Sattu Trilogy : The Sattu ke Parathe
I have always despised summer vacations. Not just because of the heat, which assuredly prompted our district commissioner, every year without fail to order a preemptive closure of schools. More than that because I believe, it was a cruel bait for kids, to work hard before the annual exams. Work hard, pass and a good, long holiday awaits you. Just one small catch, a higher grade means greater responsibility, so ready yourself with all the holiday homework.
Still me, a rebel at heart, relished working against the norm. I remember staying up all night, scribbling vehemently at school between breaks, a maniac under a spell, working for a sole purpose, to start my holidays with the homework out of the way. Baabaji however, did not give in easily, aware of my particular course of action, though never explicitly disapproving, every morning he would still insist on my waking up on time, reciting tables well into the late 20s and doing some algebra.
Summers also meant water crisis. Those were tough times. After the supply pumps failed, I was made to move from the comforts of the bathroom to the chappa-kal for my baths. Privacy concerns for a 10 year old were deemed irrelevant, which added to my lethargy. But to keep Mummy’s anger at a threshold bay, I calculatively bathed from time to time.
Halfway through the vacations, Baabaji’s brother would telephone him and suggest visiting the Gaon. Initially Baabaji would decline rightaway, stating the Gaon’s expectedly higher mercury readings. But after long deliberations with the family and Mummy’s accentuation of the forever aplenty water levels over there, he would give in and plans would be made.
The journey to the Gaon in my father’s old Ambassador was hardly anything like its royal namesake. The car was painfully slow. Plus Didi, always managing to grab the window seat, was dislodgeable only after I induced a few gag reflexes. Baabaji would sit in front carefully working out a Dijistra, mapping the shortest possible path and rebuking Papa, who would stop the car at odd times just to relish at his customised CNG powered engine.
That eventful year, Didi had been away for her school trip and thus we departed early well, before sunrise, plan having been to pick her up from the station and continue on our journey. Didi, perhaps fatigued did not argue and I had the window seat all by myself. I dozed off soon sometime thereafter. The vibrations have an effect on me. Why, I drowse even riding pinion on a motor bike.
Anyway I woke up to find myself in a huge traffic jam. Buses, cars, lorries all stuck. Rows and rows of vehicles, like a bodi bean cut in multiple sized chunks and placed one after the other. I could see people getting down from buses, enjoying a lazy trot, others were laughing and gossiping without bother. One can observe, that in situations like these, a certain type of man rises up from within the swamp, like a smelling fungus after a rainy evening. You never meet him but you’re sure he exists. He is the one who rings up the Electricity office, when the transformer fuse is compromised. Or the one who throws an old rag over the rotting dog carcass on the highway. No, he is not an office bearer of the Colony Durga Puja Samiti but stays at the river bank till all the rituals for murti visarjan are finished. He lives alone, married only to his two-wheeler. An expert in forbearance, when he regulates a jam, he barks, screams and rules the crowd, reeking authority. When the roads are unclogged, he diffuses back to the chaos. He is the faceless knight, the Reliable Stranger.
Apparently several such men rose up to regulate the traffic that day, i.e. until the batti baabus arrived, for the jam had peculiar origins. An underground coal stratum had caught fire and had given in. A patch of earth went crackling down, leaving a giant crater on the highway. We were told that a bypass was being worked on, but the movement could be expected to commence not before evening.
Unfortunately, on Baabaji’s repeated assertions that the 8 lane express highway from the Barhi junction had cut down the travel time by half, I had decided against carrying a lot of snacks (except for some spare pahelwaan channa (obviously), which I had munched on even before our first toilet pause). Numerous attempts to sooth my gurgling hungry stomach with water turned out to be futile. Mummy thankfully, forever fearing the worst, did pack lunch for us. I would have bet she looked content when Baabaji had to finally put his diary back in the glove compartment with defeat. Alas, the dreaded Sattu ke Parathe were passed around on paper plates with aam ka achar and gud.
The sudden series of unexpected events, had my insignificance hit me straight in the face. With burning eyes, I watched, while the car seats morphed, memories playing itself in a loop like a photo-reel. Me working on my holiday homework like a maniac between classes, trying to finish it off, only to find I had entirely missed one of the subjects. Me deciding to take a hot relaxing bath in the comforts of my bathroom, only to turn on the taps and finding no water. Me jumping with excitement for an awaited football match and then a teacher coming in to declare that the games hour had been cancelled for an extra history lesson. Every single time, when I thought I had the power to shape my destiny, I watched my hopes and expectations gone, vaporised. Leaving only a shell of me, helpless, prostrated in-front of the great unknown, the primordial mother, the only god, Chaos.
I did not rebel. I ate those damned Parathe, every last one of them, until it was evening. Then the car moved.
Or perhaps it still hasn’t.
