by A. N. Hegde
Hari didn’t
want to be a low-level bureaucrat; he wanted to make something of himself. He
wanted to join the Indian Administrative Service, a top government agency. Everyone
warned him that the only way to survive as an IAS officer was to be corrupt.
Otherwise, politicians got you transferred to a town with a constant water
shortage.
Hari was on his
way to the post office to mail his application for the IAS entrance exam with
the requisite fee when he saw a beggar in tattered, mud-coated clothes. The man
was beating his tummy with a stick-like hand and yowling, “Give me something,
please. I am dying of hunger here. Please take pity and give me something so
that I can fill this empty tummy.”
Hari’s heart melted and he thought providence
was giving him a chance to opt out of a dishonest life as an IAS officer. So he
gave all the money meant for the IAS entrance exam to the beggar. The beggar
thanked him as if Hari had given him a new lease on life. He then blessed Hari
and said, “If you go up this hill, you will see a big hut on the other side. If
you go there, good things will happen to you.”
Hari was
curious and he had nothing better to do, so he went up the hill and found the
place. When he was trying to decide what the etiquette was in attracting
attention at the entrance to a stranger’s hut, a beautiful young woman opened
the door as if in answer to his quandary. Hari told her what the beggar had
said. The young woman said that the hut belonged to a good old witch who
occasionally granted wishes, but the old witch was sleeping and it wasn’t a
good idea to wake her. The young woman said that she was the witch’s assistant
and perhaps she could help. She was so comely and fetching that Hari didn’t
even entertain the notion that she might not be qualified to grant wishes. The
young woman gave a seed to Hari to chew and said that upon swallowing it he
would be taken to a land of opportunity.
Hari closed his
eyes, chewed the seed and swallowed. When he opened his eyes, he was standing
in Times Square in New York City. Being from a small town in India, Hari was
frightened by the scene with multitude of vehicles and thousands of people
milling about speaking hundreds of tongues. Even the beautiful young women on
billboards looked menacing with their mountainous boobs and bare legs as tall
as coconut trees. He wandered and wandered around Manhattan and ended up on the
Upper West Side. An old woman saw him on the street and told him she ran a
place that provided a job, food and shelter. It turned out to be a sweatshop
that made robotic monkeys that sang pirated songs and danced in response to a
slow, retarded-sounding command. Hari worked and worked and complained that he
had a college degree and he was not supposed to be there. Among his fellow
sufferers there were Russians who called the old lady suka behind her back and Mexicans who called her puta. Hari, like the educated Indian he
was, called her a bitch under his breath.
One day, Hari
escaped from the basement and walked for two days and found himself near the
Catskill Mountains. It was late in the afternoon when he saw a witch sitting
under a tree. The wreck of her hunched figure told him that there once stood a
pretty maiden. She told him that his luck was about to change. All he had to do
was to walk up the hill and find a flock of wild fowl, spot the one with
reddish feathers.
Hari
interrupted her and asked, “Does this involve eating that special fowl?”
“Yes,” the
witch said.
“Don’t you know
I am an Indian and like a lot Indians I am a vegetarian?”
“In that case,”
said the witch, “take this other path where you will meet a witch with
vegetarian recipes for changing fortunes.”
When Hari found
the other witch she asked him to go to an apple tree with scrawny fruit and
find one apple that was juicy and eat it.
As soon as he
ate the apple, he became the owner of a factory that made pieces of crap
cheaper than the Chinese-made stuff. His factory made anything and everything
that could be made at low cost in Third World countries. He had money now,
plenty of it.
He asked
himself, “Am I happy?” While asking himself this question, it occurred to him
that people in India never asked themselves such a question. Why was it that
the moment they stepped out of the old country such questions became essential?
He thought he
would be happy if had a wife. So, he dated beautiful white women. It soon
became apparent that a white woman was like the earth before Galileo’s time.
She was the center of the universe. Hari was apprehensive about becoming a
minor planet revolving around her desires and demands. So, he pondered the traditional Indian model.
A Kannada ditty said that if you have disposable income, a convenient wife and
a nice house, you can pretty much burn Heaven down. He knew he was conforming
to the Western stereotypical notion of Indian marriage by letting his and his
bride’s horoscope decide compatibility rather than checking each other out. He
went to India and looked at hundreds of young women whom their fathers were
eager to marry off. He knew one thing for certain: regardless of the kind of
person she was, the bride was sure to be a virgin. When he chose a beautiful
bride, the priest, upon receiving a generous fee, adjusted Hari’s horoscope to
fit the bride’s, unbeknownst to the bride's family.
The new wife
was happy for almost three days after arriving in America. But by the third day
she had explored all the gadgets and gizmos in Hari’s house and soon became
nostalgic. He took her to New York in an attempt to cure her nostalgia with the
purchase of authentic 22 carat Indian gold jewelry (not the 14 carat trinkets
that passed for jewelry in department stores). The wife’s symptoms subsided for
a few months, but then Hari had to infuse a higher dose of cash for shopping
trips to bring the nostalgia under control.
When the
children were born, a boy and a girl, Hari thought for a while that he was
happy. He thought they would have the best of both worlds. An Indian attitude
toward life and the comforts of the West made for a great combination. He was
horrified to notice American arrogance and Indian petulance in his children as
they grew up.
Perhaps what
was missing was a soothing tropical atmosphere. So Hari had a huge greenhouse
built on his vast property and filled it with mango trees, hibiscus plants and
mini palm trees. To top it all, he purchased a peacock and let it roam the
greenhouse. One day, he was sitting in the greenhouse admiring the plants. The
peacock let out an eeow, eeow sound and danced. The peacock’s sound, like that
of all others of its kind, brought to mind the type of sound a cat would make
if life was being wrung out of it. Hari asked the peacock, “Why are you so
perky? Are you happy because you have these beautiful feathers?” The peacock
said, “No, no, I am happy because I am free to sing my song.”
Hari
immediately strummed his air guitar and sang an English song out of key. Then
he sang a Kannada song in the wrong pitch. Then he sang a Hindi song without
regard to its tune. He was happy.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
