Editor’s Choice: Hilarious Short Story – It’s Good To Watch TV
It’s Good To Watch TV – Hilarious Short Story
Photo credit: Breda from morguefile.com
We’d prevailed upon the builder, a short, stumpy man who’d sold us our first flat, to erect for us in the living room of the second flat we were buying from him a long glass shelf along its northern wall, rising three feet from the floor. Unable to stand our nagging he built it. We high-fived our little victory. You’ll agree, life, after all, is a collection of small and big victories and defeats. We filled the glass and masonry shelf with books we’d brought from Delhi as part of our intellectual narcissism. Some of the books were borrowed. For ever. We argued an entire day hurting our vocal chords whether the books should be lined up in an alphabetical order of their titles or according to the size of their spine. We did neither. We just let the books fall into an order of their choice.
The marble top of the shelf became for us a long and low mantelpiece on which we showed off some nonliterary cargo: two toy horses made of leather by Rajasthani craftsmen and gifted to us by a neighbor. We didn’t check with him about the breed of the stud remembering the old advice about not looking into the mouth of a gift horse. Both are saddled and ready to ride. They have uniform coffee complexion. If God were human, as his devotees believe, he would invest these chargers with life and ride away.
On the marble tarmac we parked a toy red Albion double-decker bus such as the ones we’d seen on the roads of Hyderabad on our first visit. The first elevated runway for any bus in the country. On top of a library. I look at it fondly remembering how as children we would run up the spiral stairway at the entrance of the bus, sit on the upper deck and look down on the tops of foreign cars and sun-scorched scalps of the pedestrians. Great fun it was to ride from Charminar to Ranigunj. Not any more. Some urban arts dork took them off the roads. They later surfaced at the Central Park in New York.
A replica of a derailed steam locomotive I’d played with as a child also claimed space on the top without its steam and steel mass. Tokens of middleclassness, you might say. We also kept a few porcelain figurines of European men and women my father had brought from Dresden for my sister long, long ago, beyond the reach of memory. My childless sister gave them to me because I’d a daughter. At the wall-end of the shelf my wife sat our new BPL color television in a diagonal position. When it is switched off you can see the kitchen counter appear on its screen. It would show the gas stove readily, and the Corelle crockery if you strain your eyes. The short stump walked in one day and said the placement of the TV violated thelaws of Hindu architecture, Vastu Sastra. We laughed behind his back.
We watched very little TV in the morning when the rush of daily chores ruled out such indulgence. When we bought our first black and white Crown TV in Delhi, we could get only Doordarshan, the media-maligned state television outfit, for a couple of hours in the morning and four hours in the evening without advertisements. The transmission closed with Salma Sultan or Protima Puri reading out the Hindi news from a teleprompter and ending the bulletin with a smile that needed some effort to eject. Teleprompter was a novelty at that time. We acquired a color TV when we shifted base to Hyderabad and continued to consume Doordarshan’s Spartan fare.
Thank God, the Gulf War came for no fault of ours, a couple of years after our arrival in Hyderabad after a long exile in Delhi. . The TV showed images of the war and the skies lit up with color and Patriot missiles. It reminded us of July 4 pyrotechnics in New York across the Hudson where our daughter lived. Soon the number of channels multiplied and we’d to change for a BPL set with a magic wand that changed channels as if it had read your mind. That set, the gift of the Gulf war, is the protagonist of today’s story.
For a few months after we bought the new TV, we marveled at the magic of the remote to shuffle channels at will. We could never enjoy the programs unless the remote was in our hands. We first saw a remote in Ek Baar Phir flick featuring Deepti Naval filmed in London. We were amazed at what technology could achieve. Taking over our minds. Though my wife and I were united in amazement we couldn’t stop the remote from becoming a menace to domestic peace like Siachen between Pakistan and India. Each would part with it to the other with an air of martyrdom and unconcealed disgust.
At the time of this story there were at least fifty channels and I would go on hopping from one channel to another till my wife snatched the remote from me and delivered a lecture on mature adult behavior. If you wanted you could see at least a dozen movies in a day winding yourself around the sleek TV cabinet. Then there was this Fashion channel for lovers of wardrobe malfunction. Models reveled in textile minimalism. Remember Janet Jackson. This channel choice aplenty called for mechanics of mutual agreement and understanding that, like Indo-Pak détente, we didn’t have in plenty. So we were both happy and unhappy with the TV. Life is a mixed bag. We also agreed that however much we loved each other TV and love were two different things.
The TV held us together for most part of the day in a state of conjugal tension, alternating between bickering and bonding. Short of writing it down we came to an understanding that my role was to simply stand and stare when serials of my wife’s choice are aired. This understanding marked our watching a film that evening when the defining event of the story began closing in on us stealthily like blood pressure. The movie was The Burning Train featuring a crowd of heroes and heroines. Dharmendra and Hema Malini were my wife’s favorites even after they had married and had children. My favorite Madhubala had died long ago.
