Farrago

By Kelath Srihari

Farrago - A confusing mixture of many things.

Now isn’t life so nowadays?

We are all spoilt by choices and hence live life in more or less one constant state of mind – Confusion.

:)

Farrago is a story about how an ordinary guy who finds happiness in the small things in life, traverses through it in the 21st century.

Life glides Adi from Germany to India, to tease him with pretences, then kicks his butt to Afghanistan to make him see the other side of life eventually helping him find his true calling back in India, to become that kind of person, which every young Indian aspires to become at some point in his/her life, yet eludes him of the one thing which he wants the most.

Was everything predestined or was it him who made his own destiny?

Will Lady Luck court him?

Will he finally get what he desperately wants?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Notion Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9789384391003

Book preview

Epilogue

Paradise Gained

A doting mother, a caring father and an affectionate younger sister, though all were there in life he had this sense of missing someone, neither did he know whom nor why and he was just 7 years old.

Finally he saw her when he was 17, and that day became one of the best days of his life.

Genesis:

Born in Germany into a typical middle class Indian family, in 1985, he was christened Adi Narayanan thanks to the suggestion of his paternal great- grandmother, a pious old lady. Having lived the first 7 years of his life in Germany with just annual visits to India, he was influenced more by Superman and Michael Jackson rather than Lord Vishnu with whom he shared his name.

Life then was all about getting up and being pampered by his mom, watching his Dad chant his way through early in the morning at the little make-shift puja table , in the bedroom of their one bedroom apartment on the 5th floor of 51, Kolner Strasse, Dusseldorf.

During summer, mornings had cartoon, afternoons had a little learning to do as his mother used to collect books from India to teach him herself and evenings translated into playing at the park on the opposite side of the street, with occasional binging on ice creams on their way back home from the PLUS retail store just next to the park.

Winters were tough, with temperatures as low as a few degrees minus zero and roads filled with snow. A beautiful sight it would be, playing with snow before it melts away with the arrival of spring. Spring and autumn were the times of the year when there were several get-togethers amongst the Indian families living there, most of them worked for Dastur GMBH where his dad worked. Each weekend would have all the families going to one household and the other weekend to the next, it was more of a rotational kind of event where each family held one at their place.

Around 4 years of age, Adi Narayanan started attending Kindergarten, as his dad insisted that he needs to go so that he can learn the language which would help him in mingling with Germans and at the same time not feel isolated. Holding on to his dad’s hand and hopping through the clean streets he used to go and at the Kindergarten there was this nice tall lady who ensured that all children felt comfortable but still he would occasionally check on the clock just to see whether it was time to go as his mother would be on the dot to pick him up and he used to banter non-stop to his mother about all the things he did that day. The walk back home was always interesting for him as it used to have either going to the departmental store or to the small grocery shop operated by a Sri Lankan family which also had a video rental store close-by. Indians used to frequent the joint for 2 reasons, firstly because they used to get Indian spices and masalas. Secondly, they had a large collection of Indian movies. Thus Adi Narayanan’s liking for films started quite early.

He used to speak German fluently to the extent that his teacher used to tell his parents that once he started speaking no one would believe that he was a non-German. And listening to that always used to bring a sparkle of pride in his parents eyes, as they were proud that their little kid was adept to grasping things quickly.

Enter 1992

Things were going fine, when suddenly one day his parents told him that they were going to India permanently and that his father would follow them after working there for some more years.

He was 7 and during their annual visits to India all these years, they used to divide their stay between his maternal grandparents/aunts in Coimbatore and his paternal great-grandmother (the old pious lady who literally chose his name), grandmother and aunts in Palakkad, both of these places being an hour away from each other across inter-state borders. On contrary to what these places are today, in those days Coimbatore (TN) had the feel of a city and Palakkad (Kerala) had that of a small town.

He hated the maternal side of the family because of their partiality towards his cousins as he always was looked after a little less by them and they used to later say You are in Germany and you can get all this but your cousins are here in India so let them have it let it be a biscuit or crackers during festivities, irrespective of whatever it was, that would be their statement after which a lion’s share will go to his aunt’s son. But his mother always ensured that she bought a little extra for him as she knew about her child a little too well.

