Corporate Carnival (10 page)

I had caught him squarely in the jaw, I could see that. All the ebullience, the zest had gone out of him in a jiffy. He collapsed on the sofa like a limp rag, a deflated superman. I knew I had given the correct answer. My confidence soared. I stood up and looked at him triumphantly. ‘It’s a coach,’ I said with the air of a boxer delivering the final knock out punch.

Suddenly, he sprang to life and rose like a cobra. ‘It is not a coach! Jabulani is the ball being used in this tournament!
This
ball!’ he screamed, holding it up, his eyes glinting with the joy of having savoured an unexpected victory. ‘You are a fraud! I have caught you, man. You are a
fraud
!’

I remained rooted to the spot. I was angry, but I had lost fair and square. There was nothing to keep me here. Who on earth knew they would name a dumb ball? I silently cursed the game and everything connected to it. Fool game! Grown men running around in shorts, kicking a ball. There was nothing to do but go back to my hotel and knock back a couple of whiskies.

Pedro quietly escorted me to the door. ‘I cannot give my account to a man who does not breathe football,’ he said, ‘but if there is anything else you would like, let me know.’

‘I would like to headbutt you,’ I told him, ‘like Zinedine Zidane.’ And feeling rather proud of my riposte, I turned and walked off. I had no intention of staying in South Africa a day longer.

A refreshing sleep later, I was a changed man. To hell with Pedro, I thought. If nothing else, I would get some fun out of this trip. I went to bed that night after tucking into a quarter loaf ‘bunny chow’. From taste and appearance, it seemed to be a local version of the Indian pav bhaji, except that here they scooped out the insides from a loaf and put the bhaji in the hole. During the meal, I also found out from the waitress why the word ‘bafana’ was repeated twice to describe the football team, something that had been puzzling me. The reason was simple. It was the plural in local lingo. One bafana, eleven bafana bafana. For some reason, it never occurred to them to use the dull and colourless ‘bafanas’. I think they prefer to leave such things to the Brits.

I was all set to ignore Pedro for the remainder of my stay in SA, but Kaushik uncle persuaded me to keep an open mind. He had thought of something, he said, and promised he would get me Pedro’s account if I hung around till the World Cup final, which was just four days away.

In the meantime, he had arranged to take all of us – my aunt, their two children, Mina, Shree, Kitty and me – on a safari to a place called Hluhluwe, in the Kwazulu Natal area, some four hours away. Their kids were thirteen-year-old Munna, a tubby, quiet fellow with a somewhat supercilious air about him, and his eight-year-old sister Dolly. Now I’ll tell you how these typically ZAR words are pronounced. The syllable ‘hl’, for reasons I have not been able to fathom, is pronounced ‘sl’ except that you have to say it with a bit of a lisp. So ‘Hluhluwe’ is ‘Slu-slu-way’ (don’t forget the lisp along with the ‘s’, it’s important) and likewise with Umhlanga (where I stayed in Durban). But the expats simply pronounce it the way it comes most easily to them; for many of them, ‘Hluhluwe’ is simply ‘Shishloowee’!

Kaushik uncle told us that there were about a hundred lions and leopards in the area, which got me, Kitty and Shree very excited. While Mina had done this kind of thing before, it was quite a novelty for us.

‘Papa took us on a safari last year but there were no lions,’ Dolly complained. ‘We saw only deer and giraffe.’

‘It is all a matter of luck,’ her dad explained. ‘Sometimes you spend days here and see nothing. At other times, you can see a whole pride when you casually drive out in the evening.’

The next morning, we left at half past six, a good hour behind our scheduled time. Within the first hour we were rewarded with some delightful views of a whole family of giraffes including a baby – a little beauty that looked like eyelashes on stilts, so pretty that I couldn’t move the camera away from her. I was sure she was female – no male could look so sweet. Later, we saw some rhinos, deer and warthogs. So many warthogs, in fact, that we quickly lost our fascination for them after the first few. For the next hour or so, however, we saw nothing and the kids started whining.

‘Papa, where are the lions?’ asked Dolly. ‘You said we will see lions and leopards.’

‘The first thing you kids must learn is patience. Look at that deer. It is known as the “McDonald’s of the forest” because of the M-shaped black line on its behind.’

‘I don’t want to see the backside of a deer,’ said the tubby kid loudly. ‘Mama, where are my burgers? I want to eat them.’

