Mr Kalboorgie's Mornings

What’s the best way to start a morning? The short answer could be “don’t”, but the worthier possibilities are infinite. You could jump on your treadmill or your part time help, smell your roses or parathas, read or watch the news, hear the neighbour’s parakeet or his wife’s pranic breathing. But of all the myriad ways that the millions mark their mornings Mr Kalboorgie has to be unique. He spends his first hours listening to the chatter of the schoolgirls.

His society is a giggle away from the school wall of Ahlcon International School. I fell into step with him last evening at the gym. We talked of strength training Vs Cardio and, water cuts and power cuts in East Delhi. I asked him where he lived. “Just by the school,” he said. And then the soft spoken Mr Kalboorgie volunteers the information which so clearly makes his mornings come alive.

Now that he has retired, the school’s routine measures out his longer hours at home .The bell marking at the end of each class competes with the cyclic gong’s of the society’s temple. His house is too far away to hear the priest’s intonations, let alone the splutter of oil lamps. All he gets is the banging of shut of desks, the screeching back of chairs, and yes the incessant banter. But Mr Kalboorgie is not complaining. Quite the contrary. For these bring vicarious activity into his unwilling leisure, and scatter his depression like the brightly colored sweets which so often splatter the play ground’s dun-colored dust.

The sounds that Mr Kalboorgie most looks forward to are those he heard even when his bank job took him out of the school’s decibel range every morning. He has lived in this quaint, low slung society flat ever since he got married, and later, among the flotsam voices drifting up, he caught the marigold brightness of his own little poppet’s lilting prattle.

Now she’s just had her first daughter, and Mr Kalboorgie has collected his PF. So much has changed but not the early part of his day. The kiddies still chatter, as they breathlessly unburden themselves of all that’s happened since the end of school yesterday, desperately trying to squeeze its recounting before the start of school today. The ‘mugpot’ loudly revising her ‘poetries’ stands no chance against the quotidian excitements of girlhood. “Eh Binnie, it’s all your fault; you kept doing najar to my new pink capri’s and now our bai has gone and burnt them. Stup-pid!Oh god. I’ve forgotten my badge; now again I’ll get detention. I’m really feddup up of Aishu’s showing off. Only her papa goes abroad or what? ”.

Aamir in RDB, Bachchan in KBC, Salman in jeans or jail, Mr Kalboorgie keeps track of all matters of compelling importance via the ecstasies and anxieties wafting up in ebb and swell. Petulant tantrum, precocious assurance, the perfidies of best friend, and boy-friend. How mortified would would little Ferzie be to know that an unknown uncle was party to her whispered secrets. Cynics may put Freudian interpretations to this eavesdropping. But the gentle Mr Kalboorgie would’nt give a toss of a ponytail. Nothing can ruin his mornings, for it starts in such a delightful way.