And so we decided to spend the weekend trekking. “You guys are so planned and organized. It is so boring! Why can’t you be spontaneous?” my daughter had cribbed.
So, one fine Saturday, I got up and planned to be spontaneous and decreed that the family will engage in a trek over the weekend. We picked the nearby Reserve Forest and in the spirit of the new found spontaneity, decided to carry nothing except for the clothes on our backs.
And so as we walked up the forest trail, and as the sun dipped, we started looking for a place to rest our weary spontaneous selves (I knew about the forest guest house located at the end of the trail, but had not shared the information with the family to preserve the mood of spontaneous discovery). As we turned into the last bend, the forest guest house loomed out of the shrub.
And as we walked up to the portico we saw the chawkidar sprawled on a cot in the verandah. Could we stay for the night? Would it be possible to arrange for food? The chawkidar spat out, “Have you been arrested? Are you in police custody? Where is the police escort?
And as the family turned to me in sudden suspicion (their old man was some kind of fugitive from law?), I bleated out to the lord of the guest house. Why did he think that I was in police custody? I was just another common man, for God’s sake! He looked at me in his infinite compassion, “Don’t you know that guest houses are required to house special criminals? Are you special? Are you a criminal?” And then I asked, “What about jails, then? Jails! He snorted, “Didn’t you hear what I said? Guest houses are meant for special criminals. What with all these scams, ponzi schemes and looting going on, where do you expect these poor VIPs to stay when they are in custody? Have they stolen billions only to go and sleep on the floor in some mosquito ridden, filthy hell-hole stinking of urine? Do you even know the number of zeroes in the amount of money this poor SUPPORT INDIA FAMILY guy is supposed to repay to the public?”
And as I reddened and started counting the zeroes, he remorselessly carried on, ” Do you run national cricket teams? Do you have a “sheher” named after your company? Do you run hospitals where you can lodge your mummy and whose doctors can give medical certificates to produce in the Supreme Court? Do you insert full page emotional appeals in the national dailies in bad English? Can you look as joyful as this guy as he is taken away by the police in supposed custody? Can you? Can you?”
And crestfallen and defeated, I turned to shepherd the family back on to the trail. We will walk back to where we had left the car. And so we did. I heard today that the erstwhile guest of the guest house..will now be kept in Tihar where he will sleep on the floor and eat jail food. Like an ordinary prisoner. Maybe we need to plan another spontaneous trip to the forest guesthouse. Unless, it is entertaining another not so ordinary inmate.
Umesh Sharraf is an itinerant who is presently a government servant. He has taken up writing recently after having been at the receiving end from other writers all his life.