Potato tale and some failure

Sudhansu Mohanty

I wasn’t qualified to be anything, so I became a babu! School life was tough, every day was a trauma. Cricket, badminton and table tennis saved me. My home tutor, Bhokulananda Sir, engaged to pull me through class VII boards, could only despair. ‘Have you seen a potato?’ he asked one evening. Tired after scoring a half-century, I longed to sleep, and with no particular relation with the Oriya poem he was trying to knock into my blockhead, I remarked: ‘Oh yes, I have!’ Maybe he was hinting at picking up a few potatoes from our kitchen garden.

‘I mean big potato, bigger potato, biggest potato!’ he chanted, stressing on potato with his teeth clenched. I sensed he was riled. My sleepiness quickly ebbed away. 

‘You’ll get the biggest potato in the exams!’ he was quick with his words, but resolute in clairvoyance.

I left the room without a word, and ran down to my father’s room, where he was listening to the radio news, tears streaking my face. ‘Sir says I’ll get the biggest potato in the exams!’ I choked. It took the family a while to calm me down. I never saw Sir again.

But I cleared the board exam — first attempt, classless pass like Oxford’s Gentleman’s Pass! The years that followed were the same — uneventful, unblessed, unnoticed.

College was better. But doubting Thomases held up my school mirror before me. Even benign Sadhu Sir couldn’t help. ‘Did you copy in the exams?’ As my silence grew louder, he said with unshakeable good cheer, ‘How else could you have passed!’ 

Life went on, inexorably, uncharitably, quietly, though not without the usual fusillade of omnipresent adolescent deviance.

When time came to earning a living, I was quaking in my feet. In the 1970s’ feudal Orissa, there was a mad rush for the Dholpur lottery, sold from a putative building in New Delhi, close to India Gate. You paid Rs 80 for a ticket. If lucky, this 80 paid for your train ticket to New Delhi and back. If luckier, you got a job and therefore a wife and a fat dowry! Humble 80 was the alchemy of social — economic change and mobility — engineering.

I wasn’t too unlucky with Lady Luck. But no changes came my way. My potato earning and copycat status didn’t dim either. All efforts drew potatoes, every success rung insincere. Anything I pretended achieving drew a blank. 

Today at 63, grayed, thinned and high BP colonising my cancerous body, I feel like a failed man. To offset my blues, I sport a beard to pass off as a (pseudo) intellectual. I write prosaic babu-tales, baring ‘babu-boards’ and the skeletons rattling inside. Sometimes I make bold to sell my ‘babu-wares’ to publishers. In quick time they regret, alas, too late to renege investing in my drivel, cursing the literary editor and marketing manager for waylaying them!

I soldier on regardless, unfazed, unflustered, ploughing my lonely furrow.