Bards of a feather

BARDS OF A FEATHER

"No no, just sit and write", said Sangeetha. Her aquiline nose, short hair and troubled forehead had the nasty familiarity of any Indian English teacher - verbose, assertive and Catholic. Of course, she didn't have the characteristic accent but that was pardonable - her schooling in Mumbai had faded those filial connections to the South. She was however the perfect specimen to head the literary club in any college - tall, pompous, exuding hubris from her pimpled forehead and completely unfazed by even the most blistering of criticisms. She would be content with managing the club, happy that the rest of the club are writing and reading, jumbling words and un-jumbling them while she sat and inspected her little flock, proud of their achievement and yet like a gullible shepherd, convinced that she is instrumental in the smooth functioning of everything.

It was on one such shepherding session - where Sangeetha watched us writing - when a couple of enthusiastic first years cleared their throats. Now you must have deduced how importance rules are to our Lady-Hitler (as Ramesh, our storehouse of 60's clichés called her; he also called our C-wing Balcony 'portico' which was highly distressing) who turned so sharply that the rest of us looked up in unison to Sangeetha's neck. It was intact.

"2 months. 2 months and 8 meetings and you're already making requests. Wait for another 6 months. At least"

One of the newbies nodded and bent down once again to solve the daily Guardian Quick puzzle, the the first puzzle for kids in the club. The other continued to stare, concentrating between Sangeetha's eyebrows where more than the required hair curled up in blonde dollops (If this evokes an image of Chewbacca, remember the scale of things. Sangeetha was already a mere 6 inches from the newbies face and her eyebrows looked like the Andes on one side and the Rockies on the other. An isthmus-of-Panama-sized unibrow was, by Indian standards, normal).

"What now?" she said, growling.

"A couple of friends of mine have been badgering me about this lately", said the newbie in a calm voice, (Sangeetha sat down. She had the ability to judge the length of a conversation after a couple of words or so) "Why don't we involve the masses. I mean, hear me out before all of you turn squeamish, it’s just that we are a club and our student body needs to allot us money. Tomorrow, yet another pompous... well certainly less talented - nitwits in fact, might stand up and say we'll form the LDC, the real LDC, and in spite of reeking of an Eminem reference, they might actually do something for the rest of the college. Like conduct some poetry contests.”

Poetry. The hallowed word had not been uttered at LDC meetings since 2007 when emo members of the literary society broke away, carrying that word in their backpacks and leaving cold cynicism and dystopian dreams all for ourselves.

The rest of us looked at the newbie (or is newby?); and then at Sangeetha; and then at the newbie (I decide, screw the British. And the Americans) again and we knew this would turn out to be a historic day in the already tumultuous (3-year) history of the club.

We waited 5 minutes.

Anxiously, Sangeetha sent the kids away for a few minutes and we gathered around her. The tension was palpable, not palpable enough to suffocate and not nearly dense enough to cut it with a knife but it was there. We didn't speak much at LDC meetings, just voted. It was like playing chess - Those who do not know how things will out end up are the ones who do the talking - we simply reach the end of the argument arguing within ourselves, individually, and we enumerate the possible outcomes. We attach weights to each possible outcome, the weights of the weights having been decided by the cumulative wisdom of our childhood and other Freudian appendages, and then we vote, trusting luck and nothing else.

We waited another 5. (5? 5 what? Soan Papdis? Minutes)

We already had a winner with 3 votes to spare - Yes won 8 to 4.

"Okay, let’s give it a shot", a visibly distraught Sangeetha said before storming out of the room.

* * *

Two weeks had passed and something dramatic had happened. Everybody was talking about the LDC! Hushed conversations behind rotund teachers and nimble benches were all about who wrote what poem and why, each person applying every bit of skill gained from their humanities courses in analysing it.

"I think she was abused as a kid. Look at that, she uses 'mum' to refer to her real mum and then to herself. And there's a tree always standing by her side, constant and phallic", an 'Introduction to Psychology' student said.

"Arre, she's a woman no? See, people simply cannot understand them. That's why so many gender issues!" said a student of 'Contemporary India', clearly swayed by a misogynistic tutor.

"I think this poem is an allusion to Mahabharatha and existentialism. My grandpa told me this.” an 'Introduction to Philosophy' student remarked, clearly confusing philosophy with a mishmash of mythology, history and nostalgia.

(Yes, I too did a course on Control Systems. I just happened to read Nietzsche during)

We convened an emergency meeting at a juice bar much like Hog's head, without magic or Aberforth –no, the only thing it had in common was that it was dirty.

"Distressing" - said M.

"Despicable!" - said N.

"Dangerous" - said O.

"Dark and sinister" - said P.

(The others sniggered at P.’s need to compensate dark with a chunkier word. All words are equally chunky, except chunky)

"Dreary" - said Q.

"Delinquent!" - said R.

"Dumb" - said Sangeetha.

"Down-right dumb; oh for heaven's sake, stop looking at me like that. I am not going to give a V’s speech in D's just because you guys made it fortuitous for one. These newbies simply cannot understand the gravity of the situation. See this proves our long-standing argument that chance is not right. It's an anomaly in the Universe" (half of us groaned) "alright fine. What do we do now?"

Silence.

More silence.

Sangeetha continued 7 minutes later, frowning - "Soon things will begin to rot. With nobody to bring order to a finite universe, they will spread like a weed, their gnarly tentacles like Scylla in the Aegean Sea, only our Aegean Sea has this finiteness, of a limited number of palindromes and puns and synonyms for ‘blush’; in a few months, people will reduce the LDC to memes of cats and American footballers. Oh God! Save us from that sight, give us the Jaundice, let the potable water mix with the vermin and rid us of the need to see this eye-shredding apocalypse. The Horror-"

"Stop", I said. I loved snails. A lot.

"We need to disband sheep-le. I see no option. Let the bubble burst; let them be purged of the desire for a class-less language. It is only a thought experiment, an experiment that will go wrong, we can say that with empirical definitiveness. How can we all know equal amounts of language, of grumpy cats and unicorn rainbows spelt in alternating cases, and having achieved equality attempt to express our infinite range of emotions? Nicht, a war by man on man for man is an oxymoron bound to implode. I resign at this moment and I say we decide unanimously without voting, bypassing the argument against collective cognitive reasoning, to disband LDC."

We looked up solemnly to grave faces all around us. A newbie walked past, kicking a sparrow's nest and saying "I kicked and flew over the cuckoo's nest." We squirmed in unison but the God's had done our poll for us. We signed the official document, yellowed by 3 years of harsh Goan weather and, more substantively, by Sangeetha's mother's tomato curry.

"Cheese Maggi!" said the juice tender, staring into nothingness. We collectively envied him for his ability to remain a thoughtless zombie, then bit our lips voluntarily in a ‘forgive-me-father-for-I-have-sinned way’ for coveting an irrational life, and then clucked at our conservative arguments, tossing our neoliberal heads only to find ourselves grinning away, lost in our hippie cloud. We stop smiling abruptly and landed on hard ground with a painful thud.

Just as we were about to leave, Ramesh, our very own 60's cliché encyclopaedia laughed at a 'real-LDC' poster on the wall. "Huh? ‘Me, the bard’ it says! I guess bards of a feather flock together." We quietly walked away.