Make Your Own
Air Conditioner-cum-Heater
While describing in detail how you can make
your own small, cheap, portable and pollution free air conditioner that runs virtually
without electricity, and can be converted into
a humidified, power saving room heater in
winter, this book also narrates the romantic
story of ‘an air conditioned honeymoon’ to
remind you of India’s long forgotten creed:
‘Small is Beautiful’.
M.B. LAL
Author of
Vanaloore Shining, Through The Eagle’s Eye
and Manikpur Junction
Pictures by Anmol Lal
3
Snowbreeze
Media View
“Scientists aren’t the only one who can come up with an interesting
gadget. A retired journalist has just invented something that could chill you
to the bone literally.......
It is enough to survive most power cuts. It is low cost, low tech but a perfect
answer to beat the heat”-From a special three-minute feature on Snowbreeze telecast on October 11, 2007 in a CNN-IBN news bulletin.
*
M.B. Lal ‘has devised this way to keep his room cool, even when rest of
the city seethes under the post-summer heat and humidity. Toying with the
idea since June Lal invented his ice-cooled air conditioner over the past
fortnight.... Put together the ice-cooler is able to quickly bring down temperature by around seven degrees centigrade. For Lal that difference is a
lifesaver... A Gandhian, Lal doesn’t want to patent his ‘snowbreeze’. Anyone
can make it.”
From a feature article by the Science and Technology reporter of the
Indian Express, September 26, 2007.
A Fridge-fed ‘Free’ A.C.
World’s Most Economic Air conditioner
Saves Money and Power
Your family fridge can feed ‘Snowbreeze’
with enough ice to cope with long power
breakdowns and give you a cool sleep in the night
for six to seven hours, virtually free. At the same
time, given adequate deliveries of factory ice from
the market a well-designed Snowbreeze can be a
match to the normal AC.
This book is as much about the unique
concept of an ice-based air conditioner as it is
about a specific design of the finished product.
Every user can make his own design. For instance,
for higher cooling you can double the number of
grooves within the same space by reducing the
height of each groove and increasing its width.
You can also manufacture your unit around a
single large drum of medium height or in a long
box on wheels placed under the bed, and so on.
Updates on our own innovations in
Snowbreeze will be provided to you from time to
time on www.snowbreeze.org. Your ideas on the
subject are welcome and can be sent to
saroj_lal@yahoo.com.
***
“Snowbreeze is a simple non-patented invention
that helps people keep cool during the sizzling
hot summers—all at a fraction of the cost required
to run conventional air conditioners.”— The
Hindu
“Snowbreeze is cheap to make. Normal
airconditioning consumes many times more
power than is used for making ice for the same
purpose.”— The Statesman
Viewers’ Comments
A second feature on “Snowbreeze”
telecast by CNN—IBN in its prime time news
bulletins on May 12, 2008 brought several
comments on the channel’s website, such as:
Really fantastic...... I would like to learn more .if
get details from 'snow breeze' by Sri. M.B.Lal,
please give the availability of the same. the steps
of ibn is appreciated—Binomon
Great effort by Mr. Lall. Generously he has not
patented it unlike other vulture who sell 1 Re.
technology for Rs. 100/-. for ex: Microsoft—
Kanwar
The heat solution given by Mr.M.B.Lal is
cool,when it is very hot during summer man. I
thank IBN for publishing this innovation. Now I
want to innovate and develope this innovation
made by Mr.M.B.Lal. Plz provide me with the
images or the blue print of this innovation—
Shashidhara V
Summer Solutions given by M B Lal is really
great. IBN is doing good job. One question??
Where will we get the book “Snow Breeze”
written M B Lal—Karthik R
SNOWBREEZE 2
A mild, cheap
self-cooling
Air conditioner.
Water has a way of cooling itself without
external aid, as it does inside a ‘matka’ (earthen
pitcher) or in a river or tank under a blazing
summer sun. We have discovered that this
unique quality can be harnessed free of cost (like
other alternative sources of energy, eg. tidal,
solar or wind energy) to cool homes.
Snowbreeze 2 does just that. It is a mild people’s
Air conditioner which uses more water than ice.
It is cheap to build and easily affordable by every
one. Unless fully filled with ice, it does not chill
you to the bone but, nevertheless, keeps your
room cool and comfortable.
It reduces your consumption of ice and saves
energy, without imbibing the slightest trace of
humidity which is the bane of other water based
cooling devices like the desert cooler. On the
contrary it has a high dehumidification rate. Nor
does it waste a drop of the water it uses.
Unlike energy guzzling ACs and desert coolers,
Snowbreeze uses only a 25 to 50 watt exhaust
fan to draw fully insulated air through the
system, in which partially ice-cooled water does
more
SNOWBREEZE 3
much of the cooling by itself, internally, like a
river or tank, by forming invisible convection
currents inside the drum.
Snowbreeze3 combines in it Snowbreeze 1
and 2. The two aluminium drums in the first unit
have been replaced by a single barrel shaped
drum to fit in an identical manner in its circular
grooves enclosure. A 20 feet long spiral made of
aluminium pipes, similar to the one in
Snowbreeze 2, has been placed in the barrel with
two openings jutting out of the bottom of the
barrel. Its upper end is joined to the exhaust fan
duct.
It has two distinct advantages. It offers enhanced
cooling and, secondly, it triggers self-cooling
convection currents in the water in the barrel,
thus cutting down ice and energy consumption.
If desired it can run on cold water alone like
Snowbreeze 2, for mild cooling.
For details visit www.snowbreeze.org.
IMPORTANT UPDATE
On March 11, 2009 Snowbreeze reached a new milestone in its journey towards its destination of
establishing itself as a “green”, 90% energy-saving Air Conditioner.
We discovered that we could double its cooling capacity by merely shifting the fan from the top of the air
duct to its bottom (removing or blocking the rest of the air duct) so that chilled air is sucked by the fan
directly from the entry point in the duct. The temperature of the air at the mouth of the fan now registered a
fall of 17oC (31oF) against a drop of only 9oC (17oF) when it was fixed at the top of the duct. We are trying
to bring the figure down to 20oC so that the present model of Snowbreeze can provide an overall cooling of
about 8oC to a 120 sq ft room.
Kindly note that this structural change will soon be carried out in all models of Snowbreeze whose
pictures are given on this website.
Given below are pictures of the old and new positions of the fan.
Note position of Fan in the New Models and
……
in the Old Model
2
Copyright M.B. Lal
First Published 2008
Rs. 150
$10
The author is obliged to Mr. Naveen Kumar Nigam, electrician, for his help
in converting Snowbreeze into a power saving and humidified Room Heater
for winter use, carpenters Shahid Hussain and Rahmat Ali for their innovative suggestions while making Snowbreeze, and technician Ganga Ram for
rendering useful mechanical support.
Design assistance by Rajiv Godial
Aesthetics by Payal Lal
Printed by Prime Papyrus Products (P) Ltd.
B-18/2, Okhla Industrial Area Phase-II,
New Delhi – 110020
Published by M.B. Lal from D-30 Press Enclave, Saket,
New Delhi – 110 017, E-mail saroj_lal@yahoo.com
Website www.gandhionline.org
4
Contents
Part I - How to make Snowbreeze
Page
1.
Cooling without Power
5
2.
A pictorial description of how
Snowbreeze is made
9
Snowbreeze as a humidified,
power saving Room Heater
33
Points to Remember
37
3.
4.
Part II - Why Snowbreeze?
(A fictionalised survey of the past,
present and future status of
air condtioning in India)
5.
An idea is born
42
6.
Twenty years later—
an Air-conditioned honeymoon
51
Other books by the author
103
7.
5
Snowbreeze
INTRODUCTION
Cooling without power
On a rough estimate Delhi consumes about one thousand Megawatt
additional electric power for heating and cooling during peak summer and
winter months. This book is an attempt to show with a concrete example
backed by facts and figures how this extra burden on the power starved
metropolis could be reduced by half or more by overhauling and simplifying our cooling and heating systems. On a national scale the saving in our
peak load capacity may be as high as 25000 MW or even higher.
In Ice based Snowbreeze the only source of power is a 23-watt fan
which needs less energy than the electric bulb in your room and can be
run for a virtually unlimited period on an inverter or a car battery to bring
down the room temperature by at least seven degrees centigrade.
Apart from being a permanent standby against power breakdowns in
the homes of the elite in metropolitan cities, it would be an ideal cooling
device for small towns and villages throughout the country that usually
have an indifferent supply of electricity.
Its movability from room to room makes it most suited to small hotels,
guest houses and nursing homes that rarely have wall air conditioners or
hundred percent occupancy.
Heating: One thing leads to another. It would be only natural to assume that the inventors of Snowbreeze would not allow their favourite
hobbyhorse to hibernate during the long winter months. The result of their
ruminations was to convert it temporarily into an eco-friendly room heater
which reduces energy costs by at least fifty percent and humidifies hot air
before blowing it into the room, establishing once again the greater efficiency of home-made Snowbreeze over factory produced conventional
domestic cooling and heating appliances in conserving and distributing
heat.
Perhaps this is so because air is a poor conductor of heat and much
6
energy goes waste while heating it directly inside a blower. On the other
hand, Snowbreeze compresses the air and heats it repeatedly (twenty
times) in the grooves around the drum before releasing it into the room.
Simultaneously, surface water inside the drum, when exposed to a halogen
bulb, evaporates in moderate quantity and humidifes the air before it is
sucked into the grooves.
One may argue that it is naive if not dangerous to jump to generalised
conclusions on the basis of a single experimental effort of an amateur nonscientist trying to grapple with his own petty personal problem of keeping
his room cool in summer and warm in winter. But why not? The malady is
as universal as common cold. If a medicine is effective in one case it
should be equally so for many others suffering from the same disease.
Since the stakes are high a thoroughly proven remedy cannot be dismissed
out of hand without being given a fair trial. The nation is facing a perennial
power crisis. Generating more power beyond certain limits is not only
prohibitively expensive it brings in its train more pollution, global warming,
disease and deprivation The whole world is searching frantically for cleaner,
cheaper, alternative sources of power.
It is this author’s humble submission that, in a small way, Snowbreeze, is
one such alternative insofar as it contributes to cutting down power consumption on cooling and heating homes and commercial establishments
and releases no pollutants whatsoever. My layman’s experiments with it
suggest that water and its byproduct ice offer a cheaper, cleaner and more
energy efficient medium of heat storage and exchange than any other
chemical agent.
The figures speak for themselves. A 1.5-ton room air conditioner consumes 1.5 units of power in one hour, which is sufficient to produce 30
kilograms of ice in an ice factory.1 With that much ice Snowbreeze can
1
Mukesh Agrawal, owner of Jaswant Cold Storage and Ice Factory in Delhi, said that
his plant produced 21 tons of ice in 24 hours against a power consumption of 1,119
units, averaging an output of 19 Kg ice from one unit of electricity. A 21 ton plant
manufactured by Metalex, advertised on the company’s website, consumes 1080 units in
24 hours, giving an even higher average.
7
Snowbreeze
keep a room almost equally cool and dehumidified for eight hours. One
might say there are distribution losses in ice deliveries. Under Indian conditions electricity transmission losses are no less, for which there are a
variety of reasons including technical deficiencies and massive “thefts”,
committed in the open, mainly by the richer power guzzling sections of
society such as big factories and large bungalows and flats. Add to that the
colossal investments in the shape of electrical energy and finance to create
the giant-sized infrastructure of power houses and transmission lines for
every additional megawatt of power. If you take all this into account you
will arrive at the sobering conclusion that a gadget which consumes one
unit of energy per hour is in fact using two, the other half being invisible.
The issues raised by Snowbreeze that need to be investigated in depth are:
1. Are our popular electrical heating and cooling devices indeed energy efficient? Can we get better results by modifying them or replacing
them with simpler mechanisms that offer more direct storage and distribution of heat, both for cooling and heating?
2. Can water and its by products, ice and steam (or water vapur), be
the medium of optimising heat transfer due to the unique property of
water of storing and releasing latent heat?
3. An important consideration in cooling and heating systems is their
dependence on uninterrupted supply of electric power or other external
inputs such as sunlight for solar power and a strong breeze for wind power.
How does Snowbreeze compare with all other systems considering that all
that it needs to keep running cheerfully through the worst and longest
power breakdown is 13 to 23 watts an hour of electric current which it can
get from an inverter or even a car battery? Does it not make it the ideal
option in areas where power is not available but ice is?
4. Every new option in creating an alternative source of power requires large investments, including even the apparently free solar, wind
and ocean energies. A cost-benefit comparison of water and ice based
cooling and heating devices with these sources of additional energy is
necessary because it will perhaps show that this is one area which needs
8
more common-sense than science, more attitudinal than physical adjustments, more application and promotion than finance.
5. How does the ice-and-water option compare with the other choices
in environmental values? Is it not the least hazardous simply because it is
the simplest? It is a well known concept of Entropy that the more complicated and intricate a process the more is the residue it generates.
6. Flexibility : In a vast country like India, which happens to be socially,
culturally, politically and economically the most complex in the comity of
nations, every system, mechanism or gadget that seeks universal acceptance by the public, must be amenable to an almost infinite number of
modifications and customized applications. How does the ice-and-water
cooling and heating technique represented by Snowbreeze stand the test?
Our experience shows that it can be developed in any shape or size, in any
environment, and can be conveniently moved to any place without prerequisites. It offers similar flexibility in capital and running costs so that
everyone whether from the lower middle or the upper classes can derive
as much benefit from it as suits his purse.
7. Besides using factory made ice for cooling and air conditioning can
we also harness to useful purpose the heat released by water in the process of ice formation?
This ice-based air-conditioner has been named ‘Snowbreeze’ as a dedication to Shiva, Lord of the snows of Mt. Kailash and symbol of the lofty, icy
Silence of heaven.
9
Snowbreeze
PART - I
How To Make
Snowbreeze
A pictorial description of
how Snowbreeze is made.
10
A pictorial description
Snowbreeze consumes less power than
this 25-watt bulb and
gives nearly as much cooling to a 10’x12’ bedroom
as the average user draws from this 1500-Watt
(1.5ton) wall AC.