‘I’ve brought one for you now, beta. The other one mama will give you when we go back, okay, sweetie?’ I always feel a little green when I hear huge kids being called such names by their mothers. I wonder if only Indian mothers do it.

We decided to give it another couple of hours and kept our eyes peeled on either side of the forest path.

‘A leopard! I see it!’ Dolly screamed suddenly.

All of us craned our necks in the direction she was staring. Kaushik uncle reversed the car a little. ‘No, that’s just a bush,’ he said. ‘The brown colour sometimes gives it the appearance of a cat. And those dry leaves in front make it seem spotted.’

We continued our hunt for the big two.

‘Look!’ I ventured, pointing. ‘There!’ I brought my voice down to a whisper. I didn’t want the lion to slink away. ‘There, on the ground, behind that tree.’ It turned out to be a largish deer.

From time to time, my uncle would stop the car when we were nearing a passing vehicle and ask, ‘Seen any cats around?’

‘Nothing,’ would be the standard reply. ‘But we saw some buffalos (or deer or zebras or rhinos and, of course, warthogs) back there.’

At various points, everyone except Mina and my uncle discovered lions and leopards. Only, it turned out to be a tree stump, a fallen branch, a heap of sand, a bush or, increasingly towards the end, just a figment of our imagination.

‘Look at those lions.’

‘Where?
Where!
’

‘Not lions, lines,’ my uncle clarified. ‘On that deer. White lines. That’s a nyala. This is a female nyala.’

The car stopped again. ‘Those,’ my uncle said, pointing at a couple of tiny black dots by the side of the road, ‘are dung beetles. They roll elephant dung into a tiny ball and bury it and lay eggs in it for the young ones to feed off. These tiny insects play a vital role in soil enrichment. It is important to understand how the entire ecosystem works. Everything here is a thing of beauty and wonder.’

‘I am not interested in dung beetles,’ Munna announced. ‘No need to give us so many details.’

Mina and I exchanged glances. ‘What a spoilt brat!’ her eyes told mine.

‘I’d like to throw the brute out of the car,’ mine replied.

‘Shh!’ her eyes cautioned. ‘It’s not your car, it’s his!’

Dolly continued to whine. ‘Can’t we see some lions? When I went with my class to that place in Jozi, we saw lions every minute!’

‘That was a park, baby. They monitor animal movements and share information with other guides so the tourists see what they are looking for. This is the animals’ natural habitat. It’s not stage-managed.’

The tubby one made a rude noise.

‘I’m tired,’ Dolly whined. This was her constant refrain every twenty minutes or so. ‘My eyes are paining from looking for leopards.’

‘They should stop calling leopards spotted animals,’ I said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Nobody ever spots them.’

‘Ha, ha, joke,’ said the eminently dislikeable teen. The chap had, I sensed, been nursing a grudge against me ever since his dad made him get up from the front seat (to make way for me) and join his sister at the rear of the SUV.

Just then we came out of a loop and hit the asphalt again. As we got onto the road we saw a car reversing rapidly. Almost immediately, we figured out why.

‘Elephant!’ we cried in unison. Just some thirty feet in front of our car, an elephant was walking towards us, looking distinctly angry. He lifted his trunk as if warning us to move back and waved his ears menacingly.

‘Daddy! Are we going to die?’ Dolly cried.

The elephant was huge. One gets slightly constrained in describing a very large elephant because you can’t use the words ‘mammoth’ or ‘elephantine’. We started reversing too, but the elephant continued to amble towards us. Suddenly, Uncle K stopped the car.

‘What are you doing, Bablu? Go, go!’ my aunt cried out.

My aunt calls my uncle ‘Bablu’. This is bad enough in itself, but what is worse is that my uncle calls her ‘Babli’. I suppose these things start early, perhaps during the honeymoon, and before you know it, the name has stuck and there’s little anyone can do about it. You can’t suddenly change these things when you are fifty or sixty. I’ll let you into a little secret here. Kitch will kill me if he sees this in print, but I’m pretty sure he and Galiya call each other ‘Kuku’. (Both of them! The same name! What sense does that make?) Of course, he stoutly denied it when I asked him, but his denial suffered from a lack of conviction and confidence that one associates with truth.

‘Bablu’ had stopped for good reason. An even bigger elephant was strolling towards us from the back. ‘Good lord!’ I said in a hoarse whisper. ‘That must be the father! Gosh, he looks angry! And b-big.’

