Nowadays, people often talk about the Stockholm Syndrome. Indeed, psychologists have turned many a syndrome into talking points simply by naming them after Scandinavian cities – Helsinki Syndrome, Oslo Syndrome, and so on. I have also coined a name for my psychological condition: the Babadin Syndrome.
Basically, the twenty-five years of my life around which this narrative revolves starts in 1973 and ends in 1998. Obviously, the readers might also want to know what I did in the last sixteen years. Actually, I disappeared from the scene and people began to come out with all kinds of speculative stories about me. There were a lot of claims about where I’d vanished and reports appeared in the press as well. But gradually, people forgot about me as did my friends. One story doing the rounds was that I had got entangled in a love affair in the office, had a fight with my wife and almost come to blows. Others said I had run away from home and some even claimed I had become a mendicant. Many swore I had committed suicide by jumping into the Ganga.
To find out what I had really done in those sixteen years, you will have to read the last chapter first. But the year 1973 has a historical significance in my story as it is associated with some of the biggest events of my life. I must make clear that the real story about the Stockholm Syndrome is also set in 1973. In that year, several employees in a Stockholm bank were taken hostage between 23 and 28 August. That’s when psychologists and criminologists first began to come to terms with the phenomenon of ‘capture bonding’. Once they had been taken hostage, the bank workers suddenly became indifferent to any government help that might have come their way and became sympathetic towards the so-called criminals. Psychologists have since deducted that on being taken hostage, 8 per cent of the ‘sufferers’ develop an inexplicable sympathy towards criminals.
The psychology of the Babadin Syndrome is a little different. I must clarify, though, that mine is not a negative or violent attitude towards homosexuality. While we were still in school, Babadin had earned a reputation of being a loudmouth, a hooligan and a blackmailer. He had a wife and children too! When we were all barely in our teens, he was twenty-three. But he stayed on as a class 9 student, terrifying the daylights out of everyone around him. Once I became his victim, I developed a psychological complex. Even today, whenever I hear the Gangs of Wasseypore song, Teri kah ke loonga, I get mild electric shocks symptomatic of the Babadin Syndrome. I was taken aback recently when I learnt that an unusual Hindi translation for ‘selfie’ on the internet was ‘apni lena’.
In 1973, Sonakshi had nearly freed me of this complex. Coincidentally, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam opened in 1973 too, the year I’d found freedom from the Babadin Syndrome thanks to Sonakshi.
In terms of time, my relationship with Sonakshi was rather brief. In any case, our relationship was incongruous. But in a way, it freed me from a malady. I had seen a Hungarian film in which a political offender is confined to a cell with a young man. The young man is a small-time crook but his problem is his unusual outlook towards sex. The political offender is a long-term detainee and is dangerous in the eyes of the authorities. But the young man and he develop a relationship for the sake of whiling away their time. Though it’s not a homosexual relationship, the political offender begins to relate to the young man, in the most graphic detail, his most intimate moments spent with his wife. Gradually, the young man becomes privy to numerous snatches of private information about the woman. Even things like what happened during their honeymoon and what didn’t. He rather enjoys listening to those juicy details. When the young man is about to be freed, the political prisoner hands him a long letter to be delivered to his wife. When the man meets her, he is stunned by her beauty and the sexuality she exudes. He also tends to relish the fact that he is privy to so many of her private secrets. Finally, this very woman frees him of his sexual disorders, taboos, hitches, etc.
For me, Sonakshi was like that woman. I couldn’t have had a long-term relationship with her but the brief one did give me some sort of freedom and a strange kind of power. The accusations she laid against me in her letter were true lies. I did go away leaving her locked up in the room. But why? So she could sleep soundly. I hadn’t forced her to come with me to the Casa Rosso theatre. Initially, the prospect of watching a live sex show seems attractive but very soon, it becomes utterly boring, like pornography. It becomes difficult to put up with it for too long. Interestingly, Casa Rosso was thronged not only by sick-minded middle-aged or elderly men, a good number among them were the young, visiting the theatre in the company of their wives or girlfriends. In fact, what was far more shocking was the number of women present at the theatre.
This is the true lie I fought with everything I had in my twenty-five years of journalism as well as in my subsequent relationships. But there was no escape from the Babadin Syndrome.
