Carrom heads & babes butchered by time

“Never judge a book by its cover
A dog by its bark
Or a girl by her lover...”
From Kiss ki Kahani by Bachchoo

Mary Wakefield, deputy editor of the Spectator, the UK Tory weekly, marks in her journalistic Diary the moment when she stopped being addressed by her local butcher as “babe” and was instead addressed as “madam”. She remarks that this was a moment of realisation if not of deep devastation. Time has a wallet, as Shakespeare said (Troilus) wherein he keeps alms for oblivion. We are moved on by the great equaliser!

Reading Ms Wakefield’s Diary reminded me of own transition across this common and universal divide. As a young and bumptious puppy, returning for an unauthorised (my parents in Jamshedpur did not know I was coming) summer holiday from Cambridge University with shoulder-length hair, a beard and the fashionable attire of those hippy times, I thought I could smuggle several bottles of Scotch past the customs officials of what was then Bombay airport. It worked. They motioned me past and I went out of the airport with my rucksack and bag of bottles into the melee at the exit only to be greeted by the cries of undeceived Bombay taxi-drivers who importuned my custom with cries of “Ai! Bawaji, Bawaji, Bawaji!” — the word of recognition and importunity to the Parsi. An unerring, penetrative recognition.
I don’t suppose I minded, though I do remember being somewhat respectful of their insight, at being identified as a “Bawaji”, a Parsi with hippy hirsuteness and unavailing pretension.
Now, I have been a school teacher in England and from my early twenties got used to being addressed as “sir”. Some of the pupils got familiar and wise in the heady days of the early Seventies when all was equality and addressed me as “Frook” or “Donz”.
It was when Mumbai rickshaw drivers, on landing in that city, instinctively addressed me as “uncle” that the fact, drive and conquest of calumniating time hit home.
Shopkeepers and urchins on the Indian streets, people I refused to allow to push in front of me in queues, clerks and petitioners all adopted the avuncular appellation. I soon deduced that my jet black hair turning platinum blonde was responsible for the upgrade. I embraced “uncle”.
Now Ms Wakefield in her Diary notes that the way she is perceived has changed, but doesn’t tell us why. It’s often that way with the Spectator. Their writers and editorials gloss over some very basic truths. The world knows, for instance, that the great crash of global capitalism built up through the last decade of the last century and the first years of this millennium broke upon the world when Britain had a Labour government under Gordon Brown. This government did what it thought best to deal with the effects of this capitalist, banker-caused, financial tsunami.
The Spectator and every Tory in the present UK government talk about the financial crisis and the “deficit” which resulted in the national finances as being somehow the fault of the previous Labour government. It’s like blaming the police for murder.
“They left us this crippling deficit,” is the cry of the Tory party which is in all aspects the notorious supporter of the banking system and even of the individual grandees of the banking system who caused the crisis. It’s like saying, “The police left us these knifed and poisoned bodies.”
That is, in limited essence, the Spectator for you. Ms Wakefield, prompting my own confession, had more important things to say in her Diary than muse upon why she had graduated to being “madam”.
Babe to madam, Bawaji to uncle, time and tide not waiting... etc. When we were first addressed as “madam” and “uncle” were we bewildered or offended? Ms Wakefield writes it off with an admirable English resignation and light-heartedness — the equivalent of “ho ho, from now on Adam, I’m Madam!”
“Uncle” doesn’t weigh heavier with me, call me “nana” if you like, but it does bring to mind the comedy of ageing.
Though it may have been there for ages, it was only a few weeks ago that I noticed the balding spot on the back of my head. The rest of my head of hair covers it up, but it’s still there. My dad had receding hair and so did my grandfather, so there’s a genetic prediction and possibility to look forward to.
When I was a bad boy on the block in a gang with several other disrespectful and frustrated lads, we would hang around the street corners of Pune, smoke ganja and poke fun for our cruel amusement at passers-by. (Gentle reader, please consider that these were the days before TV came to India, so what were we poor boys to do?) A girl would pass carrying an umbrella and we would shout, “Oi, chhatri, vaapis!” Meaning, “Oh, umbrella, return!”
There was no malice in it, or at least we thought it was frivolous and good-humoured teasing. In which spirit our bumptious crowd referred to bald men as “Carrom boards”, the shiny and smooth powdered wooden surface of the board game in which counters, much like those in a game of draughts, are scooted across to the corner pockets of the board.
The shiny surface became the metaphor. So to the passer-by, the gentleman with a shiny pate, we would tauntingly shout with the query in Hindi, “Oi, karom board! How about a game on your beautiful head?”
And now, like the cry of “uncle” that follows me, the mark of the “karom board” has appeared in the mirror. I smooth my hand over it and wonder if anyone else notices the thinning patches beginning to grin through. As Macbeth might have said, “We but teach mocking instruction, which being taught returns to plague the inventor.” The consolation is of course that those who shout uncle and karom board today will one day be “uncle” and “aunty” themselves — if not “madam”.