The Magical Mantras of Manjooran

Episode 1: Uncle Kaka

It was mid-afternoon. Manjooran was celebrating his 72nd birthday. In splendid isolation. There was a small cake on the table, chocolate coated, with white sugar piping around its edges. A wisp of the moving air licked at the flame of the single candle stuck into the top of the cake. The chocolate was slowly melting in the heat. Likewise, a glass of wine was rapidly warming in the summer breeze blowing through the window. He hummed the birthday song to himself as he cut into the cake with a blunt knife, lifted up a large piece and stuffed into his mouth.

Without question, he was completely alone. The house maid who cleaned his flat and made his meals, had long disappeared after her duties. Early that morning his son, a highly paid IT professional in Silicon Valley, had mouthed his birthday greetings into his ear via the cell phone. It was swiftly passed it on to his wife and then to his spoilt daughter, both of whom made their falsely cheerful salutations before quickly going back to whatever work they had been doing before being interrupted.

Manjooran's daughter, whom he considered to be something of a dimwit, had not even bothered to ring up. She lived in Chandigarh with her Sikh husband, a burly, turbaned giant of a man, involved in some shady business, about which he was rather elusive. How this unlikely couple had come to meet was a mystery to him. What they saw in each other, despite fifteen years of marriage, was even more baffling.

Manjooran's wife, Saroj, the long-suffering, pious woman he had married, and lived with for 40 years, had found it fit, some two years ago, to lose her battle with multiple sclerosis. She had quietly slipped away late one evening, without fuss or complaints, as had been her wont, during the long years of their marriage. Her departure left him completely and utterly alone. And so he sat, unrepentant and ever bristling, in his third floor apartment in Bangalore. In his meandering thoughts, he often found himself reminiscing about his glory days in the aery upper rungs of the corporate house he had helped create. Recently, and more often than not, he had noted his mind was flitting from one thought to another, thoughts of no consequence at all, neither elevating nor significant, but just one wisp of memory after another. Or one anxious thought endlessly following the one before it. Often these peregrinations went on for hours on end, until he jolted himself awake when he noticed the evening light starting to fade.

He moved to the verandah and looked down at the road some thirty feet below; in the late afternoon, there was hardly any moving traffic. The falling leaves from the large trees on both sides of the road had left a thin carpet of brown wisps over the tarred road. They tended to fly off this way or that, buffeted by any vagrant wind that passed by. In a moment of lucid clarity, he saw how the moving leaves were mimicking his thoughts these days. Leaves and thoughts, scattering helter-skelter in slow motion. His face melted into one of his wry smiles. It is coming, he thought to himself, the dementia that he had been warned about several years ago, surely it is coming.

But now it was time to lean back into his arm chair and allow himself to doze off a little. He realized, more clearly than ever before, that the major part of his life was over, that he had achieved whatever he had set out to do when he had joined his company as a young and energetic officer. The rest of his days could only be a post-script. He had once boasted of both brains and brawn, armed as he was by a muscular athleticism that brooked no opposition to his plans. That he was a favourite of his European bosses in those early days, (before the Indian members of the Board bought them off), had become clear to the others soon enough. What was unique to Manjooran, and acknowledged by his enemies, was that even after the ownership of the company passed to the brown-skinned sahebs, he had retained the trust and confidence of the new owners of the company. He had always been the rising star of his office, its most valued professional, who almost singlehandedly had trebled the company's profits within a few years. He knew it, and he had carried about him an easy arrogance both in his gait and his swag.