Roommates come in different shapes, sizes and natures. Looks very much so, when you are twenty three and one of your room-mates is touching 55. Room it was but mate? Seems improbable from the outside but when fate throws five of you together into one tenement, every cohabitant of the room turns out to be a mate, cockroaches and lizards included. That way, Tiwary uncle sure was a mate for us five.
And what a mate he turned out to be!
First the scene.
Silchar. An overgrown village masquerading as a town those times, the early 90s. Somewhere in south Assam. Heard of the place? I mean Assam? Well, that's where we took roots, not just in the bank, but in life itself. That's where we were first consigned to, when we joined the bank's hallowed portals. Coming from different parts of India, all of us probably had their first baptism by fire there, all of us had a taste of what the rest of India tasted like, smelt like and felt like. Even if the experience had to come in distant Assam, not India.
To cut a long story short, four of us somehow contrived to meet up with one another after joining the bank , became kind of adjusted to one another and thought of taking up a house in Ambicapatty, that locality of Silchar, the Poes Garden equivalent of Chennai.
That was when fate or providence, whatever you would call a mash up of unexpected events, brought us into contact with Tiwary uncle.
He was already leading a cozy life in his company leased house in Ambicapatty. Company? Leased? In Silchar? yes, quite possible, even in those days. Know what? Assam is a place that floats on oil and natural gas, which still find a large number of takers in India. Indian Companies will do anything to dig out oil from that place and bring it to India by truckloads. Being always a fair trade partner, India gives something in return for the booty smuggled out. It gives pavilions for free in the India Habitat Centre Trade fair every year for each of the North Eastern states. It plies trains that takes 50 hours to reach there. It has even allowed private airlines to ferry passengers there. (But why am I digressing? Should take care of this dirty habit of meandering away and finding good in every bad). The Indian companies employed an army of labour, mostly from Bihar, to dig out the gas. The labourers used to (and still do) dig, dig and dig. Why, the British started it you know, when the entire geography which goes by the name North East now, was under their colony! "Dig boy, Dig. Dig Boy, Dig" they used to exhort the labourers till oil gushed out and the diggers passed out. The story is that probably that's how another quaint oil rich town in Assam got that name Digboi. (That it is Indian Oil's first and one of biggest refineries is another irrelevant story).
Silchar in Assam too has loads of gas underneath its lush paddy fields. I mean, natural gas, not the obnoxious & hydrogen-sulphide contaminated variety or the politicians' public speeches we normally associate the term with.. So India's biggest oil exploring public sector Navaratna has huge operations there. Such operations in a big scale required labour in large numbers. Such large number of labour required a personnel department. Such a large personnel department needed a manager. Ha, here comes our link, Tiwary Saab, that famous personnel manager in ONGC. No prizes for guessing, even to blondes and Indians, that ONGC can afford company leased accommodation to its managers, even in Silchar. So now you are able to place Silchar and its famous denizen Tiwary in their respective proper perspectives.
Now the Act
Tiwary had already taken up quarters in that palatial kind of house in Ambicapatty, Silchar but singly. Now single is a status Tiwary uncle frowns upon except when it is malt. He wants company. In plenty. Of any variety and of any gender. For the statistics, he had a family of (only) one wife, and a daughter safely stashed away in Dehradun. He had a son too, employed somewhere in North India, i.e. some place north of Karnataka extending up to the Himalayas. (Just as anything below the Vindhyas is South India for my Amit friends). His work had brought him to Assam and after a brief sojourn in Jorhat, he now found himself in Silchar. Accommodation was procured, furniture was procured and basic comforts procured but what about company? So he always wanted to take in others, he had decided, when he moved to Silchar. In fact, he was proceeding on the right track even before he came into contact with us. He had procured a domestic help for his cooking and cleaning ( the house) needs. So his company already had two members in his household.
That was when we five bakras fell into his fold to enlarge his company. A private company became a public company. We were looking for a decent house, he was looking for company and the twain met. Two became seven. From here, the story should pick up.
You would have by now guessed what mould our Tiwary uncle fit into. He had some very fine gentlemanly attributes. Listed below are only two samples.
1 Disregard for age
He was 55 alright but he is fine with a company that is 5 year old, not to speak of us, all of 23/24 years each. All he needs is someone who can talk in Hindi and atleast four among us qualified in this test. The fifth one is still trying when last heard.
2 High regard for booze
He strongly believed that for any man to speak and live sanely, booze is required. Just as food, clothing and shelter. Every evening of his was an evening of fun and frolic and mirth and booze. Here, I need to elaborate but don't ask why a sub para no. 2 became this long. This sub-para could as well have become another blog in itself.
Booze, Tiwary uncle adored and consumed but mostly it came free for him. Every evening, he boozed. Mosquito free nights are possible in Silchar but a booze-free Tiwary uncle is inconceivable. And the sharab was rarely bought by him. You know how these sarkari Indian companies functioned. For the uninitiated, it functioned the same way thirty years back as it does now. Grease appropriate palms and the wheels moved. Quench appropriate thirsts and postings got fixed. Every evening, some supplicant or the other would be (forcefully) invited to Tiwary uncle's home to get his things done. Invariably, the things got done after uncle's thirst was quenched. Great man, Tiwary uncle, he never did make any fuss on any particular brand. One day it would be whisky, the next brandy and the third whatever. I run out of varieties, since my general knowledge on booze is weak.