In Bombay, we were ten trainees in our batch; three in the Hindi stream and the rest in English. One of the Hindi trainees was Raghav from Mathura, a diehard pundit. He was a devoted idol worshipper and a journalist with a deep knowledge of both Sanskrit and Hindi. He’d never touch liquor and religiously head to Geeta Bhavan for his pure vegetarian dinner. He was always suspicious about me and Sudhanshu, the third Hindi trainee in our batch.
All the English trainees knew typing. As for the Hindi trainees, the management had made special arrangements to learn the same. So we’d go to an ancient, ramshackle building in the Fort area where a wobbly lift would take us to the fifth floor. That’s where the typing institute was located. Its owner was a Sindhi gentleman. Raghav was already quite proficient in typing. Thus, only Sudhanshu and I were the learners. For the first week or so, we tried to learn with a lot of enthusiasm. Then, I began to get bored with the whole exercise. Moreover, I found Hindi typing far more difficult to learn than the English. Some things were beyond my ken. In the wake of the 1962 attack on India, schools had begun to lay a lot of stress on NCC training. But I would become utterly helpless when I had to lie down, rifle in hand, and learn how to shoot; I failed to make any move. The training officer was quite tough. When he angrily kicked the soles of my shoes, I would feel I was falling victim to the Babadin Syndrome.
But we did find a way out of the typing tuitions. Since Sudhanshu was equally disinterested in learning to type, we decided to bring the Sindhi owner around. We won’t learn, only mark our presence, we proposed, and he’d continue to get his fees from the company. And at the end of it, he’d issue us certificates of proficiency.
Initially, he was a little unsure. ‘Do you want to kill my business? Do you realize I land this contract every year? What if it gets cancelled?’ But he finally gave in. We were allowed ninety minutes to learn typing after the lunch break. Even during the days of my posting in Yugchintan, I had this time all to myself to go out and have some fun. Sudhanshu and I spent it roaming around the Fort market.
Sudhanshu was quite handsome. With his curly hair and a shy and diffident demeanour, he was a true chikna launda as they say in the UP lingo. Sometimes, I’d get upset with myself when I realized I had begun to look upon young boys with such a mindset. I didn’t feel threatened by Sudhanshu. He was a nice boy and though we lived in Bombay, he had dreams of ending up in Paris. One day, he got hold of an invitation for two for a cabaret in a hotel which included dinner. ‘Would you come along? I am told a cabaret is something quite hot.’
We did go together. The dinner was excellent. And I watched a cabaret for the first time in my life. The problem started when the cabaret dancer suddenly came up to me, took my glasses off and pretended to wear them. For a while, the half-naked woman continued to swing wearing my glasses. I was glad, though, that they were sanctified in the process. Sudhir, you still think you are a great intellectual? At one point, the dancer even dangled the glasses on her bra. My intellectual glasses must have felt blessed.
A distant relative of Sudhanshu lived in Pune. There was a five-day festival of Italian film-maker Fellini’s works and we decided to go for it. The living arrangements would be free. A covered corridor in the back of the house had been converted into a room and both of us had our own bed. We’d watch the films in the day and before going to sleep, discuss them threadbare till late into the night.
One night, during the course of our discussion, a certain mood gripped Sudhanshu. After watching Eight and a Half, our discussion had turned quite dry and entirely cerebral. But after watching La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life), we came down to discussing the leading lady’s lithe and lissom body. It was 1.30 a.m. And suddenly, Sudhanshu said to me, ‘Listen, if you want, I could shake you.’
‘What do you mean? I don’t follow…’ I was beginning to feel the intimations of the Babadin Syndrome.
‘What’s there to follow? It’s quite simple. If you want, I could help you masturbate. I don’t mind. You’d have a hearty sleep thereafter.’
‘No, thank you. I am quite capable of that myself! I was fourteen when I first shook myself in a field of watermelons in my village. I even counted it out. Sixty-one, sixty-two…’
‘No problem there. I was just making the offer. Sometimes, one needs another person’s company.’ Sudhanshu slept soon after this but I couldn’t go to sleep till late. It was raining outside, heavy winds were blowing, and I felt someone was desperately knocking on the door. I wondered if it was Babadin. Then, recalling Fellini’s film, I decided to fling coins into Fontana da Trevi in Rome. Visitors to Rome throw the coins standing with their back to the falling water, wishing they’d get to visit Rome again. But I hadn’t been there even once. All the same, I continued to throw coins and, soon, was fast asleep.
Many years later, in 1991, I got a phone call in my office out of the blue. ‘Listen buddy, I bet you can’t recognize me.’
