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

rose ¬day", a colleague says. The rose day! How she has forgotten. It was the same day many years ago when it all began. The handsome boy who is now her husband had given her a hundred red roses, no less, no more. And from that day onwards their affair had blos¬somed with the fragrance of roses and spread all around the college. Then came the marriage and the fragrance of roses was replaced by the aroma of cooked rice and dal from the pressure cooker.
"May I come in madam?"
It is the tall, handsome student from the final year civil engineer¬ing.
"Yes!"
"This is for you madam".
He hands her a long-stemmed yellow rose - a mark of respect and admiration! All through the day she keeps on thinking. How easily the red rose changes into the yellow. How easily love changes into respect. And then? May be the black rose? A mark of hate?
By two in the afternoon, the college is over. She waits for half an hour at the school and brings her son back. Till evening she has to wait alone, her son playing with the neighborhood kids in the ground below.
In the evening, the doorbell rings. She opens the door and to her surprise, her husband has brought a huge bouquet of red roses!
"Oh! Red roses! What's the occasion?"
"Don't you remember darling? This day it all begun. And I still love you the same way!"
She smiles. She brushes away her tears and puts her hands around his neck and presents him her lips like a blooming fragrant rose!


The next best thing to God


Some author has described how utterly helpless a housewife becomes in New York if there is a power failure of, say, half an hour. With us, in Pune, thanks to MSEB, it is no big deal. We have retained our contact with the primitive, so to say. But our dependencies differ. We are equally dependent on something, or shall I say someone else.
One morning 1 had my breakfast a la the cutlery reserved for guests. 1 hardly noticed it, being a man paying attention to the heart of the matter. Namely what was being consumed. Then came lunch time
I came home for lunch as usual.
The lunch was good. It melted in the mouth as usual, yes. But so¬mething was different. It was served in classy casseroles which adorned the table when some special persons had the pleasure of dining with us.
The afternoon tea saw me par¬taking in the special-occasion bone-china-set and the dinner brought out the best and the brigh¬test from the cupboard.
1 guessed the raison-de-etre.
"Is Radhabai A.W.O.L again?”
It was like removing the plug from a boiling volcano.
"That Radhabai! Who does she think she is? The Queen of She¬eba? or Sridevi?”
"Or may be Fergie having a vacation?”, I added fuel to the boiling lava.
"Now, all the pots and pans in the house ate over! Now I will have to start cleaning. I thought I will make her clean all these utensils, but she has out-utensiled my capacity. If only we can lunch out tomorrow----“
"Forget it. Shelve the thought," I said in a hurry, "It is the month-end, you know, I hardly have the money for commuting."
"Then it is sinkwards-ho!" said the better half bravely.
Two days passed and the tem¬pers got worse. It was decided to fire Radhabai, sack her permanently, the moment she crossed our threshold again.
On the third day, 1 was having a slightly, cocroachy smelling tea in a deaf cup, i.e. a cup without an ear, when Radhabai came at some 50 knots and crossed the thresh¬old.
"Radhabai, you are fired!" I thundered, the tea spilling all over me. She disregarded me completely and went towards the mountain of utensils in the sink and started sorting it out while pouring out her tale of woe.
And my wife, she was lending a sympathetic ear to Radhabai's fabricated reasons, instead of sacking her, and looking at her as if she were not actually God - but the next best thing to God!


Who is afraid of cholesterol?


