He reads about Ozymandias in a book, and thinks back to his school days. Those committee tailored textbooks of English to teach the native sonofabitch His Master’s Voice. Lord Maculay! Sahib, you just wanted some nice good brown skinned clerks, and now we are back there again. This time, however, under American nicknames, and with fake American accents, helping dumb Yankees to figure out how to turn on their latest and greatest seventy inch TVs (money spent on which, if spent on an as large canvas might have helped their thinning souls much better. But no let’s not blame them. They are only doing their patriotic duty, and helping Chinese et al., half the world away to be able to afford, and aspire to, Mercedes Benzes!) because they are too lazy to read the fucking manual, and figure out how to work the remote.

So he read many of those Romantic, transcendental, what-have-you English poets (generally not too many American poets. No Whitman, too much large hearted, large scale ache for transcendence, including sexual, not only hetero either, in his poetry. Oh yes, Frost with his Birches and Road Not Taken was there as well) in the last twenty pages of his high school textbook. And then he went to exams to answer questions about the significance, moral of the story etc (Oh! How the natives loved stories with morals! Their greatest epics were gargantuan morality plays) that Lord Byron or whoever wrote Ozzie (in America, Ozzie would turn up as some kind of punk-rock musician, no operator, who ate a live rat on TV. Ah! How is human kinkiness elevated to public spectacle!), or what Wordsworth was feeling when he saw daffodils? Again this required some fifteen odd years, and some fifteen thousand odd miles to be put behind, before he could really see daffodils in spring, and feel what perhaps Bill Wordsworth felt long time ago. Lovely! Very lovely indeed!

He also remembers all those recitation competitions the high school used to have, where one is supposed to go up to a stage, recite a poem, and win a prize for oneself, as well to whatever ‘house’ (i.e., clans into which the whole school populace was partitioned into) one belonged to. His clan was named after that tryst-with-destiny guy, Nehru. Did he, perhaps, just finish balling Edwina when he wrote that great speech for a brand new spanking nation, soon to be a republic even, created out of anarchy by colonists, and all set to sail back into anarchy. But then did the ancient philosophers over there hold that everything was Maya, and this was Kali Yuga of human existence, the dark ages waiting for some meta-mega plague to wipe it all out? The only poem he remembered for this whole dog show was one of Blake’s Songs. That theatrical operator, who later went on to study computer science at India’s finest, instead of Shakespeare, won the prize by belting it out an old man’s accent, some version of a Hindu old man. No well meaning Brit could have infused so much sentimentality into such a recitation. He almost made the whole damn panel of judges weep!

Then there was the whole terror of Hindi, administered by the “gora” (i.e. fair skinned. How racist even the “dark” races are, or have become! O! Masters, you taught us well; color is indeed power!) Northern fascists to the bumbling “niggers” down below. Teach them the damn language by beating the shit out of them. Fear is a quicker teacher than love. And if the idiot doesn’t get the hint that if he wants to be spared a caning every so often, he has to come by the house, twice or thrice every week for private tuition and coaching, give him more humiliation (ex: making him kneel down in biting sand, in the school courtyard under the hot tropical sun for an hour or so) till he gets the message that this is a plain extortion scheme, and he better cough up the dough to learn a language, which is not his own. No soft love there. Spare the rod; spoil the child, was after all the prevailing mantra.

So what did he learn in the process, apart from an ability to understand sentimental and zany dialogue (Are o Samba! Kithne admi the? Mocambo kush huaa!) or hum songs sung by courtesans etc (Inhi logon ne!, Yahoo! Koi mujhe jungalee kahen!) from Bollywood blockbusters? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. And after being away from speaking it, or hear it spoken, for some years, it all seeped away from his mental aquifer. Good riddance perhaps? So these days when people, thinking they are of his kind, which indeed they partly are, encounter him and strike up a conversation in Hindi, he can only, most comfortably, reply in His Master’s Voice, i.e., Ingles senor. Me no speak, Hindi.

Yet, some random bits stayed because transcendence sticks to the guts with as much persistence as shit does. Premchand’s Panchlight. Harivansh Rai Bacchan’s Madhushala (a warning sign that he might become a mild alcoholic in the latter years?), and Kabir’s dohas (oh stern Kabir, mad Kabir, what is man, that evolved ape, to do when he can’t do what he is supposed to do right this moment, caught swinging between past and future?). The rest of the drivel drained away.

So later he would have to discover for himself the whole other treasure house of literature created by those wandering minstrel holy fools in ten or fifteen languages that lived as long as Hindi did. He would have to discover Urdu and the massive beauty of ghazal. Muslims, those smelly strangers with multiple wives, usually shrouded in burkhas, and statueless god, and occasionally caricatures in films of his youth, had lived where he grew up, and had left behind numerous beautiful sings for him to follow to paradise.