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INDIAN IN COWBOY COUNTRY

THE FINAL EXAM

The book “An Indian in Cowboy Country” is the story of a fictional hero Satish Sharma, an IIT graduate. Migrates to US in search of better pastures, from the then Bombay to Houston in Texas. Satish feels out of place naturally, ‘An Indian in  Cowboy Country’. He feels personal, professional and romantic challenges, but manages to overcome all of them to eventually flourish.

The author Pradeep Anand, the story teller has lot in common with the protagonist Satish and shares his unique experience in this book. Nandan Nilekani, the poster boy of Indian Information technology scene, has recommended the book, as a must read.

Hence we at I & C thought that we let this unique book be read through our pages. Hope our readers will like it. – Editor

Ferocious and furious screaming was a common release of pre-exam tension at Sathish’s engineering school campus. The serene surroundings of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, nestled in the hilly area between Powai and Vihar lakes, belied the cumulative stress that the students carried around on their slouched shoulders in their effort to fulfill Indian society’s expectations of being the smartest engineering students in the country.

He and his mostly male fellow campus inmates (as they called themselves) led tortured lives, attempting to meet higher and higher academic standards thrust on them by exemplary fellow students and professors. When the pressure to perform reached a crescendo, especially late at night before an exam, an inmate went to his hostel window or balcony or to the terrace and let out a loud, painful scream into the night.

That anguished scream reverberated and resonated through the wings of the hostel, drawing sympathy from similarly stressed-out students, who in their turn screamed. Within minutes, a wave of agonized howls and yells, interspersed with the choicest multilingual cusswords, moved along from hostel wing to hostel wing, then from hostel to hostel, till every soul, flustered with his pursuit of high-quality engineering studies, had vented his frustration to the gentle but unmoved environs. Then silence and serenity descended on this campus of six hundred and sixty acres.

It was three AM on a hot April night. Satish Sharma sat at his desk, studying for his last exam on this campus. Clad in unbuttoned shorts and a T-shirt, he read his marked up textbook and his almost illegible notes, both illuminated by a limited cone of light emanating from the dim bulb of his table lamp. He had switched off the light bulb that dangled on a wire from the ceiling, but still the luminance in his room attracted mosquitoes and other insects from the campus’ pastoral surroundings.

He had a table fan set at its highest speed and pointed at his bare legs to further ward off errant mosquitoes. Yet, involuntarily, he slapped various spots on his thighs and calves, hoping to dispatch an astonished vermin to its maker.

He was intensely focused on the complexities of electrolytic production of copper powder when the next wave of screams went through his hostel and his concentration snapped. He slammed his books shut, put his feet into his wellworn rubber flip flops, stood up, and buttoned his shorts. He grabbed an empty, cleaned-out glass ketchup bottle & stormed out of his room to get another refill of cold water from a water cooler in the hostel dining area.

He ran down two stories, three steps at a time, to the corridor. He walked past the dim fluorescent lights that had attracted a layer of assorted insects. He sniggered as he recalled a particular lamp’s role in a Bollywood movie. Its hero, a student moonlighting as an electrical handyman, had pointed to a lamp & said that it was the culprit behind the power outage at the heroin’s hostel. A loose connection was creating a surge, & the entire hostel had to be rewired.

The movie had been a big box office hit, but for Satish & his engineering mates, the “tube light” was the symbol of people’s naiveté and gullibility in dealing with electrical products & services. Every time they passed the tube light, they repeated the dialogue from the movie in Hindi and chortled and guffawed, but tonight he could only break into a slight, sardonic smile as he went past it to the mess hall. 

He acknowledged the sleepy uniformed security guard who sat on a steel chair at the entrance of the dining hall, and walked past him to the water cooler. As a faint dribble of slightly cold water slowly filled the bottle, he wondered how he was going to cover and cram so much material within the next five hours before the exam.

He was very sleepy and exhausted, and he wondered if he had enough energy to not only pull an all–nighter, but also be able to write an exhaustive three-hour exam early in the day. He decided that he would study for another hour, get about three hours of sleep, and write his exam after a refreshing shower and a full breakfast in the morning.