Members of his paternal side of the family were far better, in fact they were the opposite and always used to give him extra saying, Have it son, as these are Indian delicacies and you would not get them in Germany

So his plight can only be imagined when he was told that they were going to settle down in Coimbatore, because Coimbatore was the educational hub of the South, with many good schools and colleges.

Only later during his growing up years did he realize that this shift from Germany to India was because his parents were afraid that during teenage their boy would end up being unscrupulous in his conduct and tend to get into all those things which Indian parents living abroad do not want their children to get into viz., alcohol, drugs and most importantly sexual experimentation.

YWCA:

After settling down in Coimbatore, the next thing was to get him enrolled in a school.

Carmel Garden Matriculation Higher Secondary School was one among the schools in the city which were highly respected. But the principal there denied him admission and told that if Adi had a good academic record with any other school then he would be considered.

The Young Women’s Christian Association ran a school in the city and was kind enough to take him in. The principal was impressed by his ability to converse in English at his age and readily agreed to take him directly into 2nd standard. It was the first time he was going to school and then in 2 months time faced the mid-term tests. He was ranked 32nd amongst the 34 students in the class. The next one, the quarterly examination, saw him coming 2nd in class and that instantly catapulted him to becoming the star of junior school, in fact to the extent of making him act in one of the stage plays where he played a shepherd coming to see Jesus after hearing the story of the birth of the divine child.

The kid had become a character artist in a play, at the age of 7.

Carmel Garden:

That one year at YWCA saw Adi Narayanan landing in 3rd standard at Carmel Garden the very next year, and that became his alma mater.

The last year he had studied in a co-ed school, but from this year on it was a boys school.

It could be compared to the training that they show in the English movie 300!

Boys will be boys, an adage he truly understood at Carmel Garden.

The first few months into the atmosphere made him a tough kid and then this school had a system unheard of during those days, where parents need to come, meet the class teacher and collect the progress report card even after the mid-term tests, apart from having to do so after the quarterly and half-yearly evaluations.

From that year on his mother never got to listen to anything good about him, and the standard question she had on the Saturday when she has to accompany him to school to meet his class teacher was "My dear son, is there anything you need to talk to me about? to which he would promptly say No" and she would get to know it all from the wonderful class teachers who were more eager to make his mother blast him than to correct him and she being the sweet mother that she is, would listen to all the extra fittings these ladies (the class teacher was always a lady till high school) added and later at home, would advice him to correct himself. This complaining went on till his class teacher in 7th standard, Miss Joana, did something about it and made him respect a teacher. One afternoon a fellow classmate, Robin and he had a brawl and he abused Adi as Shaitan key Bache and ran off, Robin was a sprinter at school level and needless to say took off as a rabbit. Filled with rage, Adi chased Robin down the corridor like a bloodhound and thrashed the day lights out of him. Like it always happens in schools, both were caught and brought before the class teacher and she made both kneel down and scolded him for using bad words and asked Adi one question that would change his entire outlook on profanity viz., "If he calls you that, will you become that?"

The next day was the day meant for progress report cards, and she did not mention one word about it to his mother. She just said "He is a good kid and just needs to focus a little more on chemistry and mathematics, that’s all." He was taken aback and made it point to show his gratitude by not beating anyone up that year and to be a good student in her class, both of which he did religiously.

A shrewd businesskid???

In the same 7th grade, he did buy cricketers trumps card for 50ps and sold it for INR 5, and went about doing this for a month and only stopped because the thrill of doing it got lost, as he got bored of it.

The thrill was not in making money by selling it at this rate to the guys at school who were considered intelligent as they were toppers in almost every subject. The thrill was in the fact that every time he sold them a trump card (which was actually free with a 50ps per piece Big Babool bubble gum), it was his way of saying to them "You ain’t that smart!" And there he was in his pre teens, you could say, laughing his way to his piggy bank, by outsmarting the so-called brightest of guys in classes of his grade, his seniors, their seniors, and their seniors- a ballpark figure of about 200