I know there are those who can tell you why the heat wave lasted just till election Sunday. There was an overhang of dry air that came in from the west, and the cloud formation just took 48 hours longer than what the meteorological simulations had suggested while the local topology aligned with that small trough in pressure led to an enervating two weeks. At this point of time some statistics will be thrown in to support such gobbledygook. But simple, homespun north Calcutta truth be told, they’ve got it all wrong.
It was the candidates. Nothing, I mean, nothing else that you and I could have thought up and conspired, dreamed or designed could have made these folks, from one party and the other, walk the streets and made them sweat just the way we wanted them to sweat. I know that is not the way we want them to puff and pant. We want better roads, well-lit streets, water and our leaders close at hand heaving away a hurdle or two for us. Since that ain’t happening in a hurry, as it is said among those with coloured hair, it had to be the heat wave for relief and revenge. I, for one, was quite happy seeing them perspire like labs or poms or poodles, or whatever breed you quite prefer the sweating kind to belong. The Germans, my friend with two degrees from yonder tells me, have a word for it, schadenfreude. Enjoyment at the suffering of others. I think of it more in terms of just desserts, except that since it was all before the elections should we not call it the just hors d’oeuvres. Or may be it indeed was just desserts since those calling the shots have been sent packing.
I had my inkling about this. No. It was not any dipstick survey that I conducted or my mid-night walk around town figuring where the booth jamming brothers were headed. It was more of an epiphany. That instant flash of truth that opens up before you. And it happened the moment I heard one of the mayor wannabe’s had fallen into a pothole and had been stricken with a cast. Just that moment I knew he was the chosen one. After all what better qualification could the mayor of our city have than to have fallen in a pot-hole, bitten into his lips as the bone-doctor put him together again, and then having hobbled his way through vote getting pleas. Imagine the memory of that pain coursing through the veins every time an old woman or a young woman, or any woman or man, is hit by a bus trying to swerve past a pothole. Instead of all those bouquets, I plan to send a laminated photograph of the candidate in cast and crutches to the mayor. Every time you take a decision think, could it just be that your action in some way would have prevented that cast.
But I know a thing and a half about the beliefs of the new mayor. If he doesn’t think that my mind is addled, he is likely to put down my epiphany to my Hindu upbringing or my Catholic education or my general fondness for opiates. But if you withhold disbelief like all true denizens of this town, I am sure you would agree that only a collar bone fracture or a mild concussion could have helped the other mayoral candidates. Failing which the fate of the elections had been sealed.
So here we are wishing for a better city where old folks are not battered and young folks don’t plan their abductions, those beyond the pale have water and those within it have their wine, and when the elections come in five years another candidate having lived them in the comfort of squabbles, factions, egos and ideologies, doesn’t fall into a manhole or a pothole. And I am saved from my epiphanies.
