A silly joke comes back to bite me in the bum on an average of once every year, generally around the month of June. Its been thirteen years now that my wisdom teeth have been gradually emerging, pushing out excruciatingly slowly from my gums, like a miniature version of the earth folding in to form a mountain. ‘Ahh,’ says a foolish friend, ‘explains why you come up with all your wise-cracks only around now.’ And he guffaws in great satisfaction at his joke. He means well. But I’m not amused. I imagine the roots of one of these teeth, like the legs of a very slow octopus, pushing down, to push itself up. And, despite my throbbing pain, I sympathise with my teeth. They’ve been at it for thirteen years and are still tethered to the dark recesses of my jaw by steadfast pink strings of gum.
I caress them with my tongue as I stand at my window, looking out at the dozen or so coconut trees that dot the compound of the building I stay in. The compound floor is tiled with chocolate bar sandstone pink tiles. The tiles have been laid neatly around the base of every tree, cut in circles exactly the diameter of the base of the tree trunks. At first sight it seems generous of the builders to have let the trees survive in spite of the building, considering the thousands of others who raze orchards to the ground before laying a foundation. On looking closer I realize that the roots of these trees have been tiled over. The trunk seems to shoot out of the ground, its neck tightly collared by pink. When the winds are furious, the tree outside my window sways helplessly, unable to use the muscle in its roots to grip the earth. I wonder if it remembers it has roots anymore. The tight packing of pink around its neck seems to me somewhat like the wooden clap of a guillotine. If the tree retaliates by swaying too far, its neck is bound to snap. And a giant blossom of green will be reduced to soggy firewood. The roots in the back of my mouth seem to tighten at the thought. And my pain returns.
*
Which brings me to the precarious transience of everything in this fidgety city. People. Trees. Traditions. Establishments. All poised on the edge of change all the time, tense and unsure.
*
There was a quaint Muslim laundry three lanes from where I now stay. In this age of home deliveries, I romanticized their refusal to collect and deliver my curtains whenever I needed them dry cleaned. The proprietor’s father, in a moment of clichéd cheekiness, had himself painted the legend ‘we clean and dye for you’ below the name of the shop. Last Monday, curtains bunched in arms, when I paid them a visit, the store was bare, the owners were missing. Some carpenters sawed wood, and in between vigorous chewing of paan, informed me that this was soon going to be a mobile phone store. A worker commented on the really old model of Nokia I held in my hand. I don’t remember the comment. All I remember of the two minutes I spent watching him work was how the rhythm of his chewing fell in step with the rhythm of his sawing every once in a while.
*
Hot, roasted to a black-gold crisp, rained with lemon, sprinkled with red chilli powder, held like a chicken leg, devoured like a chewed orgasm, bhutta (roasted corn) was one of those few constants that recurred year after year. During the ten minutes I took to slowly chew my way through one, I forgot – that Orange which became Hutch, was now Vodafone… that ten more farmers hung themselves in Vidarbha… that SEZs are being approved on prime Alphonso mango land… that roads paved with inter-locking bricks last month developed new potholes yesterday… that a banyan tree was spared the axe because it was granted heritage status. I forgot all of that. And when the tangy taste melted away and the stub of the bhutta was dispatched, the awareness of things forgotten slowly crept back.
But I was now better equipped to deal with them.
The road lining the sea near Haji Ali was dotted with bhutta sellers around this time of year. One of them is 12 years old. He was ten the year before last, when he ended up burning, rather than roasting, most of the bhutta he made for me. I indulged his enthusiasm and ate the charcoal black corn anyways, though I paid him less. His discount was always accompanied by a sheepish smile.
He was eleven last year. I don’t know what he did in the year in between to polish his art but suddenly he was roasting like a maestro. He didn’t knit his brows and concentrate on the job anymore, feverishly afraid he might overdo the roasting. Instead he chatted us up, a dozen customers at a time, flipping the corn over on the glowing charcoal without so much as glancing at it. And still chatting and smiling he’d snatch the cob off the fire, bathe it in the grace of a lemon and hold it up with the pride of a gourmet chef. And it would be perfect.
He is twelve this year. But I don’t know where he is. I sit on the parapet near the promenade but all I see are people walking past, and the busy bustle of car wheels. There are no bhutta-waalas in sight. I heard they were driven from the area as part of the government’s drive to clear the roads. Clear the roads for what exactly, I couldn’t fully understand. Perhaps bhutta-boy had outgrown the trade. Watching the tide rise higher than ever before, I fervently hoped he had.
*
An acquaintance (I could call her a friend, but in this strange world of collecting ‘friends’ like postage stamps, I’m not sure of the exact definition anymore) who I found on Facebook, through the proverbial six degrees of separation, has changed her ‘relationship status’ four times in the last six months alone. Her last three boyfriends were found in a shopping mall, at a party, on the beach, in no particular order. It’s heartwarming in a way, the increasing smallness of the world, and the democracy of opportunities the shrinkage brings. Everyone seems to be in with a chance with everyone else. On the other hand, it’s the attention deficit that confuses me. Everything, from competitive examinations to marriages, is multiple choice these days. And in each set of options is a right answer for the world at large, and a right answer for me alone. Most of the time, the two are not the same.
*
Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the trend. Perhaps it’s not a trend at all but another evolutionary step towards the shorter shelf life of things. Perhaps it’s merely ‘change’, the one word that traditionalists through history have always balked at when it first rears its head. Perhaps I’m one, a traditionalist. Perhaps I’m not. Perhaps I have little else to do other than worry about worlds being replaced. As usual, I don’t know.
*
Though I miss seeing the sparrows sit in neat rows on my window ledge clothesline when it rains. I’d be listening to Charles Mingus pluck his double bass, and the sparrows would chirp, out of tune, but enthusiastic. Every time a sparrow chirps, its tail perks up, as if it’s trilling with its entire body, not just the throat… the hallmark of a jazz musician. With each tree felled by paved roads, one handful of sparrows leaves us for better opportunities somewhere else. Where, I wonder, and clutch my jaw as my wisdom teeth start to push out again. The pain is unbearable. But outside my window the few remaining trees are swaying. And that eases the pain for the time being.
Photo by Robert Krčmar on Unsplash
