XX The Ground

Danny was soon back at his pad, the entire day passed through his mind like an ethereal cinema, it had drama, thrill, excitement, song and loneliness – ultimately that’s were we all returned to muttered Danny to himself - as he dived onto his bed and soon found himself next to Kurosawa assisting him in his Dreams.  

It was a blazing Sunday morning at Mettiguda. Children of all colors  sizes, age had congregated at a small open space in the center of 4 independent apartment blocks, actually their backyard, that was commonly known as the ‘ground’ the space belonged to the Railways, but obviously, in fact the whole of Secunderabad City was split between either the railways or the Army whatever left were taken over by pig infested slums that were also home to the homeless like the rickshaw wallahs or the vegetable vendor or paani puri bhaiyas or even the gorkhas, they were known as the basthis - the slums - they also had a number of mean street dogs and bitches who fornicated openly, howled and barked endlessly in the night, most of them survived by mostly consuming the remains of people forced to defecate openly – in fact the pigs and the dogs and the bitches virtually fought over human shit, everyday around Mettiguda.

So that way a play ground was a luxury for sure.

The only difference between a basthi and an Official quarter was in the "Officialness" like water, electricity etc. the basthis or the slums had none of those but then they eventually started using the Official supplies meant for the Official Railway Quarters illicitly , everybody knew it as an open secret - while the people living in the official quarters paid for the facilities, the ones in the basthi did not.

Once a while great vocal tiffs would break out between the women on the official side and the women living closest to the basthi side on issues of pilferage, robbery or husband snatching.

The ‘Ground’ was actually an open area left unused more due to lack of imagination than as a planned play area, it had over a period of time become the most preferred play and leisure spot for all the boys of the railway quarters in and around, here you would find the rogues, the rowdies, the film style heroes, the smart alecks, the cheats , the sycophants and the general jobless [ they were very important, the jobless and the sycophants, the former were the ones who were made the 'Umpires' for a cricket match while the latter were required to run the errands ] playing or participating or watching ( with a cigarette or a beedi in hand) everything from street Cricket to Football, Volleyball, Marbles or flying kites , gambling with ‘packs’ or betting with pet pigeons or playing Gilli Danda. The younger ones played with old cycle tyres some well to do managed to play with their brand new bicycles.

And Danny? He was friends with all. There was something about Danny right from the days of his childhood that made him the endearing type with every kind of person – Danny could typically converse and laugh with a murderer, a rapist with as much ease as he would with a Philosopher, Writer, Physicist or Mathematician. This is not to say anything about Danny’s morality type, its just a note on Danny’s personality type. He was always the arty type, withdrawn yet a loafer , a calm bohemian painter, a gypsy musician in the midst of urban chaos. He was an outsider who remained inside simply by chance.  

Whoever wanted to find whoever or whatever about those living around the railway quarters of Mettiguda or Lalaguda all they had to was to pay visit to the ground and they would certainly not go back disappointed- there you found the sons of Inspectors rubbing shoulders with the sons of foreman, driver, coalman, Khalasi or Gangman they were all there in a seemingly egalitarian portion of earth separated in class only by the cloths one wore or by the language one spoke.

The ground was also a multilingual, multicultural cauldron so you had the Tamil Brahmin boys, the Tamil Christian boys, the Anglo Indians, the Muslims, the North Indian Baniyas, the Marwadi the Andhraite, the kannadiga, the Malayalee everyone. So almost every language was spoken from Hindi, Telugu, a native form of English ( more like the anglo Indian type influenced a bit by the English used for communication by the Railway authorities) to all other Indian lingua pot pourri, just like the curry paste of South India, the spices came from far and wide just so that one salivating Indian tongue could taste a Chettinad Chicken, for instance.

Being the backyard it was also a museum displaying different dress codes by virtue of the large number of laundry that was put to dry, so one knew who wore what, some smart ones also noticed the colours and sizes of the undergarments put to dry and used such information to their advantage when it mattered – it wasn’t uncommon for young married brides to have roaring illicit affairs with the younger boys playing in the ground – for the women it was but one way to keep themselves entertained when their husbands went on tours that stretched for several days in a month. Some even eloped, often to return a bit dumber.     

Very few girls ventured into the ground, those few who did congregated in a secluded corner more to exchange eye contact with their own Romeos, who would once in a while whisk the girls off to movies or take them on train or bus rides or hire a bicycle and take the girls to a fair or a festival event. Those girls who were less venturesome managed to sit near the grilled windows and make their presence felt – sparking romance with just quarter inch wide window grills. 

The ‘Ground’ also had an illicit pan & cigarette shop, a water well, next to which sat Baliah who served illicitly brewed local country liquor, Godamba – by noon time on weekends it was common to find punch drunk teen adults on a slugfest invariably on reasons ranging from someone having teased a fellow alcoholic male’s sister or lover or mother or someone owed someone money or any of those things - a few drunk teens sometimes had better ideas , they would climb up the drain pipes and watch house wives doing whatever they did in their bathrooms, some found encouragement most had boiling water thrown on their faces. Those who found encouragement would get down to find a spot and masturbate, the ones who had boiling water thrown on them rushed and jumped into the nearby well screaming their guts and cursing the bitch who did it. It wasn't uncommon to find the world’s most loony barbarians hanging around the deep corners of the ‘ground’ which also meant the police were almost always coming and going about the ‘ground’.