He had a swig of refrigerated water, splashed some on his face and his weary eyes, refilled the bottle to the brim, and rushed out with renewed determination. He noticed that the guard had fallen asleep, joined in this endeavor by two sleeping pariah dogs that subsisted on crumbs from the hostel cafeteria. Their emaciated bodies were testaments to the quality of the food at his hostel.

For the next hour, he studied his notes, hallucinating that he was assimilating at an astounding rate. At about four AM, on schedule, he shut his books, switched off the table lamp, and set his mechanical alarm clock for seven AM. He hoisted his table fan onto his chair and set it to oscillate from his head to his toe.

He got into bed. As he turned and curled up, he involuntarily listened to the usual sounds of a late April night: a steady drone of crickets and grasshoppers and a lone dog, perhaps a wolf, howling in the distance. At four AM, the campus was in a deep sleep. Just as he was about to sink into oblivion he heard an unusual sound, a muted scream that came from the terrace above his room.

Satish awoke with a start, listened carefully, and realized that it was the sound of someone crying ferociously and uncontrollably, but attempting to quiet himself. He jumped out of bed, instinctively slipped his feet into his flip flops, and ran to the bathroom, which had a dangerous metal ladder to the terrace- one slip and he would plummet down three floors to an unforgiving concrete base. Brushing aside his usual sense of caution, he heaved himself to the ladder and climbed up to the terrace.

As his eyes emerged over the terrace’s edge, he saw someone sitting on the floor, crouched in a fetal position. His head was buried in his lap, and he was sobbing vigorously.

Despite his best effort to approach the crouching figure stealthily, his footsteps made crunching sounds as his feet crushed the gravel that covered the tarred surface of the terrace. The crouching figure turned to the approaching silhouette and yelled, “Who is it?” He sprang up, rushed to the edge, and stood there, as if poised to jump off.

“Stop. It’s me, Satish,” he replied urgently, his voice sufficiently loud to reach the intended recipient but not loud enough to wake students sleeping a few feet below them. The figure turned away from the low ledge, came to the middle of the terrace, and sat down. Satish rushed up and saw a familiar form, dully illuminated by a nearby streetlight.

“Kutty? What are doing here? What happened?” he asked. Kutty lived four rooms away from his; they were buddies.

Kutty put his face into his crossed arms and began to bawl unashamedly. Satish sat down next to his friend, put a consoling arm on his shoulder, and asked him in a soothing voice, “What’s wrong?”

Kutty’s feeble voice came from within the uncontrollable sobs. “I am going to fail my final exam.”

Kutty’s formal name was Thomas Koshy. An only child, he was raised according to the Syrian Orthodox Christian faith in a small seaside town in Kerala. His father, a tailor by profession, had died two months earlier. Kutty had been inconsolable since his death, and had to be regularly monitored by his friends, including Satish.

“I am going to fail tomorrow’s exam,” Kutty said as he reached out to his friend’s outstretched hand to raise himself. “I was thinking about throwing myself off the terrace when you came”.

Satish’s six-foot athletic frame easily pulled up Kutty’s diminutive, light body, and, when he heard of Kutty’s intentions, his large hands gripped his friend’s tightly. Appealing to Kutty’s common sense, he asked, “That would have been stupid, wouldn’t it? Who would have taken care of your mother after you were gone?”

In different circumstances, Kutty was the quintessential rational debater. Satish’s assertive, rhetorical questions sparked his tendency to respond and deliberate. Kutty talked about how suicide was not quite a “Stupid choice,” quoting Nietzsche and Sartre, as he was kept away from the edge of the terrace, led to the ladder and carefully down to bathroom and safer grounds.

As the two of them walked to the dining room for some cold water, Kutty continued his monologues about how nihilism and existentialism had the right answers to life’s questions. He ranted, “Engineering studies were the most constricting education that could ever be imposed on us at this creative stage of our lives, when our minds needed to be expanded and exposed by the greatest thoughts in humankind.”

When Satish saw the sleeping security guard, he shook him awake and told him to fetch Johnny, a mess servant, adding in Marathi, “Tell Johnny that I asked him to the mess hall quickly. Tell him it is urgent”. The dazed guard ran into the interior of the hostel while the two of them made a beeline to the water cooler.

Both splashed some cold water on their faces. They walked to the mess tables and sat on the worn, right-angled metal chairs.

to be contd...