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NON-FICTION
SINNING IN MYSORE by Paul Zacharia A memoir.
At the everlasting age of sixteen, like greenhorn Adam into the Garden of Eden, I was released into the bustling alleys of Mysore city. And I, rascal of a dreamer, was dumb enough to imagine that I had become a freeman at last in the sprawling and anonymous city. For Mysore was so far, far away from my tiny village in the spice-hills of Kerala where intoxicating Sin flowered and fruited lovingly everywhere along with pepper, ginger and pappaya. It rippled down the rocky streams. And God patrolled us relentlessly and inexorably. For all I knew, God partook of our sins and laughed in secret from the dark caverns of the rubber plantations, exulting shamelessly in his double-facedness. Mysore in those days had the eternal odour of horse dung and urine, of jasmine and masala dosa and of coffee and cow-dung cake whose smoke rose in blue whirls like wraiths melting in the sun. And as I discovered to my utter horror, God stalked every nook and cranny of Mysooru Nagara, round the clock, as a thundercloud of unknowing and a chastising mystery. He sat upon the summit of Chamundi Hills, disguised as the far-away row of lights burning in the cold night, filling us with an unspeakable longing for the black sky as we lay in our hostel beds looking out the window through the white and mesmerizing veil of the mosquito net. In those days God had filled Mysore with music. The city was like an immense jukebox in which robot arms kept playing music from every direction. Music hung over the city like a magnetic field. It drifted into our classrooms, playgrounds, beds, toilets and dining rooms. It stood guard over our masturbations, daydreams and terrors. Our college, St Philomena’s, was then the last urban point of the city on the Bangalore road. Beyond were tomato and groundnut farms, coconut groves and paddy fields and Tippu Sultan’s Srirangapatna and Cauvery the mother-river. On bicycles hired from shops opposite St Philomena’s church for ten paise per hour, we would race like madmen up the pot-holed Bangalore road to Tippu’s Fort at Srirarangapatna, hang around staring at the ancient things, huddle at the spot where Tippu fell and died, and watch Cauvery go by, churlish, dark-green and elusive among the waterweeds and sandbanks. I had already learned to hum “Begani shaadi mein Abdallah deevana…” because “Jis desh mein Ganga bahti hai” was still playing in Mysore when I made my first entry into the city. Our small group of bare-footed Malayali initiates into the city had made the pilgrimage to Gayatri cinema under the patronising wand of senior students and sat riveted and dumbfounded, watching Raj Kapoor and Padmini and crowds of dancers illuminating the magic screen. Soon I was at the first first-day showing of Junglee, fighting my way dizzyingly through the wild crowd and snatching a ticket for thirty paise. At that moment I knew I had become a citizen of Mysore. The film took me in custody. As the silky lines of “Ehsan tera hoga mujh par…” winged in through the orphan night into my hostel room from NR Mohalla or Lashkar Mohalla, or from Banni Mantapa, I would lie staring into the mosquito net’s
