THE BACKMIND FACTIONS When facts merge in mind into fictions

Venkatesh Kodandarama

Chennai • Bangalore

CLEVER FOX PUBLISHING Chennai, India Published by CLEVER FOX PUBLISHING 2021 Copyright © VENKATESH KODANDARAMA 2021 All Rights Reserved. ISBN: 978-93-91537-41-8 This book has been published with all reasonable efforts taken to make the material error-free after the consent of the author. No part of this book shall be used, reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The Author of this book is solely responsible and liable for its content including but not limited to the views, representations, descriptions, statements, information, opinions and references [“Content”]. The Content of this book shall not constitute or be construed or deemed to reflect the opinion or expression of the Publisher or Editor. Neither the Publisher nor Editor endorse or approve the Content of this book or guarantee the reliability, accuracy or completeness of the Content published herein and do not make any representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose. The Publisher and Editor shall not be liable whatsoever for any errors, omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause or claims for loss or damages of any kind, including without limitation, indirect or consequential loss or damage arising out of use, inability to use, or about the reliability, accuracy or sufficiency of the information contained in this book.

Dedication To my father late Kodandarama who stretched his limits to educate us. AND To my mother Indiramma who continues to shower her unconditional and unstinted love and blessings on us.

CONTENTS Prefatory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix THE MENDICANT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 LOVE DIARY 7. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 THE FOOL’S MONEY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 THE BRAGGART ASTROLOGER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 THE UNTOUCHABLE CHARIOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 AN OUTRÉ LOVE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 THE PENNY PINCHER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 POETRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Book reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

iv

PREFATORY

I

t is with much trepidation that I am set to release this maiden venture of mine at literary writing. It is my racking regret that as a professional doctor I rarely got any time to voraciously consume the literary works, and my reading of them was limited to occasional novels that I could lay my hands on. But the flame of my literary zeal was burning constantly in me and to be told the truth, if it were not to be medicine that I took up at the graduation level, it would have been English honours. It is only in the last 2-3 years that I released my professional strings to an extent and rediscovered my passion for English literature. As it happens with any budding writer, sheafs of insignificant work must have been consigned to the refuse bin before I considered this to be of any significance to make it see the light of the day. I sincerely hope my readers will take these infantile and faltering literary steps of mine much more kindly than it may deserve. It would be remiss if I don’t mention some names here who are close to my heart and mind and who v

Prefatory

remained as a backbone of support during the scripting of this book. First in the line should be Archana, my wife who allowed me to work on this in my free hours. Actually those hours were hers. It would be pretty conventional and commonplace to thank her the usual way. The feeling goes beyond that and I am happy she understands it. It is much more than my filial pride that merits my mentioning Rajiv Shastry, my son and my very first reader. I am certain that this work would have been more elegant and striking if his medical schooling had allowed him more time at editing the manuscript.A strict grammarian that he is, I owe a lot of syntax and grammar corrections to him. I believe in the dictum that one has to be a good story teller before becoming a good story writer. I ascribe the uncovering of this attribute in me to my daughter Gowri Shastry who relentlessly and peevishly pursued me to tell her an umpteen number of bed time stories which were usually cooked up instantly on the bed. Whatever I had written for the day had to be cleared by her after her careful listening of the plot. She always left me wiser after the narration. vi

Prefatory

My gratitude also goes to my lovely sisters Vijaya and Vimala and my supportive brother Vishwanath for their unstinting love and pride towards me. They make all that difference to my life and to this work. I also cherish the avuncular love that my nieces Lakshmi and Bindu and my nephews Harish and Dr Manjunath have towards me. I wholeheartedly accepted their valuable suggestions during the preparation of this book. My brother in law Dr Avinash deserves a special mention here as well. They have always been my first and unbiased critics. I am also thankful to my childhood chum Padmanabhan who is ever eager to read what I have written and is waiting as expectantly as me to see the book in print. Last but definitely not the least, I am in eternal debt to my medical undergraduate batchmates who as a group encouraged my writings in the group forum unreservedly. Most of the time it seemed they made an art out of my trash writings. But still it came from their hearts for their fellow mate. I am thankful and indebted to all of them. In particular I am thankful to Dr Govinda Raj Shenoy who himself is a novelist and a writer. He has kindly consented to write a foreword for this book and vii

Prefatory

I heart-fully thank him for his suggestions and encouragement. My ineffable thanks to Dr Murali Krishna, Dr Madhusudhan C, Dr Suma M S, Dr Vineeth Kumar, Dr G T Srinivas ,Dr Suma B V, Dr Parimala, Dr Anitha, Dr Jayashree , Dr Swaroopa , Dr Kiran Krishnamurthy, Dr Sunitha Jain and Dr Dinesh S P (not in any particular order) for always being the first readers of my writing and for offering their invaluable platitudes and critiques. I felt at times guilty and embarrassed to have hard put them into trouble in asking to review my writings and yet they were ready with their genuine feedback as if it was a matter of first priority. Any amount of thanks from my side wouldn’t recompense their efforts at it. My sincere thanks also goes to the Cleverfox Publishers team for making this maiden venture of mine a beautiful one.

viii

FOREWORD

I

t’s a strange feeling of fulfillment writing the foreword to the first book of a precious friend. Dr. Venkatesh Kodandarama was my classmate in Bellary Medical Collage and remains an extremely close friend. He describes a “Lunatic” in one of the poems. There’s a fair share of himself in that nerd. A mad nerd in an asylum built with gargantuan vocabulary. To get a peek into the world of Venkatesh Kodandarama or “Venky’s world”, we must breech the barricades of prose, scale those gigantic walls of words and pass through several corridors of poetic maze. Venkatesh was a prisoner of his profession for close to thirty years. Life of almost all Doctors can be described in a sentence. It is a self imposed sentence of life imprisonment. Venkatesh has finally decided to allow himself the liberty to break the shackles and come out into the bright sunshine. ix

