People may watch a random film without relating to anyone in it, but not a television series.
For me, since school, it was Mr. Spock. Tall, fit, logical, cool vampire ears, a deadly shoulder grip, a mind reader and with largely zero interest in women, basically everything I wasn’t, except the last part. Ironically, most of the girls around seemed to think I was just as alien anyway.
With The Next Generation, the Spock archetype bifurcated into Captain Picard and the android Data. A Frenchman with a British accent, Picard was still logical, aloof, single, but unmistakably human. His interest in women?
Strictly as intellectual equals.
Fast-forward a decade and a half. I was at my parents’ place when an early morning call woke me. It was a relatively new acquaintance from Meghalaya, with a strange request. Not the sort of thing anyone wants to hear first thing in the morning, and one that would make most people switch off their phones.
Now for a little backstory.
I had already hit rock bottom for the second or third time in my life. So I became a regular visitor to my hometown again; not to borrow money from my parents, but to try to peddle to the Assam government fiberglass boats made by a "boutique"manufacturer in Goa, a man I once considered a good friend.
To his credit, he worked with his hands, cared about quality, spoke elite boarding-school English, and wore the permanent lost-boy expression that women seem to love. All of which made his stories of being constantly betrayed sound believable. However, despite being a teetotaller, constant parties, beautiful people, and Instagramming women were his great weakness. First he worshiped, then impregnated. After fathering children with three different women, the last I heard, he had ended up playing housekeeper to a female TV celebrity. It didn’t take long before I too joined his ever-growing list of people who had supposedly betrayed him.
Bridges burnt, though my commitment to boats remained.
It was during one such visit home that I became acquainted with this aspiring politician from Meghalaya, freshly defeated in recent assembly elections. His early morning request was grim, yet simple. The nephew of a village headman, one of his core supporters, had been murdered in Guwahati. His people needed help identifying and retrieving the body from a city morgue.
I didn’t hesitate for long. I said yes, washed, grabbed a quick bite, and headed for the Guwahati Medical College Hospital morgue, making a few calls along the way.
If hell had an entrance, this place would qualify.
Tucked behind the hospital, facing the sewage “non-treatment” plant, it was an open war zone between fetid stench and sanity. Untreated sewage, hospital waste, stagnant filth from across the road, all battled for olfactory supremacy with the foul cocktail pooling beneath the morgue: refrigeration runoff, corpse fluids, and formaldehyde. And even if your nose and eyes somehow adapted, you still had to deal with the morgue staff, reeking of stale alcohol, eyes bloodshot and bodies unwashed, shuffling around like ghouls between meals.
I arrived early, parked by the gate, leaned against the car, lit a cigarette, and took a slow cinematic drag. I had learned early on, that a man in black, with dark shades, beside a black SUV, calm and expressionless, tends to unsettle most people (irrespective of whether or not they had ever seen a UFO). The ghouls noticed me right away, glared and spoke among themselves.
When the investigating officer arrived, I beckoned him aside with the casual authority of a superior, asked his name and offered him a cigarette. Then I asked which village he was from. Hearing it was not far from my ancestral village, the same one I have visited only once in my life, I promptly elevated him to the status of a relative. I somberly confided to him that politicians from Meghalaya were involved, so it would be best if “we” wrapped up this sordid affair quickly, and that I was counting on him to make sure everything went smoothly.
He complied right away.
The villagers arrived, identified the body, wept, wailed and eventually took it away. The officer blocked the usual attempt by the morgue ghouls to pressure them into paying an exorbitant amount for a supposedly mandatory formaldehyde injection into an already decomposing cadaver.
“Sir won’t be happy,” he said, nodding discreetly in my direction.
While, considering the quantity of ice that was brought, I wouldn’t be surprised if the merchants at the nearby fish market secretly started hoping for a few more regular murders about town.
More police showed up. Among them was a nervous young lady officer, quite easy on the eye and almost certainly on her first visit to hell’s gate. Within seconds she was overwhelmed, eyes watering, fighting nausea, desperately trying not to retch.
