Chapter-2: The Journey Reaches Its Moment of Truth

“Hello?” the familiar low pitched croaky voice which gave us so much confidence and courage in an age of fear and the longing to be treated as men came rushing back.
“Zebra Calling Cobra, Zebra Calling Cobra, do you read me,” Jeevan responded.
A loud laughter which the Old Man used to liken to a 60Watt bulb lighting up came rolling back, “Where the hell are you guys?”
“Aliya, Manu we are calling from Athens.”
“Poday, Poday, Or is it from Pangapaara Lodge?”
When the boys began to travel and head for foreign shores for study, work or holiday, we used to joke that it was all a big lie and we could be found at Pangapara Lodge.
“What are you doing?”
“Tonight is Barrack-khana. We officers are having dinner with the Jawans.”
“When do you get leave to come home?”
“I am leaving on a mission. Cant reveal more. Will be home in December.”
“Dai, they sending you to cooking school or to Kashmir?”
We all broke out into laughter, but the mood soured immediately.
“As I said, this is the posting I always wanted. So what’s the agenda for you guys?”
“You be careful. Da, we have taken a decision and thought you should also be part of it. We have each set ourselves a goal and try to achieve it by December and then meet at the Old Man’s grave.”
And then Jeevan proceeded to tell Manu what each of us were about to do as Manu listened.
“Machans, I am really proud that I got to study with you all. If I am alive, I too will be there to meet Him.”
The phone went dead. Manu had never before talked of life or death either. For him it was all a game…or so we liked to believe.

Manu was the soul as well as devil of our class. At an age when we were content trying hard to be good boys in the eyes of teachers, parents and seniors he decided there was more to life than being a good student, an excellent sportsman, a talented singer, or playing Mr. Nice Guy, all of which he was. He revelled in mischief, creating trouble out of nothing, making fun of anyone who appeared scared to join in one of his enterprises. But most of us in the course of time discovered his heart of gold hidden behind that rough, at times menacing, at times boyish exterior. It was like he had a halo around his head, juniors feared him, teachers wouldn’t mess with him…well all except for the Old Man, and even boys in other schools knew all about him. All of us earnestly wondered to what career Manu would gravitate, and that was one card he held close to his chest. He disappointed us all with taking up engineering but soon realizing his mistake, switched, and today served the nation and its people, a most distinguished career had taken-off and we were immensely proud of him.

By now it was eight at night. The Acropolis was closing down for the night. We looked at each other, the night couldn’t take away the glow emanating from our faces. The four of had a kept a promise with destiny. Now it was time to pull our acts together, wipe out all traces of self-doubt and push ahead with gusto. I don’t know why, but we hugged each other before making the descent. We decided to meet at night again for drinks. From there, Jeevan and Rafi would leave for the US, while Koshy and I for India. I had wanted to club a back-packing trip though Europe but money was a short commodity for me and time for the others.

The pub was crowded but we managed to find a table without having to wait too long. The music was good but not too loud which would let us talk without having to shout.
“Drinks are on me,” Jeevan proclaimed.
“Are you sure you won’t regret this?” I asked.
“Watch your tongue, you are speaking to a millionaire,” came Jeevan’s quick reply.
He was right. I knew I made a big fuss about my self-esteem at times.
We were losing count of how many drinks had passed by. Rafi as usual wasn’t satisfied with the music and kept walking over to the DJ with song requests scribbled on a paper napkin. Jeevan and I smiled. How many times had we seen this from him!
“I have an announcement to make. I will be marrying in June,” the usually secretive Koshy’s spirits had risen to the occasion.
“That’s great machu. Who’s the lucky gal?”
“We have been seeing each other for a few years now. Our parents gave their permission just now. Hope nothing else comes in the way.”
“Guys, this round is for Koshy and Lena. May you guys live to old age with love and lust never to ebb away,” Rafi as usual had his way with words.
“And may your offspring never take after your nerdish ways,” this time it was Jeevan.

