Nothing lifts my diorrhea ravaged spirits like the sight of trees, hills and big grey clouds on the horizon. After six weeks in a dusty, hot city India was beginning to lose some of its allure (staring at the opposite wall of the bathroom for considerable lengths of time for a few days will do that for you) But even a few hours in the greener and pleasanter north has done a lot to kick start the last few weeks of round the world daring do. And also taught me that, however many discussions on farming techniques I've had with the Colonel over the past few weeks, how little I've really learnt about Indians.
Pretty grey clouds with much pretty plinky plonky rain inside of them. Look, I've not had a proper dose for a couple of months now. Give me a break, okay?Meet Dr. Ranman Kumar, my host for my first week in Dehradun. He's a qualified eye surgeon and, like the Colonel, has long since retired. "I made my first million pretty quickly," he explained to me as we sat watching the thunder storm, "once you have one or two, you live pretty comfortably here. You can work for twenty but you're mad to do it." Relinquished of the necessity of earning a living and, having seen both his daughters fulfill their life's work by gaining qualifications and marrying out into southern India and Australia, he's free to persue his main hobby: stocks and shares. Every day his accountant rides up on his sleek black moped and the two of them spend five hours from ten in the morning hunched over Ranman's laptop watching the rise and fall of the stock market until it closes in the evening. Some people (I'm talking to you, Dad) might consider this an enviable use of retirement. I, however, I'm not entirely convinced that it doesn't send you slightly eccentric. When I told Ranman that I was a writer his eyes lit up and he told me to follow him into one of the smaller rooms in the back of the house. He turned on the lights to reveal a mountain of English paperback novels, at least fifty high and deep, as well as shelves crammed with the same. The accountant (who, it turns out, is also Ranman's book club reading buddy) tells me that they spend happy afternoons going to bargain basements and filling the doctor's car with paperbacks. Is it cheap, I wonder, to have a house which looks like the stroage depot for a mafia book pushing kingpin? No answer, except the the famed Indian side-to-side head nodding.
Needless to say, I'm not going to be short of a John Grisham this week. No Charlotte Bronte, though. "Too challenging," sighs Ranman, "I gave her a week then went back to Tom Clancy."
Dr. Ranman, force of nature, negotiates melon prices at a hundred haggles a second. Just slightly slower than his driving, actually.Ranman personfies a lot of the Indian contradictions that I've been trying to rationalise: on the one hand (and like the Colonel) he is incredibly dismissive of the Indian fixation with the aquisition of wealth. He believes firmly that society (and his neighbourhood) have declined as a result of the prosperity of India's wealthiest class. On the other hand, though, he spends most of his waking retirement firmly in pursuit of the aquisition of more wealth, with no real reason why he's doing it. Perhaps retirement in India is just a boring concept: a population which is so obsessed with working simply cannot find anything to do with itself once it stops, and so the cycle simply continues. Certainly his attitude to driving is no different from any of the twenty something flyboys who tore around Delhi; his regular shouts of "See these young people? Cowards!" as he cuts them up on the road are something to behold. Ranman tells me he's had at least one heart attack since retiring. "That's why I have the treadmill," he explains, pointing towards the gleaming new, never used machine in the corner of the book depository.
And, yet, beyond all that there is something which separates men like Ranman from other rich retirees: and that's a fundamental sense of social awareness. The week before I moved in he semi adopted an orphaned teenager from one of the mearby hill stations (I say semi because there's few formal procedures, it would seem, for this sort of thing). He is devoting the next few years (in between the close and opening of the stock markets, obviously) to teaching her English, Maths and Science and paying for her schooling. No mean thing in Dehradun which houses some of India's richest and most exclusive schools. He stands to gain little from this generosity on a financial level; the best thing for his adopted daughter will be to gain the skills and experience she needs to move to one of the bigger cities and find trained employment. Similarly, he is paid nothing for hosting me for this week (aside from borrowing the Carol Voderman Book of Sudukos. I hope that woman appreciates all the advertising I'm doing for her these days) and yet is willing to bend over backwards to provide a real taste of Dehradun. We spent an hour driving around looking for an authentic roti tossing stand (like making pizza bases) because the one Ranman usually visits had given their boy the night off and he was keen for me to see the impressive spectacle of one of the trained fourteen year olds spinning out dough to a hankerchief thin consistancy by handiwork alone. Eventually, after two tip offs and picking up a small boy who assured us his dad's shop down one of the back alleys could provide us with the definite article, we found the elusive roti spinner. Darn nice they were, too.
Roti tossing in the back streets. As wonderful a spectator sport as you can imagine.Later, watching the end of the storm and mopping up the last of the afformentionned rotis, Ranman told me about his life living in three different areas of India and travelling much of the rest of the country. "I've been here about sixty years," he told me, "and I still couldn't tell you much about Indians. I don't think there's anyone who really can." And you know what? He's absolutley right.
