When Nature Calls For Percussion

Lakhimpur, Assam. 1998.

The first time Bruce met Sonam was during one of his holiday trips to Lakhimpur, when he used to stay with Amit. The day Bruce arrived was Id-Ul-Fitr, so they had breakfast at Salim’s place, lunch at Arif’s, puchka (= golgappe = pani-puri) from a vendor at Malpani Chariali’s most life-threatening footpath, and dinner at Sheikh Shah’s. Amit’s mother had looked very worried in the morning about sending her son for three meals to three Muslim families. Amit assured her that he would never do anything that would make her upset. Then he went and did exactly that.
 “So, bamun,” said Bruce as they cycled back home wearily, “when’s your purifying pilgrimage to the Ganga?”
 “I’m too tired. Let the Ganga come here.”
 Amit felt a few tiny bubbles pop in his stomach. Probably the puchka pani doing battle with Sheikh Shah’s shammi kababs. The puchkas had been too pungent for him, and he had forced himself to have the last few, barely even chewing them before swallowing.
 “I thought I would die laughing when you so innocently told your mother this morning not to worry,” said Bruce.
 “Monkey number 2. Hear no evil.”
 Amit felt a few pieces of meat shifting around restlessly in his stomach. Probably Salim’s beef competing with Arif’s mutton for leg room.
 “You’ve sinned today, bamun. Shame on you. You should be excommunicated.”
 “I don’t care as long as there’s pork around.”
 Amit felt a few major upheavals in his stomach this time. Definitely not just chemical reactions between incompatible foods. The puchka was probably trying to assert its supremacy by trying to expel the other more wholesome foods.
 “There seems to be a major riot starting in my stomach,” said Amit as he alighted from his bicycle.
 “Serves you right, jackass. I told you, you were eating too many.”
 “It’s Id, man. Eating time.”
 “So – are you going to have to to visit Dr Kumud Pa Khanna?”
 “Probably…oh…I just remembered something.” Amit’s heart sank.
 “What?”
 “Ma said something about installing a new commode today.”
 “Really?”
 “The old one was pretty much beginning to crack up – I personally think it looks in worse shape after your arrival –  so they were supposed to take it out and fix a new one today. I hope it’s ready.”
 Amit’s mother was watching Kyunki Saas Mein Kabhi Badboo Thi on TV.
 “Ma, has the new commode come?”
 “No.”
 “Oh.”
 “It was brought by the sanitary store guys – it couldn’t come by itself.”
 “Oh God! Cracking bad jokes at your age. Has it been fixed?”
 “Not completely. They’ll come tomorrow morning and finish it.”
 “Not completely?!?”
 “Have a look yourself.”
 Amit ran to take a look. The concrete foundation of the commode had been dug out. The new commode was delicately balanced on just a few bricks in the centre. It wasn’t even cemented yet. Being an Indian-style commode, there was no way to even step on it without it toppling over, let alone doing anything else.
 Amit’s stomach gave a few almost-audible gurgles. They were probably the dying gasps of the pulao, vanquished by the all-powerful puchka.
 “What’re you going to do now?” asked Bruce.
 “I guess I’ll have to hold it till tomorrow,” said Amit, not very confidently.
 “Would you like to sleep with Huggies?”
 “Shaddup.”
 They went back to Amit’s mother. He asked her, “Ma, what if someone needs to go tonight?”
 “You do?”
 “I may have to.”
 “You? I’m surprised.” Amit had a habit of never unloading himself in unknown commodes. He couldn’t remember whether some childhood experience had traumatised him, but he somehow couldn’t bring himself to dispose of his waste anywhere other than home.
 “Ma, please.”
 “I’ve talked with Aunty Adi. You can go to their place.”
 “Who’s Aunty Adi?” asked Bruce.
 “Our next door neighbour,” replied Amit. “Never mind. I think I’ll just have to control till morning.”
 As if on cue, Amit’s stomach lodged an immediate protest with some really loud bubbling. He grimaced. Bruce started chuckling.
 “What’re you so happy about, dunderhead?”
 “Heh heh. This is fun. I’ll be watching you all night…and listening.”

 There are some things which are beyond will power. You can will yourself to quit smoking, you can will yourself to lay off the sweets, you can will yourself to wake up and go for a morning jog, but you cannot will your anatomy’s trapdoors locked shut when you have stuffed yourself to the back teeth with three varieties of animal flesh – which is all right on its own – and then topped it all with the incendiary material that the Malpani Chariali footpath puchkas were.
 Amit tried to forget about his internal atmospheric pressure by playing songs on the guitar, but quite the opposite happened – the pressure made him forget the correct chords. He had a habit of never getting the lyrics right anyway. Every time he hit a wrong note, Bruce would see the look on his face and laugh, and start talking about Huggies or finding a good secluded spot in a nearby jungle.
 Half an hour later, Amit gave up. He was practically sweating from the efforts at self control.