Foreword

The Sun indeed shines bright as he brushes off the cobwebs of prison and lets loose his army of words into the beautifully mad world. Venkatesh narrates simple stories and mundane stuff from day to day life in Tharoorian vocabulary. Inadvertently, he reconnects us with the dictionary and leaves us richer in lexicon. Having known him for over three decades, I’m convinced this is just a modest beginning and we have greater things in store for us. Waiting for the lunatic to unleash more madness into the mad world outside from the cozy Psyche’s bower he’s built in his prison. Dr. Govinda Raj Shenoy

x

THE MENDICANT

s

I

t was one of those commonplace outings on his job for this mendicant on a sultry morning. He was not sure about the yieldings of his job though for that particular day. Yet he was slogging away at it in an almost religious manner. He was polishing his work from the time he knew his existence on this earth. He had aced his job to perfection if you could call it a job! He was heir to the four streets of that modest and small-time picturesque town called ‘Ansal’, courtesy of his father who owned those streets for seeking alms. The other streets were shared by his near arch-rivals who inherited their claim to them from their legendary mendicant fathers. They were guarding their borders with a frenzy equivalent to that of a soldier guarding the

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The Backmind Factions

national boundary. An intrusion of any kind was feebly tolerated! Presently he was on one of those arduous day’s task of getting a square meal. Normally, it was two times a day affair for him. The time scheme was crucial. In the mornings he had to implore after the patrons came out of their muddled brains and before they decide how to dispose of yesterday’s leftovers. The municipal waste disposal truck and the stray dogs were his fiery competitors. The success of his mission depended on how well he times to appear at the threshold of his benefactor. He was proud that most of the times he achieved that feat. A successful mendicant for that day! An achiever of sorts! It was not only the timing that tested the skills of his profession. It was about choosing as well. He was out every day on the streets to disprove that outdated adage ‘Beggars can’t be choosers’. He had to select his patronising preys carefully. He wouldn’t let himself be driven by the opulence and grandeur of the mansion before which he beseeches. There were many stories of disillusionment at that. There were also occasions when he would be rudely turned away at the hovels. If these were the inanimate things he had to deal with, the problem with animated ones was 2

The Mendicant

overbearing on him. There were termagants who used to unleash their vitriolic tongues even before he cried for his alms. And there were skinflints, the hardest nuts to crack. Some were henpecked husbands who would make him wait and hear to the curtain lectures until their boss passes the final judgment from inside the kitchen. There were some magnanimous lot who would pour out everything into his dented aluminium vessel so as to curtail his parade in his fiefdoms prematurely. And there were true altruists who would concoct some dish at his appearance and serve it afresh. But this sect was rare and the act had an element of embarrassment to him. He was used to the hotchpotch of a stale meal and anything else was an aberration! He had none but a white male mongrel for his company. It was nothing but a living skeletal framework. Its facies depicted a bulging jaw with sunken eyes enacting all the worldly hunger. The pelvic bones thrust out creating big indentations on either side. Its pristine white colour existed only in patches as a glorious reminder of the past. Poverty snatched the courage from its heart and the energy from its limbs. It got habituated to wag its tail at every passerby. It failed to get enraged at the potential enemies. Its deportment was every bit 3

The Backmind Factions

of a mendicant! It was unbelievable, the destitution made it an apology for a dog! He didn’t take the trouble to name the mongrel as did his father who wouldn’t name him even at his entreatment. When he insisted his father to accord him a certain name, his standard quip was, ‘Who would care to call a mendicant by name?’ There was a grain of truth in it and he refused himself to harbour any interest in it thereupon. The mongrel was proving a difficult luxury to him and at times he felt an urge to abandon it for its own good. But every time he does that it would appear at the threshold of his shelter wagging its tail as a mark of its slavery to him. He had no choice but to admit him in his impoverished fold again. After all, it formed a major chunk of his asset apart from the crumbling shelter he had. Not that the dog was that unproductive. It used to run small errands for him like getting a tumbler of water or getting his pair of slippers. Though it was not a belligerent dog, it used to stave off him from other eager beaver strays who used to vie with him for his vouchsafed food. When he was back in his abode, the sun would be directly upon his head and it is time for him and his canine to partake in the booty. To call it 4

The Mendicant

his abode appeared to be an overstatement to himself. It was perched on the top of a hillock on the outskirts of that town. On the other side, the hillock extended itself into a short and shallow valley ending abruptly at a stream that separated the hillock from the ‘Anni’ hill range beyond that. A wide range of greenery adorned the hillock, valley and the hill range. The stream flowed to its full strength most of the year except the scorching summer when it mellowed down to half its usual size. His abode in itself was a crumbled remnant of a huge manor that was supposed to be built for one of the local chieftains and in due course of time, became a forlorn piece of antiquity. An equally disintegrated Shiva temple stood right beside it with all its sanctum sanctorum and idols in loose pieces. The majesticity of the now-defunct stately home could be discerned by the huge pillars and slabs which were intricately designed and carved but now all strewn around having been lain in a state of sleep. Any piece of stone lying there abandoned was but a frieze or a curio! There were none but some shepherds who visited the hillock to graze their sheep. Few cooked up stories of vague and wandering apparitions didn’t help the matters much and it is in these 5