Pi
– Amrut
(This story is dedicated to some of my closest friends. I love you and I am in awe of your unwavering faith in God.)
I
Brahmin is a caste in India. Brahmin names traditionally have to be such that they fit into the scansion of a traditional prayer ‘mantra’. ‘Etchel’ is a Tamil word meaning ‘food that has touched someone else’s mouth’. Ganga is the river where Brahmins wash their sins.
Clarke Quay, pronounced Clar-key-key, is a place in Singapore. SQA is the 3-letter airline code for Singapore airlines.
According to listology.com, the word ‘fuck’ has been used 296 times in the movie Goodfellas.
A leading Indian bank had the tagline ‘We change for the people we love’ during the same time as that of this story.
II
Subramanya Swami is the hero of my story. I met him first at university. He stayed two rooms away from mine. He was a conservative Brahmin from south India. He would do ‘pooja’ and offer his prayers to his favourite gods twice a day – morning and evening. (His favourite gods had been decided long back by his ancestors and he had no say in it.) He wouldn’t do his prayers before he took a bath. He wouldn’t eat before he had done his prayers. And while doing his prayers, he would wear a traditional white male sarong (‘dhoti’). But, all these were subject to the normal university exam rule – when exams are on, nothing else matters. So you see – he was a conservative man, but not unreasonably so.
We used to call him Pi, for his fascination towards the transcendental irrational number. The password to his email accounts was the first fifteen digits of pi – 314159265358979. In those days, the internet search was not ubiquitous and hence it was a difficult password for the rest of us to remember. Unlike his real name, Pi didn’t fit into the scansion of a traditional Brahmin prayer ‘mantra’. So he did complain a lot about being called Pi, but then, when kids are born, they don’t have a choice for their names, so why should they have a choice later on?
After we graduated, I didn’t meet Pi for a couple of years. Then I met him again in Singapore. I was there on a six week assignment. Fortunately the assignment was not very tough, so my evenings were mine. I called him up and said ‘Hello, we must meet up” and he replied, “Hello, yes we must.” Over the next few days, we filled each other up on our lives and we discussed common friends. He showed me Robertson Quay and Clarke Quay and Orchard street and Sentosa island and Little India and China town and all the other nice ‘touristy’ places in Singapore.
He told me about the things he loved about Singapore. He had a written list! He loved how everyone ate from their own plate, even close friends, unlike in India where everyone picked from each other’s plate. I said, “Its called sharing, not picking.” He said, “Meh.” It was amazing to eat with Pi. He had such stringent rules of ‘etchel’, that he wouldn’t touch food that the rest of us were eating. And if you felt particularly sadistic, you could always touch his plate with your spoon and he wouldn’t eat it anymore – he just couldn’t!
He loved how Singapore is clean and tidy. Every colour is well defined and the colour of the walls didn’t spill over to the streets and the colour of the streets didn’t spill over to the grass. He loved how, in his workplace, everybody came to work at nine and left at six, every week day. He loved how everybody at work was clean shaven and well dressed.
He told me about the things he didn’t like about Singapore. He had a written list! He didn’t like the fact that girls were so scantly clothed. He said he couldn’t even look down when a pretty girl passes by, because the girl might think you are staring at her legs. He didn’t like that all his male colleagues would ‘hit’ the night clubs with all his female colleagues every Friday after work. His exact reaction for what they might be doing at night clubs was ‘aiyo-rama’ (oh-God).
He missed Indian milk and Indian cottage cheese and said that the milk and cheese in Singapore tastes terrible. For a vegetarian, he said, Singapore has not much variety in food.
One of the days, I was at Singapore, we met up with some common friends for a drink at a popular pub at Robertson Quay. Our common friends brought over some of their friends. All in all, it was a merry bunch of fourteen people, all eager to make a tiny saving by drinking during happy hours. One of them was an attractive pretty young thing called Medha.
Medha was an airhostess with SQA. From what I have heard, SQA airhostesses have boyfriends in every city that they fly to. My source once told me, “Its almost as if they compete with each other on number of boyfriends.” But I believe that generalizations are only generally true and that Medha looked like a nice Indian girl who would not indulge too many boys at the same time; A few perhaps, but not too many.