Some say that booze brings out the best from a man. It certainly did for Mirza Ghalib and Kannadasan. It certainly did for the supplicants-cum-daily evening delivery boys but it even did wonders for the hero of this tale. During the course of each Daru session, our Tiwary uncle would spew forth the following gems. The same gems every evening but one never got bored hearing the same thing evening after evening. They were:
That he had three philosophies or credos or whatever funda, in life:
a) "Head office mein ghar hain , kya L _ _ _ _ ka dar hai?"
Like a treatise on Bhagvad Gita, I have to explain this. Tiwary used to emphasize more than once during the course of his evening discourses that he hails from Dehradun. The place where ONGC is headquartered. He is a Head Office man. Meaning, some ulta pulta happens means, he can throw his weight around in Dehradun, his home town itself, beware! "I come from Dehradun, ONGC comes from Dehradun, and so 'aham ONGC asmi'. That's his credo. Here what L _ _ _ _ means, you can conjecture. I will give only two hints. The last letter is A and the entire word is commonly referred to as a crass Hindi Gali.
b) " kaun si aisi chokri jo mujse na takri"?
Even after thirty years, I am still unable to fathom why he used to dish out this theorem or sloka or whatever, but he did all the same, after each evening's booze session. We saw only one chokri there in the household and that is the dear 50 year old Mashi, the domestic help. Other than that chokri, why our Tiwary uncle even used to think about any other intimidating chokri we never knew and we never will. That's an unsolved riddle I will carry to my tomb.
Here I should warn readers that I absolutely have no idea of whether the 55 year old Tiwary uncle had any takkar with any 50 year old chokri in ambicapatty. I am not suggesting anything, but again that might just provide content for another blog, nay, full length novel, if further dug up.
c) "chad gaya seedi pe, uthar gaya beedi pe"
This gem, though we all know to be an inextricable part of life, the very essence of every mortal's life, assumed huge proportions when it emanated from the great man's mouth. In fact, Tiwary uncle was no less than Einstein. Einstein (was that him or Kalam or some other science nazi?) had said something to the effect that every action should have an equal and opposite reaction and he bloody became famous for this simple quote. Our Tiwary's Beedi philosophy was no less profound. It encompasses Einstein and much more. Whoever climbs up must come down. Heads high, with all confidence, you ascend the seedi but a time will come, a moment will arrive when you all have to descend, that too with a Beedi in the mouth. Tiwary's oceanic knowledge suggests that the ascent was with a 555 cigarette but the descent has to be necessarily with a lowly beedi. What deep wisdom!
(But why such profound philosophy was shared only after 7 p.m. every night don't ask. There has to be an apt time for everything. Just read that even Osho attained enlightenment after a particularly commonplace event)
So here ends the story. I know, you are asking 'but when did it begin?' but that's the beauty of Tiwary uncle's life. His entire life can be beautifully summed up by what he used to do during those two hours of evening booze. Naturally, when the brew hits him and he falls flat on his bed, the story should end. As MKG said "my life is my message", Tiwary uncle's three gospel messages (see (a), (b), (c) above) were his life. In fact, there is neither a beginning nor an end to the tales of great men.
So this is the tale of how one great soul by name Tiwary uncle came across our lives for a brief spell of about 1 year in our early impressionable career lives. I remember each and every word of his wisdom as would my friends Tshering, Phurba, Deepak and Pradeep, wherever there are.
To be frank, on restropection, after 30 years, he can very well be called a scum, a womaniser, a boozer, an opportunist now. But who is not? At least I am one, not necessarily with the above mentioned four virtues but with qualities equally scum-like. I can't say about the other four guys but every one has some s_ _ _ in him. The point is, I still remember him after 30 years for nothing. He did not turn my life around, he remained my room mate only for a few months, he is of the same category as a traveller companion you come across during long train journeys. ( I still remember one gentleman from Ambassa, Tripura, with whom I shared 70 glorious hours of my life in Guwahati express, never to see him again, never to even remember his name but remembering word by word the conversation). Co-travellers, yes, but who add spice to the long, tiring journey called life. Helps me in prioritising life's priorities.
His three mantras of life, I would never forget, even though only one of them really holds any relevance to me. Chokri had never held any fascination for me and it never will. My ghar will never be in My Head office.The Beedi analogy probably applies to every one. Me too. The analogy as well as the Beedi.
Tiwary uncle, you must be about 85 now. And still reminiscing about or missing those Silchar evenings. Do your gharwale still allow you those small luxuries of Ambicapatty which you enjoyed and initiated us into? Godspeed to you, my friend. And to my four other fellow- bakras. And to the mashi for all reasons, disclosable and undisclosable.
