The gadget that wrote

(March 2006)

He sat at his worktable, looking with admiration at the wonderful piece of gadgetry that had been entrusted to him. He wiped a drop of sweat off his brow and continued to wipe with his oil-tinged cloth the semicircular array of metallic levers. In the background, the little radio that he had assembled one dreary weekend made whirring noises that resembled a popular song. Naresh brought out a slim box from a drawer, and from it, a carefully preserved ear-bud of dubious quality (he had bought a pack of hundred at a traffic signal). He dipped it in a bit of anti-corrosive fluid and began to clean the little serrations that crowned the aforesaid metallic levers, smiling to himself as he realised that he could recognise a laterally inverted letter in his sleep. Here, in the loop of a 'b' was a small clot of dirt, which was causing smudges of ink on the paper. There, nestling in the hook of the question mark, was another grain of dust. Having cleaned all the letters, digits and punctuation marks to a sparkle, Naresh oiled the rails of the carriage. He pushed the carriage left and right, making sure the motion was smooth, until the little hammer at the bottom of the rails coiled itself and struck a Ting! to signal that the end of a line had been reached. He tried the knobs on the carriage; he made sure the keys at the front were sparkling white. Give him one of these works of art any day, he could repair it no matter what was wrong with it. The pang of joy he felt when one of them went back to its former days of glory, typing line upon line of sparkling text on a clean white sheet of paper, in this, the age of ever-cheaper printers!

Jade Theatre

(November 2007)

Jade Theatre stood at the mouth of Peak Road. It was where an ever-busy flyover, named after a politician but routinely identified by the name of a film studio that had been located in the area, sloped gently downwards and merged with the city’s central road. Every car, bus, autorickshaw and bicycle that used the flyover in the northward direction would have to decide its course when it reached Jade Theatre. The road split into three at this point. The two rightmost ones led to semi-residential localities; the one that led straight on from the flyover became Peak Road, widening as one went north, flanked by trees and elegant colonial-era buildings, some in good trim and some crumbling, and ending up in a melange of shopping malls and office buildings.

Jade Theatre was a landmark. You said ‘One Jade’ to the conductor when you got into the bus at the other end of the city - or you asked ‘Will it stop at Jade?’ Nobody from Rakesh’s generation had ever actually been in the theatre, which was now defunct. His mother recalled going there decades earlier, when it had been a functioning theatre - in the local sense of the word. No plays were staged there; instead films were screened. It was a ‘cin-ma theatre’. Rakesh’s mother would never forget the time she had watched a continuous screening of a slick English thriller. You bought a ticket and walked in at any time, she said, and watched the movie from whatever point it was at; you then sat where you were, and the movie started all over again, so you could watch the part you had missed. It occurred to Rakesh that of all the ways to watch a movie, this was not the one he’d pick first, but apparently it had created waves at the time.

Jade was the bus-stop where he hung out with his friends after school, waiting for one of the many public buses that might take him in the direction of home. Tucked away in an alcove across the road was the theatre itself, its name running across its windowless facade in cursive letters. Behind where the boys stood was a row of mammoth hoardings advertising the latest Tamil films, so striking in their lack of aesthetic sense that they figured in a prominent encyclopaedia as an unfortunate emblem of the city Rakesh loved. The mouth of Peak Road was abuzz with activity. The air was shrill with the honks of automobiles and the revving of their engines, and the shops abutting the road sold all manner of things, ranging from electrical appliances and hardware to general provisions, from bicycle parts to ‘Saivam’ or ‘pure vegetarian’ food. As Rakesh sat on the iron railing with chipped yellow paint under the roof of the bus-stop with his friends, sheltered partially from the unforgiving near-Equatorial sun, he could be guaranteed of at least one bemused-looking traveller coming up and asking whether bus 45J or 78A or something else stopped here. Before answering, he would sigh and wonder why it was so difficult to look up at the rim of the shelter, where the route numbers were painted in black letters on a once-bright yellow background. Buses would now arrive from Peak Road in twos and threes, the boys straining to make out the route numbers in the distance, until all of a sudden, just as they were deep in conversation about yesterday’s cricket match or Michael Whitney’s antics on the the latest edition of the Australian TV show Who Dares Wins, the 15A would materialise. A mass of people would spring forward like termites from the woodwork and rush to the entrances in the front and the back. Rakesh would tighten the strap of his schoolbag, bend to pick up his sticky lunch-bag, cursorily nod to his classmates, and make a dash for it.

Jade Theatre was demolished recently. But schoolchildren, office-goers, petty traders and sundry other citizens still ask for bus tickets to Jade, and wait at Jade for their return journeys after a hot day’s work.