I WOULD like to be on the Moon for the sole reason that my weight will be one-sixth of my present weight. This, of course, is a false satisfaction as my volume and girth will not change. The protruding mound of my belly which prevents me from seeing my own toes won't vanish. Pondering thus, I cancel the idea of going to the Moon entirely, and start ponder¬ing aloud on the weighty problem for the bene¬fit of my fellowmen and fellow-women who are obese. Obesity once was a virtue. Julius Caesar liked about him men who were plump and fat and suspect¬ed thin and haggard looking men, so tells the well known bard, Shakespeare, bless him! Though Shakes¬peare has not given us any clue about Caesar's tastes concerning women, we can safely assume that he preferred plump women to thin.
But all that is history. Let us take a look at the pre¬sent. Show me one thin man in politics, show me one minister without a paunch on him and I will eat my hat, though I don’t wear one! Indeed, it seems to be a rule in politics nowadays that the greater the diameter of a minister's tummy the greater the sphere of influence of his power. Everywhere we find overfed globular lards of fat wielding power in high positions. And all of them living happily without a tremor of the dreaded heart attack which seems to be wrongly asso¬ciated with obesity. The politicians set before us this example of high living and simple thinking. Their thinking is simple and can be summed up in one line, viz. "What's in it for me?" I sometimes wonder how a minister does not explode with his bloated and ever-expanding ego inside an equally bloated body. May be that is the reason. To contain an ego so bloated, the body required must be equally bloated. But I am wander¬ing from my subject. Let us leave the sinister mini¬sters and their doings to themselves.
My weight problem began after my marriage. Before marriage I used to be a lean and hungry looking bachelor. There came a soul's awakening look on my face when anybody invited me for home food. My best friends told me not to look so starved, famished. But I could not alter my map at will. At a buffet lunch once I met a plumpish girl and had to listen to her as I was eating, thus unable to speak, and before I knew it, we were engaged. She had cast her harpoon and caught a whale that look¬ed like a tinned sardine.
I wondered what she saw in me. After marriage she told me. She was very much impressed with my wristwork with the fork and the spoon, admired the speed and the absolute concentration with which I consumed my calories. It was as if she was watch¬ing some sacred ritual. In her family she was the only one with a healthy attitude towards food. Her father had peptic ulcers and her mother kept fast eight days a week in obeisance to one deity or the other. Her brother was a diabe¬tic. Hence after taking a diploma in catering, unable to express herself on the home front, she started a cate¬ring agency.

Of course I was appointed as the Royal Taster to taste the foodstuffs. After our marriage, she start¬ed expressing herself freely. Before marriage even if I ate like a starving python, I remained as thin as a starved serpent. After marriage, may be due to the security which my better half gave me, may be due to the love which she put in her cooking, I lost all my angularity and became a smooth-faced, round¬ bellied man.
Now I have developed a perfect hemisphere of a belly, have started wearing white clothes stitched by Omar, the tent-maker. Any moment now I will be snapped up in politics and start frequenting the oft mentioned corridors of power which I can only hope are wide enough to accommodate my body.

Till then I continue to be the technical advisor of the catering service run by my wife and go on beco¬ming more and more eligible for the post of some nigh official in one political party or another!


Woes of an author


SOME people think, while reading the last page comer of PunePlus with a smile on
their face, what an easy job it must be to write something like this. Take some current topic, like pot-holes on the roads, for example, sprinkle a little wit, add a lit¬tle humor, let it simmer in mild rage for five minutes, and lo! humor in jugular vein is ready!

But the path is not so smooth. It is as full of pot-holes as any road in Pune or, for that matter, in Maharashtra. First the author has to get solitude. If he has a better half, worse luck. If he is still in his worse half, better! Then he has to gather his writing mate¬rial. The glass, the bottle, ice-cubes, snacks, ciga¬rettes, ash-tray, and finally, pen and paper.

Then he has to start imbibing, hoping that inspi¬ration, which is such a difficult thing to catch hold of, will come to him. If after the first dose, it doesn't come, he has to take a second one. This is the dangerous stage. After the second one, the thoughts turn too Camusesque or Kafkaesque. They tend to wander to universal problems when they should be con¬centrated on how to fill the required foolscaps with light, witty material.

All this is applicable to the luckier of the breed, viz. the author who has authored only brain-children. The other of the breed, who has made the mistake of entering the married state, which Bertie Wooster describes as a fate that is worse than death, has lots of more problems. As soon as he has composed a good line in his mind and is about to jot it down on paper, his better half comes looking worse for the wear, with wet wheat flour on one of her hands and the child, which he has authored, crying like a ban¬shee, if banshee is the word I want, dangling from her other hand.
"How many times have I told you," his better¬ half yells at him, "that you take care of this cataclysm at least for half-an-hour during the enti¬re twenty-four hours, so that I can cook chapatis in peace?"

"1 don't know," the author answers the ques¬tion put to him straight-forward, without going into any side issues. "How many times?" he asks back.
"1 have lost count," yells his better-half.
"That's bad," says the author, "or we could have entered it in the Guinness Book of World Records.”
But the better-half has dumped the flesh and blood on the author's lap and thumped her way back to the kitchen.
"Papa, what are you drinking?"
"It is my. medicine."
"Papa, you have to take medicine every Satur¬day night?"
"Yes, Pintoo."
"Why don't you go to a good doctor? He will give you a beeg injection and you will be com-pletely well."
"No, Pintoo. I am very afraid of injections."
“He will give you a lollipop."
"Pintoo, now you shut up, get down from my lap and let me finish writing this."

Pintoo jumps down from the author's lap and while so doing upsets the table. The bottle and the glass drop to