“An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.” Worst life advice ever!
Chacha and I were driving down a beautiful stretch of road. Or at least as beautiful as it gets in rural West Bengal. By "beautiful,"
I mean the leaves had that extra slickness post-monsoon, glistening with the
pride of not being drenched in smoky city air for a change.
‘Isn’t smoke supposed to be a tree’s favourite snack?’,
I wondered. At least that’s what we were taught in school – trees convert carbon
dioxide into oxygen, apparently. Too bad it’s only bad for humans.
Chacha jolted me back from my existential musings. ‘How much
farther is it?’
Ah! The quintessential ‘it’.
The ‘it’ for which we had made the
2-hour drive. He wouldn’t even call ‘it’
by its correct name.
‘It,’ I took a pause to let it sink in, ‘is around 30 minutes away.’
‘If the
road exists,’ I added just to mix my pessimistic realism in Chacha’s eternal
optimism.
Chacha had bought a piece of land years ago and had promptly
forgotten about it. Happens to the best of us, right? Having nothing better to
do during Covid, I tried to go over the old rusty family documents and estimate
my inheritance. There was a pandemic out there after all. During this time I
stumbled upon a bunch of deeds for this forgotten land which, according to the
ancient scrolls, was next to a highway. And we all know, thanks to our
grandfathers, that highway lands are like discovering gold under your bed.
I went into full detective mode. At first I tried
hand-drawing the land by combining all the maps on the deeds – total disaster.
Next I tried juxtaposing the plot map, mouza map, Google Satellite image, and
maps from the deeds on top of each other. Slightly better, but still not
usable. I couldn’t figure out the shape of the land. Finally, in a moment of
part desperation and part nostalgia, I turned to the oldest and most loyal tool
in my arsenal – MS Paint.
Most of the younger generation might not understand or
appreciate the importance of MS Paint. Some of you might not even
have a Windows computer. You have my condolences. For you never got to
experience the might of MS Paint - the unsung hero of the 90s. Be it making a
perfect rectangle or dive deep into Ayesha Takia’s… eyes. MS Paint was the
answer to everything. And to those who are closer to my age and still cling to
your Windows devices, I have one question – how’s your backache?
But I digress. With the precision of a surgeon I drew out
the plot of land Chacha had so longingly ignored for years. And the masterpiece
looked something like this:
No wonder Chacha forgot about it.
1.
Only a sliver of the land was connected to the
highway
2.
That sliver wasn’t connected to the other pieces
of the land
3.
Those other pieces of land weren’t connected to
each other
4.
WHAT THE PHUCK!
Now don’t get me wrong. Of course the land was connected to
other pieces of land. That is how land works. You don’t just have some
land and then it ends. Galileo proved that wrong centuries ago. What I mean is
that the bunch of land that Chacha owned was not connected to other pieces that
he owned. It looked like scattered puzzle pieces from different boxes. Sure,
the West Bengal mutation department had done a splendid job of listing the
names of the landowners on their website. But knowing someone’s name isn’t
enough if you intend to transact with them. A phone number would have been
nice.
So it turns out some clever broker had convinced Chacha that
he could acquire the whole plot. The land was once owned by the Nawab on Bengal
who in 1727 gifted ‘it’ to a loyal subject – may his soul rest in piece. The
loyal subject had four wives and a brood large enough to fill a small village.
Fast forward through three centuries of inheritance, squabbles, unresolved
disputes, legal battles, and a fair bit of incest, the land was now owned by an
army of descendants who could not agree on dinner, let alone sell their land. I guess that’s what 300 years of procreation does to family values. Since ‘it’ was presently held by scores of
people, Chacha would have to buy it slowly, one at a time. Since no one person
could use the land effectively, it could be bought at a very cheap price. That
went on for a while. And then the broker disappeared. And Chacha was left with
a jigsaw puzzle of land that wasn’t connected to anything. Not even itself.
After piecing this horror show together on paper, I
convinced Chacha to at least visit the place. Mind you, he’d had never actually
laid eyes on it. Only I had advanced his knowledge about the place with Google
Maps. But not his fault. Most of the prior generations had barely laid eyes on
what would screw them for the rest of their lives. Only after tying the
unbreakable legal knot would they realize what they’d signed up for. Our
generation had done away with those concepts.
The roads of rural Bengal pose their own set of challenges.
It is said that if one can learn to drive in Bengal, they can drive anywhere in
the world. That is why NASA is littered with Indian scientists – NASA brought
in scientists from Bengal! Because if you want someone who is able to drive a
rover in a completely hostile and inhospitable terrain having no idea what lies
ahead and being prepared for anything, you need someone who can drive in Bengal.
Which is pretty ironic, because since I have come to Bengal, this place has
done everything to kill my drive.
The drive was mostly soundless and often roadless. Years of
monsoons had withered away the roads and any kind of markings. And so, we
arrived at ‘it,’ which, as it turns
out, was less of a place and more of an existential dilemma. ‘It’ was in the middle of nowhere. Not
the poetic middle of nowhere, where you find peace and tranquility. More like,
‘How the heck do we monitor this?’ nowhere.
Evidently Chacha had bought a piece of land right in between and hence, far
from, two villages so we did not even have a lock-shop close by. Not that we
could have locked down the unwalled land with a lock. Other than a grazing cow,
there wasn’t much to see. Sure the highway passed near, but it was a West
Bengal highway. Delhi has better streets inside the chasms of Hauz Khas. And if
that’s not relatable enough, think of the roads on which two cars can make slow
love while passing by each other. The silver lining? You could drive fast –
because no one else dared to.
But the pièce de résistance of ‘it’ was this: there was no ‘it’. The land, per say, wasn’t there. Someone had dug away the earth from the land. What was left was a lake. Or rather a collection of sizable puddles. So to recap:
1. The land that wasn’t connected to the highway
2.
The land wasn’t connected to other lands
3.
The land wasn’t even land
I guess all wasn’t at loss. Some lesson could be derived from this dastardly tale. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Which brings us to our second story…
