Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea. A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background.

Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania.

I always thought that Nakulan lived a low-key life because of the inferiority complex that accompanied his caste. It is only towards the end of our life together that he revealed to me a personal secret. A particular incident that happened in his private life many years ago inflicted upon him a guilt complex. He had never discussed his personal life with me until that day. When he did, I could understand his feelings. But I didn’t succeed in convincing him that a particular personal failure need not impose a stifling guilt feeling on anyone.

Nakulan drank because of his guilt complex. I drank because of my egomania whose emptiness is more disastrous than any guilt feeling. You can come to terms with your guilt feeling by accepting your error and acknowledging your human frailty. But dealing with your inner emptiness is a terrible anguish.

Not long after Nakulan disclosed to me his personal secret, I decided to quit Shillong. Some of my previous posts in this A2Z series have already made it clear how the games played by certain forces in Shillong, along with my increasing psychological conflicts, made my survival difficult in Shillong. When I told Nakulan about it, he was utterly helpless. He neither endorsed my decision to quit Shillong nor advised me against it. Some friends are too genuine to give facile counsels. They know that silence is the only sane response to certain situations.

Nakulan was the only person who accompanied Maggie and me to the Guwahati railway station as we bid our final goodbye to Shillong. None of those people who had pretended to be our friends, who came with so much good counsel whenever they got the chance, who entertained themselves at my cost, who made me wear the motley before putting me on a high trapeze, who laughed as I fell down again and again clownishly from the trapeze into the safety net that they had stretched out below, who removed that net occasionally just for the heck of it… None of them even pretended to care that I was leaving them for good, that they would miss the entertainment. Maybe, they had begun to get bored of the entertainment. I was utterly bored of playing the game anyway.

Nakulan came with us though I told him not to bother. He was a senior professor in a central university who deserved better than a record of accompanying an utter loser to his disgraceful departure from the boxing ring of life. He waited on the railway platform with Maggie and me, in absolute silence, until the train came. He helped me load our luggage and then waited on the platform again until the train left. The tears that welled up in his eyes didn’t escape my notice.

Was he sad because he would now have to absorb a town’s lunacy all by himself? One of my convictions in those days was that every society loved people like Nakulan and me because we absorbed their lunacy into our hearts just as the biblical scapegoat carried away people’s sins.

Why did Nakulan love me when everyone else found me clownish? His guilt feeling had nothing to do with it. The drinks we shared and the songs we listened to on my cassette player had little to do with it. What I concluded after much reflection was that we were both outcasts of sorts. We failed to fit in the structures that society erected inevitably for everyone. And society loves to create outcasts. For fun.

Nakulan must have retired a few years after I left Shillong. He never responded to my phone calls or emails from Delhi. No one in Shillong, whom I contacted later, seemed to have any idea about Nakulan. I wonder where he is now. Is he still an outcast?

I know I am one still. I never learnt to fit in.

PS. I'm participating in #BlogchatterA2Z 

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