The dark is light enough!

By Adil Jussawalla

IT isn’t unusual for people to stare at me — I seem to attract a lot of attention through no fault of mine. Is it my peculiar nose? I wasn’t born with it, it just grew that way. Do the people who stare at me for no reason Ican imagine expect me to cut it off? So I can spite my face?

Is it my recently cultivated pony tail? Perhaps. A distinguished professor of literature and I swung into the lobby of the building I live in, only to notice, through the corners of our eyes, that the sturdy Bihari watchmen, not normally given to mirth, were cracking their ribs with laughter. What they saw in profile is her, the professor, and me, as we swung proudly into the lobby, with identical pony tails.

It’s not unusual, as a wretched pop-singer sang during my wretched youth. To be started at, I mean. What’s unusual is to have five young men making faces at me through my bedroom window. The window is on the 18th floor.

No hangover, nor partying the night before, so what was this? I charged from bedroom to kitchen only to find myself in purdah. There was scaffolding, there was a jute curtain beyond the scaffolding and there were these five men making faces at me through my bedroom window. They wanted water.

So I got a bottle of water from the kitchen and handed it to a man I thought was the least opportunistic of the five but who turned out to be the most insolent. "What’s going on?" I asked him, pointing in the direction of the purdah across the kitchen. He took a swing from the bottle of water and sneered in true Lawrence Olivier fashion (I swear), "It’s curtains for you."

So much for the thanks we get. But that curtain has changed my perspective on things. The kitchen light must be on every morning or I can’t get anything done there. Which is interesting, considering the fact the bulb blew three days ago and I haven’t replaced it.

In the morning, the light in the kitchen is like it is when you have to catch an early train. Up at four to make omlette sandwiches for the journey. Dear Deccan Queen, soon to be renamed Saraswat Brahmin Express, I imagine. Dear Poona, now Pune, which I prefer because my business is always to rename things, invent new meanings. Dear Congress Party, stinker. Dear BJP, skunk.

Here’s to the men who have curtained my day and brought me a change of light. I don’t think it’s curtains for me. On the contrary, as a British playwright said at a dim time in his country and century, the dark is light enough.

— ANF