The next day was spent sightseeing. Athens was a wonderful mix of the old and new. This was the first foreign city I had laid eyes on and the others were amused and envious of my excitement. Meanwhile Jeevan’s roving eye had caught the attention of a fellow-tourist in the chartered bus and we waited with bated breath as he wasted no time hitting on her. A few seconds back he returned, a little embarrassed, a little disappointed.
“Tough Luck! She speaks only French!”
“Sheh! We thought we’d be hearing of another wedding announcement when you returned!”
“It must be something about you guys. Right from school I was never lucky with girls with you louts around me.”
Jeevan loved to be in love, if there was ever a better phrase we could use to describe his love life. I wondered if I could even count on my fingers all the gals he tried to win over from school through college. A few he ditched, and a few ditched him, but the majority never responded to his charms, like this girl in the bus. But we had to owe this much to him, he never stopped trying.
“How much longer to the Olympic Stadium?” the girl asked the Guide in English as he approached.
We looked at each other in surprised silence for a moment, before breaking into a paroxysm of giggles. The girl turned back and gave us a coy smile. The sheepish grin on Jeevan’s face was a treat to watch.
“Don’t worry, Aliya. There must be some hot mallu chick in paavaada and dhaavani just waiting for you to sweep her off the ground,” this time it was Koshy’s turn. The geek really had opened up like never before.
“You kidding or what? The last thing I intend to do is marry, and that too to a homebred babe. Either way, even my mom says I take after Sreekrishnan.”
“Yeah, at this rate you sure can hit 16000 in no time!” I butted in.
It had been non-stop fun and laughter since we met. And now we had to part again. It really sucked to be a grown-up. Days like this were far and few between all the monotony and boredom of routine life. But when we bid farewell the mood became sombre. The thought of the promises to be kept weighed on our minds. We gave each other a final round of encouragement, enveloped each other in bear-hugs and without even looking back to see each others faces one last time, walked away.

The plane had begun to taxi. The smile on my face kept getting broader as I thought back to the anecdotes of the previous two days.
“Your seatbelt, sir,” the airhostess shook me up from my reverie.
I looked at her dreamily for a second before hurriedly snapping it shut. She was plain and looking old. Were all that expectations of pretty, young girls bounding about in the plane attending to my needs just pure fiction, I wondered.

My thoughts shifted back to my resolution. Me writing a novel! Why the hell didn’t I say something else. I was trapped. What was there left to write. Had not every novelist worth his salt written everything there was on Earth, good to be put on paper? What do I write about? I have never lived in any place beyond Trivandrum though I always wanted to see new places and meet new people. Had the closed world choked the last vestiges of creative thought, or should I believe that constant refrain within me, goading me all the time to give writing a shot. The lack of confidence had succeeded in holding back that urge, but now it was out in the open. It was now a promise, and was beginning to give me a splitting headache. I closed my eyes, a figure in white, old but sturdy, a face that radiated a blinding nobility and boundless energy, wielding a stick and the next moment he flashed it. Ouch! I opened my eyes all startled and started to rub my buttocks where the stick had hit. It seemed to hurt. It was all coming to me. It was The Old Man!

Fr.Thurumbikkal alias Thurumbe(Iron) alias The Old Man was for all purpose the Iron Man of Loyola. Though just the vice-principal we used to joke that not even a leaf at school would fall to the ground without his knowing. Feared, respected and loved by the boys he inspired the kind of legend that would go on to make him an unforgettable figure for all the boys who passed under his shade. To summarize what happened between him and us in the four years we came to closely know him would be impossible, the novel I am about to begin would be over even before it takes off. Let it suffice to say if people know us as good men, or as rogues, or as men who dream big, it all happened in the sub-conscious imitation of a man who lived like a king, and through his life opened up a roadmap that we schoolboys always dreamed of following, yet diverted too many times when tempting falsehoods or lecherous pleasures seemed the most convenient path to follow. And yet despite all those mistakes the roads we took had led us to Athens.

