X the variable

X is the most versatile and hence a very precious entity in mathematics. Whenever there is an unknown quantity whose value has to be discovered, the mathematician begins with: Let the unknown quantity be x.

This A2Z series presented a few personalities who played certain prominent roles in my life. They are not the only ones who touched my life, however. There are so many others, especially relatives, who left indelible marks on my psyche in many ways. I chose not to bring relatives into this series. Dealing with relatives is one of the most difficult jobs for me. I have failed in that task time and again. Miserably sometimes.

When I think of relatives, O V Vijayan’s parable leaps to my mind. Father and little son are on a walk. “Be careful lest you fall,” father warns the boy. “What will happen if I fall?” The boy asks. The father’s answer is: “Relatives will laugh.” One of the harsh truths I have noticed as a teacher is that it is nearly impossible to teach your relatives – nephews and nieces. It is also equally impossible to be friends with relatives. Relatives have a third eye that sees what others don’t. That’s why.

There are numerous others who meant much to me but were left out of this series because they may not be of any particular interest to readers. Like the math teacher at Sawan who was appointed there along with me on the same day, same year. Our friendship gelled merely because of that fact. He was a good friend for me while most people on the campus regarded him as some kind of a weirdo which he was too. One of the top administrators once warned me too. “Don’t think he’s innocent, Mr Matheikal. He’s extremely shrewd and knows how to play his cards dexterously.” I agreed instantly because that was the truth. But my point was that he deserved to be treated with equity like the others on the campus. The administrator agreed. Ideally yes, he said. But in practice, not possible, because the man himself jettisons the possibilities of his own respectability.

He was a loyal friend of mine all the years we were together at Sawan. He was the first to warn me against Anand. “He will betray you for some small personal benefit,” he said. How right was he! He was perceptive and sagacious. Yet he was a failure most of the time. He didn’t shine as a teacher or as a human being on the campus. The administrator was bang on: the man jettisons the possibility of his own progress.

The essential human vulnerability is what I witnessed in that man for years. His entire life was a Kafkaesque struggle against some inscrutable forces. A lot of us do struggle with similar forces. I did for a long period of my life. But I knew, like most others, how to present the ruins of my life as a new castle and get on as regally as I could. My friend in the math department tried too. But success evaded him like in an ancient Greek tragedy.

My heart melted for him because he was a living reminder of my Shillong days when destiny kept me like a clown in a bizarre restaurant where menacing waiters brought dishes I never asked for and could never eat. I once asked this math friend why he didn’t leave Sawan and find another place. I was thinking of how I left Shillong and found an infinitely better life. His answer was a mysterious chuckle. 

A lot of chuckles and sobs passed by my life. Successful people. Failures. Helpless ones. Clowns. And a few geniuses too. All sorts of people. Many have left their marks on my being. Some happy memories. Some not so happy. Quite a few scars too. I’m sure I did similar things to others.

This is how human life is: etching scars all too often. Mystics like Jalaluddin Rumi can sing: The wound is the place where the light enters you. But light fights shy of some wounds. 

I met another X a couple of months back. Someone whom I had not had any contact with for over 30 years. I was attending the wedding reception of a friend’s daughter. This X came near me and said, “Tomichan?” I nodded my head. “I was watching you from there. You have changed much by appearance. But your gestures assured me that it’s you.”

Not a very flattering remark that was. I had consoled myself with the delusion that my gestures had matured a lot from those days in Shillong where X was my colleague in the school. He blasted that delusion in a moment. But he didn’t mean anything more than how he succeeded in identifying me. I wouldn’t have identified him at all. He had no gestures at all – neither back in the old days nor now. He was one of the calmest persons I ever knew in my life.

The surprise came a little later, however. When the reception was over, I offered to drop X at the main bus stand which was on my way home. He accepted the offer happily. He nodded assent also to my invitation to share a drink with me when we reached the town. After a sip or two of the brandy, he told me how he had broken down many years ago and had to undergo psychiatric treatment in a Bangalore hospital. He had been on medication for depression for a long time. Even now, he said.

Yet another broken man who had looked so serene to me until I chose to sit with him and share a drink in an empty bar. He had had a long struggle with the ruins of his life. He didn’t manage to present those ruins as a castle and sit like a king in it. As I did pretty well.

Yet another X. He was a driver in Sawan school, Delhi. He appointed himself as my Guru one day. It was one day after I gave vent to all my frustrated feelings against Sanjay. Maggie and I were walking as usual on the playgrounds in the evening. This X foisted himself on us.

“Anger is the worst evil one can possess,” he started a sermon. I tolerated him assuming that he would leave us soon taking my silence as an expression of my dislike of what he was doing. On the contrary, he interpreted my silence as my willingness to listen to his counsels. He gave me a long lecture on anger.

I suppressed my urge to tell him, again and again, that anger was necessary. If you could get angry once in a while and express your indignation frankly against the oppressions and injustices being offloaded on us by some external agency, we could have saved the school. The world would have been a much better place with a little more indignation of the right kind. The serenity you preach is only a façade for your cowardice. For your inability to stand by the truth. Your patience is just another version of expediency.

I didn’t tell him any of that, however. I didn’t know enough Hindi for expressing all that. When the man came the next evening to join Maggie and me on our evening walk, I asked him to leave me alone. He was hurt. He thought of me as an irredeemable subversive.

Years later, when I created a Facebook profile, this self-appointed Guru of mine was one of the first to extend a friend request. I declined the offer. Gurus must have spines first of all. Preaching can be done by anyone. Having solid convictions is the first touchstone of a Guru. The ability to touch the heart is the next essential quality.

While I was working in Sawan I joined an off-campus postgraduate course in psychology conducted by the Indira Gandhi National Open University [IGNOU]. The first year went quite well. In the second year, I dared to point out some of the glaring monstrosities practised by the professors who prepared the study materials of the course. The lessons were plagiarised verbatim from certain websites and sometimes had little to do with the actual topic! For example, the entire ethical code for psychological counsellors, in the IGNOU notes, is copied from the professional ethics of a construction company given in their website! I wrote a blog post on this and other related issues. The result was that I became a bête noire of the university. Too many X-es there, both professors and students, stopped looking at me.

I can write about a thousand X-es. They are all interesting individuals in their own right. Some have stories of brokenness in them and a few are frauds wearing masks of sophistication. Some are like Thomas Gray’s flowers, born to blush unseen and waste their sweetness on a desert. Some are Cinderellas waiting for their time. And then there are those who post their pictures on Instagram again and again and want our applause each time. Amidst all that exhilarating variety is someone who insists that all the 1.4 billion Indians should be united by a oneness that he loves. And that last one isn’t just an X for sure.

PS. I'm participating in #BlogchatterA2Z 

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