the MIDDLE Path by Aniruddha Banhatti (howl and other poems TXT) 📖

A friend in need


IT IS my misfortune that I am very touchable. No,no, it is no misprint, I don't mean touchy, I mean touchable. One with whom making a touch is easy. English is a funny language. By making a touch I don't exactly mean making a touch, I mean bit¬ing the ear. But again, by biting the ear, I don't mean biting the ear, I mean getting in one’s ribs. By getting into one's ribs, I mean ~ and so it will go on. In a nutshell, I don't actually mean in a nutshell, I mean in two words, and what I mean is "bor¬rowing money”.

At the office my nick-name is Mr. Touchstone. As touching me is as easy as slicing butter with a sharp knife. Exactly opposite to me is a col¬league nicknamed Mr. Stonetouch. As touching him is as hard as the glint in the eyes of poet Keats when he saw a rainbow. One day Mr. Stonetouch scolded me roughly, or squarely, (as the English language will have it) just for being a touchstone for a borrower for fifty rupees.

Then out of a blue sky, actually the sky was grey and cloudy that day, the crisis hit me. I lost my job due to retrenchment. It was "minus four" budget, that is, the fourth -budget after the "zero budget”, and so the retrenchment. I sat down in my room and made a list of my "borrower” colleagues, with the amount borrowed by each. The grand total gave me great relief. I needed the money for hunting a new job, and the grand total was more than thrice the amount I needed. Then came the tricky business of getting the borrowed money back from my borrowers. People who can't pay try to make you feel guilty for asking the money back. At least that was my experience. So the total amount collected when the hat was circulated was less than one third the amount I needed.
Mr. Stonetouch, my colleague, watched my activities with in¬terest. I sounded almost apologe¬tic when I was demanding my own money back, without interest! Mr. Stonetouch patted me on the back and said, "Give me that list." He looked at the list. Saw what was the total amount collected, the remaining amount, opened his wallet, took a wad of notes, counted the amount and gave the counted notes to a surprised me. I counted the notes. It was the re¬maining amount I was so desper¬ately trying to collect. Mr. Stonetouch put his wallet back and said to me, "Don't worry, I will collect this amount from all your borrowers." With this, he turned to the colleague from whom I was trying to get my money back for the last half hour and said, with the already men¬tioned Keats-like hard glint his eyes, "When are you going to re¬turn my money? Remember now it is my money." The colleague wilted beneath Mr. Stonetouch's hard glinted stare and said,
"Er ... I will return it tomorrow. Definitely."

I thanked Mr. Stonetouch pro¬fusely. He again patted my back, he is a confirmed back-patter, and said, "Now do you understand the disadvantages of being Mr. Touchstone? It is better to be a Mr. Stonetouch. I have seen many a monsoon more than you. Don't you believe that old saying about a friend in need being a friend indeed. Instead, take my advice and take this new saying from me - A friend in need is no friend of mine!"
Now, Mr. Stonetouch is a very good friend of mine!


Early to bed


IT IS said that you take the good from anything and leave the rest. So from the saying "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” - I have taken the title. It's true the early bird gets the worm, but what about the early worm? Has anyone thought about it? The early-to-rise birds I know are the paperboys, milkmen, and a friend of mine, ¬a physical fitness fiend who can't stand tile size of a nice, rounded belly on anybody. Anil, the phys¬ical fitness f(r)iend of mine, gets up in the wee hours, drives to the ground in his tracksuit and jogs for half an hour, when right-thinking people like me are lost in sweet slumber.
When I got married, after a month or so, my wife started experimenting with her culinary skills. So, one by one, we started inviting my friends to dinner. At such din¬ners, my pot-belly - or a nice heal¬thy paunch, as I would like to call it - came under heavy criticism. My wife, like a politician, would
change party and join the Oppos¬ition. The Opposition consisted of Anil, his wife, Ashwini and now, my wife Manju. They discussed the when and how of my round tummy. Bursting with my food, under my roof, Anil said: "You should cut down on food. I didn't like the way you lowered gulabja¬mun after gulabjamun." Anil is one of those one-track fellows who think that if all the world jog¬ged, it would be a better, slimmer world.
The next evening saw Manju and self shopping for shoes, track¬suit, elastic hairband and cotton socks. Also an alarm clock. I slept fitfully with a sense of impending doom.
The alarm clock woke us up. I brushed, dressed, took a cup of tea, as jogging on a completely empty stomach was not recom¬mended, and started on my scooter to the ground where I was scheduled to meet Anil for my first jogging lesson. There was a thick
fog and before I knew what was happening, I bumped into the dim form of a paperboy who was riding a bike and both of us came down like a ton of bricks.
When I righted myself and then him, we were surrounded by his buddies, a group of paperboys. And though I was on the main road, and he had emerged from a by-lane, the fact that I was on a scooter and he on a bicycle, the mistake, it was argued by his bud¬dies, was mine. I had to pay him fifty bucks for repairs and only then was I set free from the gherao of bicycles. Depressed, I turned my dented scooter, which represented a dent of another hundred in my wallet, and returned home. This made me skeptical about 'early to rise'. It surely made somebody wealthy, but that somebody was not me.
The next morning in deference to the large amount of money spent on jogging accessories, again saw me scootering rather cautiously through the mist. I took a short-cut through a lane and the telephone people got me. They had a trench excavated and left it without any red lights. Only some red flags and written cautions on tiny boards, invisible due to mist. If I were driving speedily, I would have crossed the ditch with two great thuds, but since I was driving slowly, I got ditched. There was not a soul in sight to help me. After lying prone for what seemed like ages, I mustered strength, and with great pain, raised my scooter and returned home with a throbbing ankle which had already started swelling. Thus came additional expense of medication, loss of four days casual leave and a painful sprained ankle. This shattered my faith that early rising makes one healthy.