‘What kind of dress is that Dharmendra wearing,’ I comment unwarily, forgetting our understanding, and raise my wife’s hackles. Prickly girl.
‘Why don’t you watch the film? Commenting on everything as if you are very perfect,’ she shouts at me without taking her eyes off the awkwardly gallivanting Punjabi guy thumping the screen. It is the ageing hero that made me open my mouth, my wife doesn’t realize. With my right hand I seal my mouth and turn towards her to show I’ve carried out her writ. She is amused and endows me with a wifely smile making sure the romping hero is not watching us. The smile was not meant for him. Poor girl, my wife, she never gets angry with me except when she is angry.
The gangly Amitabh Bachan appears on the screen with his ungainly steps and a body that appears to have emerged from a medieval rack.
‘I can’t stand this guy. He should stop acting,’ I mumble to myself.
Much against my calculations, the mumble reaches, traveling on what vicious wind I don’t know, the ears of my wife. I brace for another show of anger.
‘My god, can’t you sit quiet till the movie is over? Leave me alone for a while,’ she raises her voice. I evaporate.
Making sure there has been a change in conjugal weather I come back when the scenes of the burning and speeding train were lighting up the living room. We are now friends again and watch together the blaze with interest and anxiety. The train is speeding into a dark uncertainty with half of its cars ablaze. At that point I see in the right corner of the BPL set flames that looked like a chain of orange pyramidal mountains. They were distinct in a three-dimensional way from the indolent fires of the Burning Train. Then I find a part of the kitchen come alive over the TV screen. I sense imminent danger. Come, I frantically call my wife and dart into the kitchen. One of the two burners of the stove we had switched off before sitting before the TV is burning. In the fraction of a second I detect that the fire had spread without the assistance of wind or an accomplice to the stove’s tube connecting it to the gas cylinder. With a terror-stricken face my wife reaches for the water canister in the kitchen alcove and empties it on the blazing burner. Riding on the tube, the flames now reached kissing distance off the mouth of the cylinder. I really didn’t know how it occurred to me to turn off the valve of the cylinder. When I did that the fire died down at once as if responding to a command of the gods. Another second or two, my wife and I would have become smithereens and a memory. End of tomorrow for us.
We stumble back from the kitchen into the living room, each able to hear the drumming of the other’s heart. The TV is still coping with the fires of the smoldering train. It has stopped at a station where fire tenders summoned go into instant action. The burning cars are detached from the train. The platform is full of water. Relatives of the passengers, gathered after learning of the fire, rush towards the cars. There is a lot of hugging in relief among the parents, children and friends of the passengers and tears of joy. And a huge crowd of unconnected onlookers and TV crews pushing through the throng to interview survivors.
My mind is too clogged to imagine the sort of obit that would have appeared the next day if we hadn’t escaped certain death. We needed some one’s shoulder immediately. So we call our friend Surendra and his wife and ask them to come up at once. They come up three flights from their second floor flat suspecting from the tremor in our voice that something out of the ordinary had happened.
‘What happened,’ Surendra asks me.
I’m still dazed and incoherent in my speech. My wife sits in the sofa not recognizing their arrival. She is crying. Sailaja posits herself next to my wife gently patting her on the back to take the fright out of her. Surendra asks Sailaja to go down, make and get some tea. They coax us to drink tea. After tea, we become who we were before the mishap.
‘What happened,’ Surendra repeats his unanswered question.
‘Don’t ask me,’ I tell him, meaning it is too scary to be narrated.
My wife tells them the whole story in unconnected bits and pieces.
‘You’ve done a foolish thing. You should have come down immediately and let the cylinder explode and do its damage. You’ve risked your lives. It’s a miracle that both of you are alive and telling us the story,’ Surendra nearly chides us.
The four of us go into the kitchen. Surendra inspects the innocent-looking wet tube. It showed no wear and tear. The floor became wet with the water my wife had emptied. And some water fell on the food receptacles we’d kept ready on the kitchen counter for our dinner.
‘We will buy a new stove,’ my wife tells the couple.
‘Let’s go now and buy it,’ says Surendra.
We got to one of Abid Road shops. Surendra examines several stoves before approving one. We come home and thank Surendra and Sailaja for reviving us.
It’s now three hours after our brush with death. It would be 8.30 in the morning in the US where my daughter and family live. We call her and tell her the story. She yells at us both and repeats her advice for the tenth time to come away and stay with them.
‘You would have made me an orphan,’ she cries.
That night we couldn’t sleep well thinking about what would’ve happened to us if we had not been watching TV. We learnt a lesson: always watch TV.
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Doordarshan is India’s state TV company.
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