11
Snowbreeze
Six-inch
exhaust
fan
ice jacket lined
with aluminum
sheet
Aluminum cylinder containing two
ice filled drums set
against a 60-feet
long circular air
duct
Small tank
for collecting
water condensed
from the cooled
air and melted
ice in jacket
Air exit duct
from bottom
of cylinder
Water
outlet tap
Trolley
12
A pictorial description
Container Bucket
Height
Diameter :
2 feet
at the top 19”
at the bottom 14”
13
Snowbreeze
Ice - drum
Height
Diameter
:
10.5” each
10”
14
A pictorial description
To make an air passage around the drums
a carpenter cuts 1.5” wide rings from a plywood board
15
Snowbreeze
He also makes a circular board from it to form the base of
Snowbreeze cylinder after an aluminim sheet is pasted on it.
16
A pictorial description
A hole is made in the board for ejecting water
condensed from the cooled air.
17
Snowbreeze
The plywood rings are pasted with aluminum strips which protrude outward by about half an inch so as to press against the ice
drums. The rings thus also act as fins and convert the whole aluminium cylinder into a cooling medium.
18
A pictorial description
The rings are fixed at one inch interval in the cylinder frame composed of four wooden bars standing on a board.
19
Snowbreeze
Four half-inch high buttons are fixed at the bottom of the cylinder
to allow free flow of condensed water under it
20
A pictorial description
The skeleton is wrapped in an aluminim sheet
21
Snowbreeze
An air exit aluminum duct, half-inch deep and
four inches wide, is fitted to the frame.
22
A pictorial description
Sealed on the outside the air-exit duct has an half-inch slit on its
inner side, opening into the bottom of the cylinder, to allow cool
air from the grooves to squeeze through it when pulled by the
exhaust fan at its top.
23
Snowbreeze
The half-inch opening in the air exit duct through
which air is sucked by the exhaust fan
A half-inch thick wooden frame is fitted over the bottom of the cylinder to
serve as a seat for the ice boxes so that air from the grooves can squeeze
through it with great force into the exit duct, while condensed water flows
down through the hole into the small water tank below.
24
A pictorial description
The air travels through one-inch cuts in the grooves. These cuts are
made alternately at the two ends of succeeding grooves to force
the air to travel the full sixty-feet length of the grooves.
25
Snowbreeze
The cylinder is now complete with the two empty ice boxes
squeezed into it, pressing against the 17 aluminium grooves fitted
along its periphery.
26
A pictorial description
A powerful six-inch 23-watt exhaust fan is fitted in the middle of
an eight inches deep box at the top of the air-exit duct, leaving
four inches empty space behind the fan.
27
Snowbreeze
The bucket is lined with an aluminium sheet. A removable aluminium-pasted board, with a handle and a hole in the middle, is
fitted above the two inches high water tank at its bottom.
28
A pictorial description
A wooden board fitted with large wheels is prepared to
serve as a mobile stand for Snowbreeze
29
Snowbreeze
A tap is fitted in a corner of the small water tank at the bottom of
the bucket to drain out the condensed water collected in it
30
A pictorial description
Ice jacket
Finally, the cylinder is placed in the bucket and covered with a plastic lid. The
space between the cylinder and bucket wall is used as an ice jacket. It can
take seven kilograms of ice, about the same as each of the ice boxes.
31
Snowbreeze
Snowbreeze is now ready for use. You have only to fill the ice-drums
and ice jacket with ice and switch on the fan to achieve a fall of
seven degrees centigrade in the temperature of a 10’x12’ room.
32
A pictorial description
An alternative model of Snowbreeze in a wooden casing.
33
Snowbreeze
Snowbreeze As Humidified Power Saving
Room Heater
Converting Snowbreeze into a room heater is a simple process. Remove
the lid of the ice-drum. Suspend a 500 watt halogen bulb from a bar resting
on its rim, with its frame tilted inward, in the upper half of the drum, filling
the lower 40% of it with water and leaving a gap of half to one inch
between the water and the bulb-frame. Then switch on the system. Warm
air will start blowing into the room within 10 minutes. The warming up
period could be reduced to five minutes or less if, to start with, you put
pre-heated water in the drum.
The hot air it blows out is appropriately humidified and without the
uncomfortable dryness of air from the normal heater. Mild evaporation of
water in the drum takes away some heat. At the same time it makes the air
pleasant and healthy. Inhaling the burnt out dry air from a blower can
create serious health problems. Antidotes to this menace are sold world
wide. Snowbreeze is completely free from this handicap and can be used
round the clock with perfect ease. For this reason R.G. Gupta, a senior
technocrat who lives in Dehradun, has got a unit of Snowbreeze made for
himself solely for use in winter. Blowers give him headaches, he says. He
does not need an air-conditioner in summer in Dehradun’s cold climate.
However, the system is amenable to numerous variations. You can very
the intensity of the heat generated by adjusting the size of the openings at
the entry and exit points of the air.
34
A pictorial description
An inside view of the 500 watt quartz halogen bulb suspended in
the upper part of the aluminium drum whose lower half is filled with water.
A front view of the halogen bulb.
35
Snowbreeze
The lid of the aluminium drum rests on a bar five inches above its
rim to deflect hot air from below into the air passage grooves of
Snowbreeze.
36
A pictorial description
The roomheater in operation. The angle of its draft is
slanted towards the floor to prevent hot air from
flying straight to the ceiling.
37
Snowbreeze
Points to Remember
1
Snowbreeze is an air-conditioner, not a cooler. It dehumidifies the
air like any other AC
Briefly stated, it amounts to burying in an ice tank a sixty feet long
aluminium pipe of one-and-a-half inch diameter through which
compressed air is kept running at high speed.
2
Immediately, its most important benefit is relief from massive load
shedding and power breakdowns which have become a normal feature
of life throughout India. It needs very little power, only 23 watts –– less
than half of what is used by a light bulb. In the absence of electricity
supply it can run merrily for days on an inverter or even a car battery.
3
Humidity is reduced in proportion to the maximum fall in air temperature.
4
This unit of Snowbreeze consumes two to 2.5 kilograms of ice per hour
to cool a 10x12 feet room by six to seven degrees centigrade and the air
in front of its fan by ten degrees centigrade.
5
It is energy conserving. Normal air-conditioning consumes many times
more power than is used in making ice for the same purpose.
6
Snowbreeze is completely nonpolluting, unlike normal air conditioners
which poison the atmosphere with hot emissions of foul gases.
38
A pictorial description
7
Its cooling capacity is somewhat lower than that of an AC. The objective
is relief from heat, not luxury. It brings down the room teperature by
seven digrees centigrade.
8
It is also an ideal replacement for desert coolers which are clumsy, noisy,
messy, water guzzling and cumbersome to run, besides being utterly
useless in monsoon months and even in summer when water is not
available to run them. They block windows and make the room humid
and dark.
9
The overall cost of running a Snowbreeze AC may not be much higher
than that of operating a desert cooler.
10
It is as cheap to make as a desert cooler and is intended to be a cottage
industry product. Two carpenters can fabricate it in two days – using a
few sheets of plywood and aluminium, a six-inch exhaust fan and a
plastic bucket.
11
Ice is home deliverable in most places. It can be stocked in a thermocol
box or a fridge.
12
Snowbreeze is a light-weight device. It can easily be moved from room
to room.
39
Snowbreeze
13
It can be a boon to low cost hospitals, guest houses, dormitories and the
like.
14
It is ideal for working couples or single people who spend most of the
day at work and need relief from heat in the night. As long as their fridge
is reasonably provisioned with ice, they have nothing to worry.
15
No heat expulsion: conventional air conditioning expels heat from the
room it cools into surrounding areas and causes discomfort to others.
Ice cooling absorbs all the heat within the ice.
16
The urban furnace challenge: Our policy makers envisage that within a
few decades seventy percent of the people of India should be living in
cities, against thirty percent now. It is a frightening scenario since in
summer our cities would turn into blazing furnaces of concrete and
metal on an unimaginable scale. In such a situation people would be
desperately looking for cooling remedies.
The cheaper, though milder, mode of cooling offered by ice may be
one of the obvious solutions. It should specially appeal to institutions
which would prefer portable air conditioners that can be moved from
room to room, like middle-level hospitals, nursing homes, guest houses,
student dormitories and so on.
17
Snowbreeze can be built in different shapes and sizes to suit different
needs.
40
A pictorial description
18
To obtain optimal performance from Snowbreeze its drums and icejacket have to be filled up at the start. But ice and cold water from a
well stocked fridge can adequately cope with three to four-hour power
breakdowns. Its performance remains constant till the temperature of
the melted water rises upto 15°C.
19
Its usage can be tailored to suit the user’s purse and environment. The
cold water in it continues to cool the air in the room by a few degrees
for about two hours after the temperature of the melted water has
crossed 15°C.
20
It can be a life-saver for aged people with limited means who can use it
selectively to cope with hours of extreme heat.
21
Filling the ice jacket with ice is optional, depending on the need. It can
take seven kilograms of ice, about the same as each of the ice boxes.
22
Ice can be preserved for at least twelve hours in feather weight thermocol
boxes which are very cheap.
23
Unlike desert coolers which waste enormous amounts of water, and
create slippery puddles and streams on the floor around them,
Snowbreeze conserves every drop as pure potable water.
24
The overall total cost of fabricating this unit of Snowbreeze in your
house should not exceed Rs.5000.
41
Snowbreeze
PART - II
Why Snowbreeze?
Events, characters and names in this purely
illustrative account of the small man’s
power-free, nonpolluting and portable Air
Conditioner have been changed and
fictionalized for the sake of clarity without
deflecting from hard facts.
Page
1.
An idea is born
42
2.
Twenty years later –– an
Air conditioned honeymoon
51
3.
Other books by the author
103
42
An Idea Is Born
1
An Idea Is Born
Gulzari Mal, a doddering old man nearing 80, a writer to boot, sat
smugly in his study, a cosy nook in a spacious house, with not a care in the
world. He was one of those fortunate few who enjoyed the luxury of
having a full grown, lush green forest overlooking the bedroom windows
of his flat in a middle-class quarter of the national capital. His other luxury,
of course, was his air-conditioner of which he was very proud since he
could barely afford it. For him it was a medical necessity.
He watched with poetic detachment the spectacle of a sizzling loo
tearing and whistling its way through the jungle while the trees swayed
wildly in its wake like a wounded tiger gasping for breath. The clock had
just turned the hour of noon on this hot day in June when the gentle
purring of the air conditioner stopped. Gulzari Mal was not perturbed
because, unlike the rest of Delhi, power breakdowns in his housing colony
seldom lasted longer than an hour or two and the fans in the flat could
keep running on an inverter during that period.
But this was a special day. The fans could dry the sweat from the body
but they were unable to stop for long the strong hot blizzard outside from
warming up the room to levels that were unbearable for the old man.
After about two hours, when electric power showed no signs of returning,
he began to watch the prospect through his window with a different eye.
The sight was not half as attractive as it had seemed to be little while ago.
He could now perceive the agony of the leaves on the trees that were
shuddering and withering in the heat and finally dropping dead on the
ground. The birds sat silently or flew into deeper shade to escape the blast.
A few of them sat huddled beneath a cluster of trees sipping water from a
puddle, remnant of a recent shower by a passing cloud. Gulzari knew that
soon his fate would be no better than that of the leaves and birds he was
watching.
43
Snowbreeze
He asked his obliging wife, Sapna, thankfully several years younger
than him and much more agile, to get him water in a washtub and place it
on a table under the fan. When it arrived he moved close to it with his
head bent over the water and hands stretched out to feel the touch of the
moistened air. But it gave only marginal relief, if at all, from the heat which
seemed to be getting hotter in those afternoon hours.
Just then the good woman had a sudden brain wave which was to
prove to be an event of momentous importance not only for her family but
perhaps for many others in a similar predicament. She rushed to the two
fridges in the kitchen and dining room, put all the ice cubes and cold
water bottles stored in them in a bucket and brought them to her husband’s
study. After emptying the washtub she filled it up with the cold contents of
her bucket.
The effect was electric upon Gulzari’s frayed nerves. Slowly he could
once again begin to behold the view from his window with a poet’s eye.
He could see nothing but beauty in it. The leaves seemed to be dancing
and the birds singing. After all they were Mother nature’s own children
and she knew best how to look after them, he thought.
Fortunately for Gulzari, his air-conditioner started humming the familiar tune in another two hours, just when he was once again beginning to
lose his sense of appreciation of nature’s beauty beyond the glass panes.
His devoted wife beamed with joy for his sake and heaved a sigh of relief.
Sapna told Gulzari that his torment had reminded her of her childhood
days in her small town home. On such occasions of extreme heat her
father would order a large slab of ice from the ice vendor round the
corner of the street where they lived. He had it placed directly under a
fan in a large brass tub, used for kneading dough in the kitchen, in a room
on the ground floor. It took care of the heat for the whole afternoon and
evening for the entire family of ten.
44
An Idea Is Born
Sapna’s childhood tale brought only a frown upon Gulzari’s face since
he had grown up as a village lad who had not used a fan till he was twentyfive. When at college he would spend his summer vacations in his village
home roaming in the fields and groves with his school friends in the midday heat and even playing open air games with them. Winter or summer,
weather watch had never been on the minds of members of his generation
and they never talked about it. This was a vice they had picked up in later
years from their British rulers who, they noticed, must compulsively spend
the first quarter of a social get together discussing weather. It only reminded him of the vast reservoir of energy that once seemed inexhaustible and had seeped out of his system unnoticed as the years rolled by,
largely due to his changed life-style which had, step by step, made him a
new man, a cripple sustained by modern props like the air-conditioner.
“So, Ice is the answer to our power woes”, Gulzari muttered.
“For short breaks, yes”, said Sapna.
“Why not always?”
“Because if you use too much of it for long hours, the room will become too humid. It will be worse than under a desert cooler which diffuses the moisture inside by constantly drawing fresh and dry air from
outside at high speed.”
“Hmm”, said Gulzari and added after a pause, “you always put a spoke
in my plans.”
“I merely tell you the truth to save you from making a laughing stock of
yourself. Whoever thought of cooling a house with ice? We might as well
start living in a cold storage.”
