Sunil profiles, Nirmal, the storekeeper of the museum where he works. Despite the humdrum of life, his proclivity for the pen is not all the incongruous.
Pointing to the rickety old typewriter with its spools and springs agape, Nirmal said to me with quiet pride, “I’ve got all my stories out of this.” Nirmal was alluding to his literary creations, the nine novels he has written in the last quarter of a century.
When I first heard of Nirmal’s proclivity for the pen, the fact had struck me as highly incongruous. Wouldn’t his humdrum job as the keeper of the storeroom of the museum where we work serve to keep the muses away? It was hard for me to imagine how one’s daily preoccupation with managing provisions and handling raw stock could facilitate the conception of plots and characters. But then this was before I became friends with Nirmal.
Nirmal writes his stories in Hindi, the native language of north India. Describing situations and relationships with sensitivity and candor, he mainly explores themes from pastoral life. I guess this is his way of staying in touch with the rural ethos. I make this presumption because I know that Nirmal grew up in a small village by the side of the Ganga River. My friend often speaks to me of his childhood home, painting word –pictures of bright blue skies and golden harvests of wheat and fireflies in the night. A city-dweller, I can only enjoy these experiences from afar, like a moviegoer seeing on celluloid waves washing up palm fringed beaches.
Like any hard-working author who hopes to get published, Nirmal has been trying to get a break in the Hindi literary circuit. “It’s like this,” Nirmal explains, “There has been a serious erosion of the home readership because of the coming of video and cable television. The growth of popular Hindi magazines has also contributed to narrow the market for novels. The travel segment is where I’ve pinned my hopes. More and more people seem to be browsing railroad bookshops for the kind of stories I write.”
Haven’t the dry, unfruitful years of endeavour blunted his enthusiasm? I asked my friend this once while we shared lunch inside the cool, cavernous shed that serves as his storeroom. Nirmal was quiet for some moments, looking thoughtfully at the leafy tamarind tree outside the window. His answer, when it came, was deep and clear as fresh spring water. “Yes, I do want to see my manuscripts in the press. But I guess I couldn’t have carried on for so long if it had been my sole concern.”
Strangely, it is Nirmal’s attitude towards his other concern, his ‘humdrum’ storeroom chores, that gives me an insight into how he’s able to handle his literary aspirations with such maturity. I find Nirmal’s absorption with the nitty-gritty of his daily work – be it ordering a new batch of furniture, getting a faulty air conditioner repaired, or issuing me stationery – as complete as the concentration with which he clacks out a story idea on his vintage typewriter. Nirmal loves his storeroom, its unruliness, its smells of machine oil and paper and packets of washing soap.
Walk into Nirmal’s storeroom any day, and you’ll be confronted with bags and cartons filling the vast ground space around his table. A cyclostyle perches atop a large wooden crate. Half a dozen fans lie huddled together in one corner. Metal racks rise up to the ceiling. Nirmal’s table, with its ping pong size surface, is home to numerous unwanted utilities such as old locks, brass doorknobs gone out of fashion, an assortment of burnt-out electrical switches, and other discards periodically phased out of the museum.
Nirmal is forever trying to retrieve useful bits and pieces from the motley collection on his table. So I know that the unaffected copper screws and pins will be assiduously removed from the fused switches and put away in little plastic packets for future use, and the rusted locks will be cajoled with oil in the hope of getting the levers to move again. Meanwhile, the doorknobs serve as convenient paperweights.
My friend’s obsession with resuscitating scrap surprises me no end. How does it mix, I wonder, with his other passion? Nirmal, of course, is quite bemused by my incomprehension. In fact, he tells me that his dual preoccupations are not as different as they seem. He says, “Isn’t it a little like writing, working at all this jumble? Either way, you’ve got to make sense out of confusion.”
Now, I’ve known my friend long enough to be sure that his lighthearted explanation is no mere play of wit. Somewhere along the way, he has discovered the secret of reconciling the incompatibles of literature and trivia.
And I have come to further believe that Nirmal’s ‘secret’ is bound up with a deeper conciliation, where thoughts of future rewards have been subsumed by small everyday joys, such as twisting a vagrant piece of wire into a candle stand or describing the graceful dance of peacocks after the rains.
Pix from Net
By
By
By
By
Wonderful, insightful portrait. There is a tradition of writers holding blue-collar ‘day jobs to pay the rent and keep them grounded in real life’s challenges. Dickens was a factory worker, Jack Kerouc a dishwasher. So Nirmal is in very good company !