Column

Revenge, they say, is a dish best eaten cold. I can’t remember being very vengeful in my boyhood or even later. It’s not that I am particularly good-natured and feel strongly about turning the other cheek, it’s just that I can’t be bothered. Laziness succeeds all rage and if I can disguise it as Christian forgiveness that’s so far so hypocritical and good!

I think the worst revenge I ever took in my boyhood was when along with some friends, I was sitting on the steps under the padlocked door of PS Chindy, Sandalwood Merchants, very late at night. We were making a racket as teenagers do at the corners of deserted Pune streets and the neighbour, objecting to our noise, opened his wooden shutters on the first floor and poured a few buckets of water on us in a dissuading gesture from above. It was, we felt, a disproportionate assault. To be fair to him, he had warned us once to clear off and let him and his household sleep, but we were young and careless and, yes, inconsiderate. Looking back on it, we deserved the soaking, but of course resented it at the time.

Then came the month of Muharram. We lived in a religiously and
regionally mixed neighbourhood — Parsis, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Satanists — even a Chinese family! The Muslim criers with oil lamps would patrol the streets in the dark hours of the morning and knock on the doors of the faithful and observant with religious cries to wake them for the nocturnal meal before they undertook their daytime fast. The neighbour of the buckets was a staunch Zoroastrian, but hanging around the street corner at night as usual, we accosted one of the religious criers and commissioned him with the offer of the appropriate fee to wake up that particular household at 4am each morning with cries of observance to the Muslim faithful and the ringing of bells outside the Parsi’s door.

It was a sweet revenge with a dimension of spiritual outrage thrown in. The expletives that were uttered that morning and echoed around the neighbourhood were worthy of being recorded in my Dictionary of Exclusive and Unusual Parsi Abuse.

I think the only other memorable revenge I took was when in school I was eating precious pineapple out of a can and a covetous classmate, pretending to look in the can, spat in it so that I would be put off eating it and would sell it to him cheap. I pretended to forgive the scallywag and offered him, on a subsequent occasion, one of two bottles of Vimto which I flourished before him to make him covet. The one I handed to him was filled with potassium permanganate solution which looked convincing but made him vomit when he gratefully took a substantial swig of it.

A generation later the world, I feel, has turned more vengeful. My daughter, Tir is just 16 and her school was last week rocked by a scandal. A girl in the year below hers, aged 14 or 15, sent naked and obscene photographs of herself to her then boyfriend from her mobile phone. The girl was reputedly a bad one and was unpopular in school because she was suspected of having stolen make-up and so on belonging to classmates. The romance with her boyfriend ended and some girls who bore the poor thieving child a deep and irrational enmity persuaded the ex-boyfriend to part with the dirty pictures. They printed thousands of copies of them on the photocopier and distributed them around the school and placed them on benches in the town centre for the general public to see.

In another incident, boys who disliked a classmate photographed him on his mobile and superimposed his face onto pornographic photographs of men having sex and planted them on one of these public friendship internet websites.

I record these incidents purely to point out that technology has horrifyingly advanced the means of petty revenge — and not in any way to give Indian readers new ideas of how it can be done.