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Caught off guard, taking the interviewer for a ride
SPICE OF LIFE: A mocking smile curled round his lips when he addressed me, “So Mr Parmar, let us start directly with Aldous Huxley. I’m ready for the ride.”
It was a chilly morning of the early ’70s. Standing at the Ambala railway station with a lit cigarette in hand, I was waiting anxiously for a train to Hisar. It was a different world then. You could conveniently smoke on a crowded platform, but it was not convenient to reserve a seat on a train.
I wanted to reach Hisar that evening. The next day, there was an interview for the post of lecturer in English at CRM Jat College that I desperately wanted to attend. With an air of despondence, I was looking at the crowded trains entering the platform, stopping to disgorge a mass of people, and then departing after sucking more of them. I was wondering whether I would get a toehold on my train.
But what happened next was no less than a miracle. The train for Hisar arrived and I was pushed by a crowd into a compartment. A gentleman occupying a window seat gestured me towards the seat facing him. Perhaps, it had been vacated by the person who had come to see him off. I sat depositing my airbag beneath the seat, heaved a sigh of relief and then regarded my benefactor. He was an elderly man with a suave, clean-shaven face and bright eyes shining from behind the rimless spectacles, an air of sophistication around him. Wrapped in a spotlessly clean white shawl, he could be a political bigwig or a highly placed bureaucrat.
Our conversation took off from my expression of gratitude and telling him how important this travel was for me. I told him about my interview the next day. Some people are such avid listeners that you tend to talk your heart out before them. He was such a person, listening to me intently with a genial appreciative smile, punctuating my narrative with appreciative “Really so?” or “Oh! That’s great!” and the like. At one place, he asked, “So you must have prepared hard for this interview?”
I told him that I had been appearing for such interviews for a while after my post-graduation and I had developed a technique of my own. “Now I know how to take the expert interviewer for a ride,” I said with a boastful grin. “He will surely ask what my favourite field in literature is. I shall declare it’s modern fiction. Then the next question will naturally be who my best-loved author is. Thus, we shall reach Aldous Huxley, which is my cherished territory! I have read the synopses of all his works with notes and commentaries.”
Throughout the journey, my companion cautiously evaded my questions regarding his identity or whereabouts by changing the topic or by simply ignoring me. I lost him in the crowd when we got down at Hisar without having any chance to say a proper goodbye.
The next morning, I was sitting before a panel of a five-member interview board. It was a prestigious college with a reputation for fair selection of lecturers. Just satisfy the expert at the interview and you will be in, I was told. The centrally seated chairman asked me a few questions about my antecedents and handed me over to the person sitting on the left edge of the table, “Your witness, Mr, Bombwall!”
I turned left to face Mr Bombwall and was shell-shocked. He was the man I met on the train the day before. He was wearing a well-tailored business suit instead of a white shawl and his bright eyes were laughing silently behind the rimless specs. A mocking smile curled round his lips when he addressed me, “So Mr Parmar, let us cut it short and start directly with Aldous Huxley. I’m ready for the ride.”
Anyway, I was selected for the post. The man on the train, Mr KR Bombwall, turned out to be an angel of a person. I found out later that he was a consummate scholar and noted educationist of Haryana. parmar.ranbir@gmail.com
The writer is a Shimla-based freelance contributor