And I had my story too. It was enlightenment. He was the lamp that lit up everything it passed by. And we were the flies which hovered about its warmth and showed us a way out of the darkness. Every child has a guardian angel who shows them a way. Some don’t realize it, some prefer not to see it, and others unluckily are born to a life that takes them far away from finding that angel. I was fortunate. I had done a few things in life to be proud of. That wasn’t enough. That just wasn’t enough.

“Could I borrow a pen and some paper?” my earnest request surprised the airhostess.
Within a few hours I asked for more paper and later again for more.
“That’s all we carried sir. I am sorry,” finally the harried airhostess curtly said what I had dreaded all along.
“Whatever you are doing must be very important. Here, take this notebook.” That was the first time I looked the lady who had sat besides me for so many hours. I thanked her profusely glad that my spell of inspiration wasn’t going to be interrupted.

The beautiful coastline of the Arabian Sea was finally coming into view. The beach was like a narrow No Man's Land where a mass of blue ended and an unending stretch of green began. I had reached my land again, the land which from the skies looked like the land of a million coconut trees. The airplane taxied into the Trivandrum airport and I readied to leave. The notebook and the wad of papers on which I had scribbled were safely stashed away. My novel was coming to life. I had my characters; I had a faint outline of the plot in mind. All that remained was to listen to my heart and pen down all it told me.

Chapter – 1: A Reunion and a Resolution

It was finally 5 in the evening. The sun was fast coming down, but where was everyone? The clear blue sky, the fading rays of the sun and the glorious ruins on the Acropolis was about to give this day, they had so long waited for, a fitting end. My wait had exceeded an hour, most needlessly. As usual, in my enthusiasm, I had arrived early, only to sulk. The ruins of a past civilization lay behind and the modern city of Athens lay below. Another time, I would have been enthusiastically taking pictures, but not today. Today was 10 years since we passed out of school, ten years from the fateful moment Rafi had said, we should meet atop the Acropolis hill and look back at all we have achieved in life and look ahead to what remains to be done.

We had agreed to it most enthusiastically then. After all in ten years, how many of us would stay in touch, this was just another promise to be made and forgotten. Life was waiting and so were independence, college, job and if possible a family life. Athens would remain a running joke all the while. And yet we had made it here. Jeevan was the one who made this sojourn possible. It was his spirited interest and repeated emails to the mailing groups over the last 6 months that had gotten the three of us to Athens. And I knew why the three of us were here. It had to be the Old Man. Of course there was Manu too, but he sadly announced his inability to get relieved from the Army due to some field exercises he was leading (or so he claimed…you know those armywalas, tall tales and all).

Why had I come? I didn’t know. Everyone must be saying I am mad. After all, unlike the other high-flying guys I was just a lowly schoolteacher. Jeevan had offered to sponsor the ticket-fare. I had saved enough for a laptop, but then in 28 years of living I hadn’t travelled abroad either. I was a loser to all who knew me, except my friends. Only they appreciated my decision to teach at the school we all studied in. I hadn’t regretted the decision even once. The last three years had been exciting, teaching and interacting with a whole new generation of Loyolites. For the boys I was a link to an older way of life at school and for me they were an extension of my own eventful school life. Except for how difficult the choices kept getting as I grew older, a treasure trove of experiences, and a whole new set of friends engineering college, the software job and the college lectureship was a painful, aimless phase in life. What saved the day for me was the private MA degree in History I managed to secure despite all the hardships and the paucity of time.

A group of tourists were coming up the hill. Some were exclaiming animatedly over the sight of the Parthenon. Where did my excitement vanish? I too had paced up like those tourists only to turn back and stare down the narrow street waiting for the boys to arrive, or shouldn’t I address them as men now? A boy from the group was running up the last few metres, leaving the elders struggling behind.
“Huh!”
I whirred around to see the rotund figure of Jeevan launch himselves to the ground.
“Watch Out!” before I could say he had crashed not knowing that a layer of hard rock lay deceptively underneath the sand.
“Amme!” (Mother!!!)
All I could offer as comfort was a “Sorry Aliya”.
“Shavame, couldn’t you have warned me.”