‘Matriarchs, both of them,’ my uncle replied. ‘Males rarely remain with the family once they become adult. Keep absolutely quiet. I think the rest of the herd must be around here, and almost certainly some calves.’

The first elephant came right up to the car and pushed the car with his trunk.
Her
trunk, if one was to believe my uncle. It is kind of difficult to believe that an animal of that size could be female. Besides, I thought only males had tusks, but apparently that is not the case.

The car rolled back a couple of feet. ‘We are going to die!’ Dolly moaned.

Shree started murmuring Sanskrit prayers in a last attempt to get us out of this jam. We silently egged him on. Anything that might work was welcome. I hoped he was praying to the elephant god. The elephant kept pushing and Uncle K let her do so quietly, without starting the car. I was terrified but, to the elephant, it seemed to be a very natural thing to do. She was going about her task with a sort of casual disdain.

The elephant at the back was relatively passive; it seemed to be waiting for something. Suddenly there was a rustle and a crash, and a few small trees fell like bowling pins as a whole herd of elephants crossed the road in front of us. There were elephants of every conceivable size, about a dozen of them, including three or four little ones. One of them gambolled playfully on the road in a brief canter, before being gently but firmly guided on its way by an adult. The matriarch then casually joined them without a second glance at us. We drove away slowly.

‘We are not going to die!’ shouted Dolly.

‘Wow!’ said Kitty, who had been as quiet as a mouse all this while. ‘How exciting! And what a wonderful video we have to show everyone!’ Everyone looked in my direction, the man who had been saddled with the responsibility.

‘I… er… no. I’m so sorry. I didn’t… I mean, I didn’t want to offend the animal. It might have got angry or something… Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Listen! I just completely forgot about the camera. I’m
sorry
!’ I said, faced with a howl of protest.

Munna, who had hitherto maintained a reasonable silence, now showed his true colours. ‘What a waste of a great opportunity,’ he said in a superior tone and in that irritating voice of a boy who is on the cusp of manhood. ‘I think we should just throw Jai out of the car. The lions will come and eat him up and then we can see them.’

‘Don’t say such things, beta,’ said his mother. ‘We are all disappointed like you, but it is not nice to talk like this about your uncle.’

‘I don’t care,’ the kid said. I was now developing very strong anti-Munna tendencies. ‘He missed such a good chance for a great video. Now no one from school will believe my story.’

‘That’s enough, Munna,’ said Uncle K firmly, coming close to appeasing my wounded feelings, ‘or I will have to throw you out of the car.’

My feelings got a second dose of comfort later that evening. We were staying at a cottage in the area, thatched roof and everything. Outside, we were getting busy with the barbeque or
braai
, as they call it in these parts. We had the coal going nicely. We had roasted some potatoes and corn. Now we were doing the boerewors. My aunt had brought along a few packets of biltong for us and some vegetable samosas as well (
samoosas
, as they are known here in SA). A lot of Indian words and even names had, I noticed, undergone a change from their original over the decades. Naidu had become Naidoo
,
Kuppuswamy became Cuppasami and Mudaliar was Moodli
.

The tubby teen was rather aloof, not even volunteering to help. He had just brought his burger out and sat down comfortably – greed and anticipation nicely blended on his face – when a monkey sprang down from a tree behind him, grabbed the burger and quickly climbed back, looking the adolescent clearly in the eye while steadily chomping down the burger like a man. A scream of anguish froze in the tubby one’s mouth as he writhed in distress, his second chin almost touching his chest, even as a smile of pure pleasure lit up my face.

I heaved a sigh of relief when the boy and his whiny sister were dispatched home the next morning to attend school. The rest of us left for St Lucia for a spot of whale watching. A bus took us to the beach, where we were given an informative talk about whales and their behaviour.

‘Jai, Kitty says she won’t come,’ Shree whispered into my ear. ‘The captain told us we might get fully wet and Kitty has left her… umm… spare underclothes in Durban.’

‘She can buy new ones later,’ I hissed.

‘She says she won’t. She only buys them from a particular shop in Chennai.’

‘What an idiot! She’s becoming just like Peggy.’

‘Your boss?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even she buys underwear from that shop in Chennai?’

‘I have no idea about her underwear. What I meant was, she too is finicky about a lot of things.
You
talk to Kitty. You’re her husband!’