Skip to main content

Pandey ji, Paplu, and Godman


Fiction

Pandey ji had become old enough to lose sleep over small things as well as very small things. As a younger man he knew how to make his students lose sleep. He was a teacher, a very strict one. Woe to any student who did not submit Pandey ji’s assignments on time. You could manage all other teachers somehow: an apology or a sprinkle of flattery or a “token of affection” – this last was a gift like a pen or something. “Ma’am, when I saw this in the shop I remembered you.” And ma’am forgives your lapse with the assignment. But Pandey ji was above all such temptations.

Students trembled at the very sight of Pandey ji. It is said that some students even passed urine in their trousers out of sheer fright if Pandey ji caught them for some error or mischief or negligence. If Pandey ji was the invigilator, no examinee would ever dream of indulging in any malpractice. Pandey ji kept an eagle eye on every student in the room. It was said that he had an X-ray vision that could see into the pockets of the students and detect any bit of wisdom that lay hidden there illegally in order to emerge stealthily with the intention of making its appearance on the answer sheet.

Once Pandey ji’s X-ray vision caught sight of the equations of motion on the thigh of a girl student who lifted the hemline of her skirt a little during the exam. Pandey ji rushed to the girl to catch her red handed, lifted her skirt, and stood stunned for a moment by the marmoreal exquisiteness of the fair and lovely thigh. In that one stunned moment of Pandey ji, the girl rubbed out the equations of motion from her thigh using a moist handkerchief. And then she insisted on filing a complaint against Pandey ji for molesting her.

Principal Sharma ji averted a catastrophe by shifting the blame to the hemline of the girl’s skirt which did not follow the length prescribed clearly in the student’s handbook. It is not that Sharma ji didn’t try a better strategy that would be more academic.

“Tell me the equations of motion,” Sharma ji asked the student.

“v = u + at; s = ut + 1/2 at2; v2 = u2 + 2as.” The girl rattled out effortlessly looking into Sharma ji’s eyes boldly and throwing a mocking glance at Pandey ji in between. Both Sharma ji and Pandey ji understood the situation in its real context.

The catastrophe was not averted altogether, however. The story of Pandey ji lifting the skirt of the most beautiful girl in the school under the pretext of checking an exam malpractice acquired lurid colours and the colours flew like live claws on the campus, claws that dug into Pandey ji’s upright heart. Pandey ji’s whole reputation for moral uprightness and righteousness that he had so carefully built up over three decades fell like a house of cards. Girl students started pulling down their skirts on seeing Pandey ji. Boys started putting their palms over their loins.

Pandey ji’s X-ray vision suffered an instant death. It did not even wait to experience a stroke. Pandey ji was no more a terror to his students. Equations of motion also ceased to be a terror to the students.

Pandey ji became terrified of girls after that. He did not dare to look into the eyes of girls anymore. Gradually he lost interest in morality and righteousness.

That is why Pandey ji did not want to interfere when he saw a Kamasutra dotted condom fall from his son’s pocket as he pulled out his handkerchief on his return from a business trip to Singapore. He merely made sure that his daughter-in-law did not see the condom. Explaining the presence of a condom in one’s trouser packet to a wife early in the morning wouldn’t have been too easy.

The son’s business trips increased eventually and the godman who lived in the nearby ashram became a frequent visitor to the daughter-in-law. The godman seemed to possess a divine vision which told him exactly when the husband would be away from home and for how many days. Nights, rather. The godman visited Shyamala only in the nights. Shymala was Pandey ji’s daughter-in-law who recently started taking a keener interest in beauty parlours.

Sleep was deserting Pandey ji these days. That is, nights. Pandey ji never had the foul habit of sleeping during days. He was too moral and righteous for that. As he lay awake in bed contemplating on the illusory nature of earthly pleasures, the marmoreal thighs of a young and beautiful girl would haunt him like a monstrous nightmare. It was in one of those nights he saw the godman walk out of the backdoor into the darkness of the Peelu trees that stood between the godman’s ashram and Pandey ji’s property.

Tonight is particularly ominous, thinks Pandey ji looking out the window before going to bed. The clouds look vexed. There is occasional lightning too.

The thunder rumbled restlessly as Godman put on his saffron robe. Just as he came out of the side door of the ashram, an intensely lustrous flash of lightning chose to fall on him. He got scared. Bad omen, he decided. He returned to his room and went to bed. Shyamala’s distant sighs lulled him to sleep.

Paplu was sure that Godman won’t venture out anymore. Paplu was Godman’s righthand man. His real name was Balgangadhar Deshpandey. Nobody called him that. Even he had forgotten that name. He was the cute Paplu to everyone including Godman. Paplu was good, honest, kind, gentle, and handsome too. He knew how to deal with the devotees. He handled the accounts of the ashram. He ran errands and bigger things for Godman. He knew everyone from the cook in the ashram to the Chief Secretary of the Prime Minister. Yet he was humble. Simple. Polite. Genteel.

Godman lay in his bed imagining Shyamala’s lovesick sighs.

Paplu picked up one of the many saffron robes that belonged to Godman and put it on.

The lightning refused to relent. The thunder rumbled on.

Pandey ji turns in his bed. He is unusually disturbed. There is a different sound from his daughter-in-law’s room today, he thinks. He listens. The spectres of marmoreal thighs metamorphose into sharp claws and threaten to dig into him. He gets up and goes to the window. The backdoor opens. A figure in saffron robe walks out into the backyard leading to the Peelu trees. The figure doesn’t look like Godman’s though it is wearing the saffron robe. Just then a flash of lightning falls with brilliance. Pandey ji may be an old man with wrinkled dugs, but his vision is still clear.

“Paplu, have you too become a godman?” Pandey ji mutters as he returns to bed.

PS. Inspired partly by Malayalam writer Ponkunnam Varkey whose death anniversary falls on 2 July.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Face of the Faceless

“When you choose to fight for truth and justice, you will have to face serious threats.” Sister Rani Maria, the protagonist of the movie, is counselled by her mother in a letter. Face of the Faceless is a movie that shows how serious those threats are. This movie is a biopic. It shows us the life of a Catholic nun who dedicated her life to serve some Adivasis of Madhya Pradesh [MP] and ended up as a martyr. If it were not a real story, this movie would have been an absolute flop. Since it is the real story of not only a nun but also the impoverished and terribly exploited Adivasis in a particular village of MP, it keeps you engrossed. It is a sad movie, right from the beginning to the end. It is a story of the good versus evil, the powerless versus the powerful, the heroic versus the villainous, the divine versus the diabolic. Having said that, I must hasten to add one conspicuous fact: the movie does not ever present Christianity or its religious practices as the only right way

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart

All the light we cannot see

Book Review Title: All the light we cannot see Author: Anthony Doerr Publisher: Fourth Estate, London, 2014 Pages: 531 What we call light is just a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Most part of the electromagnetic spectrum remains beyond ordinary human perception. Such is human life too: so many of its shades remain beyond our ordinary perception and understanding. Anthony Doerr’s novel, All the light we cannot see , unravels for us some of the mysterious shades of human life. Marie-Laure LeBlanc leaves Paris with her father Daniel who is entrusted with the task of carrying a rare diamond, Sea of Flames , to safe custody when the second world war breaks out. The National Museum of Natural History, Paris, has made three counterfeit diamonds of the Sea of Flames. Four men are assigned the task of carrying each of these diamonds to four different destinations. None of them knows whether they are carrying the original diamond or the counterfeit. Marie-Laure a