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Soundtrack: Bird of Prey by Fatboy Slim

Vultures aren’t a common sight in Delhi, let alone near the centre of the known universe called Connaught Place. So Inderjeet, as he swivelled the seat forward on which an old man with a film of cataract forming like the beginnings of the sides of a fried egg was sitting, was slightly perturbed to catch the sight of a vulture, complete with crooked neck and dirty wings, take flight from the window opposite his room in the clinic. “Vultures at this height?” he thought as he waited for the eye-drops to seep out of his patients crinkly closed eyes.

Who are these hanging out outside Inder's clinic?

The fact that his next patient was Jamshi Narimanpointwalla, the large but dexterous woman who had been coming to the clinic for some six weeks now to fix her lazy eye, should have told Inder that perhaps what he thought was a vulture was actually a kite with a bad neck. Also, the fact that he had developed a slightly awkward patient-opthalmologist relationship months away from Jamshi’s impending marriage to a fellow Parsi, should have signalled that all that he saw was not to be trusted.

“Hello, Miss Narimanpointwalla. How are you today?” He uttered with total confidence that he had borrowed from one of the self-help books that he had flipped through during a walkabout recently at Janpath. ‘How to be confident with women without coming across as a pervert’ was the title that had grabbed his eye that day. Of course, he hadn’t bought the book. He had just flipped through it, reading the first few pages that told the reader that the key to behaving normally with women was to not see them just as women.

“I’m fine. It’s just that my right eye is still crooked. No?” Jamshi semi-cooed in her baritone that would have made an AIR orchestra kick into the opening strains of Dum maro dum in the mistaken notion that Usha Uthup nee Iyer. Inder had first met Jamshi when she was a woman standing in front of an SUV at the Delhi Auto Expo 2009. Like those funny pictures showing how dogs and their owners look remarkably alike, Jamshi looked the flesh’n'blood compatriot of the gleaming metal monster that rotated on a rotating dais at Pragati Maidan last winter. Inder had quietly inspected the car — with no remote intention of buying it — and even tucked himself behind the steering wheel. It was there and then that he had mistaken her to be talking to him.

“The engine is perfect for our roads and beats the Mahindra equivalent hands down. And if you have a big family…”

“No, it’s just me actually,” Inder had said looking up from the dashboard that gleamed a light green that looked like one of those overpriced cocktails that they make at the TGIF outlet at Vasant Vihar.

“Um, sorry?” It turned out that Jamshi in her black wrapped-around XL wrap around was speaking to a gentleman with a waterbottle in his hand, a woollen cap coming down to his eyelids and a small wife and a smaller child of indeterminate sex standing a bit away. Not to Inder.

Nope, this is NOT Miss Narimanpointwalla

“I said that I’m single. Don’t have a large family.”

After that initial misunderstanding, a genuine conversation ensued. Inder had taken down the showroom number hoping that the information would end up where information such as this always ends up: nowhere. But a few months later, he did follow it up while toying with the idea of buying car mats for his cousin as a birthday present. And there she was, lazy-eyed and deep-voiced talking to someone but all the while one eye looking at him.

Almost a year later, Inder got to hear about how a Bandra boy had rejected her advances because Jamshi was looking elsewhere. She now needed his help. She wanted both her eyes to look at one person at a time. Thus, her regular visitations at the Shroff Eye Centre that wasd near no tower of silence.

Inder had found out from his fellow opthalmologists that what Jamshi suffered from was an ailment called Amblyopia. It was caused not by Parsi in-breeding but because of poor transmission of the visual image to the brain. The only way to fix it was by putting a patch on the good eye and forcing the ‘lazy’ one to start processing images correctly. All this made Inder remember of a picture by French artist he had seen once in his favourite paper, Hindustan Times. If he remembered correctly, the picture was that of a giant balloon with a giant eye.

Odilon Redon's 'Eye-balloon: Inder's eyes saw this once in HT

Patching Jamshi’s good eye, Inder pretended to look into the lazy eye. “So did you go to the Auto Expo this time?”

