16 January 2013, 10:50 AM IST
I went for the medical test I had to pass in order to get my first job, with an as yet-unlaunched youth magazine under the editorship of Desmond Doig, of the Statesman newspaper in Calcutta. It was 1966.
I've always been terrified of doctors, hiding needles and enema tubes behind their backs. The company's doctor was not reassuring. He looked like a patient whom he himself had failed to cure. With icy fingers he put electrodes on my chest. He studied the cardiograph. "You have a bad heart condition," he said. "But if you come to me I can cure it. No? All right, then. I'll have to fail you."
And he did. Desmond phoned my mother.
When I got home, my mother, my sister Hemu and Bunny looked at me as though I was going to have a heart attack any moment. I told them I wasn't about to die just yet. They didn't seem to believe me.
We had to get a second opinion about my heart. It wasn't anymore a question of my job, but of my life. Or rather, my death. Was my heart really going to peg out? Notwithstanding the 22 chin-ups, the 80 push-ups I did every day? Or because of all that exercise?
Desmond made an appointment for me to see his friend, Dr John Watkin. Dr John looked like a genial bartender who was his own best customer. He offered me a cigarette. "Serviceable deltoids you have on you. Do weights then, do you?" he said. I didn't even notice when the electrodes were applied. The cardiograph came out fine. There was nothing wrong with my heart. Cancel the funeral, I said to Bunny. Idiot, she said to me.
She sniffed a tear, in relief. At the end of the month, I got the first salary of my life. Rs 350. Minus Rs 28 as the monthly charge of the subsidised lunch in The Statesman dining room.
With Papa, I went to the New Market. More than a hundred years old it was still called the New Market, as it is today. It was like Ali Baba's cave; in it you could get anything you wanted.
I bought a bottle of Blue Grass scent for Bunny, a shawl for my mother. In a Kashmiri shop I saw a silver bracelet which I thought Hemu would like. "How much is that bracelet in the window?" I asked.
"Rs 55 only," said the salesman.
"Bargain," whispered Papa.
"I'll give you 45," I said.
The salesman put the bracelet back in the window.
"Walk away," said Papa. "He'll call us back." We walked away. No one called after us. I walked back.
The salesman took it out of the window and put it on the counter.
"55, right?" I said.
"I made a mistake. It's 65 only, not 55 only," said the salesman.
I opened my mouth to argue. The salesman began to put the bracelet back into the window.
"65 only," I said, and put the money down. That was the last time in my life I've ever tried to bargain. I realised I couldn't afford it.
I walked home with Bunny's Blue Grass, my mother's shawl, my sister's bracelet. It was the first time in my life that I'd ever bought something for someone with money that I'd earned myself.
I was 20 years and 10 days old. I felt like a million.
Dollars, not years.
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