Reengineers, The

By Indu Muralidharan

Chinmay Narayan is plotting to kill himself. He is a misfit at school, his parents are about to divorce and the love of his life doesn't know he exists. But before he can get anywhere with the suicide plan, Chinmay and his friends, Anu and Sabi, stumble into the eerie world of Conchpore through a portal in Uncle RK's library. They find themselves in the Seeker's School, where you can buy spiritual courses to bring you enlightenment. While the seekers seem unaware that there is something amiss, Chinmay and his friends chance upon a strange and sinister plot involving some teachers and administrators. The charismatic Siddharth, a visiting former student of the school, seems like their one big hope. Then Chinmay discovers that Siddharth is seeking catharsis from his dark past by writing a book - a book with Chinmay as the protagonist. Is Siddharth part of the evil caucus? Will the three youngsters find their way back to the world they left behind? Can Chinmay become the author of his own life? Set in Madras in the early 1990s, The Reengineers dispels the boundaries between fiction and reality to tell a tale that is as much a coming-of-age story as it is an inspiring narrative about self-empowerment and spiritual growth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Element India
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9789350297308

Indu Muralidharan

Indu Muralidharan grew up in Madras, in a small house with a large library. She counts a number of characters from classic English novels among her early friends. Her obsessive love of fiction led her to delve deep into metafiction, reading and writing stories about books, writers and the writing process, which she believes helps her to better understand the nature of reality. An engineering college topper from Madras University and presently a senior manager in eCommerce, she finds that her day job both inspires and complements her writing. She lives in Chennai, which she loves as much as the Madras of the early nineties where The Reengineers is set.

Book preview

1

The Coldest Summer

The Madras summer begins in March. I remember reading in the Aside magazine that the season of hell begins in this month, the other three seasons of the city being, of course, hot, hotter and hottest. It was my favourite time of year, for the end of March meant the beginning of the long vacations. The idea of dying at the age of fifteen in the beloved summer month had seemed morbidly romantic, and I had almost looked forward to it. However, later that summer, I truly rejoiced in the heat, for the years of ice within me had finally thawed.

Aside, which called itself ‘The Magazine of Madras’, is now as much a memory as the city’s old name. Yet, the vibes of my city remain unchanged. The vibes that you get from the old Leo Coffee ad in which a woman serves steaming filter coffee in a steel davara-tumbler to a man against the backdrop of a butter-Krishna Tanjore painting, suggesting a typical Madras home where kolams of rice flour bloomed in the courtyard at dawn and the warm morning air carried the strains of the Venkatesa Suprabhatam.

The feeling of home still pervades my city, despite the impersonal flyovers that now criss-cross above the old familiar roads, the acres of shining skyscrapers that buzz with the sounds of the software cities teeming within them, and the gleaming malls that may soon outnumber the tiny Ganesha shrines on each street, all of which make the Chennai of today such a different world from the Madras of 1991, where this story first begins, and then begins anew.

Anyone would feel the same way about their hometown. Even the global villagers who work airborne much of the time and live their lives through laptops and smartphones must call some city or town, some specific place on the earth, their own. And Madras is my hometown although I stayed in Bharati Nagar in the suburbs, a few kilometres outside the city along the old Mahabalipuram road.

My parents owned one of the two first-floor flats in Siyaram apartments. Every morning, I ran out to chase the school bus and, every evening, I returned to warm up and swallow overcooked potato curry and half-cooked chapattis before I left for the library. At night, I returned as late as I dared to sleep in a tiny book-lined room that opened onto a balcony facing Aunt Kalyani’s bungalow on the other side of the road. But where I really lived was in Uncle RK’s library.

I sought the library’s comforting silence to get away from the white noise of arguments that perpetually bounced off the walls of my parents’ apartment. A sound that could not be tuned out, blocked or wished away, it had seeped within and solidified like snow around my thoughts, freezing me to the core beneath the sweltering Madras skies.

The library had been maintained just as my uncle had left it. Cabinets overflowing with books lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Behind the locked glass panels, one could make out the hazy outlines of books waiting to be picked up and read, a sight that would always fill me with joy.

