The Recluse

A suburban station of Bombay. Every six or seven minutes, a train would arrive and a small crowd of passengers would emerge from the station to fill the arroyo fenced on one side by a straight wall and on the opposite by an array of tiny workshops, most of them always closed, with old metal working machines installed inside, which, the gully, finally led to the main road. The crowd would gradually disperse into the main road leaving behind the narrow corridor of workshops blinded by the wall to retrieve its regular depressing listlessness; it would go on and on.

K N Mathur every morning reached this station at 8.15 and from the main road outside he took a bus at 8.40 for his onward travel to office. He would spend his 20 minutes near the exit of the station engaging him with cigarettes and tea, and would intently watch the periodic filling and emptying of the road squeezed between the wall and the workshops. It all looked like rehearsals of a drama performed again and again with the drama people taking a break of some time, and then resuming again their act intently and tirelessly. Somehow Mathur would imagine that the driving obsessive force of this drama like situation was a close look alike of his own obsessions.

The clusters of haphazard stacks of engineering books on Mathur’s specialization topics would leave just a squeezed empty well of a space for his reading and working on his table. His routine 8 hours of hard work during which it would take him just a single step to reach at the reference page in the vastness of the huge mass of books with unmistakable precision, would render at the end of the day a fatigued look to the constantly occupied work space of his table. Next to him sat Bhalerao on a table with very little activity on his table in contradiction to the neighborhood. Bhalerao would wonder why the designer reminded him invariably of Father Rodriguez of the Sangli church of the old, which was alongside the Christian high school from where Bhalerao had passed his SSC. It then occurred to him at one such occasion that it was the silhouetted, unspeaking commencement of a divine pleasure on the faces of the two entirely different persons as they would near the most important part in their respective works of the design and the vesper.

The designer K N Mathur, a research engineer as well of international recognition what with his having published some original works in international journals, was known as Mathur of India in the cognoscenti of overseas and national research people. He was also known as ‘Sanyasi’ among his acquaintances not without a reason: the man could easily have taken little more trouble to develop his works, sold the patents and earned millions, multi-millions. But then, there he was, ready to rot in small engineering businesses in unknown corners of India. Even his closest friends won’t know why the idea of obtaining patents and selling them never crossed his mind or if crossed, was never implemented by him. So an apt title that people around him could coin for him was Sanyasi. It was not that he was not after money; but the money had to be earned traipsing in the regular way of engineering professionals: that is it had to come the hard way to him like any other engineering designer would earn.

Working 8 hrs in an office and getting paid for that a salary was the way he would approve for earning money. In some twenty years of his career, he didn’t remember how many applications for employment he had made. 2-3 on an average everyday for twenty consolidated years, he would say. In his interviews, he would set his conditions, which would at once distract his would be employers. He would not travel; he would not coordinate between departments; he would only do design calculations and check drawings; then further none in the world ever dares to yell at him, however big he might be. And as a result, very few employers had the heart to consider him for a position in their establishments.

Bhalerao was witnessing this not for the first time. The employer Desai and the designer Mathur were sitting in the glass paneled cabin of the former; the two men discussing. Desai was arguing and Mathur listening smilingly. The discussion was over two solutions of a gear design lying on the table side by side; one was scrawled quickly and haphazardly in few lines by Desai on the basis of raw guesswork made from experience of several years, and the other a meticulous, perfect engineering design by Mathur as per the academic guidelines tutored in college; employer-employee relationship being the reason of the hand scrawled “design” deigning to lie shamelessly next to the perfect work. It was so ironical, ill-fitting and incongruous that a good painter might have considered it for the subject of a satiric painting very appropriately titled “Search”- a painting depicting a peculiar situation of two persons searching the place of an eminent man in the city: one searching with the aid of a shabby piece of paper with the address, incomplete in details, in illiterate vernacular hand written on the chit; the second person, a professional acquaintance of the eminent man, going about the search with the aid of an exclusive visiting card of the eminent man- a card that the eminent man gave only to his acquaintances of sufficient professional relevance.

In Bombay years pass so quickly that earth appears to revolve quicker around the sun for Bombay than elsewhere. It takes here just a couple of years for a Bhalerao to become a Member of Legislative Assembly from a sugar belt town of Maharashtra. When Bhalerao was making decisions about staffing his newly started engineering college in Sangli, he recalled the designer Mathur. Who would fit better than Mathur to become the Dean, Principal and Head of the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering? So Bhalerao activated his network to investigate the whereabouts of the designer Mathur. It took him one complete month to find Mathur’s location in a small company in Delhi.

Bhalerao first decided to go himself to Delhi to bring the designer to Bombay. Then he changed idea and sent an expensive first class air ticket at Mathur’s address with a letter requesting Mathur to come and take the position of Dean/Principal/Head of the dept in his engineering college. Mathur liked the idea and joined the college.

Soon the achievements of Mathur made the first paragraph of the bulletin and prospectus of the college. A good team of professors was made available to Mathur to skyrocket the college’s reputation in least possible time. First batch from the college gave rank holders in University. The college’s performance in second year was yet better. In just five years, the college’s status was upped to first five colleges in the state. The parents of the aspirant student in Mathur’s college happily paid the 700,000 rupee donation to the college for gaining a seat. Receipt of money was never acknowledged by the college. Mathur would receive the cash, take his commission of 10% and pass on the remaining bulk to Bhalerao. If Mathur was unscrupulous like himself, Bhalerao would think, then why so religiously observe the scruples of not selling the patents even now?

