Srinath Perur is a Bangalore-based researcher by training who also writes fiction and helps develop educational content for school children. Of his entry Vijay Nambisan had remarked, “An excellent story, fulfiling all the demands of a short story. Plot and characters well executed; the setting too is drawn well. Tight writing, nothing wasted. Good punch to it. Possesses the right degree of understatement.”
He was known simply as Huchappa—madman. As far as I could tell, his particular form of madness was a furious loathing for anything he perceived as incomplete, tentative, or done solely with regard to expedience. Of all these he found no shortage on Crescent Road.
One evening, Huchappa stood outside our house, chanting “Eunuch” and jangling the gate. Father went out to see what he wanted. Huchappa pointed upwards at the pillars and screamed, “What is the meaning of this?”
We had just finished adding a few rooms on the first floor of our house. The bare concrete pillars pronged with uneven iron rods had attracted Huchappa’s attention.
“They’re in case we want to build higher sometime in the future. Almost all the houses here have them. What’s your problem?”
“In case! Sometime! Future! If you were a man you would have decided one way or the other. What’s my problem? Don’t I have to see these rusted rods everyday as I walk up and down the street?”
Which was really all Huchappa did— he walked up and down the street, taking care to keep exactly to the middle.
Those who regularly drove down the road got used to him, and they treated him as they would a roving pothole, looking ahead even as they swerved around him. Huchappa slept in Elephant Park at one end of Crescent Road—his spot was under the belly of the large concrete elephant whose trunk was meant to be a slide.
He was well-fed from the leftovers given to him, and surprisingly well-dressed for someone who lived on the street. He washed his clothes at a borewell near the park, and he ironed them in his own way. I once saw him lay out a shirt carefully between two sheets of cardboard, spread his gunny-sack bedding over it, and go to sleep.
He wore shirts buttoned (or pinned) up all the way, and tucked into his too-large trousers. He was very selective, though, while accepting cast-offs and leftovers. He only took full-sleeved shirts, and once, when my mother gave him two and a half chapatis, he returned the half and said, “What is the meaning of half?”
Architectural ambivalence particularly bothered Huchappa, and he looked out for these on his beat up and down the street. Unsupporting pillars apart, a common violator of Huchappa’s aesthetic was the protruding gate. Wide gates would be given an extra set of hinges so that when closed, the gate would extend a couple of feet outside the compound wall.
A car could then be parked half on the footpath outside, but technically still in the compound because of the gate reaching around it. It could be argued that without a car, and with the gates drawn inward, there was no encroachment involved. But Huchappa did not take this view. He waited dutifully till someone finished parking a car, and then shouted at them: “Koja! If you’re a man, block the whole footpath, let us see!”
The most widely accepted story about Huchappa’s origins held that he was the son of a landed farmer from a village near Mangalore. After his father died, Huchappa’s brothers were supposed to have cheated him of some part of the land coming to him.
Huchappa had given up his share in disgust and come to Bangalore, where he slowly lost touch with reality. Somehow, I never found the story convincing—it explained things a little too well, and I heard no trace of Mangalore in his Kannada. I preferred to think he simply came from Elephant Park. As far as reality was concerned, at least to us kids, Huchappa seemed more in touch with it than most older people.
The meaning of new...
When I got my first bicycle, I would ride it around the neighbourhood after I returned from school. Mother had insisted I keep the tubes of corrugated board protecting the frame. “Why simply expose it to scratches and nicks? Let it remain as long as it stays,” she had said. As I rode by the park one evening, Huchappa stopped me.
He proceeded to rip every bit of the casing to expose a shiny frame. “What is the meaning of a new cycle?” he asked.
None were exempt from Huchappa’s criticism: people who kept the plastic covers on the seats of their new cars, people who mumbled, people who slouched, people who let their plants wilt, school children with their ties askew, all received a rebuke commensurate with the severity of their offense. Some of the repeat offenders on the street came to dread Huchappa.
He was particularly severe on Sastry, who, having lost most of his hair, insisted on growing a few long strands at the side and plastering it across his head. Huchappa would howl with laughter when he sighted Sastry.
Sometimes he was sarcastic: “What is your secret, sir? Which oil do you use, sir?” And at other times he seemed overcome with despair: “Why do you have to do this? What are you ashamed of? What is the meaning of all this?”
Huchappa made a habit of stopping at our house and calling my father a eunuch (especially when there were visitors). But he seemed to do this almost out of a sense of duty. He’d stand there making a racket with the gate, looking about and smiling, and every now and then he’d let rip an almost affable cry. It was never personal with Huchappa—he went about insulting people on his beat with something of the detachment of a doctor or a priest.
He might abuse you one day, but on the next he’d wave, looking dignified with his beard, his shirt buttoned up all the way. Almost no one returned his wave.
