Saturday, August 27

Bedardi Raja




I still remember that day my Nanu (Grandfather) talked about biscuits and the king. The great Bengal famine was at large during the time. The whites used to drive around the choupal near the pond on their Jeep along with the little fat prince for company who would throw bits of Cambridge biscuits on the road and thus the chaos. Skinny yokels from nowhere would come up and have the fight of their lives, just for that bit of the cookie. But soon enough (like it happens in a Manoj Kumar film), things got better and people got to eat. The British left and Nanu was jobless (he was a Jamedar for the King of the land). His Highness, himself had to sell his most loved collection of Mercedes and Bentleys at some non-descript flea market in erstwhile Calcutta in order to get the queen and the fat prince two square meals a day and a roof to live. He was not a king anymore. He stayed in a Undertaker's house on the border of Pir baba's graveyard. The stench of burnt flesh and sound of cracking skulls now became a part of his existence. So much was the despair that he had to sell his Cigar circumciser to pay the fees of the lawyer who was fighting his case against the Hypocrisy. Country liqour and Beedis had replaced his daily fix of Exotic spirits.
Ok, Hyprocrisy is not in the literal sense here. For the record, it is not what it means in the Merriam Webster's. It could be a person, a bunch of them, or a letter with the tiger's emblem, anything, everything. It is a bloody element and it is omnipresent. For a lack of a better example, it is the bunch of people who took away his ancestral palace and his Kingdom when he was busy holidaying at a picturesque county in the land of the queen. They, the Hyprocrisy used to hang out at a big circular Building in the heart of Delhi at the tax-payer's expense. Last I heard, they still do that. Only the stuff they gossip on has become lamer, vague and baseless with each passing day.
Now back to the life of the King, his life was on a one-way to hell. Well technically speaking, hell was pretty close in a way.
One fine day, the little fat prince was bitten by a mad chimpanzee in the left nipple. The lung was punctured and the cute little kid breathed his last at a place where people from the city wearing white coats were royally raping the Hippocrates' oath and were least bothered to attend the ailing kid when he needed them the most. After this mishap happened, the Queen had started talking to herself. Womenfolk of the village claimed that they had allegedly seen her eating human faeces at the fields where they shat at the break of the dawn. The white coats, who were supposedly on the payroll of the Hypocrisy claimed that she had an exotic disease in her brain and called it Schizophrenia
(Wasn't Typhoid already tough enough for the village folks to pronounce?) .

2 comments:

animeshsingh said...

I feel lucky that i came across this stuff; this write up. not less than the shorts of Ruskin bond, i thank Nannu for sharing such a fact, which is more of a Noir fiction.
and the best part i liked abt the write up is, it's left abruptly as if the power cut is over and the lantern is put off and the storytelling ended as mom has to go back to kitchen. (brought back the feeling of childhood days) Master piece.
keep up..

Sampad Acharya said...

Thank you Animesh.
Nannu is an amazing story-teller. :)