I loved Aunt Kalyani in many ways. That she let me use the library whenever I liked was the strongest of them all. She was sixty, twenty years older than my father—her brother. She was also our only grown-up friend. We enjoyed listening to her stories of Uncle RK almost as much as she enjoyed telling them, blissfully oblivious that she had told us the same story countless times before. Aunt always spoke of Uncle RK as if he had just stepped out to attend a meeting, not someone who had been dead for ten long years.

Anu and Sabi usually joined me in the library for ‘combined studies’. At least, that’s what we told our families. We did study sometimes. But, for much of the time, we would sit around Uncle RK’s table reading or writing, or just being, together and yet apart, absorbed in our own private worlds that coexisted peacefully in the gentle silence. We liked being in the library and we liked being together. Most of all, we liked being away from our homes. Anurag Menon and Sabarmati Patel were my best friends, and not only because we stayed near each other and studied in the same school. It was the winter within that bonded us, the winter of the mind that had nothing to do with being fifteen. Though we never discussed it, I knew it from the way they talked, and the way they thawed as I did in the warmth of a few laughs in the library. I knew it from the way they were as eager as I was to get into the library and as reluctant to leave it. The three of us had no friends besides each other. We hated visiting relatives and hated the relatives who visited us. We were ugly ducklings of the same feather and we came home to roost in Uncle RK’s library.

Like the toys in Enid Blyton stories that were subjected to rough games during the day by the children who owned them, and led their own independent toy-lives at night, the three of us came alive within the library walls. Making up stories in the tradition of Walter Mitty and Mungeri Lal, we fought fierce wars on the Indo-Pak border, blowing up enemies with our final breath. We navigated space shuttles by pushing buttons that set multi-coloured lights blinking and mysterious devices beeping crazily on invisible dashboards. We went on top-secret missions, we negotiated peace treaties and saved the school, the country and the world.

I would have loved to die like that in real life, saving the world, the country or even the school but, most of all, saving Sonia Shastri by jumping in front of her and taking the bullet while the rest of the world looked on in shock and admiration. In reality, however, I hardly dared to look up directly at her face. I was a hero only within the library walls.

Naturally, the library was my first choice when I drew up a list of places where I could kill myself. But I could not inflict on my aunt a mess for which my parents were responsible, nor dream of polluting a place that was so dear to me. Seeking the meaning of life in death, I could not end my life as that sad little cliché, a body in the library.

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Before my parents left with Aunt Kalyani for Kailash’s wedding in Rishikesh, they moved me to her house. I would need someone to provide regular meals as I studied day and night for the exams. Though I loved Kailash like the brother I often wished I had, I had no wish to go with them. I worked at my books out of sheer habit but I was exhausted with a weariness of both body and mind that had nothing to do with stress or lack

of sleep.

I was happy to get out of the apartment. That day, the rooms were still clouded over with the previous evening’s arguments. Between stuffing my fingers into my ears and trying to focus on the Apollonius theorem, I caught the phrase ‘after the divorce’ again and again. No longer limited to the routine arguments over food and ancient family feuds that I had grown up with and grown accustomed to, they had now started the countdown to the day of parting, gloating over the Plan Bs they were making for their new lives.

In those days, divorce was something that you only saw in sombre Hindi films. The child actors playing the role of children of broken homes cried, made long, precocious speeches as weepy violins wailed in the background, and died a few minutes before ‘The End’. My death would be quick and clean, devoid of any soppy sentiment. It never struck me then that I could move into my own place in a few years, for it was taken for granted that good boys remained at home even after they had good boys of their own.

Only, there was no home anymore. My father was leaving his job as an architect to teach in a school in the mountains, where he would focus on his meditation and work at attaining a higher state of being. His mere presence used to make me quiver even when I was ensconced between the pages of my books, for I never knew when he would fly into a rage and hit me. It was almost funny that he wanted to seek peace in the solitude of the mountains.