‘Damn it, why don’t you say who you are. No point casting riddles.’
‘Well, I’d been looking for you for years and I finally got hold of your number only today. I’d begun to look for you after reading an article by you in a newspaper and it’s taken me two years to find your number.’
‘For all you know, this could be a wrong number.’
‘No, this is not a wrong number. I am an income-tax inspector. It’s taken me much hard work to reach you. Now tell me, weren’t you at the Janata School between 1958 and 1963? Do you remember Jangbahadur? And that boy whose name was Hamish Hamilton but who looked like Kanhaiyalal all the same? His family had converted to Christianity.’
‘Well, you are on the right track thus far. Now you might as well tell me your name. Or are you Hamish Hamilton?’
‘Oh yes, do you remember Sarfaraz Abbas, whose stench we’d be compelled to put up with every day?’
‘Listen, now tell me about yourself. Your real name.’
‘Think about it.’
‘Well, that’s exactly what I’m doing.’
‘Babadin!’ And then, there was a hoot of laughter. ‘I’m sure you haven’t forgotten him.’
‘I’m sure you are, Vinay. But, bastard, why are you laughing so oddly?’
In the evening, Vinay met me at Volga Restaurant in Connaught Place. Even at that time, he looked like quite a chikna boy. And smart too. He sat alone in an expensive outfit, drinking beer. His wife too was in the income tax department and held a higher post.
He gave me another shock when he told me that in 1990, he had somehow managed to track down Babadin and reached his house.
‘You see, Sudhir, I had gone to him with the idea that as soon as I see him, I’d give him half a dozen slaps. I landed up at his house in high dudgeon. But imagine, the bugger couldn’t even recognize me. He was a sick and decrepit old man lying in bed and coughing desperately. The only other person in the house was his daughter-in-law who stood there scolding him. He seemed to find no respite from the bouts of cough.
‘Somehow, Babadin managed to control his cough and asked me, “Sir, who do you want to see? Ramashankar has been missing for a long time. He owes money to a lot of people. Yes, he is my son but as good as dead for me. If you want, send him to jail. I’d have no complaint there.”’
I was digesting all this in a state of utter shock and disbelief. ‘But did you verify that the sick man lying in that bed was actually none other than Babadin?’
‘Of course, I asked him his name, asked him about the Janata School. But when he got suspicious, I simply told him that Ramashankar owed money to me as well and that I was there to look for him. I can give you his address. You could possibly meet him on your next visit to Lucknow.’
‘No, I have no wish to confront him. I don’t even want to see his face and nor do I want any revenge.’
‘Come on, you were the one who quoted German philosopher Schopenhauer in one of your articles saying that sometimes revenge is also sweet.’
‘But what does one achieve by killing a half-dead Babadin? The real pleasure of killing him would have been in the days when he threatened and terrorized all those boys at knifepoint and raped them without mercy or remorse.’
Vinay handed me his visiting card. He’d been posted in Lucknow but I never got in touch with him.
Who rescued me from the psychological ill-effects of Babadin Syndrome? I would say many things did, but if I must zero in on just one, then I’d say it was the British Council Library or BCL in Lucknow’s Hazratganj. It had Mayfair Cinema next door, Ram Advani’s bookshop close by and Chetna, the purveyor of Communist literature, not very far with its well-read manager Dilip Vishwas. Around 3 in the afternoon, I’d dump my schoolbag at Chetna to go to all these three places. By the evening, I was at the coffee house. I would buy from Dilip the works of Andre Gide, Sartre, Arthur Koestler and others. One day, he made an interesting comment, ‘Sudhir, did you notice that the authors of the works that you often buy were initially the followers of communism but, later in life, got disillusioned with it?’
‘No, Dilip sir, I have no such design in my mind. I have also bought from you the works of Neruda, Brecht and Lukacs. I am sure you know the famous quotation that if you aren’t a Marxist in your youth then you don’t have a heart and if you continue to be one beyond your youth, then you don’t have a brain.’ Dilip let out a hearty laugh.
A boy born in Phaphamau along the Ganga near Allahabad, whose father happened to be a mahapandit of Sanskrit, should have been the priest of a shrine like Pandeshwarnath Dham. I stayed in Phaphamau up to class 8. After that, I’d return only for my two months of summer vacations. Even during that break, fearing scoldings from my Sanskrit-sputtering father, I’d accompany my mother to our village. Father believed I was no good. There were very few families with an only son in those days when having seven or eight children was the norm. But after my birth, the doctor had advised my father that mother’s constitution was no longer up to bearing another child. That was one more reason for Father to dislike me. I was a no-good who wanted to study neither Sanskrit nor maths, two subjects he believed were the keys to one’s life.