 “Okay, I give up. Let’s go to Aunty Adi’s place.”
 Bruce spent a minute guffawing first.
 “Asshole! Stop laughing. I’m in a state of emergency here.”
 “Sure you are, dude. Let’s go.”
 Bruce pressed his self-slow-motion button and very slowly got up from his bed. He put on a shirt excruciatingly slowly and pretended to look for his specs, also at a painfully slow pace, and grinning all the while.
 “Bruce! Asshole! What the hell are you doing! Hurry up!” said Amit, whose internal organs were in anything but slow motion.
 “Someone’s…pressed…my…slow…motion…button,” said Bruce at half his normal pace, and double his normal bass, mimicking the resultant sound when a cassette tape gets stuck.
 “Here’s the fast forward button then,” said Amit and kicked Bruce on the backside.
 “Ow!” exclaimed Bruce, laughing. “Okay, let’s go.”
 For his friend’s sake, Bruce hastened his tempo as they walked across to Aunty Adi’s place. Amit rang the doorbell.
 Aunty Adi opened the door and said, “Hello Amit. How are you?”
 “Fine, Aunty. This is my friend Bruce. You know our commode is being changed…”
 “Oh yesyesyesyesyes. Your mother told me. So do you want to – or your friend?”
 “Him,” said Bruce. “The greedy guts. I told him not to eat so much, but he kept on eating as if he’d been fasting in the Himalayas for a year.”
 “Oh, that’s ok,” said Aunty Adi. “Young boys should eat. Comeincomeincomein.”
 And there it was for the first time that Bruce saw Sonam – the girl he was to fall in love with later. She was sitting in front of the TV in the drawing room, watching American Beauty, which happened to be one of Bruce’s favourite films. She laughed out aloud at the ‘This is just a couch!’ scene. Bruce was impressed. Few girls laughed uninhibitedly when strangers were around.
 It wasn’t love at first sight, though. Sonam had barely glanced at them before turning her attention to the movie again.
 “This is my niece, Sonam, from Dirang.”
 Sonam smiled and uttered a polite Hi. The boys hi-ed back. She was tall, slim, considerably fair and had short hair. Her face could have been better, but the rosy cheeks more than made up for it. She was wearing a navy blue sleeveless top and huge striped pajamas. Bruce didn’t form any remarkable impression of her and  Amit was busy worrying about the impression something else was threatening to form on his pajamas.
 “You just wait here a minute,” said Aunty Adi. “I’ll arrange for some water for you.”
 “That’s okay, Aunty,” said Amit. “We’re not thirsty.”
 “Not to drink, my dear.”
 “Oh.”
 Aunty Adi went in and Bruce whispered to Amit, “Don’t tell me there’s no running water in their Pa Khanna.”
 “I don’t know, dude. I’ve never been there. What for?”
 “To drown out the sounds in case things get noisy,” whispered Bruce.
 “Oh God! That’s right. What should I do?”
 Bruce snickered and suggested, “Just do it quietly.”
 “Asshole, that’s like telling someone to dream only pleasant dreams!”
 “In that case, you’re going to make a unique first impression on this girl. Oh, this is priceless. I wish I had a camera. I’d make a docu-drama on your situation.”
 Aunty Adi returned. “Okay, Amit. You can go now. Down this corridor, to your left. I’ll just go and have a few words with your mother. Bruce, you stay here and watch TV with Sonam.”
 “Thanks, Aunty,” said Amit and set off.
  As Aunty Adi left, Bruce sat down in the sofa next to Sonam’s. All her attention was focussed on the movie, so he sat silently and watched.
 At the battle frontlines, Amit’s worst fears came true. There was no running water! If there had been, he could at least have turned the tap on and created some camoflauging noise. Now he was sunk. All he could do was try to conduct business as soundlessly as possible. But how do you do that?
 About half a minute later, Bruce and Sonam heard the first popping sounds. I wish I knew how to describe this part a little euphemistically, but that’s the way it went down. Amit was trying hard to control the sound effects, but like he himself had said, it was like trying to control the quality of your dreams.
 The sounds started getting a little louder and more varied. Bruce saw Sonam cast a quick glance in the direction of the noise. A hint of a smile seemed to be forming at the corners of her mouth.
 Thank God, thought Bruce. She’s got a sense of humour. At least she’s not appearing disgusted.
 After a particularly loud crackle, Sonam finally looked at Bruce and grinned. He smiled back and said, “I think we should turn up the volume a bit.”
 “You’re right,” she chuckled, and did so.
 Bruce the drummer thought that his ears detected, amidst the traces of the racket that floated towards them, snares, double bass rolls, lots of tom-tom rolls, a few reverse cymbals and a couple of crash cymbals.
