It was a bright morning in a village next to Malgudi, where the sun always rose on command and set only after checking in with the high command. And at the very edge of the village — just beyond the signboard that read “Truth not allowed beyond this point” — stood two curious figures: one bald and shiny like a freshly boiled egg, the other with a beard so white it looked like he’d swallowed a snowstorm.
“I’m not happy,” said the Beard, stroking his chin with the seriousness of a man figuring out how to ban onions from kanda bateta nu shak.
“Why ever not?” asked the Baldy, with the obsequious eagerness of a yes-man who had done all the wrongs right.
“You’ve practically declared my religion the only religion of this village,” said the Beard, “You’ve made another community a laughing stock, silenced anyone who dares speak, and said that all foreign reports showing our poor as hungry are colonial conspiracies. And yet…” — he sniffled — “I’m not the most popular man in this village!”
Baldy gasped. “Not the most popular? How’s that possible? You banned all competition!”
“I Googled,” whispered the Beard, with the guilt of a monk caught watching Netflix. “I found a cricketer, an actress, and an actor are more loved than me.”
Baldy squinted into the distance. “Should I get rid of them?”
“No, no,” said the Beard, “I want to be better than them. I want to learn cricket, act in a few movies, maybe even play a few female roles — so I can beat them in their own game.”
“That’s not difficult,” grinned Baldy, now adjusting the truth like a tailor with a shaky measuring tape. “We’ll say you scored 1000 runs in a kindergarten match, that your batting was so powerful the ball hit the moon and came back with a Visa stamp. And we’ll release a blockbuster movie starring…you!”
“Brilliant,” said the Beard, eyes gleaming like a freshly polished propaganda channel. “What about the actress?”
Baldy tapped his head — for inspiration, or maybe just to check if his head still made an empty sound. “Say you left your wife because you realized you were husband and wife in one divine embodiment — gender fluidity born from spiritual clarity! You’ll be the most popular man-woman this village has ever had!”
The Beard sighed, moved by the sheer absurdity of his deputy’s brilliance. “Baldy, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You can do something for me,” whispered Baldy, rubbing his paunch.
“Anything,” said the Beard.
“Stop speaking in English.”
“Why?” asked the Beard.
“Because one day,” said Baldy solemnly, “we want people to laugh at those who speak English. Not at you.”
And with that, they walked back into the village, arm in arm — one dreaming of cricket scores that never happened, and the other dreaming of a national ban on grammar…!
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Robert Clements is a newspaper columnist and writes a daily column, which has graced the pages of over 60 newspapers and magazines, from a daily column in the Khaleej Times, Dubai, the Morning Star, London, and in nearly every state in India, from The Statesman in Kolkata, to the Kashmir Times in Kashmir to the Trinity Mirror in Chennai.
Ha ha ha! I loved the creativity of this piece! How I laughed at the symbolic comparison of the boiled egg and snowstorm infused beard to our national heads! To make people not laugh at them they make people laugh at English!
True Carmelita
Hilarious. Loved this article.
A “bearded” evaluation of the prejudiced “bald” approach to a global language called “English.”
Thank you Shylaja.
Brilliant tongue-in-cheek, and in English to boot. Just loved it.
Thank you Joshua