'“Sorry,
anything to oblige, but not that,” said Suzanne cheerfully; the sacrifices of
friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make
them.'
So I spent the evening reading Saki. The above line is from a short story of his titled 'Fur' and it reminded me of an interchange that I had witnessed a while ago. Here is what happened.
The unavoidable circumstance of having to visit an Indian sarkari office in order to obtain a driver's license had me waiting in a queue for hours, twiddling my thumbs. There was a special line for the ladies, numbering to about ten of us in all, whereas a separate line for the men was a serpent's coil spanning two floors. A rather noisy miss of (definitely not sweet) sixteen, a clear case of 'Money with the crass and not the class', stood ahead of me in the queue and was drawing a lot of attention from the crude and the chic. Togged up in a glaringly bold outfit quite unfit for the company of unblushingly ogling truck drivers, her voice was as loud as her attire. She was narrating the story of the movie 'The Roommate' to her companion, a boy of about her age, who stood next to her. I took him to be her family or a friend who had tagged along to bear her company; that, until he mumbled something about losing his spot in the queue since he had been gone for long. To which the girl actually stamped her foot asking him to stop interrupting her since it made her lose the thread and went rambling on in a childishly made up accent about Sara, Rebecca, Stephen interjected with a zillion 'Oh My God's, 'Epic's 'So scary you know!'s and even more expletives. The next time that the boy made a meek attempt at fleeing (which was about a half an hour and probably two floor-coils later), the girl foiled his attempt by literally latching on to his sleeve.
Finally the tale did come to an end and so, I thought, would the boy's woes. But the girl hopped on to another topic before the poor guy could get his sleeve off her iron grip. Any mention of him joining the queue and she would pout her lips and her expression would go all soulful and helpless (somewhat like the one Puss In Boots had on in the movie Shrek) and say she felt uncomfortable standing there all alone among gawking strangers. An unwilling ear to a boisterous speech, most of her shallow thoughts amused me while some were purely nauseating. One such disgusting thought cropped up when the monologue had moved on to the topic of education. The girl confessed that she was a below average student who had managed to scrape through grades by mooching on other's brains during exams. I, reluctantly, found this candid talk to be a tad amusing till she voiced her dad's views on the same. Apparently the girl's father had taught her, "If you know you can't do well based on your qualities, then make sure to pull down all others who have a shot at it". The girl proudly announced that the man had made a lot of moolah by following this maxim to the hilt and that she had followed his advice and had fared equally well in school. So she used to first put her copying quality to the maximum use, but a failure at any such attempt, and she would assume the role of a moral police and maliciously enlighten the invigilator with names of fellow students copying (or sometimes not; merely out of spite).
Now this attitude brings me to another extract that I had come across in the Reader's Digest journal of the February of 1987. The article 'Donald Thornton's Magnificent Dream' (abridged version of the book entitled The Ditchdigger's Daughters - By Dr. Yvonne Thornton ), was the story of an African-American family as narrated by one of the daughters of the family. She had quoted a piece of her father's in the narrative that went, "Niggers are like crabs in a basket. Let me tell you somethin', you have all these crabs in a basket and they're okay, jus' millin around aimlessly, until one crab decides he wants to go up the side and try to get out of the basket. Then, all of a sudden, the other crabs who was doin' nothin' rush to that side of the basket and start pullin' him down." . Wonderfully and aptly describes the outlook of the gal and her like. And true in case of crabs too, considering the fishmongers hardly ever place lids on their baskets of live crabs!
Coming back to the RTO (whence I had drifted onto crabby shores), finally the boy was rescued by the rusty wheels being set in motion by the lethargic staff who had walked in leisurely just three hours after they officially opened. The actual work took less than a minute so I was out within ten minutes of the line having started to move. As I stepped out of the building, with the gal right ahead of me, I came across the boy standing in the queue. He had apparently lost his place over loud and violent protestations about jumping the line and had been reduced to accepting a place outside the building, in the hot blazing sun. As I stood there waiting for my ride, I once again happened to be an audience to their discussion. The boy, again meekly, was requesting the girl to join him for lunch once he was done with the RTO formalities. She was saying that it was quite hot and humid and that she couldn't see a shade to protect her from a bad tan. The boy then rightly pointed out that there was a mall right around the corner and that she could wait at the restaurant that the mall housed. To which she replied with a "No can do", anything but that, and that it would be a good two hours before his turn came and that it would mean she would have to forgo her afternoon siesta and Oh, she hadn't known earlier but she could see that her dad had come to pick her up and that she couldn't make him wait since he was a busy man (no kidding!). And with a toss of her head and a very sweet and long 'Byeee', she walked away to a waiting Audi, got into the backseat of the chauffeur driven car, of which she happened to quite visibly be the only passenger and drove away leaving behind an overpowering scent of her perfume and a trail of dust into the mouth of one gaping gudgeon!!