Eccentrics anonymous


When that impulse is upon you to perform an eccentric action next time don't get carried away by it - Join Eccentrics Anonymous.
Call upon a fellow eccentric.
Talk with him about your impulse. Let all spontaneity of your impulsive action be discussed and made look stale. Thus and thus only will you be spared the consequence of an irresponsible, momentary whim.
I don't know what got into me that day. As I was browsing through a file of various bills. I came upon an electricity bill that was vastly overcharged. About ten times the average bill.
Clearly a computer error. I had paid the• bill already and was thinking of asking for a refund.' At that moment the fan stopped. Here was the regular daily power failure. I became so hot both physically as well as psychologically that I forgot my prudent
Self, wrote a scathing letter full of sarcastic stuff and went in search of the office for refund.
The search proved to be a long one. First I went to the office where I paid my regular bills. They gave me the address of "Complaints Office"
The complaints office turned out to be about complaints about power failure. They directed me to a third office in the fourth comer of the city whence I was given the address of the next office. The name of this office gave me some hope as it was called "Re¬fund Division". This hope was strangled when a pan-chewing. visitor-spraying man sprayed me with pan juice, explained to me that it was the Deposit Refund Division and not the bill refund division.
Finally, I reached the new computerized "Bills Division”. Here, after standing in the queue for an hour or so the person behind the counter looked at my application for refund, refunded me that sarcastic prose I had written along with a printed form marked Refunds. I filled the form and sub¬mitted it.
After two months I got a letter stating that my application was being looked into and soon I will be receiving the corrected bill. And surely I did receive it, and it was a whopper. It was about a hundred times the average bill.
I had to pay it before asking for a refund again. I was flabbergasted.
If I asked for a refund again, I was sure to get a bill that was thousand times the average.
I paid that bill somehow, just in time to prevent my connection from being cut. Then I joined Eccentrics Anonymous.
Now; whenever I get an impulse to do a rash action. like reporting a theft at my house to the police, or reserving a plane ticket - over the phone, or traveling unre¬served during vacation period, I think twice, or even thrice.
And when the pressure to do something becomes too much, I go to one of my Fellow Eccen-trics, and we talk it over. He dissuades me from my thought and I am left undisturbed, inert but happy and sane in the chaotic, insane conditions around me.


Exercycling the muse


I DON'T remember whether I have told you about my gastro¬nomical career. Starting at an early age, I have taken love for food to new heights. I have honed eating into a fine art. Be it any kind of food, I like it all. The result - a body that will put the fattest politician to shame, and recently, a warning by the doctor. That's how the wheel less bicycle entered our house. I was required to shed some kilos and the exer¬cycle was suggested by the doctor in addition to the daily food cuts.
The first day I enjoyed the expe¬rience of cycling while staying in the same place. The continuous movement of the legs made a nice rhythm and helped me think unin¬terrupted thoughts about the uni¬verse, the life, and other deep matters.
The second day I thought up a complete short story with even the minutest details during the half hour of my exercise. It is another matter that I never put the story on paper. While bathing and toweling myself I