ગુજરાતી
English
“One by one, the dozen odd menials came forward customarily to voice a few words of regret, nostalgia, repentance and sometimes even solace and consolation. All of them shed tears adeptly, almost automatically. Kartikeya wondered if they had some unseen knobs behind their ears, which when twisted, opened the valves of their tear ducts. There was first a tear from the right eye and then the left. These were real, salty tears, as real as the salt in seawater.”
Such is the predicament of Kartikeya Kukreja, the protagonist in the book, as he haplessly looks on at the show of pseudo-grief while preparing for yet another transfer. ‘Pyramid of Virgin Dreams’ is an engaging, if sometimes tongue-in-cheek account of life in the bureaucracy with all its farces, inefficiencies and servitude. It is refreshingly candid and humorous, told by Mittra, a bureaucrat himself. Set against the backdrop of mundane circuit houses, government-allotted residences and dull offices, the author comically narrates how the bureaucracy has the enigmatic capacity to draw the protagonist into its vortex and have him conveniently entangled in it.
Several characters, including Kartikeya’s immediate family, his college sweetheart and his very own conscience by the name of ‘Selfmusing’, find a place in the narrative. Sometimes they haunt Kartikeya in his dreams, but every time he wakes up, he finds that reality continues to remain as quirky as it always was. By the time he transforms from being a carefree boy to a typical Saheb, Kartikeya realises without remorse that much of his idealism has disappeared within the labyrinthine bureaucratic pyramid. But will this pyramid also devour his one true love now that he has found it? Kartikeya is uncertain of the answer.
In the witty and circumstantial accounts of his early years, the author through Kartikeya provides a glimpse into the world of hierarchies, promotions, fawning subordinates and vacuous privileges that accompany growing status. They received humouring by idle cops when these chhota sahebs were taken for their first illegal hunt into the woods. Over the course of the hunting expedition, Kartikeya and his friend, the two boys, in their bratty innocence discuss their fathers’ promotions. Gagan, the young son of an IPS officer explains to Kartikeya how the collapsible windshield of the police Jonga ensured that the khaki uniform gathered dust in less than 15 minutes, thus enabling his father to proclaim his hard work. “‘That is how,’ Gagan unveiled, ‘my Papa reached the level of a Deputy SP.’ He cooed, ‘And now, after the promotion, he has a white official Ambassador with closed airtight windowpanes and an orange light on top, though just a blinking light and not the rotating type as yet. Still, it is quite comfortable!’”
At school too, officers’ children were the privileged ones – the ones to get roomy classrooms when the small-town school had only three rooms. Kartikeya recounts how this Government Model High School, far from being model or high, had phenomenally versatile teachers, where between them, the complete staff of two teachers could teach English, Hindi, Science, Social Studies, Mathematics, Craft and PT. English poetry was taught in the vernacular mode where even Wordsworth’s ‘Three Years She Grew’ was narrated in the Punjabi language. However, some lines were conveniently omitted due to the limited translating capabilities of the teacher, and these, the teacher would say were irrelevant and wouldn’t come in the exams anyway. Such exam logic, thought Kartikeya, -helped abridge even the sonnets quite well, reducing them to a good level of comfort and comprehension, thereby facilitating cramming.
A part of Kartikeya’s growing-up years was spent in the small, rustic town of Varsa. During Operation Flood, Kartikeya’s bureaucrat father, Pratap had a technocratic job thrust upon him when he was transferred to Varsa to look after a milk plant. This obscure place, through decades of its existence, had steadfastly refused to pulsate or grow. It was much like the Himalayas, remaining enwrapped in a static, frozen, motionless state, sedating even its new entrants like the Kukreja family quite successfully. Although detesting every moment of his job, Pratap managed to grasp the easier inanities of milk production, to the extent that he even felt confident conversing with the white Danish experts who were visiting the plant. ‘Whose claim to fame,’ he would confide to Lingaswamy, his colleague, ‘is the breeding of cows with extra large udders, and the designing of white steel milking machines with vulgar grabs that clutch and jerk those extra-large udders.’ The milky existence, on the other hand, suited Kartikeya and his brother just fine. They found a cosy play area in the cold storage where they could merrily while away their afternoons playing catch-catch and similar childhood games with butter-balls, cheese and other derivatives of milk.
Kartikeya cast off his semi-rural moorings when he entered college in Chandigarh. By the time he had moved on to train for the Administrative Services at the Academy in Mussourie, Kartikeya had already experienced the thrill of lusting and the trauma of being spurned by his first love. Mittra writes, “Kartikeya’s maiden experience of sitting thigh to thigh with his pretty classmates on wooden benches brought in inexplicable excitement. The monotonous drone of lectures did little to distract Kartikeya from imagining with heightened sideways concentration, the kind and quality of body the quivering neighbourhood thigh would lead to, if he were to be transformed into a male ant and crawl upwards, slowly: up, up, and up.” Later, once Kartikeya finally finds his true love, Lulla, his only mentor on matters of love, advises him, “’My policy on girls says keep all options open; if not this one, then the next one. If still not, then the next to next one, the next to next to next one, and so on. A man’s heart is after all, quite large. In fact, the larger, the better!’”
Training at the Academy was physically gruelling with the freezing early morning jogs that only served to benumb the brains. Kartikeya’s batch mates reasoned that while civil servants were not supposed to use their brains in the face of political interference over the next 30 years, the neighbouring faujis had to be effectively jerked into psychic nothingness to confront enemy bullets. Jogging long and hard day after day along the ascending, serpentine hilly paths thus served that purpose – of benumbing their brains. Despite the congenial air of camaraderie that pervades the training, the Academy also brought with it important lessons in solitude. Cadre-related anxiety eclipsed virtually everything else. As one of the faculty put it, “‘So, you see, for most of us, an inconvenient cadre means banishment for a span exceeding twice the period of Lord Rama’s wanderings in the wilderness, which was just fourteen years of exile.’”
Soon, before he realises it, Kartikeya finds himself having metamorphosed into an IAS officer. Once a Saheb, he has to contend with his wife, two highly charged, energetic kids and his own conscience as he grapples with his climbing career graph and transferable postings. Mittra humorously illustrates the protagonist’s plight, “Kartikeya hurried over his daily bathroom rituals. He browsed through the newspaper while seated on the pot, the most secure seat where no one could shake him off. He found a caricature of himself displayed in the newspaper, drawn by a sub-talented, two-bit artist. His recent transfer to Sachivalaya had made him newsworthy. He felt like a puppet that was dangled in front of the toilet-seated public by the colossal hands of the media, to be loudly and freely guffawed at from the top and bottom by the egesting squatters.”
As the book concludes, Kartikeya, quite by accident, stumbles upon his first love – Revati – the girl he was smitten by in his college days. Both of them are well-settled in their own lives, but Kartikeya still feels irresistibly attracted to this now grown woman. The meeting is fleeting yet they each feel the palpable chemistry between them. He is torn between his feelings for Revati and the very public life that he leads. Kartikeya tries to return to his routine life after that fateful meeting with Revati but finds himself unable to do so. He finally prepares to take the plunge and pursue his love – the one thing that he knows for certain, and what he has yearned for all his life. But here too, he finds that fate has other plans.
