the City and the Cantonment. If you're an old Bangalorean, especially a choleric fellow, you'll sarcastically wonder if this means he lived in a PWD tent inside Hudson Circle; if not, you'll sigh exasperatedly, and think, here we go again with the bungalows and trees.
About the young man in question, you see, one set of his grandparents had lived in Basavangudi and the other, just off Coles Road. All four were gone now, but this made him quite unique, a true blue Cuspy Puppy. In a town apparently named for beans, he was getting his fix of baked beans on one end and avarekai saaru on the other.
He leaned towards the baked-beans end himself, for he lived on the little street next to Khuddus Saheb Burial Ground, well in the heart of the Cantonment. His home was a sparrow's nest, with its wooden threshold and low roof. But his parents still lived about five minutes from Vani Vilas Circle. If anyone now asks, do you mean old Bangalore-ean (as in resident of the Bangalore of yore) or old (as in ancient) person living in Bangalore, I will say, Ha ha ha, stale joke, and don't teach your grandma to suck eggs.
What is interesting about him is a fine question to ask, and here's what I would answer: Well, this. That one winter's night, at about 3 am, wearing his legal black coat and trousers, he was kissed by a fellow court clerk, also in black coat and trousers, beneath a streetlamp at the end of Victoria Road. The year was 1980. The fog was yellow beneath that streetlamp, and they were both cold and deeply warm at the same time. A huddle of street dogs lay asleep nearby and squealed in their dreams. There was not a single other soul around. Save one.
This kiss was spotted by a fifteen-year-old girl, squashed into an Ambassador with a bunch of friends, on her way back home from an illegal party she had attended. Illegal only because of her youth and worried parents; the drugs those days were still innocent and indigenous.
The Ambassador raced by at 50 km per hour and she craned her neck right around to double-check, because she couldn't believe what she was seeing beneath that streetlamp. She was the sole witness to this kiss and held onto it for years.
The kiss, like all things animate and not, had a starting point. Rajesh Rao, for that is the name of our protagonist, had studied law at National College and found himself employed at Mayo Hall, shuffling files, writing postcards, demanding due process. In his free time, he liked to read poetry and history. T S Eliot's The Waste Land lay by his bedside, for he felt Eliot and he were kindred spirits as, while they both loved letters, in the prosaic world they were file-shufflers, the one in Lloyd's Bank, London, the other in Mayo Hall, Bangalore.
Rajesh was also something of a pedant who liked to correct people's pronunciations (when pronunciation was pronounced pro-nounce-iation, he lost his marbles a bit), visit places of historical interest in Bangalore, and understand the references in Eliot. That he hadn't loosened up enough to sing or dance was cause for some concern, but that Eliot had embedded Prajapati's Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata into the fifth part of his poem gave Rajesh a special thrill and he often mulled over those lines in the elegiac ending, What the Thunder Said.
He moved into the sparrow's nest, thinking this is what a young single man ought to do in the '80s. His parents, who had been secretly worried about his propensity for reading and contemplation, were pleased that he was getting on in the world, settling down and very shortly would begin asking him about marriage.
Then, one day, as he sat on the Mayo Hall steps eating a Fanoos roll, thinking that his body could well be a metaphor for a wasteland and staring at the pink-and-white temple-flower tree in the park opposite, a voice floated down to him.
‘That's Krumbiegel, he planned the trees in Lal Bagh.’
What? He looked swiftly up at the voice, straining his neck in the bargain. Ouch. What did you say?
A lovely young man in a white cotton shirt, open at the throat, stood etched across the blue of that day's sky like a very-sure-of-himself Arjuna about to shoot an arrow into the spinning silver eye of a fish.
‘I saw you looking at that temple flower tree. It must be about 100 years old. And the statue there? That is Krumbiegel.’
Almost immediately, Rajesh snapped: ‘No, that's not. This is Ferdinand Kittel and he was an Indologist, not a botanist.’
‘Oh, okay, maybe. I don't know, but they're both German. And anyway, Krumbiegel is the reason for that tree's existence.’
When you think about it, most epic romances, Laila and Majnu, Dagwood and Blondie, Lady and Tramp, have the oddest beginnings and quite unlikely couplings.
For that's how Rajesh Rao's world and head were blown wide open and his body stopped being a wasteland. In the time it took him to finish his roll, which had turned into sawdust at the sight of that throat, he was informed by an over-confident stranger that the German botanist, Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel, was the reason why the Bangalore trees seemed to move from colour to colour a month or so after Sankranthi. First, the yellow of the Tabebuia argentea, and last, the pinks of the December bloomers, Tabebuia rosea. But mostly, he knew that his new friend also donned a black coat and black trousers every day and made his way past the typewriters and notaries up the Mayo Hall steps.
The stranger learned nothing about Kittel from Rajesh, not that day anyway, but so charmed was Rajesh, so blown away by throat and gloat, that he never mentioned his own lonely visit to Krumbiegel's gravestone in the Hosur Road cemetery.
The neck massage happened later that evening, back at the sparrow's nest.
The girl had a starting point, too. She began as a brief and passionate encounter in a car on the road between Sankey Tank and Cauvery Theatre. Or, if you wanted to go even further back, her paternal grandfather started far, far away in Rawalpindi and journeyed to Ludhiana and then onwards to love and an Austin Seven by the Bay of Bengal, and her maternal grandfather travelled from East Godavari to Bangalore and, yes, love. The grandmothers, for some reason, just stayed put, no journeying for them, those days. (Regarding the issue of cars, many years ahead she will realise that cars had been quite the theme in her life and will invest in an old blue Packard Clipper.)
Finally, after all the journeying it took for her to be a twinkle in two people's eyes in a car on the road between Sankey Tank and Cauvery Theatre, she was born at St. Martha's Hospital and raised beneath a suspended mosquito curtain in a little house near Benson Cross. Then she ended up in convent school thanks to the good offices of a Christian friend of her father, and there she stayed, stuck between logarithms and eternal boredom, till the moment of the kiss.
So her world too, at least according to her, was a miserable wasteland of dry convention and rank habit. You see, the day before the kiss, she had been peeling back gulmohar sepals and sticking them onto her nails to turn herself into a femme fatale, thinking, there is no way out, there never will be.
Mrs Braganza had been droning on about upcoming graduation. Her friends, who were all discussing the white sarees they would wear for graduation, were pretty sure about hanging around college for a few years and then marrying suitable Bangalore boys. She had no such desire and often fantasised about travelling the country as a driver of Ashok Leyland trucks. This seemed romantic to her and a cheap way to travel.
Then, she got caught in hectic rehearsals for The Monkey's Paw, the nun's choice for the Annual Day play, said yes to a party with an older bunch of college students who had come in to help with the play, lied to her parents about studying at a friend's house, and ended up coming home at 3 am in an old black 1960s Ambassador with a faulty clutch plate. Nothing was ever the same again after the kiss.
So, technically, two worlds blew wide open. And that's better than none.
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This story, reproduced with permission, first appeared in the author’s collection Bangalore Blues, Little Jasmine Press, 2022.
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Kirtana Kumar is an actor, director, and film-maker based in Bengaluru. She writes on theatre and film and has been published in national papers and magazines. She has a Master’s degree in European Classics and American Literature. She has received several awards and fellowships including from the McArthur Foundation and India Foundation for the Arts for her contribution to theatre and film. She is a trustee of Women Artists’ Group, runs the year-long Theatre Lab (Youth) and is co-owner of Infinite Souls Farm, a rural artists residency in Bangalore. Bangalore Blues, Little Jasmine Press, 2022, is her first collection of short stories.