Charlie’s Chatter

The cap of his pen was blue. Its nib was stained blue with the ink. One of the files on his desk was blue, as was the colour of the lettering on his calendar. His computer didn’t count in this game. There were one, two, three, four blue books in his shelf. And he bent over to look through the glass top of his table, his eyes level with their surface. No, that was more green than blue. Damn it, it was never blue enough! The blue on the label of the manufacturer on the side of the couch, he declared proudly! Yes, that was a good one.

It was a wretched time, the wait between appointments. He always squirmed around so impatiently as he waited. He had broadly two kinds of patients – one who were rich and just needed reassuring that their fears were baseless and that their symptoms were a result of boredom and a bad lunch and the other, who were rich and needed convincing that their health could not really be bought for any sum of money. Yes, the heart was a cruel bitch of an organ and he had dealt with that bitch every day of his life for the past three decades. His last patient had been a rather cooperative specimen of the first kind and now he had another forty minutes to kill before the next arrived. So out came the colour game.

Appa had taught him that game many years ago. The gum bottle was blue. His shirt was blue. That plastic cover was blue. They usually played with blue, sometimes with yellow, but never with red. The post office was full of red things. The letterbox, the sealing wax, the pencils, the pens, red uniforms, red embroidery on khaki uniforms, red chillies in the lunch box, the red thread dangling around the peon’s neck, red paan spit on the wall….

Appa had first taught him the game many years ago when Amma had gone back to her parents’ house when she was pregnant. Both she and the baby had died at childbirth. But it didn’t matter, that was too long ago to be painful any more.

Krishnan would go to the post office with his father after school and sit there on the rickety table talking to his father and the peon and the guard and the shopkeeper across the street and the shopkeeper next door and the one next door to him. Appa was always in a hurry, always working. In the morning he’d be in a hurry doing the whole bath-temple-coffee-tiffin routine before sending him to school and climbing on that jangling arrangement of metal and riding to the crumbling two room post office with its perennial smell of glue, mouldy paper and candlewax. Oh yes, the logo of the Indian Post was red.

Appa was always doing something there. Nobody could really say what, but he was always doing something and never really had time to stop and talk. But he listened vaguely, little ripples from the constant stream of his son’s chatter lazily slipping into his mind, for want it seemed of an alternate destination.

Sometimes, he rode around the village with his father, handing off people’s mail. Some got blue inland letters (yes, those were blue too), some got yellow postcards. Sometimes someone received a big bundle and Krishnan would scream out to the entire street as they rode up to the recipient’s house. And everyone would gather around to watch, and they would remain there till the parcel had been seen and passed around and commented on by everyone. And Krishnan and his father would spend the next hour or so talking to them all too.

It had been a rather unusual childhood. Appa’s job with the postal services had seen him spending his entire childhood hopping across the little villages and temple towns across southern Tamil Nadu. He never really had and lasting friends, and he wasn’t too keen on family, they all looked at him with a sad sympathy that he really rather didn’t have. And teachers and priests and everyone else came and went with every new hop. Ironic, that a man who spent his entire adult life working for the only means of organized communication in that part of the world had managed to distance himself and his family from all lasting relationships. Every couple of years it was a different village. Some near the sea, some near the hills, all surrounded by paddy fields and all swelteringly hot! Krishnan played cricket with everyone and went to the temple with everyone and talked and laughed to everyone but in the end, he turned around and walked back home.

All these villages were built the same way, temple in the middle, Brahmin families in the streets around it and everyone else in the outer streets, with the paddy fields beyond. He was a Brahmin by birth, yes, but he lived in the little quarter provided by the Government. Usually, it was in a dubious plot just near the entrance of the village, that everyone knew, but nobody associated with. It was neither here nor there. It just existed on the horizons of everyone’s lives, but was never in focus.

And he’d wander in to the temple and through the market and everyone would know him but in a year they’d all be replaced with a different set of faces. Eventually, he left this lifestyle to become a doctor and a very good one and he lived now, in London.

There was a knock on the door and another fat, rich white woman walked. Aah, and her dress was blue.

He was good with his patients, they loved him, and he felt nothing for them.