Father’s uncle’s son, Brajeshwar, had an informal academy to teach wrestling in the Alambagh area of Lucknow. He’d been an expert wrestler in his youth, had never married and the wrestling pit was a kind of spiritual base for him. After my class 7 exams, I had gone to visit him once and never went back to Phaphamau. When Father visited us, he told Brajeshwar uncle, ‘Looks like you’d turn the boy into a wrestler in your image and he’d eventually end up a bachelor like you.’
‘Bhai Saheb, this damned fellow actually steers absolutely clear of the pit, spending all his time reading Qissa Tota-Maina in my room full of books on the top floor.’
I was keen to stay on in Lucknow so I could keep away from Father’s slokas in Phaphamau. In Brajeshwar uncle’s library in Lucknow, I had discovered the key to a magical world. He was an avowed bachelor and in his library, one could find everything from the novels of Sarat Chandra and Rabindranath Thakur to the poetry of Jibanananda Das to Arabian Tales and who knows what else. I also found a copy of The Perfumed Garden there. Obviously, the hardened bachelor nurtured some hidden territories as well. But he wouldn’t ever tell me anything.
But I pressed him one day, ‘Did you ever have an affair?’
‘Listen, you never ask wrestlers questions about their loves and affairs. Our tricks are a little different. You compose poems, don’t you? Come down to the pit one day and look at the way the wrestlers struggle with each other. You’d notice poetry there as well.’
‘Are you sure it was not Kavita Pande?’ I needled him.
Uncle ran after me, a slipper in hand. ‘From today, no entry for you in my library! You’re a dangerous man.’
Uncle would often refer to Sarat’s novel Datta, claiming to have read it three times. I had never read it but had found in it a registered letter from one Kavita Pande threatening him that if he wrote one more letter to her, she’d report him at the police station. ‘Uncle, how did you get scared by just one letter? You shouldn’t have given up.’
Uncle would cook his meals by himself and was a master in the art of preparing pumpkin dishes. At the time, he was immersed in the spiritual pleasure of cooking one. He didn’t say a word, merely continued to hum an old Hindi song. ‘Jawaani beet jayegi, yeh raat phir na aayegi…’
Had I wanted, I could have easily asked uncle to give Babadin, the loudmouth, a sound thrashing. All his bravado would have vanished into thin air. Why, uncle was notoriously tough in the area. But I didn’t want any more trouble. I was afraid Father might then call me back to Phaphamau.
Uncle’s library was amazing by any standards. He lived in a small and ancient three-storey building. The library was in a top-floor room with windows on all four sides and could be reached through a well-worn and ramshackle staircase. It was refulgent with light and air and one could enjoy fine views over the tree tops with the sound of birds chirping. And there were books ranging from The Perfumed Garden to the novels of Devkinandan Khatri. When I moved from this book world to that of the British Council, it was a completely different experience. My world was radically changed by journals like Sight & Sound, London Magazine, Encounter and Studio. There were no photocopying machines in India in those days and I remember the many occasions when I sat there for hours copying into my register my favourite poems, essays and short stories.
When the secret letters James Joyce had written to his wife Nora came to light, I put in a lot of effort to transcribe them all. Obviously, I hadn’t got them from the British Council library. The letters had been published in a New York magazine and their photocopies were sent across from America by an artist to the special correspondent of Prarambh, the rebel poet Pravesh Tripathi. I spent a whole night transcribing them in my register. Such intensely pornographic letters! And written to his wife suffering from the pain of separation. But these were Joycean effusions. Simply magical.
The point is there were numerous such innocent obsessions which helped me to avoid falling victim to the Babadin Syndrome. My serious critical pieces were beginning to appear in literary journals by the time I was eighteen. Then one day, I got a letter from Prarambh’s editor, poet Mahesh Uniyal, inviting me to write for him. A byline in Prarambh meant overnight fame. It was a miraculous incident to have my essay on Noam Chomsky published in 1971. In those days, Chomsky was known not for his serious political opinions but for his revolutionary views on psycholinguistics. After it was published, I continued to wonder till late into the night: who’s afraid of Babadin?