My friend from Indore
K S S Pillai
When I came to know that my friend Kapil was no more, I felt guilty for not remaining in contact with him more often. We had parted company years ago and had exchanged letters regularly in the beginning. Then letters were replaced by telephonic talks.
As time passed, these contacts had become less frequent, though we would wish each other on our birthdays. The only saving grace was that I had returned to Indore a few years ago with the main purpose of meeting my past colleagues in the LIC Divisional Office there. All of them had retired from service, and a few had left this world.
Indore was the first place to which I migrated from my home state of Kerala. My elder brother was employed there. As it had several famous colleges that conducted morning and evening classes, he had asked me to join him. A friend of his had come to Kerala, and I was to go with him. The trains had steam engines with hardly any reserved accommodation. We had to change trains at three places to reach Indore. By then, my body and clothes had turned black with coal soot.
As the region was once ruled by the Holkar dynasty, the city had a considerable Maratha population. It was a clean city, and I am not surprised that it has been adjudged the cleanest Indian city continuously for the last five years.
It was in 1961 that I joined LIC at Indore. I was posted in the Salary Savings Scheme section and Kapil was the first person that came into contact with me there. He was a few years older than me. The section head had given me some work and asked Kapil to guide me. I had liked him instantly, and the relationship remained strong till the end.
Indore had several textile mills then and his father worked in one. Being an LIC agent, Kapil would contact potential customers before and after office hours. He was a glib talker, and convincing people about the need to insure their lives, particularly in the presence of the dependents, must have been easy for him. He needed the extra money, he told me, as his father’s income was meagre and it was Kapil who ran the house.
Within a short period, he had become a close friend of mine. At regular intervals, there used to be tea parties after office hours. Being good at bargaining, he was the one who was always entrusted with the task of shopping for eatables. He would ask me to accompany him.
Shopkeepers would give us samples of different sweets. By the time the shopping was over, we would have tasted several varieties of sweets. Later I came to know that the shopkeepers used to outsmart him. As he was a regular customer, they knew his habit of bargaining and would inflate the price at first and bring it down later to satisfy him. Shops were not required to display the pricelist those days.
Though we were close friends, once it so happened that both of us had contested for the same post in the employees’ union and he beat me with a huge margin.
After some years, I had applied for a lecturer’s post in Gujarat and was called for an interview. A few days after the interview, I got a letter in Gujarati from the education department of Gujarat. Kapil took me to a Gujarati friend, who informed me that it was an appointment letter, posting me to the Agriculture College in Navsari.
When I missed his call on my last birthday, I called him on his landline number, as was the usual practice. He was in a precarious condition. He was suffering from some form of cancer and had difficulty in speaking, though he wanted to go on talking.
After a few days, I called him again and got the message that the number no longer existed. Alarmed, I called a mutual friend, who told me of his demise a couple of weeks ago.
(The author is a retired professor of English. A regular contributor to ‘The Kashmir Vision’, his articles and short stories have appeared in various national and international publications)
