Vaaru’s Maneuver
As has been customary for him the last thirty some years, Vaaru got up around five in the morning and got downstairs without making much of a fuss. Waking Karthiany (Karthu to family and friends) at that ungodly hour can be quite devastating especially on a week-end, for she probably did not hit the sack until Letterman signed off. He and Karthu are about three hours off with him going to bed around ten and her past midnight and a similar disparity exists about the time they wake up. His morning routine is pretty predictable; by the time the water he put on the stove starts boiling, he will have the coffee mug with sugar and ground ready on the counter top and fetched the Post. He then makes his way to the basement, turn the television on, and sit back on the couch and try to comprehend what all them Libs (that is how Vaaru refers to the liberals and left leaning politicians) have to say even though he violently disagrees with that ideology and literally hates anybody that follows it. During these self-imposed torture sessions, better termed as virtual flagellations, he may yell back at the TV or run commentaries about various news items in the ComPost (his reference to the local newspaper, The Washington Post). No matter how irate he gets, his masochistic temperament will keep taking him back to the same watering holes for an update of his mental picture of how the world progressed while he slipped into oblivion after the fourth drink the previous night.
His costume at home consists of a simple lungi, a checkered, small bed sheet for all that matter, tied around his waist, no shirt, no underwear, nothing else. Sometimes he will make a pouch out of one end of the lungi in order to keep the remote control handy. All his lungis are stitched together, almost like a large skirt so that there is little likelihood that he will inadvertently expose his other assets highly valued in his younger days but have since diminished in value due to infrequent usage, other than for liquid waste disposal. He keeps a trench coat handy downstairs so that he does not have to change his outfit when he goes out to fetch the newspaper. Neighbors probably wonder why this buffoon wears a jacket even during summer time. He was pretty sure that folks around his neighborhood had a very low opinion of him and his family but it did not bother him much. He only wished he could take some of his neighbors back to his ancestral home in Trichur and show off how the Aattukarens live!
Vaaru maintains that his ancestors were mill owners from Trichur supplying tons of coconut oil all across Kerala, the western coastal region of India where the Malloos call it their home. But that was not a well-accepted fact even with his beloved wife, Karthu. Thimthy, his next-door neighbor, is pretty certain that is not the case for his great uncle had worked with Vaaru’s grandfather as a Chakku operator (hence the family name Aattu + Karen) in one of the mills owned by a Chettiar from Madras. As customary in Trichur, now that the Aattukarens have become wealthy, the stories have changed in context. Wealth begets connections and connections beget aristocracy. In this bizarre region, social ascendancy with the culmination of aristocracy is directly coupled to material holdings. So, in the social rung here gold merchants, sari peddlers, and stationary store operator occupy the upper rungs of the totem pole while intellectual professions like academia, engineering, and the like are cast into the lower end of the spectrum. Regardless of whether one operated a store in the “Trichur Round” or peddled empty bottles door-to-door, the accumulation wealth results in many a nobility appearing magically in the ancestral chain including some direct dealings with the royal family. If one drew an eight-mile circle centering the temple in Trichur, one runs into an alien culture unfamiliar to the rest of Kerala. Where most people in that part of the world cherish generations of continuously increasing respectability in order to ascend the social ladder, here in Trichur one only needs to make some money; street peddlers become part of the aristocracy overnight by crafty crooked dealing, smuggling, adulteration, tax evasion, or anything that results in the accumulation of large amounts of wealth. As long as one is not caught by the law enforcement, all activities are acceptable. Vaaru maintains he did not have to come to the US, he wanted to prove to the world (his world consists of Nasranies from Trichur and surrounding towns) that he is his own man in spite of what the gentry thought about his education at the parallel college. He married Karthu, an Ezhava girl he met at the parallel college, because of true love and not at all because of her uncle’s sponsorship for bringing her to the US. Obviously, he was kicked out of his “aristocratic” clan for the cardinal sin of marrying an Ezhava girl there by the apparent tarnishing the lineage of the Aattukaren family. Obviously, working in Chettiar’s mill has long been forgotten!
Announcement by CNN about the re-airing of the Blitzkrieg interview and commentary redirects Vaaru’s attention from the newspaper to the Television. He had already reached somewhat of a crescendo going through the ComPost articulation about illegal immigrants deserving full medical care even if they had not been contributing anything. He strongly believes that Blitzkrieg is a crony of the previous president and he refers to CNN as the Clinton News Network. When Monica and Bill were defining new chapters to the “Kama Sutra” and trying them out on the Oval Office desk, CNN, he thinks, was concentrating on the plight of orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. For them downplaying the rigamarole and acrobatics of a president with an intern is essential for those news item casts an unfavorable light on the activities of the libs. As usual, Blitzkrieg again has two guests, one the hard-line pit-bull-like leftist senator Dick Turban and the other the left-leaning, nose-picking, thump-sucking in-name-only republican, Chuck Haggler.
And Blitzer goes, “Senator Turban, please tell me, tell me Senator, the AP is reporting that a private first class, identified as Pfc. (Private First Class) Tyrone, was caught peeping into the latrine of an elderly Arab woman. You know this extreme humiliation will not have happened if Mr. Bush had not ordered recklessly our troops into Iraq, into this unwinnable quagmire of an operation reminiscent of the conflict in the Nam.” He continues, “Do you think the President should apologize and may be even impeached from the Presidency for having his actions result in this inhuman way our beloved Muslim brethren been treated? Will you be encouraging your counterparts in the House on a motion to impeach him if he is unwilling to level with the American people and resign from the presidency retroactive to 2004?”