“You women think that God has given all His wisdom only to you.”
“Oh my God! I am late for the party. I must dress up and rush. But how
45
Snowbreeze
could I leave you in this condition?”, Sapna said closing the argument.
“I know. It is too late to find another husband, even for you!” said
Gulzari taunting her.
“Yes, I know it too”, retorted Sapna looking far into the forest through
the windows with a squinted eye before walking out of the room to keep
her social engagement.
After Sapna’s abrupt departure Gulzari suddenly felt lonely and hollow.
He had grown accustomed to being treated by her like a pampered child.
The three-hour battle with the heat had left him no energy or inclination to
read or write. He gazed vacantly into the forest outside, then at the washtub placed before him on a stool directly under the fan. In her haste to join
her friends at the party Sapna had forgotten to remove it. A large block of
ice was still floating in it. Gulzari eyed it with reverence and awe. “Why
waste it?”, he thought, and decided to put it back in the refrigerator, to be
used just in case the power supply failed again during Sapna’s absence. He
had forgotten the proverbial slipperiness of ice. The moment he took the
first step after putting the ice slab on an empty plate it glided swiftly over
its edge and crashed on the floor. In a moment the centre of the room was
covered with ice splinters. Within a few minutes he could feel a whiff of
cool breeze rising from below and tingling his cheeks, ears and nose. The
experience lasted barely a few seconds but it was enough to convey to his
alert mind that this momentary experience was caused by the coldness
released by the ice. In scientific language it would be described as heat
absorbed from the air by the scattered ice particles to melt and evaporate.
He picked up his walking stick and treading cautiously over the icy floor
hobbled towards the dining room and kitchen to see if there was any more
ice left in the refrigerators. Though he found no ice in the machines, a waft
of cold air greeted him as he opened them. Walking a few steps to the
balcony he hailed two gardeners working in the colony lawns and asked
them to come and help him for a few minutes. With their aid he moved
46
An Idea Is Born
the two refrigerators to the centre of the drawing room facing each other,
leaving a space of barely two feet between them directly under the fan.
He got a chair placed there, sat on it and opened wide the doors of both
the refrigerators. The fan overhead was now blowing over his body air that
was cooler than the ambience of his air conditioned study room. “Another
temporary shelter from a power breakdown”, he mused.
Sensing Gulzari’s predicament one of the gardeners said, “I am a small
man, only a mali, Sir, But I can I make a suggestion?”
“Go ahead.”
“If you take my advice, put ice in a can, the ordinary empty can––you
use to keep ghee or wheat––and blow air over it.”
“How will that help?”
“My grandfather was a railway coolie in the days of British Raj in India.
My mother told me that sometimes he used to bring home blocks of ice
left behind in first class compartments by English passengers. During summer days they would block the windows near their seats with large wooden
crates of ice fitted with grills on the inside, facing the passengers, and also
place one of them on the floor between the seats under the fan. They
would leave behind the remains of the ice in the bathroom sink. Porters
like my grandfather would pick up the left over ice and bring it home.
“In course of time when freedom came and the British left India we got
back our lands from the zamindars and became landowners. My father
became a village pradhan and once, during a long summer train journey
with all of us, in an ordinary compartment, he did just what those White
man used to do to impress other villagers traveling with us. I still remember it though I was a child then. It was great fun.”
The talkative gardener had given Gulzari food for thought and added a
new dimension to his own theory that ice was perhaps the answer to his
47
Snowbreeze
heat phobia. That Englishmen in India had been using it for the same
purpose more than half-a-century ago was added proof of the soundness
of his theory. If the modern system of air conditioning had proved to be
impractical or inadequate under Indian conditions where was the harm in
reverting to the old one?”
Accordingly, he persuaded Sapna to part with one of the tin cans in the
kitchen so that they could together try out the gardener’s remedy with ice
from the market. It didn’t work. The can filled with ice when placed under
a ceiling fan, sat idly without making an iota of difference to the surrounding air.
The gardener who had suggested it was summoned.
“What is your name?” Gulzari asked.
“Inder.”
“Are you given to practical jokes or are you out of your mind?”
Inder eyed Gulzari curiously thinking that it was the writer who had
gone crazy.
“Why do you say so, Sir?”
“It seems you merely made up that story about your grandfather and
the Englishmen to fool us. Your claim that they used ice cans to cool rooms
was a hoax.”
“No Sir, I can say it again under oath to Lord Shiva”.
“What has Lord Shiva to do with it?”
“Everything, Sir. Ice is the symbol of Lord Shiva who lives on top of Mt.
Kailash, the iciest place on earth. Saint Tulsidas says about him:
48
An Idea Is Born
“Woh seetalta Ko Seetal Karahin” (he is the one who imparts coldness
to cold)
“Who told you that ? I don’t remember reading it in the Ramayana”,
said Gulzari facetiously.
“I am an illiterate man, Sir. In our village in East U.P. we learn such
couplets by heart from generation to generation. The quotation cannot be
wrong.”
“He removed the lid from the tin can before walking out of the house
and said, “just leave it open and the Lord will do the rest”.
Whether it was the effect of the gardener’s invocation to Lord Shiva or
the removal of the lid from the tin can which caused the air under the fan
to cool down a bit is difficult to say. But Sapna was the first to acknowledge
that Inder’s recipe for cooling the room had proved to be more effective
than her own earlier efforts by putting ice cubes in a washtub. At the same
time it was clear to the old couple that this was hardly a substitute for the
air conditioner or even the desert cooler installed in the sitting room as it
would make the room more humid and stuffy. Much more effort would
have to be put into the experiment of which the gardener’s tip was just the
beginning.
True to his temperament of a pseudo artist Gulzari was a man who
worked in fits and starts. For a few days the subject was forgotten till
another four––hour power failure made him sit up and start thinking about
it once more.
“Those Englishmen couldn’t have been fools to be traveling with cans of
ice in their train compartments if it brought about no appreciable fall in
temperatures” said Gulzari to his wife.
“Yes, and the trains are not like ordinary rooms. Being made of steel
they are hot like ovens.”
49
Snowbreeze
“So why do we not get the same effect from ice here?” Gulzari mused.
“Perhaps the ice absorbed surplus heat much faster when the train was
in motion”, Sapna suggested.
“Or may be the air blew over it with greater force as it entered the
cabins through the gaps in the windows due to the speed of the train”,
Gulzari said.
“In today’s phraseology it would be called pressurized air” said Sapna
who, unlike Gulzari had been a science student at college and had kept up
her interest in the subject in later years.
This time Gulzari did not let the matter rest there but continued to
brood over it, at times loudly, but mostly in silence.
After much thinking he said to Sapna, “So if the gardener’s story and
your theory of it are true we need two things to repeat the seventy-year
old British practice: “Wooden crates and pressurized air.”
“Yes, but don’t forget the humidity in the room which will rise sharply
as the air absorbs moisture from the water produced by the melting of the
ice slabs. In the train there must have been a constant flow of fresh dry
breeze.”
“Yes, we have to consider that too,” he conceded.
The die was cast. The couple plunged into the project in a do or die
spirit, regardless of the labour and expense it involved. It was a case of trial
and error all the way, like swimming in very shallow waters. Not having the
foggiest notion about the principles of modern air conditioning and refrigeration, nor of the unique properties of ice, they had to be prepared to hit
or miss at each step. It took them weeks to realize that what they were
expected to achieve was not the transfer of the coldness of ice to the air in
the room but just its opposite, that is, absorption of the heat in the room by
the ice, keeping the humidity factor in mind. Though they had known this
50
An Idea Is Born
vaguely for some time it took weeks for the fact to sink into their subconscious so that they could spot the basic flaws in their experiment. Ultimately before success came, they discovered that tin was a poor medium
for this function because of its low conductivity of heat. After much discussion among themselves and consulting a book on heat, they settled for
aluminum. The tin can was replaced by an aluminum drum of the same
size. Lo and behold! results started appearing.
Finally, with the help of two carpenters, an electrician, an ice vendor
and number of others they managed to produce within a few weeks the
prototype of what they finally called “Snowbreeze”. They gave it that name
in honour of Shiva, Lord of the snows. At the back of their minds they were
conscious perhaps that, for all they knew, their success, partial or complete, might be the answer to the gardener’s prayers to the deity to save
the honour of an humble devotee and prove him right.
Gulzari found that Snowbreeze was more suited to the needs of his
frail body than the wall air conditioner. With it he could keep the room
mildly cool by using half or even a third of the optimal quantity of ice it
required to function at par with the regular AC. It would thus be much
cheaper to run than the wall AC. Sapna liked the idea. She liked all money
saving ideas.
“In that case we can dispose of the present AC,” said Gulzari enthusiastically. For him it would he a proof of the success of Snowbreeze, his brainchild.
“We cannot do that even though it would fetch us a good price since
we bought it only last year,” she said.
“Why can’t we sell it if we don’t need it any more?”
“My friends will think we have gone so broke that we cannot afford
even an air conditioner. It must stay in its place though we may not use it”,
she replied, thus closing the argument for all time.
51
Snowbreeze
Twenty years later --An Air Conditioned Honeymoon
WANTED
For immediate
marriage a beautiful,
accomplished bride
from highly placed
family for boy with
rich connections,
owning car and fully
air-conditioned house.
Thus read an entry in the matrimonial columns
of the Delhi Express of May 13, 2028.
52
An Air Conditioned Honeymoon
Two Weeks Thereafter
“You have cheated me and my parents,” says Skimpy, the bride of the
marriage solemnized in response to the ad, on her wedding night.
“How?” asks Ronie the bridegroom.
“Your notice in the newspaper said your house was fully air--conditioned. I don’t see a single air conditioner in this large flat. I shudder to
think what my friends will say when they see how we live.”
“How can you say that? We have a large Snowbreeze in every room to
keep it cool.”
“Which is worse than not having an AC of any kind at all.”
“Why do you say that? Do you feel it hot in this room?”
“That is not the point. It may be as cold as Mt. Everest here for all I
care. Your Snowbreeze units only go to confirm that we are ordinary people
who cannot afford a decent life-style.”
“But what is the point of having in the house machines that won’t work.”
“Why should they not work if they are new?” she shot back.
“Because in our Moon City, the swankiest place in South Delhi, we get
power only for eight hours and that too during day time when all of us are
away at work and do not need electricity anyway.”
“But I see all the lights and fans on in the whole house, as if it was
Diwali.”
“This is because like every other private colony ours has a low voltage
generator which would not support energy-guzzling air conditioners.”
53
Snowbreeze
“But still you should have installed them”, she said peevishly.
“Why? Do you want them as showpieces?
“Why not? After all what is life but a show. In our house in the factory
colony near Vishakapatnam we have four ACs. My Ma is so proud of them.
She had to wait long years for Papa to become the GM so that we could
move into that house. You see as Deputy GM he was entitled to only two
ACs.”
“The power supply in that part of India must be really good and cheap
to enable you to run four ACs. Here you would need a prince’s purse to
operate them,” he said inching slowly towards her and trying to assuage
her hurt feelings.
Skimpy could sense Ronie’s amorous mood and changed her tune.
After all it was their first night together and she wouldn’t like to be a
spoilsport on this happy occasion. Though theirs had been an arranged
marriage she was beginning to feel romantically drawn towards him due to
his good looks and submissive attitude.
She moved closer to him, put her arm fondly on his shoulder and,
gazing straight into his eyes, said “how can I lie to you, my dear Ronie, and
on our first night too. I feel there should be no secrets between us. The
fact is that those four ACs in our house are only showpieces. The factory
stopped paying for the power consumed in the officers’ homes after the
rates crossed twenty rupees per unit. My father cannot afford to run the
ACs on his salary. If he did questions would be asked about where he got
the money. Do you know that in our region power is costlier than water?
You can buy a bottle of drinking water for twenty-five rupees but power
costs forty rupees a unit. How much does it cost here?
“We pay thirty rupees a unit to our society for operating the diesel
generator.”
54
An Air Conditioned Honeymoon
“This means we cannot afford wall ACs”, Skimpy agreed and added,
“but still you should have them, if only as showpieces. They make the
house look grand from outside.”
Ronie agreed to Skimpy’s reasonable suggestion and decided to have a
large double AC installed in the drawing room the very next day though
they both knew that it would never be used.
It being the middle of May, the hottest part of the year, the newly weds
left early next morning, well before sunrise, in Ronie’s car for their honeymoon. Though stingy by Skimpy’s standards in spending money on installing cooling systems in his house, Ronie had provided himself well in the
matter of driving comforts. Only a few months earlier he had bought a
luxury car. For Skimpy, who was seeing it for the first time that morning,
nothing could be more romantic and thrilling for the start of their honeymoon than the sight of the long, slim shiny blue limousine whose graceful
curves seemed to match with her own willowy and lissome frame. She
uttered a shriek of joy on seeing it and instantly fell in love with Ronie who
had been till that moment for her just a husband. She looked fondly into
his eyes and hugged and kissed him.
“It is yours”, he said handing her the keys of the car with a graceful
bow.
“It is beautiful. You never told me about it”, she said excitedly while
taking the keys and opening the front door.
“There was no occasion for it”, said Ronie casually. In fact he had
planned it that way to start their honeymoon with a bang. Even during the
previous night when she had been berating him for not having proper air
conditioners in the house, he had resisted the temptation of showing her
the car to put her mind at ease about his social status. His patience had
paid off. From a demanding independent minded, modern girl Skimpy
had suddenly transformed herself into a coy maiden, a doll he could play
with any way he liked.
55
Snowbreeze
After fiddling with the steering wheel for about a kilometer Skimpy
stopped the car and asked Ronie to drive so that she could recline in the
adjoining seat and take a short ‘beauty sleep’, not having slept much during the night.
Ronie took the wheel. Their first destination which they hoped to hit in
a couple of hours was Jaipur. They had not realized till then that Indian
roads were not made for honeymooners. An unwritten law of the jungle
prevailed and all species had to scurry for shelter when the king of the
jungle decided to take a stroll in his domains. Ronie had barely turned into
the city highway leading to Jaipur when he was greeted by sirens and
whistles from his left, right, front and back. In a moment he was surrounded by gun toting armed motor-cyclists. Behind them stood two jeeps
blocking the way. The car was led back to the street it had come from and
all its ‘papers’ minutely examined. Its boot was searched, apparently for
explosives used by terrorists.