It was a comical sight to watch Jeevan rub his elbows, occasionally look up, then down, wincing in pain, blowing some air from his mouth, trying to cool off the pain. He was the funniest of us. His fantastical tales were legendary in our class. His eyes would widen, any one from an infinite permutation of facial expressions would form as the story demanded, his voice would quiver to a high pitch and then fall from that high crescendo to a whisper with us all eyes and ears to entertainment of the highest form. I was his bete-noire…like pricking an inflated balloon just to hear the popping sound; I had always found sadistic pleasure in deflating his puffed-up narrative. Once he was expounding the pleasures of taking a cruise on his uncle’s yacht, which he kept pronouncing yaach that I remarked, “Aliya, are you sure you are not talking about the boat ride on the Karamana river?” For a second I thought he was offended, but he had by then disregarded the laughter that arose and jollily moved on to a new plot, a new killing to be made”.

The Jeevan I knew was always fat; it was obvious he was exercising hard nowadays. A heavy eater, he hated any form of physical labour and was considered as a sloth by all. We loved to push him harder on the football ground and basketball court but he never relented, the game has to be played his way or he fled away. The joke was that he exercised only his tongue…to swallow and to talk, which he loved better, none of us knew. But today he was none of that to the world, though he remains the same old guy with us. Immigrating to the US, after school, he had dropped out of college after 2 years and begun his first business, a dotcom which failed. Realizing his strengths were not in technology started a successful business in heavy transport when the whole of America had deemed the market as saturated. With common sense and a lot of hard thought and 18 hour workdays, he had turned profitable and was capturing more markets every year. The newspapers were bullish about his company and an Indian website even carried a feature on him. Was he here to announce something big to us, was he here to talk with us, regain focus and take off, for that business encore which would make him king, I wondered?

“So where is Rafi? Do you think he will keep us waiting till midnight?”
“Unni, I frankly don’t know. It was his idea that we shouldn’t meet up anywhere in Athens until this evening here on the Acropolis. He claims he has changed but if he doesn’t show up everyone’s gonna laugh at us. We coming to Athens only to hear that Rafi is still on his way, somewhere in the Amazon jungles!”
A solitary figure came in view, huffing and puffing his way up the narrow alley. As the person came closer, we froze for a moment. Koshy! What is he doing here? He had never ever sent an email to the mailing group, the last many years, forget even letting us know his intention to come here. We had thought he was lost to us forever and now he shows up here. It was becoming clearer to me now. It was the Old Man again. It had to be.
“Am I welcome,” he asked, half in a tone unable to hide his moment of success at the shock still visible on our faces, the other half struggling to sheath a look of uncertainty on his face.
“Da Koshy, if what I think this rendezvous is all about is true, then certainly you had to be here too. But why this surprise?” I weakly offered.
“I wasn’t sure until the very last moment. That’s why.”

Koshy was a real oddity in our class. An outspoken guy, he feared none, and never wasted time in small talk. One moment he would be brutally loyal to a cause, the next he would appear disinterested. None could claim to be his best friend, but no one hated him either, for we all knew him to be a good man at heart. We knew his issues with his parents and sympathized, but he never opened up and we never bothered to hold him close either. After all we were boys hungrily looking for the next round of fun and frolic. Right from high school he showed his talent for computers and surprised none of us by getting into computer engineering. We all believed he was headed for fame as a tech-guru. Until a few years of working for a top IT company had convinced him that he wasting his potential, moved back home and started working as a freelancer developing some new software. What it was, he worked on, none of us knew. It must be something big, or he wouldn’t be here either, I wondered again.

The sun had set by now. Only the last of its sprawling limbs clung above the horizon as we watched its descent, a bewitching silence for company, the thought of this moment of truth, we so long carried with us as a burden, now a reality enthralling our hearts.
“Am I late, or am I earlier than usual?” then taking a look at our faces launched the most apologetic face he could muster and coughed out a thousand sorries, while simultaneously lunging forward into each of our arms in a warm hug.
Then raising his arms most dramatically to the sky he exclaimed, “Oh Athena! Oh Athens! Cradle of western civilization and knowledge. We who slaved at a Jesuit school to master all that poured out of your womb in later years, we present our humble selves at the Temple of Nike, in the quest of success.” We all laughed. Rafi was never given to dramatics. He seems to have changed.