Having set the stage perfectly for his tirade, Senator Turban recites the standard litany of how rapists and murderers in Louisiana were assaulting, maiming, and raping the victims of Katrina while the President was giving tax break to the wealthiest one percent of the Americans who amassed all that wealth by stealing from the poor. And the Senator continues, “This President is in bed with the Halliburtons of the world while the illegal chicken catchers from Mexico are depressing the wages and living standards of hard-working Americans. He is taking money away from the school lunch program, where that may be the only meal many of these kids have during a whole day, and giving it away to the wealthy geezers and their pharmaceutical compatriots for Viagra and Cialis pills. For the President it is more important to have one horny senior citizen than a bunch kids escaping the day-to-day reality of starvation.”
By now Senator Haggler has heard enough, unable to reciprocate the aural diarrhea of Turban, he interjects, “Tyrone’s behavior was completely legal and is allowed under the “peep and sneak” provision of the Patriot Act. The Pfc had probable cause in suspecting that the facility may have been used in the past to discharge bomb grade material.” He continues, “Unlike some of the past presidents, this president is focused on the safety of every man, woman, and child and not concerned about hiding some blue dress under his wife’s bed”, a veiled reference to Kama Sutra effort by the previous president.
Vaaru, meanwhile has gone back to the ComPost story of how the CIA had abducted law abiding Arabs displaced by the brutal Tora Bora bombing and forced them to unfriendly countries like Egypt in a rendition scheme of unimaginable cruelty when they all could have been rehabilitated in the US and won the hearts and minds of the Muslims around the world. The newspaper had unconfirmed reports of some mansion being made available in Hyannis Port and Coco Beech in Florida. Apparently, by this extremely charitable act, some Boston area Senator wants to absolve his sins of driving off the bridge and causing the drowning of a young girl a couple of decades ago. With these stories and the other ones he had a chance to skim through, Vaaru reaches a stage of extreme turbulence and agitation and starts running commentary, may be a call to an armed conflict, to the plants, chairs, and other artifacts in the family room. He starts prancing around the family room at times swinging the rolled-up newspaper in what appeared to be a mock sword fight.
The loud knock on the front-door brought an abrupt stop to his oratory; he starts frantically searching for clothing to wear in order to open the door. Luckily, he had brought the hamper downstairs the previous night and diving into it, he comes up with a pair of pants and a hooded sweatshirt, affectionately referred to as “Hoodie”. He swiftly jumps into the pants forgetting the customary boxers he wore underneath, making him a note that he will be careful zipping up to prevent vital appendages getting caught up in the zipper. He shoves the two arms through the sleeves of the sweat shirt and in fine motion, pulls himself in with the hood of the contraption resting on his back. Proud of getting himself ready with such short notice, he proceeds to the entrance foyer and opens the door. Unbeknown to him, the lungi accompanies him as a portion of it gets caught in the back of his pants giving the appearance that the attire for men from that part of the world included a tail. Even while approaching the door, he could see through the window that all kinds of uniformed and plainclothes men including fire fighters, agents from the Bureau, and state and local police are all spread out and searching his property. They are carrying seismometers, Geiger counters, bomb detection devices, IED deactivator, robotic detonators and everything in between. As he unlatched front door, two massively built men from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) lifts him up in the air almost to the ceiling and holds his hands straight outward as though to prevent Vaaru from activating possible explosive devices attached to his own body.
Vaaru tries to defend himself; say something but words did not come out easily and what he was able stutter did not make sense. His extreme anger has given way to a stomach-churning nausea with entire anatomy shivering violently from fear; the law men are now reading the Miranda rights, giving him a choice to remain silent, and about his right to have an attorney present if he chooses. Karthu, still half-asleep calls out from upstairs threatening to kick his rear if he does not keep his antics down; she still has a couple more hours to go to complete her ritualistic sleep. Recalling an episode of the TV show, “Law and Disorder”, Vaaru asks for the customary right for a phone call. Using the speed dial, he calls Karthu’s cell phone but remembered belatedly that she has to dump the entire contents of her purse before locating that contraption and it is unlikely to persuade her to even attempt that fete this early in the morning. As the receiver goes into voice mail “You have reached the..”, Vaaru, for the umpteenth time, realizes the folly of depending on Karthu for these life threatening emergencies.
As called for in the SOP (Standard Operating Procedures in the law enforcement vernacular), Vaaru is taken into the armored van shackled and hand-cuffed. He realizes that the law enforcement folks have been pretty busy early for there were a couple of winos already in the van sitting in a corner releasing toxic fumes from the occasional burps. As he settles down for the long lonely ride to the downtown precinct, he does not know what bad “Karma” resulted in this fate. He cannot remember having conspired to do anything against anybody. His sole conspiratorial effort is centered on fooling Karthu from knowing the amount red-label (Johny Walker) he consumes each evening. He has no clue as to what, if any, defensive maneuvers he will be able to pull out of his arsenal. More importantly, he is clueless that the FBI had made a colossal mistake identifying him as a suspect in the plot to kill thousands of wild goats and had him picked up, for they were looking for a five foot six inch South Asian male in his fifties named Khadeer Aadukaren, a trader in livestock, not an Attukaren, an oilman like himself.