Mathur had come to Bombay to discuss a matter of some importance with Bhalerao; rumors had it that the local income tax authorities were planning some serious action against the college. Bhalerao, after assuring Mathur to take care of the income tax people, asked him to spend the evening with him. Bhalerao would tell now everything of his politics or business to Mathur. Bhalerao was entrusting more of his business to Mathur’s care. For example Mathur was now the head of a cooperative organization, owned by Bhalerao that ran 2 sugar mills in Sangli. At this moment, the two were sitting in a parked Mercedes. Bhalerao himself was on the driving seat of the car, which stood in the middle of a row of cars parked in a lane of a residential colony of Bombay. The two men were waiting there in the car to see the death of a man; a man was about to be killed though Bhalerao had told Mathur that the man would receive just a non-fatal bullet wounds. Bhalerao asked Mathur to accompany him just to mean ostensibly that he wanted to conceal nothing from Mathur, Mathur very well could interpret this: none was safe if he started speaking sensitive matter against Bhalerao.

The man, an enthusiastic young civil engineer, who had turned out to be a cumbersome nuisance resulting in serious financial losses to Bhalerao, walked out of a multistoried building with no premonition of the looming death over his head. The professional `supari’ shooter pulled the trigger of his pistol, and the first heralding and preparatory bullet found it way to the arm of the person. In a jiffy the small crowd in the gully disappeared from the vicinity of the person being lynched, as was the objective of the first shooting. With one bullet wound in his left arm, the wounded man ran begging shelter from door to door all of which were closed in awe of the shooting outside. He was hysterically running, now to some unresponsive door to bang, now to the middle of the road to yell for help. It was hard to imagine whether the type of his desperation and disintegrated composure was ever seen elsewhere before. Or would it pair to some extent with the desperation and complete loss of sangfroid of a man who had to call somewhere to stop the breaking loose of a hell somewhere- a desperate man confined in a sequestered railway station’s corridor lined with all non-working telephone stands; now he would run to this telephone and failing there, now he would run to next unexplored phone to see if he had some luck.

The man fell to the ground when the second bullet speared in his chest . The engine of Mercedes revved up and the vehicle drifted from the place. Bhalerao looked a bit into Mathur’s visage. The face of the erstwhile scientist was full with his usual equanimity. Even a scene of murder made no matter of substance for the former designer who now knew that he was associating with a criminal politician. All men could not go through so precipitous a paradigm shift, said Bhalerao in his mind to himself. Bhalerao wondered where Mathur had disposed off the creativity that he appeared a few years back not able to part with. Bhalerao thought it was the creativity that kept Mathur alive. He looked more carefully, delving into the facial expressions of Mathur, and his years of experience in reading faces, told him that it was there even now. It was meticulously hidden; but Bhalerao didn’t miss it. And Mathur had certainly cast off his scruples. Would the man just survive like an ordinary upstart? Certainly not. There was so apparent a satisfaction of having freshly achieved, ingrained in that equanimity and sangfroid of his, which the scene of even a murder could not muck.

They spent the evening in the bar of a posh club of Bombay, discussing over champagne and dinner the setting up of a mid size fabrication and machine shop with high-tech imported machines; the plant would cater to the needs of sugar plant machinery that had a big market in that area of Maharashtra. At around 8 PM, Bhalerao dropped Mathur at his 3 bedroom apartment in Sion that Mathur had purchased a few months before for a price of 6500,000.

The CST-KALYAN 7 PM local after unloading a huge mass of commuters at the suburban station’s platform was now leaving in a slithering motion. The disembarked giant mass of the passengers soon crowded in a thick immobile middle bulk on the broad staircase of the platform’s over bridge, from either side of which the incoming passengers in two thin disciplined files, as if shearing from the middle mass, made their way to the platform below to catch their trains. It had the blend of incarceration and mesmerism of a house full cinema hall with the theatre’s vast, pitch dark roof seamed with two slim parallel lines of colored light illuminating dimly two opposite edges of the roof.

A courier boy squeezed his way in the middle bulk of outgoing passengers and leaving the station, came to the residential streets of Sion. He didn’t have to look for Avantika apartments as he already knew where the flat was. Every month one or more letters he delivered at this address. A young man used to receive the letter. The courier boy reached the flat and waited as he heard the steps reaching the door in response to the call-bell. This time a different person, a man in his late forties, probably an uncle of the young man, presented himself to receive the letter. As the courier boy left, the man opened the envelope and started reading,

“Dear Mr. Mathur,
Congratulations. Your new short story has already been sent to the press. We are now ready to publish the collection of your literary works published overseas, which you had sent. As per your wish, we have forwarded the royalty money DD for the amount 42 thousand rupee payable to you on account of your recently published book, to Mrs. Shubhadra Devi memorial trust for research studies in UK.
You will be paid a royalty of 15 % on the sale price of the book that we are now undertaking for publication. You will have to issue us another authorization letter to donate the royalty money to the trust.
Yours truly
For New Delhi Write-spot literary publications ltd