Mothers and parents belonging to more educated class of railway employees always dreaded their children playing at the ground but for the boys who did it it was but one place where they could sweat and play ball and gossip and learn to smoke or for those more adventurous to smuggle whores or girl friends in the night. For the Homosexuals it was heaven on earth at night. And yes even the sodomists, the deranged and the dysfunctional who it was rumoured used animals, used the ground when it was dark, real dark, albeit more discreet than others.

One odd day one would have news about a dead body found, often in an abandoned well that supplied water to surrounding railway workshops or parts of a body found thrown casually or some such thing. Those days policed dogs would be put into service early in the morning a small crowd would hang around then evidence will be removed and soon the ground gets filled with children playing. So in short ‘the ground’ had something for all – from a sports enthusiast to a murderer, a alcoholic, a gambler or a Policeman, or a whore or desperate lovers.

The scene in the evening or more so on a Sunday would have looked like ‘all hell had broken loose’ for an outsider not just because of the shouts and shrieks and the choicest cuss words being thrown in abundance but more so for the sheer chaos they would have seen, during play time at least a few hundred children would assemble together on that ‘ground’ - a small space just enough to say park about 15-20 cars [ of course for the children of the railway quarters a car was way ahead of their imagination] -   here the 100-200 children who had gathered would all belong to their teams and localities, sometimes they would ‘matches’ between two different Apartment blocks  but that way it would be normal to find about 20 different matches going at any given point of time and one had to be a genius to differentiate between a fielder of one team from another. A fielder chasing a ball hit by a batsman from his match will often find himself chasing at least 20 other balls on field hit by other batsman from other matches and the fielding often had to cut across the football and volley ball courts that also had their own ilk playing the games – once a ball was hit you simply chased, everyone else would simply adjust around – guess it’s probably from these chaotic playgrounds that most Indians learnt their weird traffic sense.    

It was one of those Sundays, the ground was filled to the brim with children playing all sorts of games, the aromas of different cuisines being concocted by mothers of various caste, creed and cultural affinity mixed freely in the open air, the pigs, the dogs and the occasional donkey were busy too. Daniel was too small to fit anywhere, he and a few of his size simply ran around playing odd games, mostly catch me if you can or hide and seek, they often got beaten up by the grown ups when they inadvertently bumped into a fielder chasing a ball or trying to catch a ball or throwing for a run out.  Daniel’s mother hated it whenever she knew it that he was playing at the ground.

So often on Sundays Daniel would often start with the girls first. He knew that the little girls avoided the ground so he would start the day playing with them in their games of cooking or dressing up or walking the ramp or playing ‘teacher, teacher’ or hide and seek when he could cuddle up with some of them which kind of excited them. It was such a Sunday, Danny’s mother had given him a bath, powdered him nicely, he smelt good, combed his hair into a trademark Elvis Presley puff in the front.

Daniel had the nose of an Aryan, the eyes of a South Asian, skin of a Dravidian and the physic of a unique metabolic mixture that placed him somewhere in between a tall Mexican and a Short Kenyan, would have suited to be a part of the British Mail Service or Kipling’s team of explorers if he had been born earlier.

He had a starched and ironed cotton shirt with a neat short slack and a hawaii.

Even if Dan’s parents were of very modest means they never made him feel it, at least during his early childhood when his own needs where also minimal, Dan’s father was a graduate officer in the railways, his Mom tended to the household needs along with his Sister Stella. Dan’s mother was expecting a third family member soon. Dan’s mother came from a modest background, She had 15 siblings, they originally hailed from Madurai a place in the state of Tamilnadu. Danny had heard about rumors of how rich his grandfather on the mothers side used to be but some unfortunate circumstance, brought in by his Grandfather’s step mother, who fearing division of property one day threw out Danny’s Grandfather's entire family from their ancestral family estate that had Rice and Oil Mills, they used to own private buses and also a number of retail shops selling groceries and automobile spares. But once they stepped out of the family estate the siblings experienced poverty and penury. Danny's grandfather had to rebuild life from scratch Thanks to help from some friends from the trading community, who were Muslims, but what the hell? .

Danny’s Father too had a similar background, they belonged to Palghat, a town in the state of kerala.

They too belonged to an erstwhile rich ancestry with huge tracts of agricultural land to take care of an equally large family of 16, but the family lost most what they had owing to different reasons including the onset of land reforms by one of the world’s first ever democratically elected Communist party government that kerala shared with the Republic of San Marino ( San Marino’s Government in fact preceded that of Kerala’s by almost a decade ) in the last part of the 50’s ( ’57). Justice Krishna Iyer, a Brahmin socialist, changed the destiny of many a rich agrarian Kerala gentry , known as Jenmins a.k.a. the feudals, life overnight. But, Danny’s grand parents did not lose their wealth purely due to the reforms they had several other complex reasons. The only thing Dan cared to remember was that his grandfather was an Art Teacher, at a local Government School [ which he reached by walking over 20kms  on one side] a quack of Ayurveda and Homeopathy and also a closet Alchemist.

Danny’s great grand father had joined the railways as a Station Master somewhere in the late 19^th century , he then joined the Basel Mission - of course as a heathen who needed purging.