Of red chutneys and green grounds

MUSINGS FROM INDIRA GANDHI NATIONAL FOREST ACADEMY DEHRADUN, INDIA

Of red chutneys and green grounds KS JAYACHANDRAN

The Sunday morning air was overly crisp and light played in a way that the edges of the scenery looked too sharply defined as if drawn in ink. From my veranda the picture outside looked like a fresh green carpet slowly and imperceptibly merging with the woods. The woods at the periphery of the playground had all hues and shades of green and looked like the magical forests of the Harry Potter books, as if any moment Potter may fly out of the canopy in a broomstick or the huge Hagrid may walk lazily out of the woods across the ground.

Like many writings about India and the Raj, it is not surprising that we have been told by a Britisher about a phenomenon we scarcely bothered to romanticize or even investigate fully. And I generally find myself often looking into the most insignificant things around to write about.

Fantasy is not bad. Fittingly the new forest campus always looked like the Narnia countryside with the FRI building sitting confidently like a big castle sans the customary princes, princesses, goblins, fairies, elves, hobbits and unicorns.

I had finished almost all the academic compulsions of the forthcoming week including the elective, two presentations and a handful of assignments. Sitting in the hostel verandah with a free Sunday sprawled ahead, I wanted to write something about our campus and two years of academy life, for our Academy literary journal. Of all the clubs, the literary club is the most crucial because it finally gives something which we can carry throughout our life – a magazine 2

describing our finer moments of triumphs and failures. We tend to forget the food, games, movies, dance parties, competitions, festivals etc. but not the slim book in the bookshelf which our children will fall upon to mock us with our old photographs.

Madanji, a hardworking and sincere member of our mess staff, perennially ill dressed and shabby out of compulsion and not habit, shouts at the top of his voice in the corridor that he brings tea to quench the thirst of officer trainees, who turned round lazily on their beds stung by the fangs of his shout. Euro cup ran late into the night. As he approached, the stench dominated by garlic and masala grew wilder and stronger. Perhaps an instruction to wear the uniform dress only inside the hostel, a change room, a dhobi to wash their dresses and a humanly mess off once in a fortnight would have addressed this universal concern of saabs who hate the “garlicy�masala odors early in the morning.

Eagerly sipping up the tea, primarily for the temperature and not the taste and aroma, I gazed with pride at the beautiful playground. The green of well fed grass which has soaked up more water than it needed was electrifying. The red pavilion building loomed over like an overzealous security guard watching the ever growing grass with precaution and amazement. The growth of grasses matches up easily and at times surpasses the mowing rhythm of the women from the mess quarters, who attend the same patch of ground at least once in 3 days. Their men who work in the mess often help them out in pushing the mower around and surprisingly present such a superior picture of efficiency and speed, seldom or never seen inside the mess. Their houses next to the A Block resembled the crumbling walls of 3

disturbia and offered a fleeting view of Naipaulean squatters whose moldy damp bricks, stagnating pools of water and overflowing septic tanks of mass excreta from saab logs hostel offer you a fond remainder of insanity and evergreen divides. Mildew, moss and bacteria!

I stared again with a buzz of anxiety at the green playground, to force back positivity and happiness into me through the pastoral assuredness of the emerald landscape. A small disturbance on the sky became evident as dark clouds slowly marched towards an agitation. The morning clouds of Dehradun don’t make way that easily for the sun during July.

The clouds turned greyer and their other grey counterparts added yet another blanket of darkness to the already dark morning. The rainfall leaves this stretch of land embossed with an air of mystic during the monsoonal period every year. The trees the campus ensured good air and favorable temperatures prompting many fitness freaks to come in throngs to the campus for jogging in the morning. This incidentally promotes bird-watching of a base nature among probationers. The milder and the lesser aggressive ones came in the evening for walking.

The drizzle slowly started. The barbets came to the corridors, sat in a huddle and looked skywards. The pace picked up soon and continued relentlessly accompanied by the steady drumming of raindrops on the tin roofs of the hostel.

Trevor road was deserted, reminding me of children going to school on other weekdays. They are mostly covered, a parental precaution against the unpredictable behavior of the rain gods. They swirl their colorful umbrellas which look 4

like the halo of divine protection, their attention wholly focused on not getting their notebooks wet. The next good thing about the New forest campus after the good tree population is the presence of two or three schools inside, which means lots of children. Seeing them fresh, innocent with oodles of passion and anticipation keeps jaded souls like me going.

Street dogs from the road scrambled in anxiety and rushed towards the new hostel for cover. Many dogs slipped and fell down outside during the mad rush on the new shining granite floors on the foreground of the hostel. They felt that it was God’s ploy to prevent them from reaching their Mecca.

Once they reached the blocks they felt safe due to the rough floors which provided good grip during their playtime in the corridors, professional security which meant no children pelting stones on them and food at the right time since the bin near the wash basin was usually filled with waste food material.

