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Cross Roots

Posted on March 30, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

If one wasn’t paying very close attention, it sounded like the same thing. There was music, only the event was different. Trouble was, even a cursory glance would have delivered the same impression no matter the situation. The by-lanes always seemed to look the same even though it was clear that the area was morphing, every day. Like a time-lapse of cancer or the haphazard construction of a child at Lego.

This is my neighbourhood, these were my friends and I don’t recognize either as I pay what could be my final visit to the old neighbourhood.

We never realised it, growing up Catholic in India, that we were probably the most misfit of misfits in a nation with a hundred religions. The Persians and the Buddhists had roots here, at some time in the distant past. At least that is what I think. But Catholics…unless we came over on some misdirected boat in some unnamed century we are probably descended from people of a different faith in the not too distant past. I try not to think about things like that but the truth remains that the music is probably what is most integral to the Catholic stereotype. That and the alcohol.

Apparently we’re all drunk, paunchy folk with a penchant for playing guitar and singing loudly and off key, maybe because we’re all drunk. See how that works out? Oh yeah, and Catholic chicks are easy. Must be all that church-going that makes them want to get all freaky in the aftermath. I’m not entirely sure why I’m even thinking these things at a time like this.

It’s the returning to the old neighbourhood I guess. I wasn’t the first to leave and I most certainly wasn’t the first to have such tenuous ties to the old place that there really was no question of severing anything. Still, being back brings back memories; of ideas I used to have and clues to forgotten dreams long buried under the avalanche of the bullshit that passes for my thought process these days. This is where I was born but I’m hoping it won’t be where I die. I have always wondered whether death was something all of us (Catholics) thought about a lot. I cannot remember a time I was not aware of my own mortality but I read somewhere that it’s the kind of thing that only affects people as they approach their thirties. I’m guessing, people with near-death experiences had been excluded from that study.

And the trumpets start up again. Mournful, possibly going for soulful, but the paunchy old man with skin the coloured of brown granite doesn’t have the lung capacity to hold the note for anything approaching soul. Which categorizes this particular procession as a funeral but it’s not really that simple.

The first time I ever got to be part of a procession was at a family wedding in Mangalore. That revelation always led to all sorts of disappointment in people I spoke with. Not that I was in a wedding procession but that I was from Mangalore. Another popular misconception in a country where there are enough people trying to stick their penis in a girl’s belly button because that’s how they think a baby grows in her belly…is the assumption that all Catholics originated from Goa or have roots in Goa or most definitely some ancestral property in the land of feni and white tourists. Not true and therefore not sexy. Me, that is. Fortunately I didn’t cling to that particular fantasy for too long. That I would be considered sexy. I was disabused of most false notions about myself at a very young age, by my parents no less. It’s not all bad, I was just forced to develop new fantasies. Forced me to think outside the box. Any day now I’m going to want to dive right back into that box and slam the lid shut.

Existing on the margins of society isn’t really living at all.

So anyway, back to the music, decidedly funereal sounding; enough to provoke me into momentarily fearing for the health and longevity of the trumpet player in the floral shirt whose primary colour was pink. The sixteen strands of hair still attached to the top of his head were slicked back with what I could only assume was Brylcreem. It might have been coconut oil, I wouldn’t know and unless some controllable urge overpowered me I wouldn’t be leaning in to sniff his head anytime soon. It’s sort of weird when people do it to babies, it’s off the charts if someone wanted to do it to an old man, unless he was super rich and she was super young and only in it for his money. The trumpet player wasn’t and I’m not a girl or young. I might have been coerced into doing it for the money but there’s no money so I’ll never know.

That’s when Auntie Filu got into the act. Her name was Philomena but who the hell had the time to utter all those syllables every time someone wanted to get the attention of a lady who had been hard-of-hearing for as long as I could remember, right? So she was Filu and her voice was pure metal grate against unwashed-scum-coated-floor, “Maxi what you’re playing men? Dis is not a funeral. What you forgot again?”

Maxi was Maxwell Lewis, the trumpet player, the man whose lap I had briefly thought about sitting upon. Not considered, thought about. There is a difference. I had considered having sex with all of the semi and totally attractive women who lived in my neighbourhood when I was a horny teenager. Considered and rejected because I was too funny looking. For a very long time I didn’t even really know how one actually had sex. So the stirring was there, the equipment hummed and vibrated to the frequency of whatever snug-skirted vixen happened to cross my path but I hadn’t been handed the User’s Manual yet.

So anyway, Maxwell. Maxwell Lewis, a distant relative of Auntie Filu who just happened to live right next door to her. See I wasn’t related to Auntie Filu in any way that I could actually identify along a family tree but everyone called her Auntie and she addressed everybody as men, as in, “What men?” “Where you’re going men?” “What’s the time men?” Maxi wasn’t related to me either but he might have been a distant cousin of Auntie Filu. Might not have been the only reason she got him to play at any occasion she was recruited to organize. It helped Maxi make a little money that he immediately spent on the largest quantity of whatever liquor he could get.

Now Maxi wasn’t a young man, hadn’t been for years but he could be entertaining, especially when he was drunk. Which is why some of the guys from the old neighbourhood would often pay to keep him in that state. They didn’t see it, those guys in their imitation brand name clothing and their sixteen black rubber bangles on their wrists. They didn’t know, or remember that paunchy old Maxi had played hockey as a teenager. That he had nearly made it to the national team. They didn’t know that a moment of weakness and an unnecessary clash with his drunken father had led to the smashing of his only hockey stick and the tragic end of a promising career.

In a parallel universe somewhere, Maxi did go on to play hockey and help India win gold at the Olympics. In that universe he moved to the US with his wife Philomena, they had a couple of kids, William and Marcel who spoke with American accents and looked down upon all the kids from the old neighbourhood on the solitary occasion that Maxi and Philomena came back to visit.

In the real world, Filu and Maxi didn’t marry. She was married to Henry for a very short while before he was killed in a motorcycle accident somewhere outside of the bubble that existed around the small suburb we all lived in. All anyone heard was that he was killed upon impact, a pothole was involved and his skull might have been caved in by hard contact with a street light. Maxi had moved into the house next door pretty soon after. Though there had never been much proof, it was a never properly killed rumour that Maxi and Auntie Filu had enjoyed a clandestine relationship for over thirty years. Made them more stable than most married couples but few people would have seen it that way. So she tossed him a job or two whenever she could and berated him in public for wasting his money or booze.

The reason the younger fellows paid for Maxi’s drinks is because they were playing a game. It was a simple one really, all they were trying to do was see how many drinks it would take to get Maxi to blurt out the truth about himself and Philomena. A kid named Godfrey came the closest. But that was ten years ago. It was a foregone conclusion that Maxi wouldn’t be upright long enough to be able to give up his only secret. Still didn’t prevent people from trying; the same guys who didn’t see that they were actually drinking with a version of their own future.

Ironic in a way I liked it to be.

It’s amazing where a guy’s mind will travel to when he’s just trying to kill time and not look as ridiculous as he feels. It was definitely not my idea to have the procession but I guess my parents needed to let the whole neighbourhood know that their son wasn’t that abnormal after all.

Here we go. The church, the sweat running down my back, the priest waiting for us with a solemn expression that makes me wonder if he knows something I don’t, and next to him, my lovely bride.

Time to go. Time to get married. Most importantly, time to pay attention to what’s happening in the right now.

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