Shiv Narayan Katha

 

My mother was the best raconteur I have ever come across in life.  She used to narrate lively anecdotes that would come out of her repertoire as vivaciously as the video streaming happens these days. My penchant for nostalgia often takes me back to those childhood stories and I share those with my family, just to further the chain of those memories for the next generation. One such story is that of Shiv Narayan and his trip to Rameswaram.

While working for Defence Accounts department, my father had a crack at the UPSC interview for setting up a new office of the Employees Provident Fund department at Kanpur. This was a new concept then and they were yet to establish their offices across the country. My father was the first one to set that up in Kanpur and then hired all the lower level staff locally. Being a small setup in those days, the employees moved closely with our family – which at that time consisted only of my parents and the elder sister. Even after my father moved back to his parent organization after completing his deputation, the connect continued.

My earliest memory of Shiv Narayan was the time when he used to come to our house at some monthly frequency. He used to be a watchman at the PF office and probably was amongst the first ones hired by my father. He would come and sit only at the doorstep or would quickly move to the balcony. Will do some dusting there on his own, will chat with my mother – sharing some information about how the people at PF office were doing. My mother would know many of those folks even after a gap of a decade since my father had left that organization. He will eat something and then sleep in the balcony for a while. My mother will serve him tea at 4 PM. And as he sipped the tea from the saucer with a roaring slurp, his long unkempt moustache will float in the saucer and that made quite a sight for me. He would then leave after bidding a ‘Ram-Ram’.

The discussions would range from the news about some Agarwal, Nigam, Pinge, Shrivastava or Tiwari – their families, their promotions and at times their conduct in office, which by that time had attained notoriety for ineptitude and corruption – to our studies, our schools, the difference between a PhD doctorate, that my sister was pursuing and the doctorate in medicine etc. I was too young to comprehend much of that but enjoyed the gossips nevertheless.

Shiv Narayan hailed from a small village near Orai, a town near Kanpur. He was not educated but would have been a literate per the government criteria. He had a strong desire to make a trip to Rameswaram for religious reasons. A very simple man’s simple dream. So, on one of their planned visits to the native down south, my parents decided to take him along and help him fulfil his long-cherished desire. It seems, on the way at Itarsi – where the train stopped for a long duration, he got a bit adventurous and got off the train to see the station. When the train started and he did not come in, my parents got worried. They thought he would have got into another coach and might join them at the next station – as the train did not have the vestibule between two coaches in those days.

At Nagpur, when there was no trace of Shiv Narayan, my father went to the Station Master, narrated the incident to him, showed him Shiv Narayan’s ticket that he was holding and requested him to send the details to the Itarsi Station Master. A telegram was sent with full details of the person and the ticket number etc. and my parents proceeded with their journey. In today’s mobile-phone dominated world, this sounds too primitive.

After reaching Chennai, my father made daily trips to the Central Station, expecting Shiv Narayan to appear from one of the trains coming from Itarsi but he didn’t succeed. After 3-4 days, one morning, a person knocked at my grandparents’ doors. He didn’t know anything but Hindi and my grandfather wouldn’t know Hindi. But Shiv Narayan saw his steel trunk kept at the portico and conveyed his identify through a sign language. My parents were very much there in the house and were too happy and finally relieved to see him safe. It seems, he got the telegram delivered to him by the Itarsi Station Master and he showed the same all through the journey – with his ticket number and my grand father’s address printed on it – and made it all the way to our house.

My parents then happily moved to our village at Kumbakonam and then my father took him to Rameswaram for his much cherished darshan of the God and the holy dips in the 21 teerthams. And all through my childhood, he had always quoted this trip to Rameswaram as his lifetime achievement and that he would always remain indebted to my parents for making that happen.

Reflecting on it today, I am amazed that those were such simple and easy times when there were no communication links like we have today and yet a person without a ticket, lost in a crowd at an unknown place, carrying very little money, could get help from all the people en-route to reach a house in a city where people did not speak his language. No railway employee harassed him on the way, no policeman took advantage of his situation and no fellow passenger exploited his vulnerability.

Shiv Narayan kept visiting us until I was in college with the same enthusiasm, albeit with reduced frequency, as he grew older and was not keeping good health. Later he passed away in the same servant quarters at the PF office. Not sure who informed us about that but I remember my mother going over there to pay her last respects before his family shifted the body to Orai.

Remembering that simple man with simplest of the desires from a small village near Orai and thanking my parents to have helped him fulfil his desire of traveling 2500 Kilometers down south to have the divine darshan at the holy Rameswaram.