It was then time for me to break my fast in the regally designed officers mess furnished with luxuriant velvet drapes and tight-fitted glass windows all around, resembling a claustrophobic glass drop-box with no outlets, which means air conditioning even during colder monsoons. The dining table covered with white tablecloths with parenchymatous designs and ripple marks of red, brown and black colour which usually reflected the mess menu of the last three days groaned under the weight of lip smacking dosas, sambhar and red chutney. Red chutney made out of tomatoes, onions, ginger-garlic paste and salt was the obsessive specialization of Tara Singhji who never likes to be challenged by over-enthusiastic mess duty officers, who 5

he feels come up with weird ideas to puncture his culinary instincts. I devoured the dosas in their normal forms and as their closer cousins- onion and egg dosas along with yummy red chutney; with scant regard to the battalions of dosa lovers to follow, who would by then discover to their dismay that red chutney became history in the first twenty minutes of breakfast. People like Arunprasad, MK Kumar, Matheswaran, Vijayanathan and myself are usually held responsible for this mass annihilation of red chutney, which we proudly accepted like martyrs of the INA mutiny. Frankly speaking, I feel that red chutney is the best thing to happen to the academy after the green playgrounds.

After the morning showers died out, the glow of morning descended on the hostel. Droplets on pot plants glittered in the new found light, which sneaked its way from a veiled sun smothered by the remnants of the clouds. There can be no flooding in our green grounds after a downpour due to the exceptional natural drainage system without the help of slumberous ground officials, which makes it the best playground in all training academies visited so far.

Immense gastronomic satisfaction often sends people shooting into cloud nine and I wandered aimlessly in the corridors meeting similar happy souls like Jitendra and Deva. Jitendra joined the academy as a blue eyed boy keen to learn and study with oodles of energy and passion towards anything academic in nature. Oh boy! He has transformed slowly into a cool dude with an attitude matched by rap star Eminem alone. Deva, the king of circumstantial one – liners, would be remembered more for the Subhiksha range of materials from extension boxes to fish pickles carried by him during outings. On reaching any new place, he would be the 6

first person to scan the entire economy, culture and ecology of the town inquisitively, to come up with a dependable compendium of shops, hotels, dhabas, theatres, bus stops and other relevant commercial establishments in the area.

He is a pioneer in his own right.

We stood in the corridor leaning against the railing near the ‘fountain - like thing’ which springs to life occasionally like a wild mountain torrent, sprinkling water on everybody possible walking on the corridor accompanied with seedy colored lights and mossy smell, during official dinners. In normal times the fountain - like thing caters to the water needs the hostel dogs after their share of food from our mess. We stood there, attracting a few more souls and slowly the crowd swelled. We made mockery of theorems of revolving earths, solar systems in constant orbit and most importantly sweet – nothings about our Academy. Prashant is the crowd’s favorite because he reached everyone not only with his decibel levels but also with an unmatched sense of humour helped by good timing and a sharp memory. Manish came a close second in the same genre with the aid of his additional mimicry skills.

Hours flew past, as we then defeated by our aching calf muscles shifted venue to the nearby lounge. Efforts of Smitha and Vaibhav to redecorate the lounge, which two years back looked more like an old furniture rental shop, bore fruits and we soaked ourselves in the delights of a plush lounge watching TV and reading tabloids. Sometime later during last year thankfully, corny efforts to rename the lounge into some memorial lounge were also fended off successfully.

7

Back at the mess for lunch, we sat in hordes waiting for the chicken curry to descend on the tables. The four musketeers from Karnataka sat opposite as the gang leader Malli narrated some events to them in chaste kannada while others listened courteously and attentively and went about their work of collecting salad from the plate. Deepak is one bundle of energy interested in the 3 T’s of tea, timber and tennis and believes in fun and frolic more than anybody else in our batch. He gels well with others like Kenei and Irfan.

Speaking of Kenei, he is exceptionally talented and can any day win my award for the best all-rounder among the thirty odd officers – he plays all sports and games with exceptional finesse, plays the guitar effortlessly, sings melodiously, gets along with everyone and is good in academics also. Back to the four musketeers, both Malli and Bhaskar are striking personalities that attracts the people around them. Bhaskar almost did an unbelievable rehabilitation act ala Adam Sandler in Anger Management, transforming from a hot headed aggressive guy to a composed monk in no time. Raju was a super hero in the first year excelling in all the activities which demanded traces of originality and creativity, but somehow became an absent minded professor in the next one. At the table, other people slowly joined in as I lazily minced the chicken with my molars. Moments passed. Two years had gone away unnoticed like these innocent moments.

The next duty officer Ganesh looked relaxed in his jeans and T shirt and wrote something official about the classes on the message board. I struck a conversation and we walked out of the mess. A modern day e-pirate, Ganesh specialized in hacking, non-stop downloading and computer wizardry. He stocked more movies and programs than the Adobe library.

8

At the same time, he was a strict disciplinarian and deserved the President’s Police medal for distinguished service, courage, leadership and integrity exhibited during our stay at the National Police Academy. We headed towards our respective rooms for the next obvious activity. Walking back to my room I heard snoring –almost lazy, deeply sonorous rumbles like prostrate, dormant like volcanoes too tired to erupt from the other rooms. I could not wait and ran all the way to my room.

A couple of dreams and a cup of tea later I was back in the corridor. As evening approached there was an aura of expectation and a soporific stillness enveloped the hostel.

The winds assumed a purpose and the clouds darted around with the thrill of having reached their destination. There was a hush in the green grounds and a sepulchral silence descended. Thousands of bats flew across the darkening sky towards the Harry Potter woods at the other end of the grounds, perhaps to the castle inside. Red salvias in front of my room swayed sleepily. Tiny specks of light fought a losing battle through the dark clouds and then stopped flickering.

And the rains began again.

9