A CALLOUS DIVERSIFIED ROAD

As he hauled himself loose out of the squeezing shared space from the passenger seat of the six-seater vehicle on seeing landmarks of his destination, the older talkative woman passenger, sitting alongside him, in her unbroken conversation with the lass sitting on the floor said, “come on girl, get up from there and sit at the place being vacated by Vakil Saheb”. Her addressing him Vakil Saheb in her gross error of opinion was so humor producing that it brought a smile taking a little the distortions off his countenance, and he said, “Mother, not a Vakil I could have been in life”. The older garrulous woman had no regrets for her misinterpretation due to his black tweed coat. She took a moment off from her humor charged conversation with lass, “Your black coat made me guess that”. Immediately after, she picked up thread of her temporarily broken conversation with the lass. Much before he had finally made his exit from the interior of the vehicle, the lass on the floor had got rid of her unprivileged occupancy on the floor, and squeezed her in the insufficient vacancy on the seat. The humor, reeking of rain’s odor at the core, arising out of his mistaken identity in the vehicle was still wet as he stood on the road. He suddenly burst into a laughter relaxing him into an immunizing comfort on the pluvial caress of incident of a moment before.

During last three days of his new appointment as a professor of engineering in this Rajasthan town, he was feeling the sudden union of a strengthening to his retrievals that this short lived humor had done to him as a deodorant. The students as per expectation were, for bulk of their population, too crass in every respect. The paint on the newly commenced college had not dried completely yet, and faculty hunt was yet in the process. The students had found a pastime of levity in expressing their dissent at the unsuitability of most of the immature faculty. Baring a dozen, the students had secured admissions in B.Tech. on ‘payment seats’- the payment adjective in the classified category of ‘Payment seats quota’ was probably a miserably distorted misnomer here as a larger percentage of the students belonged to privileged class payment quota than the rest that had to manipulate their finances for their payment seat. Thus they laughed and chuckled with intermittent words from their dialects in their purchased, unguarded leeway or parking lots in the classroom- they were allergic source of a fast rocking in equilibrium as the professor seeing rupture of his collimation on the densities of his topic on hearing commotions from behind tuned to face them; some had residues of smiles derogatively focusing on the face of the professor indicting them clearly that they contributed in straying professor’s attention from his serious topic. The students whispered, laughed, talked in high decibels like turbulent noisy flow of water from a tap into a bucket underneath; the noisy mixing of masses of water into nearly settled water produced a nuisance.

He would start with a mathematical or otherwise complicated theory at the board in the classroom; not much later to his opening the topic for a horde of hopeless, unmotivated and unruly students, the students would pipe up incoherent noise as their better option. This farrago of noises with their hollows having an ersatz hostility towards him would tarnish his good aimed attempt to benefit them with depths of his knowledge; and he would be nonplussed when this de trop intrusion to his work would undo his thoroughly okayed attempt; nonplussed with a lookalike of a beleaguered take off that may be seen in the confusion of a rare bird with its approved and available exit from a quarantine cage at restoration of normalcy in the aftermath of an epidemic- just at the time of well programmed exit of bird , a malfunction from intrusions of noises from beneficiary corners would set the cage in rotation followed by sudden momentous gain in revolutions that would make it impossible for the bird to place the exit door from the quarantine cage.

Then after 3-4 classes, the students gradually became drawn to listen to his lectures. Their frustration was on the wane due to incremental disclosure to them that their persistent demand for good faculty was on not being ignored. Some didn’t want to let go of their dissent so uneventfully; but most were changing in the heat of their hopes restructured through his coming to teach them. The students were a mix of changed, changing and reluctant to change, like you placed an empty ice making tray in between the tap and the bucket and had already opened the freezer compartment of a refrigerator to place the tray inside it; it won’t take long to coalesce the frozen water boundaries in the tray with the plastic skeleton of the tray.

He was returning from the mess to the department. Near the AC and Non-AC rooms of high school classes in two separate building that stood alongside, he stopped for a while, and looked in his amusement at the two AC/ Non AC educational blocks. He had seen never a blatant persiflage of education inferior to these two educational blocks standing there in tandem. The erectly ascending best quality steel water pipe work for the two buildings was however alike in two buildings. The Non AC building was a worn dilapidated block, taller and much bigger in contrast to the AC building with the latter reeking of costly paint on the exterior, giving an image of luxury in the interior. The two building set there side by side looked too unseemly in a singular conspicuousness. It had the degree of paradox of a place where brand new luxury cars had just rolled out of two carriers. One was an old and dented conventional whereas the other was a new modern one- equipped with power steering ,ac and other features, and the two carrier trailers had transported the new cars travelling together from the distant manufacturing plant in Maharashtra.

After a highly tiring class, he schlepped himself up the stairs in search of an incompletely constructed portion of the building, in the incomplete toilet block of which, he could smoke a cigarette. He had not opted for staying in the college hostel for the same reason. He usually became late and missed his first lecture at eight AM.

Despite good indications for the management having come across a very good instructor, they blindly and preposterously asked him not to hope for a long association for their ridiculous reasons. He in disgust tendered his resignation as he had been doing in previous many jobs.

Originally he was an expert on toothed gear mechanical design. The thought was running in his mind that cost of quality could never justify its worth when demand is basically numeric in nature. Also he was thinking that a diversified road may not always promise some gain in the travel. He had carried newly purchased second hand books of Indian writers on his subjects, which he taught in the engineering college to the old town’s market. He had to lessen his travelling gear, so he decided to sell the books in a small second hand book store. The shopkeeper said that the books had no resale value. He in his desperation to catch his train that evening asked the shopkeeper to buy the books at whatever rate he would please. The shopkeeper brought a weighing scale and loaded the books in the tray of the scale. He stood stunned there when the shopkeeper brought from somewhere the old broken teeth miniature transmission gear pieces to use as weights of measure and dropped these in weight measure side of weighing scale.