A jeep with a digital video camera mounted on its bonnet drove close
to the car. A man sitting by the driver’s seat activated it by remote control
and took pictures of the offending limousine with its occupants. By pressing
another knob the photographs were instantly flashed on internet to all
police headquarters in India and Interpol in London. The operator pressed
another button and speaking into a mike fitted in the dashboard shouted at
the top of his voice, “it is a brand new blue Mercedez, Sir. Number IC 3D
4W3439W8. Occupants are a man and woman, both young about twentyfive, man’s name on driving license is Ranbir Singh. He is clean shaven,
cropped hair, red scarf round the neck over white shirt. I can’t see his
lower body as they are seated in the vehicle and can not say whether he is
wearing shorts, pants or pyjamas. Woman is tall, short hair, white neck and
breasts, cannot see any clothes on her since she is sitting behind the man.”
“Seems suspicious. Go and find out”, shouted a female voice at the
other end of the communication line. Apparently she was speaking from
56
An Air Conditioned Honeymoon
intelligence department headquarters. Her orders beamed over the audio
system were heard by every one around. Ronie and Skimpy jumped out of
the car through their respective doors and walked upto the operator to
save him the trouble.
“It is O.K. madam. Woman wearing wide pink belt over lower half of
her breasts, nothing on waist and legs. Between them she has a blue skirt
printed with white flowers. Message complete. Await orders.”
Anxious to prove their bona fides Skimpy poked her head into the car
close to the dash board and screamed into the mouthpiece,
“We are a honeymooning couple, madam.”
“A likely story, young lady. But we shall see” blared the invisible female
on the other side of the network.
Ronie and Skimpy returned to their seats in the Mercedez with hangdog looks. The jeep waited for ‘orders’. Two policemen stood on alert in
front of Ronie’s car to block its way. After two minutes’ stunned silence,
observed with the solemnity of a mourning ceremony, the audio system
came to life like an old man croaking to clear his throat.
“They can go”, the lady in the intelligence cell announced and added.
“Next!”
“We have apprehended more than a dozen cars by now madam.”
“Detain only the suspicious ones like big cars, young couples, distinctive
number plates, tinted windows, dark goggles etc. Let the others go.”
An officer who had been standing like a detached observer near the
Mercedez but was in fact the director of the drama came forward.
“Extremely sorry for this minor inconvenience, Sir. You can go now”,
57
Snowbreeze
“Why were we stopped at all?” Ronie asked politely.
“The Prime Minister is to pass this way any moment now.”
“Is that all?” Skimpy piped in.
“You don’t know, madam. These are hard times. Our job is to look for
terrorists where they don’t exist. That is the only way to catch them.”
Ronie had heard enough. He thanked the officer and started the car.
“Not on the highway, Sir. You have to turn back.”
Ronie looked behind and said
“Turn back where? There are a hundred cars behind me.”
“Then I am afraid, you have to wait Sir.”
“How long?”
“How can I say? Actually the PM should have gone past this point an
hour ago. They usually give us wrong schedules to guard against informers
in our own force who might be mixed up with terrorists. After all he is the
Prime Minister. His safety is India’s safety.”
“We seem to be living in a police state”, skimpy whispered in Ronie’s
ears after the officer had withdrawn.
“India has always been a police state, my dear, since the days of Lord
Ram and even beyond, except for a brief glimmer of the rule of law during
the last few decades of British Raj and its spill over into the Nehru era in
the twilight years of Independence. With Nehru’s death we quickly bounced
back to rule of the ‘danda’, hundred percent.”
“Why is that so?”
58
An Air Conditioned Honeymoon
“Because India presents a unique case of arrested social evolution.
People in Europe transitioned over time from the tribal to the feudal state
in which the serfs can get together and make common cause against their
oppressors. On the other hand, thanks to our fascist Aryan laws, we remain
split into thousands of sexually regimented tribes that are mutually segregated in a rigid hierarchical order. This facilitates blind submission to the
local chieftains.
Skimpy put her hand on Ronie’s arm and pulled it away from the steering wheel.
“Put up the window panes darling. This is as good a place as any other
for my beauty sleep. Just switch on the air conditioner.”
The Prime Minister gave Skimpy ample time for her ‘beauty sleep’. She
had barely opened her eyes about forty-five minutes later when she heard
the clatter of outriders on motor cycles as they passed in front of her. They
were followed by three large trucks with huge gleaming white containers
placed on them, each large enough to hold in it a complete bus. They
reminded her of the tableaux trucks in the Republic Day parade she had
often watched on TV. About a dozen jeeps loaded with soldiers holding
guns pointed in all directions followed.
In another moment she saw approaching a police officer who was returning from his assigned post on the highway in a jubilant mood. Throwing
his hands up in the air with joy he declared to his colleagues “What a
perfect passage for the PM through our section. Not a mouse stirred.”
“Yes, Sir, we have proved the Law still rules in this country”, said the
other voicing the sentiments of the several hundred other policemen along
the PM’s route who must have been similarly patting their backs for having
accomplished the great feat of ensuring safe passage for the 21st century
equivalent of the King Emperor of India.
59
Snowbreeze
“What were those containers for in the PM’s fleet?”, Skimpy asked the
officer.
“Inside them are bomb proof capsules of the kind used in space shuttles.
The PM sits in one of them,” replied the officer.
“Poor man. It must be very stuffy there.”
“On the contrary. The air inside is as light as space itself. Those three
are the best air conditioned vehicles in the world.”
“After all he is the Prime Minister!,” said the other policeman standing
behind the officer.
Before Skimpy could ask further questions to satisfy her feminine curiosity the simultaneous honking of a hundred cars from behind made Ronie
start the car without further delay. At last they were on the highway again.
Their relief was short- lived. Within minutes the hundred feet wide road
was choked with thousands of cars that had been held up for over an hour
at all intersections on the route of the PM’s cavalcade. Once again the rule
of Law which the policemen had succeeded in enforcing for a short while
had turned into the Law of the jungle. Delhi roads had returned to their
normal state.
The Mercedez stopped amidst a sea of cars. Ronie switched off the
engine. After a fifteen-minute wait Skimpy became fidgety. She could feel
the heat of the Mid-May Sun shining directly on the car turning it into an
oven. With thousands of cars stuck in the same situation around her the
scene looked like a city on fire.
“Why not start the motor and switch on the air conditioner, dear?”,
asked Skimpy.
Ronie told her that running the AC in a closed car while it was parked
for long in a traffic jam in Indian cities, with hundreds of other vehicles
60
An Air Conditioned Honeymoon
spewing harmful gases, was four times more poisonous for the passengers
than sitting with the windows open. Fumes from outside seeped into the
automobiles and got trapped inside the passenger cabin, he explained.
“Then what is the use of buying a luxury car like the Mercedez if its air
conditioning cannot even filter out poisonous gases?”, she asked.
“To tell you the truth, Skimpy, these cars are not made for Indian conditions.”
“You mean we should travel in bullock carts if we want to live pollution
free.”
“Yes”
“But how will you air condition them?” she asked to while away the
boredom.
“Again, my answer is the same. Modern air conditioning is not suited to
Indian conditions. It is just a façade, a status symbol, a cosmetic that only
people like the Prime Minister, who can live in space capsules on earth,
can enjoy so that they are completely insulated from the effects of the
weather.”
“Oh, how I wish the PM had not spoilt our honeymoon at the very
start,” she moaned.
“Why blame the poor man?” Delhi is always like that. If not the PM, it
would be something else, a religious procession, strike, an accident or just
a traffic jam some five kilometers away which sometimes has a snowballing
effect on the roads over a large area.”
“How often do you have to face it?” asked Skimpy for whom it was her
first day in Delhi, having arrived there only the previous night as a newly
married bride with rosy dreams of living in the national capital.
61
Snowbreeze
“Oh! every day I suppose except when I am sick or out of town.”
“And you sit through it all the time without the AC on?”
“Yes.”
“How long will it take you to have enough money to buy the kind of
capsule in which we saw the PM traveling?”
Ronie knew that being unused to Delhi’s heat Skimpy had lapsed into a
state of delirium. He poured ice cold water from a large flask on a handkerchief and put it on his wife’s forehead.
“I shall keep wetting it as soon as it dries up”, he told her.
“How will it help?”
“This was Mahatma Gandhi’s version of our modern air conditioning. I
know it works.”
It was not before the cars had stood motionless for an hour in the jam
that the chaos showed signs of easing. They were on the move again and
Ronie could switch on the air conditioner. But it was perhaps already too
late to revive Skimpy’s spirits. She collapsed in Ronie’s lap as he slowly
negotiated the traffic. Her face was now receiving a direct blast of cold air
from the car AC while Ronie was patting it gently with his left hand.
Apparently the Gandhian formula of placing a wet cold pack on Skimpy’s
forehead hadn’t worked. It may have been all right in the green, pollution
free and slightly humid wilderness of the Mahatma’s Sewagram Ashram but
62
An Air Conditioned Honeymoon
could be of little use in Delhi’s summer when the whole city is turned into
an oven of steel and concrete in which human beings roast like potatoes.
“It is too ‘vegetarian’ a solution for a modern problem,” said Skimpy
jocularly after she had recovered her wits.
It took them two hours more to clear a few other shorter hurdles and
reach Delhi’s border with Haryana, a drive of seventeen kilometers from
their house. The car picked up speed and had proceeded smoothly for
five kilometers when they saw a large hoarding with the following inscription:
Welcome To Sakalu
Taste the Flavours of Japan.
Skimpy thought it was a food joint and suggested they might eat and
relax in it for a while before continuing their journey to Jaipur. Ronie
dutifully turned the Mercedez on the road to his right as indicated by an
arrow inscribed on the board. They drove for two kilometers on a pleasant
serpentine driveway lined with double rows of exotic flowering trees. A
strong wind had scattered leaves and flowers from the trees in their path.
It looked like a road prepared for royal receptions. The long winding avenue, part of which lay through a thick forest of recent origin, ended in a
spectacular habitat the like of which they had never seen or imagined.
Awe-struck and dazed on beholding the sheer majesty of the entrance
and the grandeur of the façade before them, Ronie halted his car at a
respectable distance. They got down from the car after parking it in a tree
cluster and gazed at the architectural fantasy they had least expected to
find in this wilderness. Its chief attraction perhaps was that there was in it
nothing for the eye to behold or hold on to except a glass box of gigantic
proportions, at least a mile long and sixty feet high. A mini replica of it in
the foreground, about hundred foot square and thirty feet high, suggested
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that the main structure would likewise be square and therefore a mile
wide. The words ‘Welcome’ flashed by blinking lights from the smaller
building indicated that it was the reception hall.
They had barely stood there for a minute when a shiny white limousine
drove upto them. Two young women stepped out of it and formally welcomed them to Sakalu. Addressing Skimpy and apparently bypassing Ronie
who had moved forward to greet them one of them said, “It is a pleasure
to receive you and your companion to our dream city, madam. You can
leave the key of your car to me. I shall have it properly parked and dusted
while you enjoy our hospitality.”
Skimpy, who was a simple girl from a provincial town, was flustered by
such sophistry and muttered, “we seem to have come here by mistake.
We are on our way to Jaipur and your board at the intersection suggested
it was an eating place.”
“So it is madam. We provide the best food here. You have come to the
right place.”
“What is this place, any way? Why this giant forbidding structure of
glass? It is almost like a city.”
“So it is, madam. Why not step in for a moment and see it from inside?
It is a marvel more fascinating than Taj Mahal.”
Without further formalities the kindly hostess who introduced herself
as Suzie, hustled the visitors into the white car. At the same time she took
from Ronie the key of his car and gave it to her colleague who jumped into
the Mercedez and drove it towards the glass city while the white car took
them to the reception hall about fifty yards away.
In response to their queries Suzie told them that the city was called
Sakalu to commemorate a village of the same name on the Gujarat-Rajasthan
border to which Madhushree, the owner of this place belonged. “He has
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An Air Conditioned Honeymoon
vowed to our reformist Prime Minister to make a mini Japan in Sakalu in
collaboration with a consortium of some of the largest Japanese firms. It is a
unique marriage of Japense technology and Indian management,” she
added.
A chill ran through Skimpy’s scantily clad body as she entered the
reception building. Ronie also felt a slight tremor in his veins and stiffening
of muscles as they braced up to meet the sudden drop in the temperature.
“Feeling too cold here?” their guide asked.
“Yes, we better not stay long here.”
“Do not worry young lady”, said a kindly voice near them whose source
they couldn’t determine. “We shall give you an air bag each which will
automatically adjust itself to the temperature your body desires.”
Skimpy almost fainted and collapsed in Ronie’s arms on hearing the
voice so close to her ears that she could almost feel the presence of an
invisible man in her proximity. Had they entered a house of ghosts? The
whole place looked like that anyway. There was no one in the spacious hall
except their hostess Suzie who had brought them there. Skimpy eyed her
curiously as if she was a witch who had trapped them in her clutches by
her wizardry. In another moment she began feeling a cosy warmth in the
air, the kind you experience in a comfortably air conditioned room.
“Don’t be alarmed, madam”, said the voice from the void. “There are
no wizards or witches here, only the latest marvels of modern science. You
are now dressed in an air bag which is the latest innovation of Japanese airconditioning. It provides a separate invisible space capsule for each person
in a group to keep the air around his body at his own desired levels of
temperature and humidity.
“Who are you? Why can’t we see you?”, Ronie asked.
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The voice laughed. “Ha ha! You cannot see me because I am not a
person but an electronic robot.”
“But robots are solid machines operated electronically” Ronie protested.
“That is old stuff for the Japanese. They have conjured up people like
me by configuring electronic waves which can interact without the aid of
physical transistors.”
“You mean you are an aerial nothingness.”
“No, you have got me all wrong. I am pure intelligence.”
“How can intelligence function without a brain?”
“Japanese scientists have invented electronic brains composed entirely
of sub-atomic transmission cells configurated into modules that do not
have to materialize into physical substances to be made functional.”