I called her aside and told her to stand still and breathe, to let her senses adjust. Fighting it would only make things worse.
“So, Sister,” I asked, “what twist of fate brings you here?”
Through a towel pressed tightly over her nose, partly against the smell and partly to soak up the tears, she answered timidly, “It really is my bad fate, sir. It’s called duty.”
In that brief moment, looking at her youth and innocence, the police uniform notwithstanding, I couldn’t help feeling a deep and equally helpless sense of compassion, but decided not to burden myself by wondering how long her youthful fragility would survive.
Everyone who later heard about my day reached exactly the same conclusion: she must have rejected a superior’s advances to be assigned morgue duty.
It was during this episode that Delhi called.
Someone was interested in my work with industrial fuels and wanted me as a consultant. It was a field I had already abandoned, as I had learned the bitter way the difference between developing a technology under your own authority and trying to sell and implement it in someone else’s organisation.
Two entirely different worlds.
A few months later, I landed in Delhi to work for a duo trying to enter the clean industrial fuels space.
The offer was too good to be true, as such offers invariably are.
One was a serial conman on his sixteenth or seventeenth venture. The other, though principled and honest, was a self-anointed management guru who collected business books and ran coaching sessions which I dubbed as his Mutual Appreciation Club.
They over-promised and under-delivered.
I stayed on because I had no other options.
Instead of becoming the innovator or the head of QC, I had been promised, I found myself working in a fanless, toiletless shed in Mundka, West Delhi’s bleakest industrial corner, during the peak of summer, processing tonnes of shadily acquired black bituminous HFO.
Nevertheless, my visiting card first read “R&D Head” and later “CEO.”
The management guru loved emotional catharsis during weekly meetings. One day he asked everyone to name their favourite film and explain why.
I went first.
“The Bridges of Madison County, because to me it is the the most honest portrayal of enduring love. So what if it's adulterous?"
No one seemed particularly impressed, either by the film, its story or by my enthusiasm.
By then, my marriage had already ended with a mail-in divorce from abroad.
Around the same time, thanks to Facebook, an old flame resurfaced. Married with two children and a sad-sack corporate drone of a husband. She was someone I had always fancied as the one who got away. I resumed the friendship ignoring every red flag that popped up. Even the fact that in a very short time, if I ever tried calling her, the call disconnected immediately , while she had no problem calling me every week for a long chat. Network problem, she explained.
Still, nobody’s perfect, I told myself.
Nothing happened, either carnal or caramel. I don’t break homes, however broken they already are. She never signalled anything either, the textbook Sati Savitri.
At some point upon her request, I spent night after night helping her rewrite her PhD dissertation. Except she never bothered to inform me when she was finally awarded the degree.
When I asked, she casually replied, “Busy with the kids’ exams and their tuitions.”
She then added, “Besides, what’s the big deal? Everyone gets one at our University.”
I asked her that if it really was no big deal, why she had asked me to spend so many nights reviewing and correcting the draft.
“Oh, because your English is better than mine.”
Convenient.
Soon afterwards she cut off all contact and embarked on a very public affair with someone who, of all people, happened to be a very close friend’s much detested next-door neighbour.
I was thus unwittingly subjected to a weekly update on all her activities. Like most liasons of that relationship ended, it also successfully took her carefully cultivated image of the impeccably respectable lady disappeared down the drain.
Another bridge burnt, this time with dirty water underneath.
Not long afterwards, I started binge-watching “House M.D.”
Both were single and with a limp (mine was temporary). We both like fast motorcycles. Neither of us is particularly known for our politeness. Beyond that, I am no doctor, certainly no genius, and definitely not a sociopath, at least not in my own opinion.
No drug dependency either.
So I told myself that the real reason I kept watching was because of the the compassionate and pretty Dr. Allison Cameron. Though I lost much of my inital enthusiasm after the episode where she had a drug-fuelled one-night stand stand with that blond goldilocks colleague of hers.
Now, whenever anyone asks, I simply say my favourite film is District 9.
Somehow, alienation feels more honest than normality.
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