Manish Nandy’s charming autobiographical tales show that real life can be more amusing than fiction

The doctor and the outlaw: A last appeal

Any dying man would be a doctor’s special concern. However, this one was very special for my uncle. He sat close to the gasping man and whispered, “I am the one you sent for.”

He had just taken out the two bullets the police had used to take the man down and knew the damage was extensive and irreparable. All that my uncle could do now was to help reduce his pain and find out why the man had specifically asked for him.

My uncle knew the man from before as Ram but almost certainly, that wasn’t his real name. Three years ago some farmers had found Ram at the edge of their field, dying of bullet wounds, and had carried him to my uncle’s country clinic.

Uncle was sixty-five, a country doctor who had become a legend in his lifetime and drew patients from over twenty villages in eastern India. A large man, with silver hair and a walrus moustache, he was the calmest of listeners and gentlest of healers. He treated many of his poor patients free of charge and I marvelled to see his eyes turn moist when women or children spoke of their pain.

Ram had said that he had been robbed and then shot by hoodlums. He teetered on the verge of death for weeks before he recovered. Because he now walked with a limp and could not return to his work as a day labourer, my uncle hired him as a domestic help. The children liked him, and he became a part of the family.

One day he disappeared, about as suddenly as he had originally appeared. My uncle missed him, but when others commented on Ram’s ingratitude in leaving without a word, he said, “We don’t know why he left so suddenly. We shouldn’t guess, and we shouldn’t judge until we know.”

A shattering blow came in less than a month.

Ram, it turned out, was no day labourer. He led a notorious gang of outlaws who had been shot not by hoodlums, but by police in the course of a violent encounter.

Worse, when he had left, he had stolen my uncle’s hunting rifle, using his position as a trusted help. Since rejoining his gang, Ram had shot and killed two policemen with the gun. Now my uncle was implicated, because the police presumed that he had allowed the misuse of his gun or at least been negligent in its safekeeping.

After grilling him for three days in the district court, the authorities let my uncle go but cancelled his gun licence. The public humiliation was his worst punishment.

Now, after three years, a police car had fetched him to the bedside of a dying man who did not want any doctor but my uncle.

Ram said, “Doctor, you saved my life once. In return, I stole from you.” He paused, and added, “Please forgive me if you can.”

Those were his last words.

~~~

A tip I earned: You aren’t what I think you are

A large diplomatic cocktail party in an Asian country. Lots of food, lots of drinks, and lots of guests. The host is the American consul: me.

Though there are secretaries, assistants and other people to help, I prefer to open the door personally to welcome guests to my home. I was doing so for each incoming guest.

An American couple came in. I smiled and greeted them. The husband looked at me but did not respond. At first I wondered if he had heard me. Then I realised that, from my looks, he had inferred I was a domestic help and beneath the level of a polite response.

I extended my hands then to take the coat from his wife. She said, as she divested herself of the fur coat, “It is an expensive coat.”

Though I nodded to indicate that I had understood, she stressed, “It is a very expensive coat. Take good care.” She placed a dollar bill in my pocket.

I hung the coat in a closet and went in. The barman was giving drinks to the couple. My assistant said to them, “Let me introduce you to our host, the consul.” The man’s jaw dropped in surprise and the woman started stammering, “Oh, I am so sorry. I hope you don’t mind.”

I raised my voice just a little bit, so that all the guests in the hall could hear me, and said, “I don’t mind at all, unless you ask back for the tip that I have just earned.”

~~~

A hall of ricochet: Place unforgotten, unforgettable

Sir Andrew Henderson Leith Fraser, lieutenant governor of Bengal, had gone to the Overtoun Hall in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on a warm July evening in 1908 to hear a lecture. He suddenly found a revolver pressed to his ribs.

The nondescript young man that had his finger on the trigger seemed determined to send him to the hereafter, as a coup against the ruthless colonial rule that the governor represented. But the revolver malfunctioned. Before the man could try again, the large American, Keith Barber, who looked after Overtoun Hall, tackled him, and the police arrived.

That wasn’t the only episode of the nationalist drama in the Overtoun Hall, the centrepiece of the large YMCA building at the corner of College Street and Harrison Road. Keshab Chandra Sen had advocated for English education there, and a decade later Gandhi spoke there on nationalism and Rabindranath Tagore offered his “interpretation of Indian history.”

In 1950 my father came to take charge of the building, moving from our home in the pleasant YMCA building located on, coincidentally, Keshab Chandra Sen street in the Mechua Bazar area. We lived on the topmost floor, in a spacious bright apartment, with an airy living room, several bedrooms, a modest kitchen and a long, broad, covered terrace. We loved the apartment, but what made it exceptional was the access it gave to a remarkable building: without even stepping out, I could go to a gymnasium, a library and a restaurant. And to the Overtoun Hall.

The hall had been built fifty-two years ago with a bequest from John Campbell White, later Lord Overtoun, a skinflint Scottish chemical manufacturer who docked a shilling from his workers’ meagre wages any time they smoked and five shillings if they drank beer. Overtoun would turn in his grave if he knew how the hall became a symbol of independent thinking, particularly against the British.

Now the British were gone, and the hall had turned into a different kind of symbol: of a new cultural renaissance. In the newly independent, post-colonial India there was a spurt of creativity. Books, hitherto vetted and censored, were coming out in profusion; people were writing poems and songs, unashamedly patriotic; dances were choreographed and plays staged with bold, new ideas. For a pittance one could rent the Overtoun Hall and offer music, dances and theatre to an eager audience. For every show, Father would receive a bunch of free tickets.

Invariably, I was one user of those tickets. Night after night I would fast-track school homework to rush to Overtoun Hall to hear the finest musicians of India, from Ustad Vilayat Khan to Nikhil Banerjee, from the Dagar Brothers to Shamshad Begum, to watch outstanding plays from the historical Chandragupta to provocative Nabanna, and hear lectures from scholars, writers and politicians. The last was the most frequent and luckily so, for these were my favourites. I hung on their lips as I listened to my adored litterateurs like Narayan Gangopadhyay and Pramatha Nath Bisi, and to much-admired political speakers like the communist leaders Soumyendranath Tagore and Hirendranath Mukherjee.

I never cared much for my schools as sources of learning; later I developed the same scepticism of my colleges and universities. But I have no doubt in my mind that my true alma mater, in the sense of a “nourishing mother”, was Overtoun Hall. It fed my growing appetite for new and challenging ideas, opened my eyes to different options for perceiving society and my ears to incredible heights of musical and dramatic power. I never lost my longing for the theatre and my endless obsession with new concepts, and I owe it all to endless evenings in the last row of an overcrowded auditorium.

I can still remember the thick Teutonic accents of Arthur Koestler as he urged his listeners to “think and write” new ideas. I can never forget Utpal Dutt’s – he was still a student – vibrant soliloquies from Shakespeare that made me a lifelong reader of Shakespeare.

Last year I went and took a look at the building at 86 College Street. It is no longer a YMCA building; it had been sold. Worse, it looks abandoned and unkempt. Overtoun Hall now probably hears the footfall of ghosts.

The young intruder in Overtoun Hall who held a revolver to the governor failed to put a bullet through his heart and possibly spent his life in a miserable British jail. But Overtoun Hall certainly put a different kind of bullet through my heart that has ricocheted through my whole life.

Excerpted with permission from The Stranger in My Home: Facets of a Life, Manish Nandy, HarperCollins India.