Huchappa sometimes surprised us with the things he knew. He once stood watching at the gate while we played cricket in Varun’s driveway. After I was bowled, playing awkwardly at a ball, Huchappa had screeched with laughter. “Frontfootbackfoot frontfootbackfoot frontfootbackfoot —do one thing!” he said. Somehow, we hadn’t expected him to be familiar with those terms. (I was called ‘Frontfootbackfoot’ for a week after that.)
Battling the elephant
My fondest memory of Huchappa is not of him on his beat, or of him ridiculing someone. It is of him exercising.
Huchappa, probably the fittest person on Crescent Road, performed sun salutations for a whole hour every morning. To face East, he’d have to turn towards the elephant, and if you took a walk early in the morning it would appear from a distance that a tiny figure was taking the elephant head on. The figure would appeal, threaten, yield, submit, resist and rise in revolt, all in one relentless, lithe sequence. This the elephant would watch, grey and impassive, as dawn broke over a sweating Huchappa.
It was only much later, when I was in college and Huchappa was long gone, that I began to suspect that he might have been trying to show people what they did not— or could not— see about themselves. My parents had insisted, against my inclinations, that I train to be an engineer: “What else will you do? You don’t have enough marks for medical, and if you do a science degree you’ll only end up as a teacher.” So I joined an engineering college in a place about eight hours from Bangalore and moved into a hostel.
Studying outside gave me fresh eyes with which to see Crescent Road, and it seemed a little smaller every time I returned on vacation. By the time I was done with college I found myself thoroughly disenchanted with engineering. I announced my plan to start afresh and become a journalist. This was regarded a calamity by almost everyone I knew. By then I had begun to see the world of Crescent Road with some contempt. I felt that its eagerness to grasp all it could, combined with its reluctance to release anything it possessed usually left it dangling somewhere in the middle.
So much about it seemed to me narrow, limited and afraid, and this view helped me hold my own during the period of strife that ensued at home. How much I owed to Huchappa for that perception I cannot say. But occasionally, when I was overwhelmed and felt a need to escape my old friends or the confines of home, I’d go sit on a bench at Elephant Park and smoke a cigarette. It somehow helped affirm that what I wanted was not entirely ridiculous, and I would return home composed. It was at those moments that I most missed Huchappa and wished he hadn’t been driven away.
The trigger
Among Huchappa’s many irritants had been people who left their vehicles with the engine running while they made some quick purchase. If he saw a scooter or a motorcycle idling, he’d hop on and ride away to give the owner a scare. He’d park it some distance away, switch off the engine, and disappear.
Once an idling scooter outside the Kaka shop seemed to drive him to a frenzy. He revved the engine to the limit, put it into gear and shot off. He careened across the road for a while before managing to get the scooter on to the footpath. After rattling over the pavestones for a stretch, the scooter veered to the right and lurched into the gutter.
This happened just up the road from Varun’s house where we were playing. We ran over on hearing the commotion. A small crowd had already gathered there. The scooter was horizontal, wedged across the gutter, its front wheel still spinning. Huchappa appeared to have suffered only a few bruises. Rising in the gutter, he stilled with an imperious hand those who were attempting to help. He then climbed up and sat cross-legged on the flank of the scooter. He reached over, applied the front brake, and motioned to us to wait.
Soon the scooter’s owner rounded the corner and came into view: he held a cloth bag in one hand, and with the other clutched his breast pocket to prevent its contents from falling out; he wore a faded blue helmet, its visor missing, its straps flapping about his cheeks; he was portly and shuffled along, breaking into a clumsy trot every few steps. Seated on his throne, Huchappa pronounced: “Look at him! Look at him! What is the meaning of this man?” And for once, everyone there knew exactly what Huchappa meant.
Huchappa would have been pleased with the decisiveness shown by some of the neighbourhood after the incident with the scooter. Sastry led a small delegation of retired men who went about explaining how it was essential for the safety of both Huchappa and the neighbourhood that something be done. They went and met a retired police official who had been one of their classmates, and he placed a few calls.
A couple of weeks later, a jeep from the mental institute arrived at Elephant Park. Huchappa was out on his beat, and the driver and attendant had waited for him to return. What happened next is the subject of some uncertainty. The driver later said that he and the attendant were at a nearby pushcart buying guavas when it happened. But others who claimed to have been at the scene offered a different story.
Elephantine escape
They said that when Huchappa returned, he saw the jeep, ran up the steps of the elephant slide and stood quietly atop it. The driver and attendant had pleaded, cajoled and threatened from beneath, only to be met by a stoic silence. Finally they had climbed up the steps after Huchappa, and just as they were about to reach him, he had slid down the elephant’s trunk.
The driver and attendant had hesitated over whether to follow Huchappa down the slide, or whether to descend by the steps, and Huchappa had escaped in the delay. Whatever version of events one chooses to believe, this much is known— Huchappa managed to drive off alone in the jeep. He even waved goodbye to all those who were about at the time.
He left the jeep at the end of Crescent Road, windows rolled up and doors locked. He had made sure to park the jeep exactly in the middle of the road, and to take the keys with him.
We never heard from him again.
