Malvika's Ramblings

Maurya

“Do you follow such stories?” asks uncle, as we recline on the sofa watching TV, hot tea mugs in hand on a Sunday morning. His daughter is still sleeping, as are my other three flat-mates. Aunty is going around looking at the unclean fridge, lack of pestle and mortar to smash ginger with. She is looking around at stuff that wrings her heart, but she cannot complain about to her daughter on this short happy-family weekend. The daughter, when awake, tinkles endlessly with delightful talk. This is a short break of sane desultory, quiet leisure. Or so I think.
“No uncle” I say, as I look at a kid with lots of face powder, playing the young Chandragupt Maurya on TV, on a windswept temple porch, thinking aloud – Oh what dilemma is this? Caught between my duty to the state and my mother’s wishes, what should I choose?
Ok.
5 minutes later uncle says, “You know people who are in administration, those who govern others, should know history. They should know how empires came up, how they fell. How masses of people were mobilised…”
I add “Yes, like a leaf should know what tree…”
“No, you are not getting what I am saying. There is difference between a worker and a manager. Now these kings and all, they were managers. Great people. Why is a manager more important than worker?”
I try “Because he gets things done.”
“No, you are not getting what I am saying. A manager, he is the one who gets things done by other people. Takes care that there is maximum efficiency. And if everyone does his best, you know how it helps?”
“There is …”
“No. It helps in building the nation. You get me? The Nation. I have seen people becoming big. How people just stay workers or become CEOs, and directors. I have told people who have started business without having the mind for it, get back to your job. And talented people, who are wasting themselves at a desk, I have told them to start their business. And then, what a meteoric climb I have seen! Come, get a paper-pen and I will show you.”
As I spring up, and Chandragupt Maurya’s internal conflicts are put on mute, Aunty enters and says – “He is never so free usually, to be explaining stuff like this. The rest of the girls should be up as well."
“Well, those who are up shall gain”, I add with a sparkle, since we are in the mood to build nations, seize the day today anyway.
Aunty thinks of girls who are dozing late into the afternoon, unaware of the refrigerator’s inventory, unaware of the maid’s comings and goings. At this rate of activity, what fine careers can they carve? What kind of wives would they make? She laments quietly, as a girl rolls in bed, enjoying the snug bed, so far away from the constant Mumbai drizzle. She rolls over yet again, cushioned by pillows, so far from her daily office chair that forces her to do calisthenics. Her arm dangles over the bedside like a liana in Amazon forests. She curls her rosy, cosy toes no longer soaked in Ghatkopar’s flooded street, occasionally twitched by a live wire, or soft with furry flotsam.
Armed with paper and pencil Uncle explains how a person should divide his jobs. How common logic says spend forty per cent of your capital and keep sixty as profit, but he says spend sixty per cent and keep forty, in order to hook better and better clients. I nod, understand. How could I not? He explains the same point and many others, underlining the figure written on the page, then ticking it, then encircling it. I assure him - I get it. I do. I make a mental note, to apply the very practical wisdom Monday onwards.
Maybe I should go meet my Dad. This was the kind of stuff he told me when I was in school, when I lived along the lines of hard sense, so that life always seemed like it was in the correct place.
The maid interrupts to hand me three hundred rupees found in my pants. The doorbell rings and the pest control guy asks for a suitable date to come gas dead all that Mumbai rains threw up. Do you know, that’s also how they find and get rid of Mumbai lovers, from the mangrove thickets near the seashore?
And perhaps uncle waits, for the end of this Mumbai trip of late afternoons and the ascent of the Maurya dynasty. Waits for the morning when he can begin the morning building fortune.
(The image is the first one that Google threw up on searching the blog title)