The explanation sounded too long-winded and technical to Ronie’s
understanding. But it was enough to assure him and Skimpy that they had
not been abducted through witchcraft into a chamber of ghosts, howsoever much the house they were in might resemble such a place.
“Most of our first time visitors have to go through this culture shock”,
the pretty hostess told them while trying to soothe their nerves ruffled by
the sudden jolt, as one might feel if suddenly transported to an alien
civilization on another planet.
“Why can’t you put real human beings at the counter to deal with
visitors so that they do not have to suffer such torture.?”, Skimpy asked in a
timid tone.
“We do this to condition your minds and prepare you for even greater
marvels of Japanese technology that await you inside this wonder city
named Sakalu.”
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“You mean more shocks. I hope you are not going to pass live electric
currents through our bodies.”
Just then Ronie and Skimpy experienced an electric shock. It lasted
barely a fraction of a second.
“What was that?” Skimpy exclaimed recovering from the shock.
“Your health check, madam”, replied the voice. Our medical scientists
have evolved a technique through nanotechnology to scan the entire human body, from head to foot, in a split second.”
“What did you find in my body?”
“Those details will be provided to you by our specialist before you
leave Sakalu. I am only authorized to tell you that you should not have kept
your malady a secret all these years.”
“It was not kept a secret. I was told I had to live with it all my life. There
is no cure for an enlarged heart.”
“Nonsense!” It will be cured before you leave this place. Our doctors
can make you a new woman within minutes.”
Skimpy who was beginning to have cold feet about staying on in this
weird place and was on the point of asking Ronie to leave this ‘house of
witches’, perked up on hearing the invisible person’s assurance that her
life-long ailment could be cured in a jiffy.
“I hope your doctors will not make me invisible like you”, she asked the
voice in a cheerful tone.
“No they won’t. But you would not regret it if they did. Mine is the
happiest state of being.”
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“What are you but a bundle of software, a piece of artificial intelligence
created by Information Technology?”
“I am much more than that. You may call me a mixed breed produced
by mating Information Technology with bio-technology and further crossbreeding its offspring with nano-technology.”
You are using sexual terminology to describe a scientific process though
you are an asexual yourself, belonging to neither of the two sexes.
“Who says I am asexual? My sex life is more colourful and exciting than
yours.”
“Do you have males and females amongst you?”
“Yes in equal numbers too.”
“I don’t believe you. But even if what you say is true, you are just a
brain. There is no sex in the brain.”
“Again wrong, not your fault though. It is a pity human beings are so
ignorant about the fundamental facts of life. Our Japanese scientists have
proved that brain is the seat of sex. Not only that. Sex is its primary activity.” Sigmund Freud, father of modern psychology was the first to discover
this simple truth about the human mind.
“Sex is a passion of the flesh. You are a bodiless being without an ounce
of flesh. As you say, you are pure intelligence without flesh and bones.”
What goes by the name of sex in your physical world is merely a shadow
play of the real drama being enacted in the domain of Intelligence.”
“This is only a repetition of what Buddhist and Hindu mystics have
been saying for thousands of years. According to them there is nothing
beyond the mind. The physical world is an illusion, a mere reflection of the
tendencies of the mind. If that were so there would be no purpose in
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having all those scientists and the goodies of life they produce. Oh! how
can you feel even a fraction of the ecstacies I experience in my husband’s
embraces!” Skimpy protested.
“You feel them in the mind, the non-physical part of your body called
intelligence, and nowhere else.”
“I must take your leave now, madam. I have other clients like you to
attend”, said the voice interrupting the dialogue. Skimpy and Ronie felt a
slight vibration inside their heads as the ethereal communication links with
the invisible geni snapped.
This is no place to narrate in detail the numerous experiences, some
bizarre, but mostly weird, that Ronie and Skimpy had during their hectic
sojourn in Sakalu. It would take a whole book of several hundred pages to
do so. Their first point of call, at Skimpy’s suggestion, was the doctor who
would cure her of a disease that Indian specialists had declared incurable.
Ronie and the hostess had to wait in an adjoining room while the doctor
attended to Skimpy’s problems in an examination room.
Their visit to the surgery is of vital import to this story since this was the
only occasion during their Sakalu trip that Skimpy and Ronie were separated from each other. This gave Ronie the opportunity he had been pining
for to exchange a few pleasantries with his old college flame who was
none other than their charming hostess, Suzie. Being a smart girl she had
bypassed Ronie and spoken only to Skimpy when they met at the city gates
to save him from embarrassment.
Ronie squeezed Suzie’s hand as they sat down on a sofa after the door
of the surgery had closed automatically as Skimpy entered it.
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“Not here, darling”, said Suzie sweetly while softly withdrawing her
hand.
Ronie understood. “you mean invisible eyes are watching us.”
“Yes, and ears too”, she whispered.
It was a tantalizing situation for both of them but there was little they
could do about it.
Ever since their eyes had met outside the reception hall Ronie had
been dying to know more about Suzie’s personal life. This chance meeting
after a lapse of almost ten years had revived old memories of the time they
had spent together. They had literally sung and danced their way holding
each other’s hands through Ronie’s last two years at college. Umpteen
moments from that past flashed across his mind, when for both of them
merely being together was ecstasy and life looked like a fairy tale packed
with romantic episodes.Today his former sweet heart had the advantage of
knowing that he was a happily married man honey-mooning with his wife,
whereas he knew next to nothing about her.
Her blank gaze told him that while in Sakalu he could ask her no
personal questions. He hoped against hope God would give him an opportunity to renew his association with that wonder girl “just as an old friend.”
Or better still, for Skimpy’s consumption, she could be treated as a ‘new
friend’ they had met for the first time in Sakalu.
He was still musing along these lines about the young woman sitting
before him when Suzie broke the silence.
“May be I could brief you about Sakalu while we wait for your wife.
Here Time is money”, she said trying to save themselves from the ordeal
of gazing at each other as strangers.
“A fine idea, go ahead,” he said.
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Sakalu is a special Economic Zone set up by the Government to create a
state-of-the-art industrial hub in India using the latest Japanese technology.
You have already had a foretaste of it in our reception hall.”
“What do you produce here?”
“Oh, anything under the Sun.”
“What do you mean by anything?”
“Mainly, we make robots which, in turn, can be used to manufacture a
variety of goods of daily use.”
“How many companies are operating here.”
“One, the largest Indo-Japanese venture Sakalu owned by Madhushree,
India’s biggest industrialist.”
“How many workers do you employ?
“About ten thousand.”
“Against how much investment?”, asked Ronie who was himself an
economic strategist in the Delhi office of an American multi-national.
“Ten billion dollars.”
“That would be forty thousand crores of rupees or an investment of Rs.
Four crores per worker. What is your total output in dollars?”
“About the same, that is, ten billion dollars”, said Suzie.
“That would be four crore rupees per worker. Impossible. I can’t believe it. No individual worker can produce so much worth of goods. You
will need a human dinasaur to do it.”
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“You are right, Ronie. That is precisely how our workers are expected
to perform.”
Ronie laughed, “You are kidding. I don’t know what the invisible eyes
and ears watching our conversation will have to say about your childish
remarks.”
“No, I am not kidding. I am quite serious. Our production efficiency
has brought us here. We want to show the Indians how to get the best
from a human being”, said Suzie deriving vicarious pleasure from her Japanese link and forgetting that she was herself an Indian.
“How can you turn a human being into a dinasaur?”
“You are forgetting the robots. There are no limits to their prowess. All
the work is done by them. Men merely sit and watch them work like a
supervisor monitoring his mates”.
“And what are they paid for their services?”
“It could be anything between half to five dollars per minute.”
“You said per minute. I think you meant per hour.”
“No, I am not out of my mind. I meant what I said. We are paid by the
minute here.”
“How much do you get?”
“Oh, I am among the low paid staff.”
“Don’t you get paid by the minute Suzie?”, Ronie asked her in a sympathetic tone.
“Being a mere receptionist I get only one dollar per minute. As in Japan
we have rigid hierarchies here.”
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Ronie didn’t hear the last half of Suzie’s statement, being too occupied
with the earlier part.
“One dollar a minute, that would be about five hundred dollars a day,”
he said.
“No, it comes to six hundred dollars. We work ten hours a day here.”
“This is over seven lakh rupees a month, which is twice as much as I get
as a senior executive of an American company. It seems this place is paved
with gold.”
“So it is. Don’t forget we are in a Special Economic Zone here. It is a
city state within the Indian Union. The company’s writ runs here.”
“You must be all multi-millionaires here.”
“So we are. That is why our flashy malls are stuffed with everything that
money can buy anywhere in the world. Casinos, glitzy shopping arcades, a
race course, several golf courses, underground swimming pools, dazzling
hotels and theatres abound in this pleasure garden of paradise. Name
anything and you have it here.”
“What must be the population of this wonder city?”
“About a hundred thousand.”
“What do so many non-workers do?”
“They provide various services.”
“Must be low paid.”
“No, they too are paid by the minute.”
“Who pays for them?”
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“The economy. It is like a fast moving bullet train driven by the powerful engine called Sakalu.”
“How I wish whole of India was like that” Ronie mused.
“It is quite simple. Just hand over the country’s management to Sakalu
and within a few years the company will transform the whole country into
a heaven of prosperity”, said Suzie who, despite all her apparent sophistry,
was a simple-minded girl.
“Talking of fast moving economy reminds me I have to get both of you a
credit card each from the Sakalu bank next door”, Suzie told Ronie.
“I already have one from Citibank.”
“That won’t do here. We are a very hospitable people and do not want
our guests to be deprived of the special discounts that we offer on all
purchases they make on a Sakalu credit card. This city offers you a real
bargain by any international standards.”
“But not by Indian standards?” Ronie remarked.
“What are Indian standards? The gentry in Delhi and other big cities do
not shop Indian anymore. They only visit malls where international standards prevail. ‘Live-global-think-global’ is their life’s motto.”
“You have changed quite a bit, Suzie, from the old days.”
“So have you, Ronie. Everybody has changed. Today we live in a different, fast changing world which gives you only two options.”
“What options?”
“Change or perish.”
Skimpy emerged from the surgery looking fresh and rejuvenated.
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“What did the doctor say about your heart?”, Ronie asked.
“He has fixed it”.
“How?”
“Through an operation.”
“You mean surgery?”
“Yes.”
“How could he operate upon you without my consent?” said Ronie
turning pale and rising from the sofa with an anxious look, adding “an
operation is a serious affair, a matter of life and death. You must lie down
on the sofa while we arrange a room in a hotel where you can rest and
recuperate.”
“That won’t be necessary”, said Skimpy smiling. “The surgery was a
simple process. The doctor merely inserted a long needle thinner than a
tungsten wire which did the entire job internally in the heart within five
minutes. I felt no strain. When it was over the surgeon infused into my
veins a strong dose of energy fluids and told me to go back to my office for
work. ‘Time is money’, she said with a chuckle. She did not know I was a
tourist.”
“Why didn’t you tell her who you are?”
Ronie was amazed when he learnt from his wife that the operation
chamber was an empty room with no visible doctors and nurses. Skimpy
could have sworn that she could feel the doctor’s hands and instruments
groping over her breasts and making an incision to inject a fluid that would
instantly bring her heart back to the normal size. Suzie told her that the
doctor, who was a woman, had been operating upon her from her surgery
in Tokyo.
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“Our doctors are concerned with the disease not the patient about
whose identity they are supposed to know nothing.”
“You treat even doctor and patient as two machines and not human
beings with individualities.”
“Our society is work driven. There is no room for personal relationships
at the work place in it. They are a waste of office time.”
“Surely you say hello to your colleagues when you meet them in the
morning,” Ronie said.
“Here every employee is given a roll number. Calling each other by
name is not permitted. It smacks of familiarity which disturbs the pace of
work. There is no ban on saying things like ‘hello Roll number 237’ to the
man sitting next to you and his replying ‘hi roll number 927’”.
“In other words you are trying to eliminate the human element from
work so that men can work with the efficiency of machines.”
“Precisely,” said Suzie.
“Are you sure you are all right?” Ronie asked skimpy.
“Yes. Sakalu should be listed among the wonders of the world. I hope
our kind hostess will show us everything worth showing here”, she said
rising from the sofa and turning her eyes towards Suzie.
“My pleasure”, Suzie replied. They picked up their credit cards from
the bank nearby, hopped into the limousine with Suzie, who was performing the double role of guide and chauffeur, and started off on a tour of the
city which looked more like a Japanese garden than a human habitat, let
alone an industrial township. All the time they were driving up and down
the hills which had been carved out in a rocky tract of Aravali ranges.
Millions, if not billions, of tons of fertile earth must have been moved to fill
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An Air Conditioned Honeymoon
up gorges or create thirty feet high mounds, well rounded like a woman’s
fulsome breasts. Forests grew and flowers bloomed on their gentle slopes.
Suzie stopped the car beneath a cluster of trees in a bowl shaped
forested plateau which stood barely ten feet below the sixty feet high
tinted glass ceiling that covered the entire city. It was built like a mini
picnic spot with artificial plants, flowers and fancy mechanical devices for
thrill loving tourists. Among these was a high powered telescope through
which one could view the entire city.
“You should come here after dark to watch the city’s night life through
this telescope which can see through the glass walls of all the malls and
entertainment halls in Sakalu. It looks simply gorgeous and beats Paris,
New York, Chicago or even Las Vegas with its exotic thrills and sensuous
appeal”, Suzie said.
“On the serious side”, she added, “this telescope is used by our scientists to observe atmospheric conditions in the biosphere.”
“How is that connected with your industrial production?” Ronie asked.
“Sakalu is a space city in the making.”
“What is a space city?”
“Don’t you know. Within a few decades the Japanese propose to build
whole cities in space.”
“Why?”
“To colonize it, of course. They do not want the entire earth orbit to
become an American property.”
“What has India to do with it?”
“Why should India be left behind? Our Government is collaborating
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with Japan on this project. If it succeeds no one can question India’s status
as a Super Power.”
“Must be frightfully expensive. It might take up half of India’s annual
budget.”
“So what? It is an investment in the future?”
“What about the present?”
Ignoring Ronie’s question Suzie went on to add, “just think of the tremendous energy it will generate. With it our country could become one
giant power house.”