My mother was all set to marry again. She had barely finished college when she had married my father, and must have seen me as a reminder of their unhappy alliance. The interactions between the three of us were like a constant tug-of-war that left me exhausted all the time. But I didn’t blame them for wanting to leave our home. Ever since I could remember, I had so often wanted to leave it myself.

It would have been easier to understand had my parents been alcoholics or adulterers or drug addicts, or had some other credible reason to have pioneered divorce in their respective families. Instead, it was pure incompatibility between two otherwise good people, an attribute that must have escaped the darned astrologer who matched their horoscopes. It was strange that my parents were incompatible. If any couple had to be incompatible, it should have been Uncle RK and Aunt Kalyani. Uncle had been twenty-five years older than her. Theirs was not a child marriage, common in those days, but a love match initiated by the bright young woman, one of the first few graduates (she had passed with honours) from her district. She had been awed by the handsome intellectual who had sacrificed the better part of his life for the cause of the nation.

Whenever she spoke of Uncle RK, Aunt Kalyani sounded as though she were far away from her comfortable old bungalow. She spoke from another world, where uncle dazzled the adoring crowds with his razor-sharp intelligence and wit as well as his fiery nationalistic poetry. She conveyed much more than she said through her music. Aunt Kalyani always played by herself and always in the late hours of the night. She played like a Tagore poem, my aunt did, and the snatches of Yaman and Kedar, Behag and Bahar ringing out from her veena would suffuse the night air with notes of love and longing.

At that age, I was too full of myself to wonder what may have lain behind the sweet strains that warmed me as I sat in my room huddled over algebra or geometry. I simply enjoyed the sound of the music. Sometimes, the music would lift me so high that, forgetting my fear of the dark, I would open the door, step onto the tiny balcony outside my room and touch the skies. The dusty brown ninth cross street that was no different from any of the other streets in Bharati Nagar by day, turned into an enchanting place at night under the magic of my aunt’s music, the smell of half-open jasmine flowers and the starlight above the fluorescent street lamps.

Aunt Kalyani and her four sons lived by Uncle RK’s ideals. Oddly enough, each of the sons had fallen in love with and married a girl from a different part of India, as though they were all contributing to the cause of national unity so beloved to their father. Indeed, Uncle RK had in one of his poems proposed inter-caste marriages to promote national integration, a poem that remains much-quoted to this day. At a time when such marriages were discussed with more curiosity than Rakesh Sharma’s voyage into outer space, Aunt Kalyani had graciously blessed Badrinath, Somnath and Kedar when they married girls from Punjab, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, the north, west and south. Fortuitously, Kailash’s wife turned out to be a Bengali girl from the east. From the day Kailash got married, Aunt Kalyani was referred to as ‘Bharat Mata’ in family circles. Had she heard these comments, my aunt would have taken them as compliments.

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Unlike me, Anu was the epitome of the friendly boy-next-door. But he was forever eclipsed by his sister Anuradha as he was unable to live up to her irritatingly consistent achievements. Anuradha was the last girl anyone would have wanted for a sister. A gold-medallist medical student, she was the quintessential ‘good girl’, smug and confident. My problem was different. Once, when a classmate called me ‘goody-goody’ to my face, my fingers had twitched with the need to beat the bastard’s face to a pulp. Yet I had ignored him and walked away, feeling like a horrible coward for not being able to strike back, for not having the courage to smudge the ‘good boy’ tag that I desperately held on to even though it weighed so painfully upon me. It was what my parents desired, and I did not know then that I could choose differently.

Sabarmati came from a rich joint family teeming with aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins. Sabi could have passed for a maid among her cousins who dressed like princesses. Her plaits and plain khaddar salwars made her stand out, and though she came from a family that ran a diamond business, it was strange that she did not wear any jewellery, she did not even apply a bindi. But Sabi seemed to be more of a real person than her snooty cousins, who were always cold to Anu and me.

Sabi’s parents did not care much for the extraordinary scores on her report card. They did not seem to care much about her at all, and ignored her as long as she followed all their rules and returned home on time. Anu and I envied Sabi, she was free of pressure for the perfect report card, and had a really cool brother, Sanju.

