The unconventional historian

“What are you kids doing here?”

“This one is telling a story.” One of us almost ratted another out. Half of it was true. It had been that pointed one indeed, but surely we weren’t surrounding him for a story. He was perhaps convincing the rest of us to chip in to buy a new cricket bat or teaching us how to sharpen something to peel the skin of raw mangoes. That’s not the point. We were there. As you are here. That’s the point.

“Only old men can tell good stories. All good stories must be told by old men”, he said. I was about to interrupt him about the usage of two sentences for a simple and quite questionable statement axiom, but I hesitated. He never struck me as someone to receive feedback graciously. Furthermore, all of us kids were interested in being told a story and I didn’t want to be the villain of the group who pushed away the narrator because he had a itch in his bottom about the newfound love for brevity and logic. Unless you are of a certain age window and educated in a certain way so as to value objects of utility above the objects of joy, you don’t care about such nuances. So, I actually we all agreed with him.

His cows had walked away peacefully into the field. It was too hot for him to keep walking with them. He stopped there, put his palm on his forehead so as to imitate a pair of shades and looked intentionally at the cows, wiped the sweat off of his face and head with his napkin and crouched. As is the custom in my village, he started by asking one of us,

“You are Xyz’s third son, right?”.

“No, I am Abc’s son” was the response.

“Yeah yeah. You have two sisters, right?”.

“No no, I have only one sister. She is younger. I had an elder brother. The one who was called the mute and drowned in the flood they say”.

“Oh! You are Abc’s son!! I see. Do you go to school?”

“Yes. I am in standard eighth now.”

“Oh you are too young to be standard fifth. Is your father trying to push you away or something? You’ll fail in fifth standard at this age for sure.”

“No, grandpa! I am actually doing well. My terminal exams have just ended yesterday. I study hard. I want to be a teacher like my father.”

“Yes. Your father was a bright fellow in his school days. What subjects do they teach you?”

“Bla, bla, bla and history.”

I will tell you something about the people from this village now that will hold true till the end of time. If you want a long story out of them, you have to speak their trigger word. The trigger word is a cue for something ancient in their blood. The trigger word will vary from person to person. People may or may not know their own trigger words. For some, it can be something sophisticated like an anthropological concept, for others it can be something extremely simple like bhaat. Every person of this ancient genetic line carries this suppressed talkative identity within them regardless of their outward appearance. And as soon as the word is spoken in their vicinity, not depending upon whether it is uttered to them or to someone else, not depending upon whether they have already spoken on the matter or not, if they have any quantum of energy in their being, it will be spent on telling you a long structured or unstructured story about their experiences with that phenomenon or object that word is used to describe. I, for my life, cannot figure out what my wife said to me this morning but while putting together this theorem, I realize that our old comrade had an affection for the word that was spoken last in that brief conversation I recalled above.

We could see something ancient waking up through his eyes- something excited and argumentative, something childish if I may say so, something divine, something that wants to exert its presence- something the innocent may interpret as wisdom.

He asked, “What do they teach you in history?”

“Everything! I had to write a ten marks answer about the reasons of the War of Plassey. I wrote a big essay.”

“Hain? What do you know about the War of Plassey? You are barely 10”, he replied with disdain, disbelief and a dodgy correlation between age and exposure.

“I am not 10. I am 11” was the rebuttal. “I wrote a big essay” was repeated with following addendum: “about how Nawab Sirajuddaula was betrayed by the traitor Mir Jaafar. He colluded with the British to become the king. They dethroned and imprisoned the Nawab. Mir Jaafar became the puppet king and then the Britishers took over all of India. They always wanted to rule over all of India.”

“So that’s what they teach you about history at 10?” the old man skeptically replied. Actually, this reply came with some ornamental implication of the child having being given birth by a certain animal. Actually, the whole process of his possible conception was described. It was rather long. But I have to omit it. I don’t want to digress, but still, I have to add that this quick transition from friendliness to condescension or even hostility might appear sudden to the uninitiated, but to those who are pure of faith know that the residents of this village are prone to undergo such reversible transitions without posing any intentional or unintentional harm. Back to the story.

“I am not 10. I am 11” was uttered again, this time more as a murmur.

“Jagat Seth was the richest man of the world. He was called the banker of the world- that’s what his name meant. No one in the world knows his real name” thus started the tale. The person he was referring to was Mehtab Chand. Jagat Seth was actually a designation.

“Siraj-ud-Daula was vicious little child. He had three wives- innumerable concubines.” At this point, like a trained method actor, to bring deliberate incongruity for impact, the narrator looked to the sky so as to remember his dead wife. His wife was not dead. She was back at him home waiting for him to bring back the cows. This was no time for the cows to roam around, nor was it for him.

“He was a characterless and insolent 20 years old who insulted Jagat Seth publicly in his court. He slapped and kicked him in front of his court- slapped and kicked. A man responsible for the finances of the whole world! Slapped and kicked by a 20 years old.” The audience was struck with the cumulative bombshell of ethos and pathos far beyond their imagination.

If you are anything like me, then you’d be lost in your thoughts searching about the present whereabouts of Jagat Seth’s great great grandchildren on your phone half-sitting and half-standing on the railings near the Amsterdam Central bus station waiting for the bus number 42 if I remember correctly, humming a crooked version of Raag Gujar Todi originally composed and sung by the great Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan Sahab, while your lovely life partner is staring at you from the corners of their eyes questioning the feasibility of spending a lifetime with someone with the attention span of a baby sparrow. And then suddenly, this version of you that is quite surreally if I may say so, will snap back to reality, apologize and then immediately start contemplating the thought process behind the designing of a railing upon which only the people gifted with certain height, weight, width and carefulness half-sit and half-stand half-comfortably for at best 10 minutes before the behinds of such a person start talking to their souls in the ancient languages of survival and evolution. Anyway, I digress!

“Jagat Seth had no option than to save the country from the tyranny of this useless king”

“And Mir Jaafar. He was his own uncle. He loved and cared about him as his own child.” In hindsight, the narrator had played a lot with the facts here. While they were related, Mir Jaafar was his grand uncle not his uncle and the assumption that he loved or that he cared about Siraj-ud-daula is debatable.

“Mir Jaafar was the commander of his grandfather’s military. He was removed in favor of another 20 years old” continued the 250 years too late advocate, “He had to save his honor. What good is loyalty if it gets you kicked around by 20 year-olds?”

“But what about country?”, one of the kids asked. I do not remember clearly if this kid was me, but I would like to think it was someone else to avoid thinking that the animated response that followed.

“Listen you son of …”. Feel welcome to fill in with the most ridiculous combination of animals who could have produced a thinking animal. “Kings are not countries. All these nawabs and kings were sitting on their behinds for 200 years when we went to jail to get those Britishers out. I remember how they beat us and crammed us in small rooms for days. And then when they left, all these nawabs and kings popped up back again like buffalo-backs from the river to get back to rule. We were the country and we were marching on the roads and crammed up in jails. What about the country, son of …, teaching me history, son of … from where” retorted the aged protagonist of his own movie.

“But my teacher said that he learnt this from R.C. Majumdar”, one of the children tried to pull rank.

“R. C. Majumdar was a great old man. But do not believe things just because someone tells you that an old wise man told them so. What do they teach you in school anyway? Read and make up your own mind” concluded the narrator standing back up from his crouch and bringing back his palm pretending to be shades over his eyes looking in the direction he had left the cows to go. We could feel his sense of triumph and his subsequent disinterest in indulging in another conversation. We watched him walk away and got back to doing whatever it was we were doing.