“How?”
It should be obvious to you that the entire energy resources of the Earth
would not suffice to create a replica of Sakalu in space. Colossal amounts
of it will be needed to generate an energy field at the base of the city to
equal the Earth’s gravity so that human beings can live on it just as they do
here. Besides as you can see ours is a fully air conditioned city, three miles
long and one mile wide built like a single box. All the energy needed to
run a space city will have to be found in space.”
“How can you generate energy from pure space beyond the Earth’s
biosphere.”
This is precisely what Japanese and Indian scientists are working on
jointly. They have discovered that space is not a void as is generally believed. It is composed of a substance which is pure energy in its primal
form. It is the Mother of all the stars and galaxies. If only we can discover a
way of harnessing it before the others, India and Japan would become
rulers of the world. No power on earth, leave alone our traditional enemies Pakistan and China, can challenge us.”
“We have always been told that to be a super power you needed
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nuclear energy and atom bombs. That was why we agreed to dove-tail our
foreign policy with that of America”, Ronie pointed out.
“That was twenty years ago. We are now planning to make Space Bombs.
If a hydrozen bomb can wipe out a city, a space bomb should be able to
wipe out a whole country of about a hundred million people. Its spray of
poisoned ether from any point in the orbit can cover an area two hundred
miles-square on Earth.”
Skimpy didn’t look much enthused. She was a simple, fun loving girl.
The idea of acquiring the power to kill a hundred million people at one
stroke didn’t sound very funny to her. She asked her hostess to tell them
more about the night life of Sakalu of which she had earlier spoken in such
glowing terms.
From the plateau Suzie showed her guests all the sights and landmarks,
using the telescope for spots beyond the reach of the naked eye. From the
outside one could see little distinction between offices, factories, work
places and houses of pleasure in this garden city. They all looked beautiful
like a tourist resort.
“I am starving. Can you take us to a decent place where we can eat?”,
Skimpy asked the guide.
“In Sakalu you will not find one spot which is not decent.”
They went to a nearby restaurant and, after the meal, took a quick
round of the city’s science museum, race course, golf course, swimming
pools, bookshops, art gallery, theatres and a large, half-a-mile long, factory
where robots were being manufactured.
What fascinated Skimpy the most were the malls. A customer could
simply stand on an electronically operated board at the entry point and
come out at the other end in an hour without moving a foot, while travers-
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ing a kilometer long circuitous path along the goods shelves. He could pick
up whatever object happened to catch his fancy by merely punching his
credit card in a machine placed on every counter. The tourist couple were
at once charmed by the arrays of fancy electronic gadgets they had never
seen before. Since they were small in size and easy to carry the starryeyed shoppers loaded their bags provided by the company with the articles. They purchased the things against their credit cards, assuming that
such small knick-knacks couldn’t be frightfully expensive.
The high-point of the grand shopping tour was Skimpy’s visit to various
garment shops in the malls. What with the alluring sights of dressed-up live
models, both male and female, decorations, light settings and contrasts, all
created by expert choreographers and interior designers, it was impossible
for any modern minded and young member of the gentle sex to come out
of these places empty handed. Skimpy did herself well and picked up
several choice garments and jewellery pieces.
The revelries that followed at a night club to which Suzie had taken
them were riotous and exciting. When at the stroke of midnight, the mandatory hour of closure of all such establishments, they retired to their hotel
room both Ronie and Skimpy were sozzled and happy.
“Oh! What a real honeymoon darling! One could ask for nothing more.”
said Skimpy falling into her loved one’s arms.
“Five thousand dollars as air charges! What is an air charge?” Ronie
asked Suzie with a bewildered expression when, the following morning,
she handed him a consolidated bill of the expenses he and Skimpy had
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An Air Conditioned Honeymoon
incurred during their stay of twenty-two hours nineteen minutes and twentyfour seconds in Sakalu.
“This is the cost of the air you have breathed in this city.”
“Are you crazy Sue?” Never heard anything so preposterous as a charge
for the air one breathes.” Skimpy frowned as Ronie addressed Suzie as
Sue, her pet name. In his excitement he had forgotten that he was not
supposed to be on such intimate terms with the hostess who had proved to
be a crafty sorceress and had landed them in this soup. However, Skimpy
let it pass since she was even more disturbed than Ronie about the huge
bill of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine dollars and ninetynine cents (gratuitously one cent short of sixty thousand dollars) that Suzie
had handed them as a parting gift.
Suzie explained that the air they had breathed was the costliest item
among the necessities of life in Sakalu. “It is the cleanest, healthiest air ever
produced on earth, “she said.
“Is it not the same air we breathe under an open sky outside?” Ronie
asked pointing to the vista outside the reception hall where they had come
from their hotel to settle their accounts before leaving Sakalu.
“No, this is the air that the citizens of Sakalu would breathe if it was
stationed in space beyond our bio-sphere. You can appreciate that air is the
first thing residents of a space city will need for their survival. There is no
air in space. To live there you have to produce it by artificial means. Ours is
a truly ‘air conditoned’ city in every sense of the term. The air breathed
here is synthetically produced by mixing in precise proportions oxygen,
hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon-di-oxide, ozone and other gases in their purest form. To avoid contamination of any kind it is manufactured in a factory
three hundred feet deep below the ground. You can imagine the colossal
investments that have gone into this single project.”
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“Do all residents of Sakalu pay such a heavy amount for the air they
breathe?”
“We pay about a third of the rate charged from you. You pay more
because of the high investments made on developing the special invisible
air bags which we gave you on your arrival and which you are still wearing.
They will automatically leave your bodies the moment you step out of this
room into the open air outside.”
“We would not have taken them had we known they are so expensive.
Just a piece of extra clothing would have sufficed to avoid the chill.”
“They are given to you for our protection, not yours, to insulate ourselves from all earthly contaminations that every resident of this polluted
planet carries with him all the time. This is why this reception hall has been
located a hundred yards away from our city which no unsanitized person
can enter.”
“Your water charge is equally exorbitant, two thousand four hundred
ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. What is that for? We hardly
used any water except for a shower.”
“Like air, water is also synthetically produced here. It is totally pollution
free. Besides, you are forgetting the swimming pool where you swam for
half-an-hour. We have to create specially designed water capsules which
cover a tourist’s body without his feeling it and prevent him from polluting
the water.”
“Who pays for the development of such costly technology?”
“India, of course.”
“Why should we? Of what earthly use can it be to the one billion and
two hundred million people of India?”
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“Here we are building India’s future. If we want to be a Super Power of
not only the 21st but also the 22nd century we have to invest on the latest
technology, no matter what it costs us today.
“I notice you have charged us four thousand dollars for shaking hands
with Raju and Dolly, the bollywood stars you introduced to us at the night
club.”
“They are our brand ambassadors. We pay them several million dollars
every month to endorse our products.”
“That is why the products of your technology are so expensive,” said
Ronie.
“High technology means high quality and high productivity which can
be accomplished only through heavy investments on sophisticated machines to replace relatively inefficient masses of workers. All this plus considerable promotion costs show up in the pricing of the product.
“It also requires that the best qualified people who work in such an
environment must enjoy the highest standards of living,” added Suzie who
was showing signs of annoyance at having to waste so much time over a
routine bill.
“Surely, these trinkets we bought for nineteen thousand nine hundred
and ninety-nine dollars from the mall could be returned to the shops and
the amount discounted from the bill.”
Suzie was prepared for this. She took out a tiny magnifying glass from
her wallet and taking from Skimpy one of the small gadgets she had bought
asked her to read through the lens an inscription carved in fine print on an
inside pocket of the device which said, “goods once sold cannot be returned unless proved to be defective or hazardous to health.”
“Had I known that a minute’s invisible incision in my heart would cost
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my poor Ronie ten thousand dollars I would never have agreed to it,”
murmured Skimpy.
“In fact this is the only item on the bill I would pay without hesitation,”
said Ronie looking fondly into the tearful eyes of his beloved wife.
To cut a long story short, when it was discovered that the combined
bank balances of Ronie and Skimpy fell far short of the amount of the bill,
Suzie generously suggested that they could square the bill and buy their
freedom from Sakalu if they surrendered their Mercedez car to the space
city.
“But the Mercedez is already hypothecated to the Standard Bartar
bank. They will skin me alive if they knew I have taken a second mortgage
on it from Sakalu,” Ronie pleaded.
“You can pledge your house for another loan from a different source to
pay off the Standard Bartar bank,” said Suzie
“The house I live in belongs to my father.”
“Then perhaps your father can bail you out,” she shot back snappily,
trying to close the discussion.
Just then the appearance on the scene of two burly uniformed guards
sporting big moustaches and armed with iron rods, who were staring at
Ronie and Skimpy as unwanted intruders, appeared to close all other options for the mild mannered honeymooning couple.
As a further gesture of the company’s generosity Suzie offered to give
the guests a free lift in a prepaid cab she had summoned from a taxi stand
on the highway. It would take them to Jaipur, their next destination.
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Skimpy and Ronie shoved their suitcases in the boot of the taxi and
slumped in the back seat. They were in a state of shock. Ronie had never
expected that of all persons, Suzie, his erstwhile bosom mate would do
this to him. He closed his eyes and so did Skimpy as the car drove off, thus
dispensing with the formality of saying goodbye to Suzie who had walked
upto the cab with them. Since both of them were too dazed to talk due to
the sudden and entirely unexpected developments in the reception hall,
where they had gone to settle their bills and leave Sakalu with pleasant
memories, they sat motionless and apart near opposite windows with their
heads resting against the corners of the seats. Ronie mused over Suzie’s
betrayal. Why had she not warned him? Instead she had treated him like
any other business target fit to be robbed of everything he possessed. He
could never have thought Suzie –– his own Sue –– capable of committing
such treachery. It was not in her character. But what was character, he
thought. It was just a combination of circumstances which varied from
person to person and made them so different from each other. Gradually,
over time, it took the form of their ‘philosophy’ of life. Also, people changed
with a change of circumstances. Suzie had changed.
Quite suddenly her words “change or perish”, which she had pronounced with such flourish in the surgeon’s waiting room, flashed across
Ronie’s mind. Was it a coded message from her? Perhaps she was warning
him in a subtle manner that he could no longer take her to be his ‘favourite
doll’, the name he had given her in the good old days. Could it be she had
no choice but to do what she did as her duty? To him Sakalu looked to be
a city of gentlemen criminals nearly all of whom were supposed to play the
twin roles of Dr. Jekyl and Dr. Hyde every day of their lives. This fitted in
with Suzie’s own description of her dilemma “change or perish”. In order
to survive she had preferred to change. Could he blame her for loving
herself more than a past lover who had, anyway, drifted away from her
long time back? He looked at Skimpy. She had dozed off. He let her sleep.
‘It will do her nerves some good’, he said to himself and continued with
his soliloquy about Suzie till his thoughts of her, which were a mixture of
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the past and present, drove him crazy and he muttered aloud, “Damn it!
Why the hell should I think of her at all?”
Skimpy woke up with a start on hearing his troubled voice. She was
shocked to see him in such an agitated state, sweating all over. She hurriedly took out from her bag a fancy scarf which she had picked up from
the mall they had visited the previous day, and stretched her hand to wipe
beads of perspiration from Ronie’s face. Ronie snatched it from her and
quickly lowering the window pane with the other hand threw it out from
the running car.
He pounced at the bag and tried to throw it too but skimpy struggled
with him to save it.
“I do not want any trace of that city of devils to live with me, not even
its dust which I promise to wash from the soles of my shoes at the next
stop.”
“Don’t be rash Ronie. This is not the first time you or I have been
swindled. In our free market society it keeps happening to all of us all the
time.”
“But never on this scale”, Ronie asserted.
Skimpy nodded assent. “These days everything happens on a big scale.
Such practices are no longer considered a ‘swindle’ in modern parlance.
At the worst they could be called ‘dirty tricks’ that are not legally punishable. My father says this is how people become multi-millionaires overnight at the stock exchange. And they are our most respectable and
honoured citizens,” she added.
“Times have changed. We have to adjust to the change”, said Ronie.
He was alert enough to realize that his better half was only repeating in
different words Suzie’s dictum “change or perish.”
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“Women!” he said to himself “you can never understand them. They
look so simple minded but are more practical in worldly matters.”
“Do you mean that I should also start swindling others?” he asked her.
“Sooner or later you will have to do it, if you wish to survive in this fast
changing world.”
“Change or perish!” Ronie muttered.
“Yes, change or perish, that is our motto from today!” declared Skimpy.
It relieved her mind of much of the tension it was experiencing from the
shock of losing the Mercedez.
“Don’t worry, my dear”, she added, “we have lost only a car. Perhaps
this is a lesson to us on how to acquire more cars. Sakalu was not built in a
day.”
Talking in this incoherent and wayward tone induced by their traumatic
state they had not noticed that the car had stopped and was standing on
the left side of the road while the kindly taxi driver had walked back some
distance to retrieve Skimpy’s scarf. She thanked him profusely for it and
out of sheer generosity gave him a hundred rupee note for his kindness.
He promptly returned it.
“This was my duty. If, however, madam would feel more happy by
tipping me for it, a ten rupee note will do. I can accept nothing more, even
as a gesture from a princess.”
Ronie hurriedly gave the cabby a ten rupee note and thanked him
again. As they resumed their journey Ronie whispered into his wife’s ears,
“Thank God! there are still some honest people left in the world.”
He leaned forward and asked the driver, “have you ever been to
Sakalu?”
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“No Sir, but I have often carried passengers like you from this place.
The company usually calls our taxis from the highway in such situations.”
“Have other visitors to this place forfeited their cars here?”
“I can only presume so from the few words they say to each other.
Normally they are too dumbfounded to speak at all. It was different, however, on one occasion when I had the privilege of having as my passenger
a young princess who said she was daughter of the Maharaja of Rangipur.
She was mentioning to her companion, a White man, that they took away
her jewels too, besides the car, for the bill she had incurred. But it didn’t
seem to matter to her at all. She was quite cheerful about it.”
“I don’t see anything to cheer in it,” said Skimpy.
“The White man told her he would charge it from her sponsors as
expenses on her publicity,” said the chauffeur.
