by Ram Govardhan
“Nobody in India lives; everyone, even on a generous estimate, just survives,” he says, “Unless you are well-endowed or have married into money.”
Surviving, indeed, is a perilous, full-time job. Whether one is employed, unemployed, self-employed or bankrupt, regardless of class, every passing day is a testimony to one’s grit and fitness to survive. Fitness and survival have been Siamese twins since Darwin’s days and as relevant to present-day Indians. And the ones who survive India, and go on to live overseas, evolve into an unbeatable species not only to conquer Downtown San Jose but also to trail-blaze and turn up trumps anywhere on earth. Yet such species, on rare visits to India, feel unbelievably suffocated, while people unevolved like us continue to survive with great aplomb. However, there are a few uber-Indians who know how to ‘live’ here too, like our man, a digital-age beggar, whose comic-tragic portrayal, you, the reader of Spark, are about to be treated to.
“Joblessness, technically, is a better survival tactic; you can choose your calling and, as a matter of greater consequence, you can choose a less egoistic boss. Indisputably, of all the walks of life, begging is a greater survival tactic,” he says.
But then beggars are said to be surviving without a right to choose, which, in our man’s case, is simply untrue. He is the only soul yours truly has ever seen who seems to know a thing or two about ‘living’ life as opposed to mere death-defying survival or, as is the case with most of us, hand-to-mouth life. You, the middle-class reader, at the end of this narrative, may figure out whether our man is living life happy as a king or is just surviving like most of us.
With his outlandish gait, a vivid broad-brimmed hat, dreadlocks under it, an extravagantly embroidered jacket, a matching khadi sling-bag and a neatly trimmed torpedo beard, he looks a veritable scholar polishing his thesis and preparing for viva-voce. These are the very intellectual looks that unfailingly keep other ordinary beggars from approaching him for they know scholarly people are seldom charitable on streets.
You can spot him on the six-laned information technology corridor where he meticulously spots his almsgivers whom he fondly refers to as prey. As he zooms on his kill, given his instinctive grasp of pure mathematics, and of quantum mechanics, he is so methodically deductive that he seldom misses the bull’s-eye, saving crucial minutes of every one of his sorties, and hours in the cumulative sense.
Since he is a great face reader, hitting the road is not that tough even in the tropical heat; he doesn’t even look at half a face, he just goes by the shape of a nose. Still, in general, since noses are too tiny to achieve any degree of accuracy from far afield, he waits until his prey is close at hand. Nonetheless, when an occasional beaky nose appears in the distance, he goes ahead and lays a wager with intuitive panache. Of all the sorts of noses and faces he encounters, a strong hard face is what he loves to bet on. Positive outcomes of such hard-nosed encounters satisfy his soul for they testify efficacy of his manoeuvres and reinforce their continued relevance.
He is also a decent-plus grade gait reader; he spots a sucker from a mile away simply by the way of his walking—the swing-span of arms, the length of strides, and the pace of steps are quickly analysed. And most important of all, how harried someone is on the phone while walking takes most weightage among all the inputs his brain frantically computes to seize the moment.
Close quarters or far-off, his hit rate is eight out of ten; irrefutably not a bad ratio for a one-eyed beggar, but then his eyes are hidden behind the most luxurious eye wear in the world: Christian Dior Glossy Gold.
His skills, honed to razor-blade sharpness, earn him enough dough within few hours, letting him to live rest of the day. Did you, the reader, spot the word ‘live’ in the preceding sentence? Yes, he lives: he has a Bose Home Stereo. Instead of the old compact disc player, these days, he just plugs in his smart phone or a flash drive, lessening the wear and tear, to enjoy his evenings and nights over beverages and assortment of pizzas. Past dinner, the music lingers over Coetzees, Millers, Becketts, Naipauls, Okris, Murakamis, Joyces, Solzhenitsyns, Achebes, Rushdies, Morrisons, Tolstoys, Hemmingways, Nins, Russells, Marquezes, and Tagores. However, on holidays and Sundays, he uses the extra hours at his disposal to catch up with the latest sensations on literary horizon: the Byatts, Adichies, Cattons, Díazs, Constantines, Lahiris etc.