Sabi was as indifferent to our teasing her about being the ugly duckling as she was to the bright clothes and ornaments her cousins wore. She rarely spoke about her numerous family members. But when she was in the mood to talk, she had a lot to say about the things she wanted to do with her life. She dreamed of becoming a doctor in the Indian Army and serving in remote villages. She dreamed of backpacking and hitchhiking around the world. She must have dreamt all the time she remained impassive and silent outside the library. It was no wonder, for had she voiced her dreams to her family, they would have stopped her from dreaming once and for all.

To make matters worse, her parents had betrothed her unofficially to a rich businessman in Rajasthan, and were waiting for her to turn eighteen before they got her married (and permanently locked up in a diamond-studded golden cage). Plucky enough to run away, she was practical enough to know that it would be disastrous if she did. She was swotting for a scholarship that she hoped would help her escape.

Sabi said once, ‘I must be someone else, mixed up with this family by mistake. Maybe I got exchanged in the hospital. That is why I don’t fit in here.’

I was so annoyed that I could not speak for a minute. That was my idea, my fondest fantasy—being someone else. How often I had daydreamt about discovering that I had a real home somewhere else, a real family.

‘Sabi, you still have a better time of it,’ Anu said. ‘Even my name is not my own. The doctor memsahib is called Anu and I am called Rag. Why on earth did they have to name me after her?’

‘I wish I had been named after someone at home. All the others were named sensibly while my name was the result of a sudden burst of patriotism in my great-grandmother,’ Sabi said angrily. Personally, I thought the name Sabarmati suited her. Like her, it had character, a far cry from her indistinguishable cousins who were called Rina, Tina, Mina, Myna and so on.

Still, I empathized with Sabi. The birth name inscribed on my horoscope was one of the few trivial secrets of my life. My horoscope referred to me as Pundarikakshan after an ancestor whose name was handed down to the eldest son in each generation and sounded like a tired dinosaur by the time it was attached to my horoscope, and consequentially to me. No one used it except the wizened priests who conducted the prayers that my parents arranged once in a while. They would intonate that name, appending it to my birth star and the name and lineage of my father’s clan in a monotonous sing-song chant before invoking the gods and their blessings. Everyone else knew me by my official name, Chinmay. Later in life, I would throw out that other name along with the horoscope.

Besides that dreadful name, I had nothing to hide. Nor did I have much to hug to myself when it turned cold inside. Except for the two secrets that were all my own. One was my plan for suicide, and the other was Sonia Shastri.

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Fourteen is the age when time first starts to make its presence felt. Time took on such a variety of hues in those days that even my frozen mind sometimes reflected the colours of the world around me, and I could feel my thoughts fluttering in the humid, salty breeze. At such moments, when the brilliant blue skies, the flaming carpets beneath the Gulmohur trees in the school grounds and the nut-brown twinkle in Sonia’s eyes splashed into the moments of my life, I felt alive.

The red mosaic steps that led to the school grounds held some of the most precious memories of my fourteen years. It was here that Sonia Shastri broke the handle of my water bottle. I was sitting on those steps working on a geometry exercise during a games period, wondering how it would actually feel to get all hot and sweaty on the field, when I was startled by a hot and sweaty body that flopped down beside me. My compass lurched, spoiling my perfect diagram as I looked up at Sonia.

‘Water!’ she gasped. ‘Wat-er!’

Mother would not have minded me sharing my bottle with Sonia as she was a Brahmin as well, but I did not like to share it with anyone at all for reasons of hygiene. However, before I could think of an excuse, she grabbed the bottle and tried to twist it open. I pulled it back but she wouldn’t let go and suddenly, the straps broke. Uncaring, she noisily gulped down the water, which ran down either side of her sweat-streaked face.

‘Thanks,’ she said, as she made a show of adjusting the broken straps. Then she thrust the bottle back into my hands and sped back to the throw ball court. Watching her, I decided that girls looked most beautiful when dressed in dusty, navy-blue pinafores. I tenderly wound the straps around the bottle and sipped the remaining water a little at a time. Notwithstanding the many articles that