2002. Second year of the dreaded chase called Engineering. I was sitting in a smoky, ghostly room with fellow Mech-ies enjoying a rather strong brew. Tranced into the ocean of Bengali Renaissance songs, we hovered in a make-believe happy little world. All sorts of topics, ranging from girls to the ever increasing price of liquor were being seriously discussed. I really don’t know how that name came to my mind. It just came .Perhaps I was a bit high. And I started.
**
‘It seems…’ there was a pause. All looked at me with utter disinterest. ‘The chaos in the world is perennial. And as per Naipaul… .’ I was unable to complete my sentence as one of my friends interrupted.
‘Chandrapaul’s brother?’ he looked at me with hazy eyes.
‘Did he also play for West Indies?’
I… felt like I was in midst of a curfew. No one was there except for the burning flames lapping me up internally.
‘Hmm…I know re’ said another intelligent fella. ‘He played for Trinidad and Tobacco.’
Trinidad and Tobacco… Trinidad and Tobacco…echoed for quite some time inside my brain. Many years later while reading Sasthi Brata’s My God Died Young (his autobiography written at the young age of 28-29), I read of a similar situation.
He writes, ” We were at dinner round the marble table, some dozen faces in all. In between all the inane chatter I managed to scatter my pearls. ‘We no longer live in Wasteland,’ I said. ‘The ground is rich once again and Eliot’s voice is weak with fatigue…..’
At this point I was rudely halted by my eldest brother.
‘Who is Eliot’ he queried.
I felt stung. My orations ceased. I looked blank and cold.”
My God Died Young was first published in 1968. Not much had changed in 2002. Life went on. Chandrapaul did hit a few centuries after that and Naipaul was hit by a few controversies. The world mostly remained the same. We completed our engineering with bruises and burns. Slowly Naipaul retired temporarily to the dug-out and Bill Gates appeared with MS Word and I somehow crash-landed in one of the country’s most esteemed software dressing rooms, I mean software companies.
**
Then by God’s grace, I met an IT engineer cum Bengali Renaissance poet. I was extremely proud to share our rented apartment with him. Ofcourse others were there, but he was the most intellectual artiste. Life went on. One boring night I asked him about his favourite English novel and waited eagerly. It was like stealing some diamonds from his ocean of intellect. When he scratched his French-cut and said ‘Hmm…there are plenty…But…recently I liked…’
‘Which one?’ I shouted in my excitement.
‘There’s a book called I Too had a Lovely Story…nice but one problem’.
I felt cold. ‘What problem’ I meekly asked. ‘The name you know…it should have been… I Too had a Dog Story…so much like our life…’
‘True’ I said somewhat crushed.
**
Let me however clarify, I have nothing against dogs. I love them. Whenever the bar-man asks me, I have one constant reply. ‘Black Dog, eight years’. Not a very old dog you see, just eight years. Couple of days back with my Dog on my table I was unhappily singing a few Metallica lines and said to one of my office colleague. ‘You know…Philip Roth is retiring…sad…isn’t it?’
He looked at me surprised. ‘What has happened to you, Basu? Why are you lamenting an English cricketer…is this Philip in the recent India-England series?’
So life went on. For, Chandrapaul, dogs and Naipaul… who is perhaps still in Trinidad and Tobacco.
Saptarshi Basu is a gold medallist in Mechanical Engineering and has worked in the IT industry for the last eight years. However, writing has always been his first love, his passion. His debut novel-Love (Logic) and the God’s Algorithm is now a national best seller in Infibeam, a premier online store. His second novel, Autumn In My Heart was published by Vitasta Publishing with Times Group in November’11. He maintains a blog http://saptak-firsttry.blogspot.in/ and writes screenplays for movies and columns for some online magazines.