Looking at heaps of books, sometime before American recession turned vengeful, the landlady had said, “Obviously, you have taken this room to store your books and CDs, and you somehow find some place to sleep among them.”
But the advent of Kindle changed all that; he began shopping, downloading, browsing and reading e-books, blogs, magazines, newspapers, and other broadcasting digitally. Suddenly, the empty space made him feel lonely but, in three weeks, quickly regained his usual tactile sense of socialising with great authors and musicians within the confines of his room.
Before long, he upgraded from the simplistic Amazon Kindle to Kindle DX, then to Kindle Keyboard, and then to Kindle Paperwhite and, despite owning a Kindle Fire at the moment, he is also evaluating other e-book readers from China, Japan and Taiwan. The digital devices save him huge sums of money that he paid out to newspaper vendors; he used to get five magazines a month and four newspapers a day—he can tell us as to why Berkshire Hathaway is always on the money or why Hillary would succeed Obama, or why Boko Haram will throw up the next Bin Laden. Or, nearer home, as to why Modi will retire as the greatest prime minister from Panchavati, popularly known as 7 RCR.
Despite his incredible fluency in English that matches that of his almsgivers who do night shifts in diverse twangs of English, he has narrowed down the three most effective sentences that he calls ‘juicy baits’. After spotting his potential prey, he takes his position and, as his kill moves into the ring of no return, he unleashes the first sentence, and waits for the prey to react. When there is no yield, he sets the second sentence free that is to do with job loss. More than ninety percent of his prey are tamed by one of the two and, of late, he has grasped that both were better than either alone.
Discarding the customary salutation of bowing, he never, in his words, ever stoops, but behind his innocuous, erect craft, there is method, tact, insight, underpinning and forethought. And aspects of behavioural science, psychology, and crowd management are all there in good measure to maximize yield of every bead of sweat.
He loathes tricking people in tattered clothes; his wardrobe boasts of dazzlingly patterned and pure Yves Saint Laurent clothes that are never more than three months old. And the most ethereal of his accessories that tames his prey subconsciously is generous sprinkle of Luna Rossa—the most masculine Prada fragrance for a man on the move. Whenever all three of his tricks fail, this perfume has consistently softened up the most apathetic of almsgivers.
He hates saving for a rainy day; by spending a few more hours in field, he goes overdrive only for three sorts of contingencies: hospitalization, acquiring expensive albums and buying expensive literary tomes. After supper, three to four hours a night, he pores over books while the home stereo blares Beethovens, Floyds, George Michaels, Santanas, Burmans, Garfunkels, Braxtons, Estefans, Stings, Bachs, U2s, Marleys, Scorpians, Boltons, Take Thats, and Adeles. He has bundled all the CDs and put them away on the attic, for his DT HyperX Predator flash drive boasts of one terabyte space. And YouTube has come as manna from heaven; he no longer splurges on expensive music albums.
Due to the savings made possible by e-readers, YouTube and e-commerce, he is paying his credit card bills in time, avoiding cumulative interests that come disguised as service charges. This is the credit card he was given by the bank when he was employed in a multinational company ten years ago. While many of his former colleagues have lost theirs or have bad enough credit histories to lament their woes, our friend’s credit score is 900, the maximum score rating agencies have ever been able to give.
He is biding his time for the day when he could access the Outernet Wi-Fi that is said to be free of cost, since the internet charges he pays per month are extortionate to say the least. And, having read so many great authors over the years, he now intends to write a bit, which is why he is now unpacking his fourth laptop: Stealth MacBook Pro.
As for religion, or way of life as he prefers to put, having spent a couple years in Ethiopia with the multinational company, he has embraced Rastafarianism and, just as all other Rastas, asserts that Haile Selassie I is none other than Jesus Christ. Amen.
Ram Govardhan’s first novel, Rough with the Smooth, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize, The Economist-Crossword 2011 Award and published by Leadstart Publishing, Mumbai. His short stories have appeared in Asian Cha, Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, Muse India, Asia Writes, Open Road Review, Cerebration, Spark and several other Asian and African literary journals. He works, lives in Chennai, India. Email: ramdotgovardhan@gmail.com