About two hours into some happy drinking, Pi announced that he wanted Indian food. We complained, saying that we were not done drinking. Pi said that he doesn’t drink, so he doesn’t care. Pi asked us if we wanted to join. Just as the rest of us were about to burst into a loud insensitive laugh, Medha announced that she will join. We didn’t complain.
So Medha and Pi went to an Indian restaurant and then to a French chocolate house. From a distance, they looked like they were enjoying themselves. (The Indian restaurant and the French chocolate house were adjacent to the popular bar we were at.)
Much later, I was shown a message from Medha that read, “I’ve not met a boy so innocent since I was fourteen. I have this urge to eat him alive.” And that is how Pi, at the age of 23, got himself a girlfriend. I wondered what Pi would say if I showed her the message or told him what I have heard about SQA girls. My guess – “Aiyo-rama.”
III
“Turn the volume down.”
“Relax. Its two thirty dude, No-fucking-body is around.”
“I am not sure. I got the keys, it is my laptop. If we get caught, it is my ass that will be fried. I’ll turn it down myself.”
“Fucker. Please raise it. Nothing can be heard.”
“What do you need to hear? Every second word is ‘fuck’. All they are doing is shooting people and fucking girls. Seriously, what do you need to hear, the bang or the moan?”
We were watching the English movie Goodfellas at 2:30AM on a Saturday night in one of my department’s lecture theatres. I had the keys over the weekend, and in a Saturday night moment of madness we decided that it will be very ‘cool’ to watch a movie there. It goes without saying that once the idea was ‘out there’, nobody could be ‘uncool’ enough to suggest that it’s actually a stupid idea. So, all ten of us walked down to the lecture theatre at 2AM, opened it and connected by laptop to the projector. And watched Goodfellas, the movie.
According to listology.com, the word ‘fuck’ has been used 296 times in the movie Goodfellas. If I were to summarize the movie, I would say it was about a lot of men shooting a lot of other men and men fucking girls.
As the movie progressed, all of us got more and more belligerent (not sure why). I kept turning the volume down. Karthik kept turning the volume up. Thirty minutes into the movie, we were arguing loudly. And of course, everybody else wanted us to just shut up. In all the general chaos, nobody could figure out what was actually happening in the movie, apart from the killing and the fucking. So a general argument about the storyline was going on.
At exactly 2:50AM, Kaushik started laughing hysterically.
“Ok. What is it?”
“Pi…
“Pi… how will you kiss a girl who has been kissed before?”
“Huh?”
“Her lips are ‘etchel’.”
The laughter that followed lasted so long that I can’t remember what Pi’s first reaction was. But his second reaction was to slap Kaushik hard.
“Sorry… Sorry.”
At exactly 2:58AM, while some man was fucking some girl in the movie, Kaushik started laughing hysterically again.
“What about the rest of her body?”
IV
I met Kaushik in a pub in Bangalore. It was completely by accident. I was waiting for a colleague who was supposedly stuck in a traffic jam. He was, curiously, drinking alone. So I asked him why he was drinking alone. He said that nobody seemed to be available. And that he wanted a drink.
We drank together, like ol’ times. Kaushik could drink a lot, but not more than me. Truth be told, both of us had low capacity to drink. But amongst us, what harm is a little boasting? We filled each other up on our lives and we discussed common friends. The one person whom we discussed the most was Pi. It seemed that Pi and Medha had become more than good friends. They seemed to be in love with each other.
It had taken a bit of time for all of us to accept that Pi had a girlfriend, and that too a beautiful one. We always assumed that Pi was so difficult to be with that no girl could ever be with him, let alone be a girlfriend. We argued about whether he had kissed her or not, given that she had been kissed earlier and that Pi had ‘etchel’ ideals to honour. We laughed about how Pi and Medha can’t cuddle in a movie theatre and share popcorn or sit in an ice-cream parlour and share ice-cream or bite half a piece of chocolate off each other’s lips since Pi cant possibly let someone else’s saliva into his mouth. At this point of time, we wondered how he could kiss in the first place. Kaushik said to me, “Its got to be asked. Lets just ask him.”