The driver’s observations brought a smile on Ronie’s wrinkled face.
“You take it from me, my friend, that woman was no princess. She must
have been a famous film star passing as a princess to avoid attention, and
the White man would be her agent”, he told the driver. “It would be front
page news for the papers.”
“Queen of the Screen loses all in a Roman holiday binge’, the headlines
would say”, added Skimpy.
“It will be good publicity for Sakalu too. Foreign billionaires would flock
to the place to burn up some extra ‘fat’”
“Yes. ‘the-costlier-the-better’ is the slogan of the new rich class the
world over.”
“True, it is the first mantra of our fully re-conditioned and air conditioned globalised society,” said Ronie making an effort to produce a wry
laugh.
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Imagine the young couple’s surprise when a shiny blue Mercedez shot
past them and its sole occupant, who was none other than Suzie, the
temptress of Sakalu, hailed the taxi driver to stop. The two cars drew up on
the pavement. Suzie was the first to come out on the road since Ronie and
Skimpy were too dazed by the new development to react to it. They sat
still unable to make out the purpose of her coming after them in hot pursuit. Her sudden appearance on the scene could only bode fresh trouble
for them, they both feared.
“What does she want from us now?” Skimpy muttered to her husband.
“I don’t know.”
Suzie had by now reached the taxi. Leaning into the window on Skimpy’s
side she said with a smile.
“Can we exchange cars now Ronie? You get into your Mercedez and
take it where you like while I take the taxi.”
I don’t understand you”, Ronie mumbled .
“It is simple. You two pick up your suitcases, put them in your car and
drive away for your honeymoon.”
Suzie asked the driver to take out her three suitcases from the Mercedez
and put them in the taxi.
Mystified by Suzie’s instructions to the driver, Skimpy asked, “how did
the suitcases come to be in the Mercedez?”
“They are mine. I am going on a holiday.”
“With so much baggage?” asked Ronie who had by then come out of
the taxi and seen the large boxes Suzie was carrying with her.
“Yes, I am going on a long holiday.”
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“How long?”
“I don’t know”.
Awakening dawned on Ronie.
“You aren’t quitting Sakalu for good, Sue?”
The girl demurred, then said in a faint voice. “I don’t know,” while she
lifted the last of her bags from the Mercedez, the driver having already
removed the other two.
“Wait!” Ronie shouted as he rushed towards Suzie and caught her
hand to stop her from taking out her suitcase.
“You quit your job to retrieve my car, sue! I shall not permit it.”
Unable to control herself, Suzie dropped the suitcase, flung herself into
Ronie’s arms and burst into tears.
“No Ronie! I did it for my sake, not yours. Your case was instrumental in
making me realize that I have been wallowing in sin as an accomplice of
the bandits of Sakalu. Your plight has opened my eyes. All these years with
them I have been gleefully watching the spectacle of people like you buoyantly entering Sakalu and leaving the next day with haggard faces and
downcast eyes,” Suzie said between sobs.
This was all she said before she fainted. “Quick Ronie. Lay her on the
car seat and start the AC while I pour water into her mouth and sprinkle
some more of it on her face,” said Skimpy.
“If you take my advice, Sir, Let us take her away from this place as fast
as we can. We can go to Alwar, the nearest town. It is the air of this place
that she cannot stand. I understand that in Sakalu they breathe the air only
gods of heaven breathe. You can yourself smell the foul gases the earth is
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oozing out here. You have been too busy with your own problems to notice
the devastation all around. You will hardly find a tree for almost a hundred
miles around Sakalu. There used to be a lush green forest here. Now there
is nothing but wilderness.
“Why?”
“Because, to build a modern city like Sakalu you need huge quantities
of wood.”
“Who allowed them to cut the trees?” Skimpy asked as she got into the
taxi to look after Suzie while Ronie followed in the Mercedez.
“The Government, of course. They say India cannot become a Super
Power until it builds a thousand Sakalus”, the driver replied.
“And nothing else”, Skimpy quipped in a sneering tone.
“Not content with the wood the vandals have taken away the earth
too. You can see for yourself the huge craters they have dug up all over the
place.”
“What did they do that for?”
“To take away all the top soil for their landfills”, the driver told her.
“What landfills?”
“Whole gorges of the Arawalis had to be filled up with earth to make
Sakalu look like a Japanese garden. Some of the huge pits you see to your
left were created for making bricks”,
“What happened to the people who lived here?”, Skimpy asked pointing her finger at the blazing barren earth on both sides of them as they
drove on towards Alwar.
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“Those who owned the lands got some cash which most of them have
burnt up by now on wine, women and gambling. The rest have drifted to
the slums in big cities to seek work.”
Looking at Suzie who was lying unconscious in the backseat, he said
that hers was not the first case of its kind from Sakalu. “Permanent residents of that city who seldom come out of its gates are not accustomed to
our air. They say it is too toxic for them. The young lady is suffering from
the double effect of mental exhaustion and partial asphyxiation. She should
come around in a few minutes once we enter a zone of cleaner air,” he
said.
The cabby noticed through the rear window of his car a white van
picking up speed to overtake him. He waved it to a stop. A shiny streamer
painted on its gleaming white body proclaimed it to be a mobile medical
unit of the Sarva Suvidha Corporation.
Two female doctors in white coats and a uniformed nurse came out of
the vehicle. The taxi-drive pointed a thumb at Suzie as she lay unconscious
in the back seat. They looked at her. The senior doctor called for a stretcher.
Suzie was immediately shifted to the medical van which Skimpy was initially not allowed to enter. But the doctor softened when she noticed
Ronie stepping out of his blue Mercedez after stopping it behind the taxi
and hailed her with a casual wave of hand. Though dishevelled and downcast he still made an impressive figure. He hurriedly climbed into the cool,
fully air-conditioned vehicle after Suzie’s stretcher had been taken in.
Skimpy followed him. The patient was put on oxygen while the junior
doctor injected a medicine into her veins.
“She should be allright within half-an-hour” the doctor said and asked
the couple, meanwhile, to have a cup of tea with her in her tiny cabin
adjoining the driver’s seat in the truck. She adjusted a thermostat on a
panel of switches near her seat to make it cooler.
“You are a godsend for us in this wilderness, doctor,” said skimpy. “I am
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amazed by the shiny state-of-the-art medical instruments your ambulance
is equipped with.”
The elderly grey-haired doctor smiled and replied, “For this blessing
we have to be grateful to the Japan-India foundation, my dear, not God.”
She had taken off her doctor’s gown and, despite her age, looked quite
handsome in her shirt and jeans which showed off the outlines of a tall,
slim and shapely body.
“I thought Sarva Sudha Corporation was a private medical facility.”
“So it is. It is one of the subsidiary units of the Japan-India foundation
which again is a private trust created with endowments by the giant Japanese companies operating in India and helping this country to become a
Super Power.
“With the aid of the Foundation in which Sakalu is one of the major
donors, its owner, Padma Vibhushan Seth Madhushree, has created several corporations which ensure that no one within a hundred miles of this
wonder city goes hungry, naked and without any schooling or medical aid.
Madhushree, who is the biggest philanthropist in India, has floated similar
corporations even to provide sports and entertainment to the poor and
needy. The common man in this region never had it so good. In case of
need he has only to turn to one of Madhushree’s charities. People whose
ancestors used to sweat and struggle as small tillers, petty vendors and
toilers without incomes in hundreds of small trades can now sit back and
bask in the glow of the Japan India foundation, without doing a jot of work.
The government is proposing to confer on him the title of Bharat Ratna,
India’s highest honour, for his services to humanity.”
The India-Japan Foundation is a strong contender for this year’s Nobel
Peace Prize. World Bank has hailed it for creating the model of a permanenet
solution to the problem of poverty in the whole world. The Bank has given
the Foundation a special grant of a billion dollars to strengthen and spread
its charity network throughout the country.
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“It must have meant a big sacrifice for you to join this charity giving up a
lucrative practice perhaps.”
“On the contrary, I am among the best paid doctors in the country. These
charities are run like any other Japanese corporation on sound business principles. They hire the best talents who are paid high salaries and produce
results.”
Soon Suzie came to, sat up and drank a full glass of water from the junior
doctor’s hands. The elderly lady hurriedly donned her white coat, examined
her with several instruments and declared her fully recovered. The tourists
resumed their journey.
Being aware of their straitened circumstances, on reaching Alwar, the driver
took them to a modest hotel facing a park in the city.
“It used to be the bungalow of a prince of Alwar state before Independence”, he told them. The furnishings and cuisine were sober, clean and
comfortable. There were no air-conditioners but the ground floor of the mansion, where the visitors took two large and spacious rooms, was cool and
comfortable, though a bit dark and gloomy.
“This was the way the princes liked it in summer before the advent of
electric fans and air-conditioner, said the hotel steward who showed them
around. Portraits of former rulers of Alwar and other paintings of life in feudal
times adorning the walls, together with the small well-laid out garden on the
hotel lawns, gave the place a regal look.
Not much was said between them till lunch after which they settled down
on sofa chairs in Suzie’s room and chatted over a cup of coffee. Suzie had by
now recovered her wits and was calm and composed. The mild ambience of
the hotel was soothing to her nerves. For the first time in many years she was
savouring the silent joy of indifference. The taxi driver had unwittingly brought
them to a place where Time, the tyrant of Sakalu, had stopped moving several
decades ago. Having lived in a place where Time was Money and where, if
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you were not alert enough, you would lose your rythm and drop out of the
never stopping dance drama of Sakalu life. To exist at all in that world of
glamour and glitter you had to be in the spotlight all the time. In this moldy
relic of an ancient town she had suddenly become a non-person. Nobody
cared who she was, where she had come from, what she was wearing and
whether she was rich or poor. It was like home where nobody seemed to
notice what other members of the family were doing. It brought back to
her nostalgic memories of her birth place, a hamlet in the backwaters of
Kerala. All naturally grown places in the world are the same, she told
herself while admiring the quiet charm of the landscape of hills and gardens she could see before her through the verandah of her dark, damp
and modestly furnished room.
Suzie told Ronie that his visit to Sakalu with Skimpy had reminded her
of their old days in college. “Those were such wonderful times. We were
far happier then than now among all the thrills and luxuries of modernization.”
“And far poorer too” Ronie said.
“Yes that is the beauty. One felt only the beauty of the moment, not the
poverty.”
“This was so because everybody seemed to be sailing in the same boat.
You did not have to catch up with the others all the time.”
“And in the process prostitute your talents.” Suzie added.
“How can you call it prostitution?”
“When you commit a dishonest act for another person, institution or
country for money what else would you call it. I have been prostituting
both my body and brain.”
“How?”
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“By luring unsuspecting tourists with my beauty, innocent looks and
sweet talk, hooking them into accepting Sakalu credit cards and taking
them to the most expensive places to splurge, thus leading them on the
road to ruin.”
“It is not your fault. Indian society is like that today.”
“Yes, today, but it was not like that before. I am sane enough to realize
that the new culture is a monstrous super-imposition by our colonial masters which we shall have to shake off to become human again,” Suzie said
wiping her tears.
“Such philosophy will lead you nowhere.”
“I want it to be so with me.”
“To be nowhere.”
“Yes to be nowhere, like I am here in this no man’s land. I came from
nowhere and will go back to the same place. My parents are teachers in a
missionary school in Kerala. Theirs is a far happier life than mine can ever
be. I have decided to go and join them and use the ill gotten money I have
made in Sakalu for some good purpose.”
“The doctor who treated you in her mobile clinic on the highway described Madhushree as one of the world’s leading philanthropists deserving a Nobel Prize for his grand charities,” Skimpy said.
“Grand is the right word”, Suzie quipped. “These corporates are our
modern day Robin Hoods. ‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul’ is their lives’ motto.”
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They chatted in this vein for some time more before the taxi driver
took them on a round of old buildings and lakes in and around the city and
made them savour Alwar’s distinctive sweets. The evening was muggy and
hot. The ceiling fans in the rooms provided limited relief from the sweat
but were powerless against the heat and humidity. Suzie was showing signs
of strain and went to bed in her room immediately after an early dinner.
Skimpy and Ronie were worried about her, Ronie more so because he
had been the cause of the this unexpected upheaval in that young woman’s
life. An idea came into his mind that perhaps he could partially alleviate
Suzie’s suffering.
His baggage in the Mercedez included a plastic bucket which Skimpy,
and others who saw it, took to be a repository of miscellaneous items. It
was, in fact, Snowbreeze, the small man’s portable air conditioner which
he had shoved into the car for use in out of the way places. His inquiries at
the desk revealed that a substantial quantity of ice could be obtained from
the hotel and more could be brought from a nearby market, if needed. He
hurriedly put about ten kilos of ice in the ice can of his ‘desi, air-conditioner and, holding the plastic bucket in one hand tiptoed into Suzie’s
room. He put it on a table near her bed and plugged it to the switch board.
Soon it was blowing cold air on Suzie’s face, soundlessly.
Shutting the door of the room behind him Ronie retired to bed in the
suite he shared with Skimpy. Needless to add that for both of them it was a
troubled night. They spent most of it talking about Suzie. Both of them felt
that Ronie’s old college flame was committing a rash act and must be
dissuaded from it. They decided that they would not allow her to leave
them until they had themselves reached her to Sakalu’s gates and seen her
walk cheerfully into the demon city. It might take her several days to calm
down from her present agitated state and see reason. This could spoil their
honeymoon. But it was a sacrifice they had to make for that rarest of rare
friends who had thrown away in a jiffy a bright carrier for their sake.
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Shortly before dawn they dozed off while discussing various strategies
including shock therapy that they could use to bring Suzie’s mind on the
right course. It was well after breakfast time when they woke up. Ronie
jumped out of bed with a start. Suzie must be hungry, he thought. He
hastily discarded his night clothes and changing into formal wear rushed
out. Not finding Suzie in her room he went to the lobby at the opposite
end of the building, walking through long corridors. She was not there.
Nor could he sight her in the garden or the dining room. Finally he went to
the reception hall to inquire if the lady at the counter had seen Suzie.
“Are you Mr. Ranbir Singh?”, she asked.
“Yes”.
“There is a letter for you,” she said handing him a sealed envelope.
