September | 2012 | Manu Kurup

One of these days I was thinking about the random things we used to do as youngsters in a University which had no restrictions. Freed from the ties of native place, when I came here, I had the luck of getting the company of some of the weirdest people from all over the country. Even in that situation, we came across people who would even make us look like we hold platinum memberships in the ‘Sanest People on the Planet Club’. One of them was V.M. We used to wonder if he was an alien. He was unusually tall and had long curly hair which often served the purpose of a curtain in front of his face. If someone wanted to see his face, he/she should take the opportunity to try and see him in the canteen. That was the place where V.M deliberately parted the curtain to show his face to the world. I have even heard stories of people getting scared by the sight of V.M in the poorly lit corners of campus at night. You’d believe me if I had posted a photo of him here but I don’t have one.

When I first saw V.M, he was in his European phase. Wait… I will explain. He often wore shirts and shorts which would make even the ultra-modern male models on FTV look like a bunch of out-fashioned street boys. He used to carry around a multi-coloured umbrella which looked like Avant-Garde artist decided to have a wild party and the umbrella happened to be in the middle of it. Apparently, he never wished to leave the campus as he often registered for courses after courses. He had a room but no one ever dared to be his room-mate so he enjoyed a single room all for himself. When I came back from my vacation in the beginning of the second semester, we found out that V.M has undergone a serious change. A whole paradigm shift in everything that had described him till then; his western clothes had changed into Saffron Kurta and a saffron pants. The umbrella became black and his hair became messier. It looked more like a tropical forest and every time I took a look at him I half expected an Orangutan to jump out from it. Someone who used to talk to him (???) told me that he had been to the Himalayas and meditated there for two months. He decided to change his methods to become spiritual. Thereafter, he became more or less the campus Yogi. He could be seen under the Neem trees, meditating. Whenever he was seen at the canteen, I noticed that he was eating fruits instead of the Chinese food most people queued up for. I have even seen the fruit seller in the food-court reverently giving V.M bananas and apples. One thing I should say is that V.M never deliberately did anything to grab attention or forced others to treat him as a Sage… people just spoke about him when he was around.

One of those days, a friend of mine was allotted a room. He came to meet me to seek help in shifting his luggage. I readily agreed because we often shared books with each other during that time. When we went to the hostel office, we found out that the room that was allotted to my friend belonged to V.M. My friend, B, objected but the supervisor assured him that V.M has discontinued the course and his application is been processed. Upon opening the room we found out that V.M’s belongings were still there in the large shelf and it was locked using a chain. We obtained V.M’s contact number from the office and informed him about the allotment and told him to relieve the room of his belongings. He hung up on us. We waited for another week and then contacted the office again. The office told us that V.M is out of reach and we are in our right (as per the hostel rules) to throw his belongings out. Being the youngsters we were, we decided to break open the door to clean it up and abandon his belongings in the corridor. After working half an hour on the lock, we broke it and the wooden door of the shelf was thrown open. Paper after paper started falling on me and B as if it was raining paper pieces.

They were erotic posters of famous film stars from all over the world… an entire shelf filled with posters and newspaper/tabloid cuttings of porn stars. B cursed V.M using unpublishable words and started shoveling the whole erotic stuff out of the room into the corridor. People who were passing started looking at them, some of them even bending down to pick a couple of pictures… only to giggle at us.

Two weeks after this incident (which I should say that tarnished my image on the campus) B called me up to say that V.M showed up one day in his room in full yogi attire. He demanded all this things (bags of erotic photo clips and semi-porn magazines). B said he had thrown away all the things. V.M bellowed at the breaking of the news and threatened to sue B and cursed him in some unknown language (which B believes to a dead one, by the way!) and hurried down the corridor.

The legend of V.M ended there.