 In the battlefield trenches on the other hand, Amit was reproducing the sound effects of a battle where a B-35 fighter jet, a couple of M-16s, a few AK-56s, some grenades and a couple of British WWII Bren guns were all being used with silencers attached. This was the comparison Amit would have drawn, being a fanatical reader of Commando and Battle Picture Library comics, were it not that he was busy abusing the puchkawala with all his mental might. If I ever get out of here alive, he thought, I’ll make that puchkawala eat all his own bloody puchkas at one go, then I’ll shut him up inside a cardboard cell with no running water and no gas masks. When he begs for food, I’ll send his family a ransom note demanding 2000 puchkas. Then I’ll feed those puchkas to him again…
 Unfortunately for Amit, things got worse. The Assam State Electricity Board, ASEB, is also termed After Sunset Electricity Breakdown. Eager to live up to its nickname, it decided on a power cut. All the lights went out.
 “Oh no!” groaned Sonam and Bruce together.
 Amit, at the same instant, not only said oh and no, but also inserted God’s name in between. The TV had been drowning out some of his explosions, but now there was complete silence and total darkness. In the darkness, Aunty Adi’s niece would have nothing to look at. That would leave her ears as her primary sense organ, and he well knew what they would hear. Amit tried hard to procrastinate matters till the lights came back on, but he knew it was a futile endeavour, as the electricity would almost surely take at least one hour to return.
 Bruce was unsure of what the right track of conversation would be with a girl you’ve just been introduced to and are now stuck with in total darkness. Sonam spoke first.
 “What’s your name?” she asked casually.
 “Bruce. Hazowary. What’s your surname?”
 “Lamu.”
 “Born in…’81?”
 “Good guess.”
 “That’s great. Me too.”
 In the meantime, Amit had been trying to hold things back till the atmosphere was more conducive, but he might as well have tried to cork a volcano. Things gave way with a loud array of muffled explosions.
 Bruce tried hard not to laugh. But then Sonam burst out first, giving Bruce license to join in. He immediately started liking her. Probably one in a hundred girls would have been bindaas enough to laugh in a situation like this. The other 99 would have either maintained an awkward silence or tried to escape.
 “I’m so sorry,” said Bruce in between chuckles. “He had too many puchkas.”
 “That’s ok,” said Sonam. “Something similar’s happened to me before as well.”
 “Really?”
 “Yeah. A friend’s birthday party. There too the lights had gone out.”
 “Now that’s some coincidence,” said Bruce and laughed. He really liked this girl. Probably just one in a thousand would have ever admitted to such an embarassing story, let alone in a first conversation.
 As Bruce and Sonam got to know each other, Amit cursed and abused the puchkawala and the electricity board for grinding his izzat into the mittee.
 Sonam was doing her higher secondary science studies in Bomdila. She loved books and movies the same as Bruce, he was pleased to note. Her father was a contractor and her mother was in the state government. She planned to come to Guwahati the next year to do her Bachelor’s degree from Cotton College.
 “That’s great,” said Bruce. “If I’m still there next year we’ll be batchmates.”
 “Yeah.”
 After a beat, Bruce said, “Amit’s fallen silent. I think his ordeal’s over.”
 “Yeah. I think I should get a candle.”
 In the meantime, Amit finished his rituals in the darkness and crawled out, not literally, but spiritually. He could hardly think of bringing himself face to face with Sonam after all the sound effects he had produced. Oh God! Whatever would she say to Aunty Adi!
 Amit opened the door at the same instant that Sonam stepped out of the kitchen with a candle, which she was holding at waist level, causing bad horror film shadows to form on her face. The sudden sight of a girl ghost with a candle was too much for Amit’s already-numbed brain. “Oh Ma!” he exclaimed.
 “Sorry, sorry,” said Sonam, laughing. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” Bruce was laughing in the drawing room.
 “Oh, it’s you,” said Amit, clutching his heart.
 “Did some more come out from the shock, Amit?” asked Bruce.
 “Shaddup, nincompoop.”
 Sonam placed the candle on a table and sat down again. Amit slid into a sofa with a huge sigh of relief.
 “All out?” said Bruce.
 “Shaddup.”
 “I’ll get you some water,” said Sonam.
 “Yes, please, thank you.”
 Amit drank the water Sonam brought, then thanked her and rose to leave.
 “Let us know when you come to Guwahati,” said Bruce.
 “Yeah,” said Sonam, although not as enthusiastically as Bruce would have liked.
 “G’night, then.”
 “Good night.”
 As they plodded towards Amit’s door, he said, “I’m never entering Aunty Adi’s place again while that girl’s still there. God! Did she say something about me?”
 “That you were the most disgusting creature she’d ever set eyes upon.”
 “You’re lying…aren’t you? God no, she might have actually said that…did she really?”
 “No.”
 “Thank God.”
 “She said she wished she had a tape recorder at hand.”
 “Asshole. Now you’re definitely lying.”
 “She didn’t say anything. She just turned up the volume. And when the lights went out, we both laughed at your symphony of destruction.”
 “Hey Bhaggu Dada! My izzat’s gone!”
 “Into the septic tank.”
 “I’m never entering Aunty Adi’s place again while she’s still there.”

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