He opened it with trembling hands. It read:
“Dearest Ronie,
You and Skimpy must forgive me for barging into your honeymoon. I do
not wish to spoil it any further. I know both of you are bent upon sending
me back to Sakalu as you do not want the ‘crime’ of ‘ruining’ my career to
rest on your conscience. Skimpy almost said as much this evening. But I
wish to assure you that if at all you two are responsible for anything in my
life it is my redemption from that Devil’s ‘paradise’. I pray to God that he
forgives me for having been a willing accomplice. I have already told you
of my plans. I am driving to Delhi in the taxi that brought us here to go
back to my home-in the backwaters of Cochin. By the time you open this
letter I shall have boarded the Trivandrum express at New Delhi railway
station.
I wish you both a glorious honeymoon and happy life together.
With all my love.
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Yours as ever
Sue.
P.S.
I have already told you that I have been working these few years in a
den of thieves. Habits die hard and I couldn’t resist the temptation of
stealing a precious item of your baggage, your Snowbreeze. Besides being
just the right thing to use in Kerala’s summer, it will be for me a keepsake
from you. I was not asleep when you entered like a thief into my room to
put Snowbreeze near my bed. It was so sweet of you. I cannot tell you
how much I was touched by your concern for me. It made all the more
imperative that I should leave you soonest before I get trapped by your
innocent snares once again.
“I had seen this plastic bucket containing the air conditioner in the
Mercedez. So I knew it belonged to you and felt no compunction in taking
it away. The place where I live is awash with ice, being a fishing town
where they use ice to preserve their daily catch from the sea. I could
operate Snowbreeze there virtually free and take it with me to work as
well.”
Ronie was all in a sweat on reading Suzie’s letter. The familiar handwriting added to the poignancy of its contents. It reminded him of the thrill
that used to run through his veins each time he received one of those
romantic notes she was fond of sending to him on her own initiative or in
reply to his copiously written love letters. It had started with her giving him
two pieces of a home-made Christmas cake with a small note. He had
responded with an effusive letter of thanks. Her long reply the next day
had begun with the words “Your letter was sweeter than my sweets”. Thus
had started an unending chain of letters. It had abruptly stopped, by mutual consent, when Ronie left college and moved on to distant city. Suzie’s
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handwritten note brought back a rush of the old sensations he had experienced with her in the halcyon days of his youth.
When a few minutes later he returned to his room Skimpy was still
lying in bed though wide awake. Ronie went close to her with outstretched
arm and handed her Suzie’s letter. She sat up and read it. Tossing it on the
pillow she stood up and asked Ronie,
“Did you put Snowbreeze in her room last night?”
“Yes, I was afraid she might faint again as she did in the morning. She
was looking so pale and exhausted. Having lived in Sakalu, a fully air
conditioned city, for so many years she will need time to return to our
world.”
“Poor Suzie! I hope she doesn’t have another fit of fainting on the train.
Had she told us she was going you could have gone with her to Cochin to
make sure she reaches home safely. This is the least we could do as a token
of our gratitude for what she has done for us.”
“You are an angel, Skimpy, This is precisely what I was thinking too,”
said Ronie completely missing the undertone of sarcasm in his brides’
highly accented phrases.
“I know she will be on our mind till we hear from her again and are
assured by her that she is well and happy”, said Skimpy softly.
“How right you are, dear?”
She drew up to her full height of five-foot-seven. Wearing just a nightie,
her long hair resting on her half exposed breasts, she shuffled her feet to
locate her chappals. Having found them she walked upto the mirror in the
wall and, after a meditative look at her image in it, turned around and said
in a gentle voice that was barely audible,
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“Let us pack up, darling, and go.”
“Sure, now that we have our Mercedez back I can take you whereever you like. But there is no hurry. Perhaps we can spend a few hours
roaming in this historic city before we proceed to Jaipur where you will
stay in a fully air conditioned hotel.”
“Ronie, you said you will take me wherever I like.”
“Yes, you name the place and I am at your service.”
“Then take me to Delhi.”
Ronie was astounded by Skimpy’s suggestion.
“But why? Our honeymoon has only just begun.”
“And ended too. I hope you will respect my sentiments and not ask me
any further questions.”
“But”
“No buts, please Ronie. My mind is made up. A honeymoon involves
two persons. It is like a bicycle drive on which you cannot proceed if one
of the wheels in punctured.”
“Which wheel?”
“In this case both perhaps.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Please don’t try to.”
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They drove back to Delhi in silence and reached home much to the
consternation of their relatives and friends. “Skimpy had suddenly taken ill
on the way. We thought it best to abondon the trip so that she could rest,”
Ronie told them. Skimpy retired to her room.
Ronie decided not to harass her with questions. He sat quietly by her
bed side reading books and newspapers. His parents and wedding guests,
who had not gone back to their homes yet, dropped in occasionally for a
few minutes and went away when they found the couple uncommunicative.
The following morning Ronie thought it best to cancel his leave and go
back to office. He was not so naïve as not to understand the cause of this
sudden fiasco in his life. Nor could he deny that his old love had flashed
back into his life with a passion more violent than the original could have
been. He knew that only time, the best healer, would cool his revived
passion for Sue and calm down Skimpy’s agitation over this new development. Perhaps what Skimpy needed was time to be left alone for the
better part of the day to arrange her thoughts and come to terms with
reality.
When Ronie returned home and entered his room with a feigned smile,
he was greeted not by Skimpy but a sealed envelope that was sitting prominently on the pillow against the bedrest.
“Not again!”, he said to himself,” I hope she hasn’t bolted too.” He
stood watching it for a minute before walking upto it, tearing it open and
reading it. It said,
“My dear Ronie,
I am flying back by the noon flight to Vishakapatnam where my father
has a large bungalow with four air conditioners. I might have stayed on and
put up with the crude device you call Snowbreeze if, instead of one, you
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had taken two units of it on our honeymoon so that on that night in Alwar
you could give one to Suzie and the other to me. But, as it happens, you
had only one and you gave it to her. I don’t blame you. Afterall God has
given each of us only one heart and he or she can pledge it to only one
person at a time.
Love
Skimpy
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Snowbreeze
Other Books by the Author
VANALOORE
SHINING
A fantasy describing a
mythical city of the
Ramayana era, a marvel of
Vedic science resembling
21st century Bangalore.
All the adult rakshasas in Lanka having been killed along with Ravana,
their king, by Ram and his Vanara army, their young, sex-starved widows
set out for neighbouring islands in search of men they could woo and
marry. The leader of this romantic expedition is an intrepid princess of the
royal family who would stop at nothing in her quest for a true lover. She
finds one at last in a member of the enemy race. Their unholy union leads
to cataclysmic events culminating in the founding of a new empire, with its
own civilization, on the ruins of the old.
Essentially a graphic account of the thrilling adventures of the daring
rakshasi princess and her equally brave Vanara lover, ‘Vanaloore Shining’ is
also a reminder that Ravana’s imperialist Lanka has been an ever present
reality throughout our history and still is. Perhaps this is how its creator,
sage-poet Valmiki, envisioned it.
THROUGH THE EAGLE’S
EYE A Fairy Tale for
Young and Old
“I shall not marry you, Nakul,
until with your help I have discovered the secret code through
which residents of this colony
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communicate with birds and animals,” Mary tells her boy-friend while
they are sitting by a mountain stream in a remote snow-capped valley of
Kashmir during their college vacations in the summer of 1944. Nakul is
stunned but undaunted.
Ever eager to smoothen the course of
true love the gods of the hallowed vale
bless their unique mission. The lovers are
summoned through a pigeon and rushed
off on eagles’ wings on a quest that takes
them to strange places including a miledeep crater in the Earth and the forbidden terraces and halls of the Viceroy’s
palace, seat of the British Empire in India.
THROUGH THE EAGLE’S EYE describes their experiences during this exotic journey, in an eagle-flown aerial
chariot commanded by an ape, the like of
which no man, woman or child has ever
underaken -- in fact or fiction.
While children will enjoy this book for its thrills adults will perhaps take
it as an illustration of how language has shaped our thoughts to create the
atmosphere of hate and violence that surrounds us. The author cites the
illustration of a less violent species in the Ramayana and wonders whether
Hanuman was the offspring of sage Valmiki’s frustration with the human
race?
In a moment of deep anguish on the killing of a male pigeon while it
was in the embrace of its female partner the poet uttered the following
‘shloka’ “Fowler! Listen to my words. May peace of mind never be yours, For
you have killed this innocent bird in his act of innocent love.”
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Snowbreeze
Brahma, the Creator of the universe, appeared before the Rishi
and said “May this sloka bring you glory. May this be the foundation
of the world’s greatest epic -- the story of Ram.”
Was this sublime Sanskrit couplet, born of Valmiki’s all embracing
compassion and blessed by Brahma himself, a curse upon a mere
hunter or was it a prophet’s malediction upon the entire race of
man? Remember, out of this God-inspired poem was born Hanuman.
‘Through the Eagle’s Eye’ delves into the phenomenon behind
Valmiki’s agony which led him to envision a new race of Vanaras,
half-man-half-ape, epitomised by Hanuman.
Manikpur Junction
Published by Hemkunt
Manikpur Junction is a novel describing the adventures of an English
girl of Swedish origin during World
War-II, in British ruled Gandhian
India where she is tracing the roots
of Hitler’s Aryan fixation in a unique
brand of ‘sexual fascism’.
Deprived of male company for six months Mary Jacobson, a high spirited Oxford scholar on a long study tour of India in 1943, takes a liking to
Nakul Pal, a young fellow passenger who invites her to have tea with him
in the dining car of a mail train at Allahabad. She follows him effortlessly
from one compartment to another, as if impelled by a divine force, to cope
with unexpected happenings during the three-hour journey into Vindhya
mountains.
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There she finds herself stymied over a trivial issue by a party of tribal
pilgrims. These are people who live shut away in a time capsule of their
own. She is told that such segregation between communities is essential for
the preservation of India’s pre-historic Aryan dharma which uses selective
breeding amongst humans as its principal instrument of governance.
In this isolationist environment she sees in Nakul a long lost cousin
whose friendship she must nurse and cultivate with her feminine arts. On
his part the young man spares no pains to prove himself worthy of her
favours, what if it involves blackmailing a plenipotentiary, getting bumped
in the head by the police and Subhash Bose’s guerillas and being fired at
by soldiers under British command ?
Mary has to tread cautiously in a land where everybody looks and
behaves like a suspicious character in detective fiction. The British suspect
her of being a German spy. Orthodox Brahmins attack her views on the
Hindu caste system which she dubs as the Aryan sexual hierarchy. They
want her expelled from the country. Native students and teachers amongst
whom she lives shun her as a member of the ruling White race, thus
applying to her the infallible Indian caste laws of untouchability in reverse.
This weird setting makes her friendship with Nakul all the more exciting as both of them make silent allowances for their vastly different social,
cultural and academic backgrounds. Each moment they spend together
brings new surprises.
Mary is adventure loving, even reckless at times, Nakul polite, timid
and cautious, yet never unwilling to risk his all to help Mary in critical
situations. This is perhaps the right mix for the alchemy of romance to work
its silent magic on their hearts and minds as they drift along in the swift
current of Time, the ultimate arbiter of their destiny.
Manikpur Junction does not focus on a theme though it seems anchored on the Aryan caste hierarchy which fascinated Hitler. Its main
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Snowbreeze
thrust is on recreating the atmosphere of pre-Independence India, touching all religious communities and classes from humble destitutes to Maharajas, from bohemians to dedicated churchmen and Gandhian social workers.
Humorous and light reading, with never a dull moment, the novel
refrains from preaching any ideology since the quaint world of the Nineteen – Forties it replicates is itself a message. It reads like a fairy tale from
another planet –– a country which was so different from today’s India,
before the creation of Pakistan—less noisy and belligerent but more humane and at the same time exciting and bubbling with romance. It is a
thing you can find only in a society which is at once multi-religious and
multi-cultural.
As the reader wades leisurely through this 1,80,000- word tale of intercontinental romance, he has ample opportunity to slowly sink into it and
feel himself a part of the world of his immediate ancestors.
Spiritual Awakening in
Gandhi and other
Indian Saints
R.D. Ranade
This fifty-year old rare book by another writer is included here due to
its relevance to Snowbreeze. It was discovered, edited and produced by
M.B. Lal, in collaboration with Dr. M.N. Deshpande, to save it from becoming extinct. Arun Gandhi, a distinguished Gandhian and grandson of
the Mahatma, has written a scintillating foreword for it while his equally
illustrious son, Tushar Gandhi, has done its colourful multi-religious cover
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design. Dr. Despande, a former Director General of Archeological Survey
of India and an ardent disciple of R.D. Ranade(1886-1957), has written a
life sketch of this great philosopher-saint of the last century.
Published by the Sarva Seva Sangh of Varanasi, noted publishers of
Gandhian literature, ‘Spiritual Awakening in Gandhi and other Indian Saints’
goes deeper into the soul of Gandhi than any similar publication.
In his introduction to the book M.B. Lal has dwelt on the twin pillars
of Gandhian philosophy, soul force and charkha, highlighted by Ranade.
Gandhi never tired of claiming that in his battle for India’s liberation from
British rule he was armed with a weapon more powerful than the atom
bomb. His weapon was ‘Ram Nam’, constant inner chant of the name of
God, through which he invoked his soul-force that gave him the strength to
stand against the brute might of the imperial power. “Without it I am a
cypher,” he said.
In the charkha, which became the emblem of the national tri-colour
flag during the freedom movement, Gandhi saw a synthesis of India’s political, economic and spiritual goals. Through it he challenged the soul
crushing gigantism of multi-national corporations of the day, one of which
(the East India Company) had enslaved and ruled India for over a century,
as well as the political authority of the mightiest empire on earth behind
them.
Gandhi visualized free India as a nation of self-reliant village clusters, a
bee-hive of small industries where every house was a small factory, producing a variety of basic needs of the people, thus giving each person
enough physical and spiritual space and freedom to develop his talents
according to his own inclination. To Gandhi freedom had no meaning if
did not enable man to tend his free soul as much as his body.
Snowbreeze, an entirely home made product, takes its cue from that
dream of the Mahatma.
***