The sweet baritone coming from the face bathed and invisible in the bright light replied, “Are you crazy? This time it was zunbearably chaotic. In any case, small cars are the rage this year and they needed smaller girls.”

Inder flinched at the words ’small girls’. His elbow bumped into the swivel light that in turn smacked right into Jashmi’s still-invisible forehead. Above the soft ‘thwak’ sound that came out of the impact was the woman’s throaty bellow, Bosudi maga! Waving the light away, Inder touched Jashmi’s head as if trying to douse sudden flames out.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” He stuttered away like a tweet with nothing to say. It was a disaster and Miss Narimanpointwalla, who was sure to have either Soli Sorabjee or Fali Nariman as her uncle, would now sue him, expose him as a charlatan and, perhaps most importantly, change her moderate interest in his existence to full-blown hatred.

More apologies later and after convincing Jamshi that he had to make up for his utter clumsiness by taking her out, Inder realised that the vulture (that was actually a kite) had been a good omen. He had taken off his white coat, rushed to one of the Dr Shroffs (there were more than one) and said that he had to leave as there was a family emergency. Well, it was a family emergency, except it wasn’t his but one that concerned the diasporic Narimanpointwallas that even noted writer Suketu Mehta had woefully ignored in his book Maximum City , a book that crypto-writer Inder had tried to emulate by writing his biography of Connaught Place tentatively titled, Maximum CP and had given up on after realising it was too hard a task.

It was in CP, Connaught Place, Rajiv Chowk to Congress flunkies, that he found himself walking with Jamshi Narimanpointwalla. With one eye on the central park twinkling with fake colonial streetlights and one eye on his face, Jamshi spoke incessantly about how her cousins all played hockey always for the country and never for the money “unlike those bloody bastards on strike this week asking for more money to play hockey for India”. Inder politely asked when her cousins played for India, to which she said that they had played for the Parsi Sticks XI but because of sports politics — that had included K.P.S. Gill pinching the bottom of one of her uncles, Russi, mistaking him for a catty bureaucrat — none of them ever represented India.

As the two sidestepped the landmines and bodies that seemed to cover good old CP now under renovation from what appeared to be an virulent terrorist attack during these ‘Aman ki Asha’ times, he heard her pepper each sentences with great unparliamentary language that would have made even the great potty-mouthed H.D. Deve Gowda blush.

The man who made 'Bosudi Maga' popular

And then she used those words again: “That bosudi maga Lt Governor Tejender Khanna now has decided to cut down on renovation work! Now, after all this disaster!”

As they sat down on the first floor of the totally hidden-by-scaffolding KFC outlet, Inder very politely asked his companion, “Those words, ‘Bosdi…’ something. What’s that? Japanese?”

In between scoops of cole slaw and a bite off a chicken wing (hot’n’spicy) Jamshi gave out a loud ‘Hari Om Hari’ laugh, “Oh that? Ha, ha. Bosdi maga That means son of a bitch in Kannadiga!” As she proceeded to explain her ex-assailant how she had picked up the colourful abuse (her father was posted in Mysore when her voice was still high-pitched) with one eye on his plate and one eye gazine into his, Inder flinched. Sitting a few seats behind her was Amar Singh, the Samajwadi Party leader, looking a bit lost and thereby earning every ounce of sympathy that Inder could muster.

“Oh my god,” thought Inder as the voice of Jamshi boomed on drowning the construction work immediately outside the KFC shop. “He’s got Amblyopia too!

(Next week: With a heavy heart, Rakhi Sawant...)

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Posted by Indrajit Hazra on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 7:48 pm 
Filed under Music · Tagged Amar Singh, book, Bosudi maga, Connaught Place, delhi, Delhi Auto Expo 2009, H.D. Deve Gowda, Lt Governor Tejender Khanna, maximum city, maximum CP, the Samajwadi Party leader, vultures

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