Relativity and the Ramayana

(Published in Zeitgeist, The New Indian EXpress, on 12th December, 2009)

“Chabhi to... kho gayi. Teen char mahiney ke pehle.”

The fact that the platform official couldn’t meet my eyes was due entirely to his squint. I was shivering on a bench at Ayodhya, at 10:30 p.m., and being told the key to the waiting room had been lost months ago. The monkeys that were huddling together were looking at me in pity. And I glared at their furry bodies, wishing I weren’t so conscientious about my appointments at the salon.

My teeth chattering, I asked how many hours the train was late by.

The platform official beamed and said, “siraf teen-char gante.”

“WHAT!”

“Hanh, hanh,” he nodded, smiling, “you’re lucky today. Usually, it comes in the morning.”

I vaguely recalled having read something about Rama taking the entire population of Ayodhya along to Vaikuntha. I empathised at that moment with the people, who must have thought they were trotting along to a community bath at the Sarayu, only to be given the “ooh, good news! You’re all going to drown and come to Heaven!” line. Death by water, death from cold…not much to choose from there.

“The station master’s room is open if you want,” Mr. Can’t-Meet-Your-Eyes said, usefully, when the noise my teeth were making began to rival the cymbals a group of singing devotees was clashing at regular intervals.

“Yeh to pehle bataanaa chaahiye tha, na!” I snapped, and he stared after me as I hurried along to the door marked ‘STATION MASTER’, wondering whether I had actually uttered a grammatically correct Hindi sentence. I was dimly aware that I had left my parents on the platform, but figured that since their intention had been to lose themselves in the footsteps of God, I might as well leave them to it.

Our trip to Ayodhya had been timed quite to perfection. It was the day the Liberhan Commission Report was to be tabled, and the day after all hell had broken loose in Parliament after a media leak. Thanks to which, the entourage of guides chorusing “hum yahaan ke Brahmin hain. Pandhra rupai leythe hain” and promising to show us round, hadn’t been the most painful part of the journey. No, they lost ground to the security checks.

It is my personal belief that the people who conduct security checks are carefully selected from among India’s most sexually frustrated citizens – and on an occasion like this, they do their job so thoroughly that you can’t, in good conscience, wear white at your fantasy wedding. While being groped, poked and prodded with a ferocity that would put ‘eve-teasers’ to shame, I noticed that the security staff seemed to trust their hands far more than that strange black equipment that beeps three times on an average. They simply didn’t have any bomb detectors – on the day the report was being tabled! Of course, one could argue that bomb detectors aren’t particularly useful in spotting axes and hammers.

I flung open the door of the Station Master’s room, to be greeted by a blaze of saffron. Fifteen men stared, while the Saffron Man who had been given pride of place – the station master’s chair – gave me a disapproving look and then went on, “so Dhashrath died alone, just like Shravan’s parents. What do we learn from this? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

Having satisfactorily linked Newton to the Ramayana, Saffron Man sat back on his chair and closed his eyes – the fifteen others followed suit. A few seconds on, a synchronised snoring session began, that would only be interrupted by the arrival of the train, four hours later.

As I yanked at the door of my compartment, wondering whether my children would abandon me at a pilgrimage centre someday, I realised it was locked from inside, and the Ticket Collector was snoring too.