All the planning done, and, now within an ace of action, I must tell you that although it all looks very easy, to my mind it was not. For days I lived in the fear of being caught by my parents though they are pretty understanding otherwise, I was certain they’d feel let down should my plan fail. My mind was disturbed by negative thoughts, helped in no way by my friends and kin in whom I confided, for they admitted frankly that they wouldn’t have done it. And they were right too. After all, I was bunking a compulsory educational tour… lying to professors… changing trains… traveling the length of the country… meeting my love… about all of which they were unaware. I shuddered to contemplate the coming of it all out in the open together… How, then, did I steel myself? True, I was madly in love and impelled by that mad drive only a lover knows. Yet, an incident from childhood played no small part in my determination.
Once during my exams in high school, I was caught with two answer sheets – one of them mine, of course, diligently copying a complex solution. There was a huge scandal. The teachers, one can still understand, treated me like the rotten fish that spoils the whole pond, but even my peers, who might not have been entirely scrupulous in their ways, looked down upon me.
Therefore you can imagine the heavy heart, the teary eye and the quivering body, with which I told my father about the summon orders. I felt that I was a stain on the blemish-less lineage. I expected a thrashing and had closed my eyes in anticipation when I heard my father say, “You should always be careful, son!”
I prayed that he’d relate to my present mischief too in some strange way and he be accommodating. He had told me only years later about his sheet-swapping exploits and I hoped there was still something in his closet, some such wild act, about which I was yet in the dark.
=========================================== ================Professor P.P. Sidhu, popular as Pappi among the students, is the head of the Industrial Tour Committee, to whom one must report in case one wishes to exempt himself from the compulsory tour. And so, it was required that I meet him. He is a Sikh, a jovial fellow as Punjabis usually are. One of the coolest professors in IIT Delhi, he doesn’t mind students bunking or talking, as long as they don’t interrupt him in his work. He has never failed anyone too, I guess. A pioneer in the field of research, he doesn’t have much time to probe why bally fellows should go about bunking bally tours.
He taught us the fuels course in which I was supposed to make a “Pneumatic Linear Double Sided Anti-Rotation Tubeless Air Transfer Cylinder’, whatever that means. This was to be installed in a breakthrough bus being developed by my institute which was to run on bio-gas, and I hadn’t even gone so far as to decipher the meaning of each term in the title of my project. This had not impressed Pappi, who, however jovial he might be on the subject of bally tours, is somewhat professional on the subject of projects. I tried telling him mildly that if making cylinders with such obnoxious names were child’s play, India would be producing such buses like babies to which he replied, “That’s exactly where I take India.” He asked me if I knew that in Japan, a seven-year old could make a computer, and I said I didn’t know to which he replied that I better know. I had adroitly delayed the project so far, but, now that the semester was coming to an end, the going would be tough.
I saw him bending over a fat book, scribbling down notes with the enthusiasm of a child who has just been gifted his first crayon-box. He looked up at me for a fleeting second and bent down again.
“Sir,” I began, “I am afraid it won’t be possible for me to go on the Industrial Tour.”
”O-k-a-a-y,” he said in a sort of tone which comes out when one has cold. In his case the cold was perennial.
I didn’t know what to do with this long ‘Okay’. I found myself puzzled. It couldn’t have meant: “Don’t be afraid, son, I am sure whatever that prevents you must be a worthy cause, go home, son, go home and celebrate!” I endeavoured to speak again, this time clearing my throat. “Sir, I wanted to tell you that it is not possible for me to go to the Industrial Tour.”
“Okay,” he said again as he continued to play with is crayon box. The second nasal “Okay” was a tad too much. What on earth was that supposed to mean? I felt increasingly that I spoke to a parrot that had been taught extremely well to speak, the only problem being to be ‘Okay’. I looked on while he played on. What else can a student do in front of his professor, however jovial he might be, who has in his hands power, which can be misused to stop him from meeting his darling?
It would, no doubt, be astonishing for you all this parrot-like conduct of the professor but I knew better. The one adjective that immediately comes to mind, the moment one talks about professors, however rare that might be, is absent-minded. O other adjective described a thing or a person better. Pappi was known to immerse himself some ten thousand leagues under the sea, when in the midst of his research, so that it took him jolly good time to come up to the sea-level. Presently I waited for that moment. But then I eared, perhaps he might have drowned. Thus, like a nimble lifeguard, I shot, this time coughing more and speaking louder, “Sir, does that mean I have got your permission?”
“Yes!” he shouted ecstatically and with ecstasy jumped my insides too. I had heard that it was all a cakewalk, this permission getting session, but what the hell, the professor hadn’t even asked for the reason. I scarcely believed my good fortune. I admired the professor and his ways, what with the amount of ecstasy he showed, as if he was handing me his daughter’s wedding card. Just when I was about to thank him, he shot out from his seat a if a pin had been poked and shouted, “Yes, yes, yes!” and then looked at me. I wondered what the next three yes’s were about, just when he ran up to me as ecstatic a Archimedes must have been once out of his bath and said, “Tell me, what’s five multiplied by six!”
Once doesn’t expect that. I wondered if it was a test one had to undergo to secure permission and I promptly replied thirty to which he said, “Thirty it is indeed then, you know what! We’ll soon have a bus that runs on gas made from human wastes and gives an average of thirty kilometres per cubic…”
“Congratulations, sir,” I hastened to add.
“Yes, yes, yes!” he added to the already confusing yes’s listen! You wait right here and I’ll be back!’
I wondered what I had to wait for, my work already over.
Then it dawned to me, the mystery was solved, I had already placed what those three enigmatic yes’s were about. Now, I knew the origin of the first ecstatic yes too. It was right there, right there with the next three yes’s like a bosom bother. They may better be called four yes’s four yes’s of celebration, of finding that five into six was indeed thirty! What a fool I was to celebrate prematurely. Presently he entered with a pile of books and asked me, ”What brings you here?”
“Sir?” I said, hardly believing that he had not heard a thing. “What sir?”
“Sir, I told you that it is not possible for me to go on the tour.” “Tour? Ah yes, the tour, indeed, yes, yes, the tour, indeed. Okay!” “Yes sir! I was asking for permission and you said yes.” ”Did I? Okay! But why? What happened? Why are you not going on the tour? It is a privilege to go isn’t it?”
“sir, it is my brother’s marriage.”
“So?”
“Sir, I must attend that!”
“Ah, yes, okay okay, I see, but you’ll miss something; it’ll be a landmatk tour; not just for India but for the world. The first drive of the Biobull!”
“Sir, Biobull?”
“Yes, Biobull… isn’t it a nice name for my bus?”
“Sir, bus?”
“What else?”
“Sir, the tour, the Industrial Tour to Pune this winter.” “Oh, that!”
“Yes, sir!”
“You should have told me before.”
“Sir, I did!”
“Okay, okay,” his okay were driving me mad, “I must have been busy; you’ll be required to write an application which’ll require my signature. Now go, please go.”
“Yes sir!”
“No, wait!”
“Yes sir!”
“Congratulations!”
“Sir?”
“Your brother’s marriage!”
“Oh yes, thanks you, sir I’ll write the application. Thank you, sir.”
And with that I left his room. Never had I seen a man so absent minded. I worried about his wife who must have to remind him every dawn that she was indeed his wife. But then he was a gem and one doesn’t mind much if gems are a little forgetful. Anyway, I had given him the application. He said gleefully that he would sign it and I could take it from him the next day, tomorrow that is.
How I wish now, to go back in time and stop the clock here, right here!