Karad Diaries-6

My college life thus started with stay at my uncle’s place during the term and back to Karad in vacations. I was thus at Karad for the winter vacation in the second year of the course when the youngest of my brothers, Srinivas, was born. My father was away in Mumbai, and the task fell on me to write a telegram to him to come back as mother became suddenly very ill and it seemed that she would not survive the childbirth. I was 17 at the time, and was more worried about the wording of the telegram than the seriousness of the situation we were in.

I later felt guilty about this kind of frivolous concern taking hold of my mind at the time, but I am told that the human mind works in funnier ways than this. Anyway, father came back as a result of the telegram, mother was admitted to the hospital, and everything turned out to be just fine.

It must have been my feeling of inadequacy that was responsible for this kind of concern rather than the problem with the language, which was a part of my studies in school, and moreover, my journey of the English literature had started at Karad well before the admission to architecture. I was already an avid reader, one of the tenants at my mother’s place in Kolhapur was owner of a bookshop and used to have a number of new books delivered at the residence, which he graciously allowed us to read, on the condition that we read them then and there without spoiling them in any way. It was thus my hobby of reading was nurtured, and has stayed with me ever since.

When we moved to Karad, my next door neighbour was an enterprising and ambitious young man, Anil Kulkarni, who gave me a copy of ‘Crime & Punishment’ by Dostoevsky, told me it was a classic and insisted that I must read it. As my knowledge of the language was limited, I read the entire book with a dictionary at my side. In retrospect, it seems a bit too heavy a book to try out in a new language, but strange though it may seem, I developed a taste for English literature because of this first experiment. Anil eventually went over to USA after his graduation in Pharmacy and was quite successful there, became a US citizen and married a Punjabi girl. I googled him and wrote to him when I first went to USA in 2009, and he invited me to visit him, but somehow or the other I could not make the trip. 

Anil was my mentor in many other ways. He lived with his family next door to us, and all of his family members used to carry out all household tasks all by themselves. We were also from the same middle class section of the society, but we had maids for cleaning the utensils and washing the clothes, and I never thought that you need to do anything about it yourself. Anil taught me many of the skill involved in these tasks, including ironing the clothes and I remember we also did a lot of experiments including taking out a blue-print and measuring time by using the solar shadow angle and so on.

He was admitted to the first batch of the pharmacy college that opened at Karad, and I remember attending a cultural event at his college in winter, in which Anil was one of the actors in the play “Shantata Court Chalu Ahe”, a serious drama, the depth of which I could not really understand at the time, but remember a very sad incident on the way back from the event, where I saw a bunch of college students burning a blanket in the bon-fire depriving its owner, a poor man, of his protection in the winter. This happened at least 50 years ago but it is etched on mind as some kind of proof of human carelessness and pointless cruelty.