So, from a bar in Bangalore, the two of us, drunk beyond our capacities, called Karthik to ask for Sid’s number. We called Sid to ask for Arvind’s number. Then we called Arvind to ask for Pi’s number. Finally, we called Pi and asked him, “Pi. Her lips are ‘etchel’. How did you kiss her?”
V
On a flight from Mumbai to Chennai, I ran into Medha. It was a connecting flight for her. She was flying back to Singapore, where she had a day job now. We exchanged pleasantries and managed to get seats next to each other.
After a while, I said to her, “I am sorry, but I have to ask you. How did a girl like you, fall for Pi.”
“Before I met him, I had every old man look up my ass, every middle age man ask for my phone number and every young guy making a move on me. So it was a relief to meet Swami. He just seemed so nice. And he was very romantic.
“My favourite was our Saturday evening routine. We would go first to that Indian restaurant on Robertson Quay. I would take a little wine and he would eat his usual vegetarian subzi with roti. Then we would walk down to the bridge just before Clarke Quay and sit there for hours. Behind us, at Robertson Quay, would be a quiet evening crowd that just wanted to have a good clean evening. In front of us would be the Clarke Bridge with girls in their shortest skirts. On the night clubs in Clarke, the bartenders would still remember my face. On our right was the lawn where the Singapore hobby club flew its propeller kites. The kites had shiny lights and as they flew and made lovely patterns in the sky, Pi would try and explain the science behind them. It used to amaze me that after being an airhostess for so long and after being close to so many pilots, no one had tried to explain how a plane flies to me.
“Between Robertson, Clarke and that lawn, I just lost myself. Everything about him was so simple. None of the complexities of my life ever made any sense to him.”
I smiled at her.
She continued, “Did you know air hospitality professionals have the highest suicide rate in India? Much is hidden behind that friendly smile.”
I didn’t know that. So, I kept quiet. I ate my little airline snack.
I knew what I wanted to ask. But I was a little embarrassed to ask after her emotional monologue. But then, as Kaushik had once said, ‘its got to be asked’. “We used to wonder, given his religious views on spit, how did he ever kiss you?”
“He didn’t.”
This was one of the two points in time where I wanted my plane to suddenly crash into a hole in the earth. The other was when I had made a move on an airhostess. She said to me, quietly in my ear, “Your zip is open.” I reached to close it – it wasn’t open! She giggled and left. From the eight row, I could hear the giggle in the little flight crew compartment at the back of the plane.
“It seems to me that you don’t know that Swami and me, we are not together anymore.”
I didn’t know. “Why did you break up?”
“We had disagreements.”
“And…”
“Well… Ok.
“Number one, his mother didn’t like me. And I think she made it a point to tell Swami every time she got an opportunity. Number two, I wasn’t stopping over at Singapore as much as earlier, so we were meeting up less often. Number three, someone told him that SQA girls have boyfriends in every city and we had a huge argument over it. But number four was the tipping point.
“Some drunk friend of his called him during one of our dates and told him that he can not kiss me because I have been kissed earlier and that my lips are ‘etchel’ and that he has to purify my lips by washing them in the Ganges. He said to Swami that he can not kiss me because that will involve him taking in my spit.
“I found it very funny. And I laughed. And he took it to heart. He felt hurt that I am making fun of his religious habits. I think, at some level, he had never liked that I’d had boyfriends earlier.
“After a week or so, he messaged saying that I should go to the Ganges and take a dip and that he will take me there. I thought he was joking, but apparently he wasn’t. He was being stubborn and ridiculous. I thought perhaps his mother had something to do with this. I tried to tell him that he’s being completely unreasonable.
“He was so adamant about this that I finally caved in. So we went to the Ganges.”
VI
Pi took Medha to the city of Benaras to wash her lips so that he could kiss her. In Benaras, after Medha had taken the holy dip and while Pi was not around, she left. On the bed where they were to kiss later that night, she left a note that said, “We change for the people we love. Call me if you can show me a sign that you will change too.”
He never called back. I wonder which one of us would have thought that a small bad decision, as small as choosing the wrong movie, could have such a late recoil.