Rafi was the Mr.Genius of the class. He was a top-ranker in class, his creative abilities included singing, painting and poetry. A competent sportsman too, what made him different from all of us was his erudition even in subjects as diverse as philosophy and psychology. Everyone thought he would go to an IIT, but he chose to study photography, worked in advertising where he soon got fed up and now worked as a freelance photographer whose works appeared with regular frequency in several magazines of international repute. I was wondering, had Rafi come here with an agenda not just for himself but for us too, he always pushed us to think bigger, achieve further, was he here for that?

And so it was just the four of us out of our class of 44 who could make it. The full-moon was coming up. The Acropolis would stay open till 8 at night. That meant we had another two hours to kill.
“So what do we do?” Koshy asked.
“Let’s talk about the good old days,” Jeevan enthusiastically offers.
“We do that at every reunion. Let’s make this one different,” Rafi suggested.
“How?” quipped me, though I had by now known what the answer would be.
“Don’t you guys realize, it is our destiny, it is the spirit of the Old Man that has caused us to meet in this strange place thousands of miles away.”
“But Manu is not here. Without him this reunion is incomplete.”
“We can always call him up.”
“For so long we have all rubbed along unable to do that something extra-significant in life. For everything and anything we take the Old Man’s name but there still remains lot to be done to make him proud. Today we are just also-ran’s. Tomorrow I believe with all my heart the whole world will look to us. But only if we try. I am glad it is the 4 of us who are here. I always knew we would end up different from all others and look where it has got us,” Rafi’s words were echoing deep within us until…
“Four hundred feet off the Parthenon and I still haven’t clicked a…”, the icy stares from the three faces silenced Jeevan.
“Sorry. My bad. Poor joke,” Jeevan trying hard to recompense, “Aliya Rafi continue.”
“I want you all to tell me your big dream”

Jeevan looked around for a second; a momentary uncertainty fleeted across his face before he recovered his smug demeanour and said, “I want to take my company to public issue. Before that I need to capture the West Coast market too. Compared to the millions I will rake in then today I am just a zero. It is not just about the money, my innovations in operational logistics will change the way many businesses operate.”
We looked towards Koshy, who pondered for a while before opening up to his usual measured response, “Guys I am sorry I never talked about my work before. But I am developing this new encryption technique which will prevent movie and music piracy from DVD’s and CD’s. We have applied for a patent and several top tech companies are showing interest. If this succeeds you can imagine what it means, for so many years we have been called service-men, this will be a boost to R&D in India’s IT sector.”
My turn had come up. I felt sheepish at my open-mouthed expression at my two friends’ bold pronouncements. “I…I think, I am going to write a, a novel.” Where did that come from? Was I spurred to bravado by the resolutions my friends proclaimed or was it something that had lain there in the recesses of my heart waiting to come bubbling out. The damage was done. I knew nothing should stop me now.
“Me. I am going to Africa. I am planning an entire photo feature that will shame the rest of the world into action”
“My God! It is dangerous. Are you sure you want to do this,” Jeevan quivered.
A stare with hurt scribbled all over emanated from Rafi’s face.
“I am sorry. Do us proud da,” Jeevan said as he set aside all his reservations.
“So I unilaterally decide that by the end of this year, that gives us nine months, we all meet at the Old Man’s grave to take stock and to present our progress reports. F is not an option. The only grade in this exam is Success.”

“Let’s call Manu!” I was surprised and pleased to hear Jeevan and Rafi shout that out at the same time.
“Bloody Pattalam, he must be busy cooking for his officers”. To make sure he never got too heady with pride, we always pulled Manu, a Major in the Indian Army down to the level of a cook at the Officer’s Mess. Jeevan took out his phone, set it to speaker-phone and dialled. We waited in anticipation for the dear voice on the other side.