“Captain” was never in the army, nor into any sporting activity, and nor was he a stocky, spitting-image of “Captain” Vijayakanth (a Tamil movie veteran of the 80s and 90s). Instead, he was short at about five-and-a-half feet, skeletally-thin, and quite dark-skinned to account for the unforgiving humid heat of Madras. I knew him at a time when Sunny, the two-wheeler, was in vogue and not quite coincidentally, he rode one of those. If you’ve seen Sunny, and if you’d seen Captain, you’d say it was a perfect match.
Captain was, as was common in those days, the de facto electrician-plus-plumber for our apartment (and a few more in the locality). He had this dingy-little shop right across the road from our colony but you couldn’t find him in his shop almost ever. On the rare afternoon that he did exist in that small, dark 5x10 half-filled with the kind of dismantled clutter you’d find in an electrician’s shop, you might find him leafing through a thin novella or a serious magazine. Yeah, he was one of those rare kinds – somewhat well-read, could dole out a good dose of English when required, could speak at length on realpolitik, wax lyrical about out-of-fashion Tamil-cinema legends and down a lot more than a few gulps of TASMAC whiskey.
Andaman Maami of the fourth floor once told me she was the one who christened him Captain. I can’t remember if I ever did ask her why but if I did, I’ve forgotten her answer. Captain was fixing something in her house at the time, wearing a camo cap that he’d occasionally wear to keep his bald head safe from the scorching heat. The physique and the name had no business being together but he was Captain for all the time I had known him, even though eventually I would know his actual name.
Captain’s notoriety was of two kinds. He was a hard man to catch hold of when you had a dysfunctional ceiling fan or a tube-light that suddenly wanted to be a disco one. He wasn’t busy, per se. He was just uninterested being an electrician to the boring old families that resided in these apartments. I am sure if left with a sizable inheritance, he would have reduced it to ashes in a couple of years spending them on books and booze. The second thing he was notorious of was the ignominy of being a wife-beater. “He comes home drunk and starts scolding me, harassing me,” was a perennial complaint. Counseling by the women-folk of the apartment – my mom included – did not really change him. By the time his son had come of age, the wife and son left him. That shattered him and while he seemed to have deserved it, it was unsettling to watch a frail man implode unto himself.
Much before those things happened though, I asked him with my schoolboy naivete if it was true that when people get drunk they have no idea what they’re doing and end up harassing their wives and other people. Chuckled, and said, if someone gets that drunk, they’d vomit and pass out. All the other drunk-and-did-this is a pretense: if I weren’t drunk, I’d get beaten black and blue. Being drunk is just an excuse. Appalling as it sounds now, he delivered it with such characteristic Goundamani-esque wit that I’ve remembered it all my life as a funny narration.
Captain was a very staunch supporter of the DMK party. There was a communist/trade-unionist living in the apartment and my mom was a talkative, politically-conscious, happy-to-debate person so our living room would occasionally be the staging ground of lively, humorous, but also very-pointed debates about politics. And it was in one of those moments that Captain declared no party was good and the one he chose to support was the least-bad. This logic is as old as the Greeks and even older perhaps, yes, but for a school-going teenager just being exposed to the vagaries of layman politics, the perspective seemed fresh and intelligent.
He was an inherently witty man, ready with an arsenal of situational comedy. The problem was that he’d manage to tickle himself with his wit in the most inappropriate of times. This one time he was supposed to fix the fan – heavy as it is, compounded by the fact that our man would’ve weighed no more than 50 kilos – and he cracked a joke that had me drop the tools (I was supposed to hand him when asked) on the table because I started laughing my lungs out. Contagious laughter happened and he started laughing with the fan precariously half-stuck on the hook from the ceiling, not yet fully screwed-in.
There was also this once when Captain and I discovered the wrath of a pigeon that was guarding its eggs that she had unfortunately laid in an empty house on the top-floor that Captain and I were set to clear-up. We didn’t know that the pigeon had laid eggs in the house so we tried to shoo the bird away nonchalantly only to be met with a fierce attack that culminated in the bird deploying its weapons system – bird-shit ejecta. We came back with an umbrella but our attempts were completely thwarted. We had a good laugh about it the next day, but I’m sure the birds had a better laugh about it on the same day.
In restrospect, I think he might have found it disrespectful that a teenager no taller than himself was calling him by his moniker as the adults did, but if he did, he did not show it ever. Or maybe he did and I was just not smart enough to catch the cue. I’d occasionally split between Captain and his real name (or the way I’d use it – Gopal Uncle because in India, any man older was “uncle”). Interestingly, you could also place the people of the apartment on a timeline by the way they called him. The newer folks knew him as Captain but the OG residents (like my dad) would only address him as Gopal. On the rare occasions that they’d use “Captain”, it was to add flavor to the funny anecdote they were sharing about him and his antics on any given day.
All our lives are peppered with interesting characters like Captain and it takes years to realize how deep an impression they’ve left in our psyche. The last I spoke to him – over a decade ago – he was managing a hostel on Nelson Manickam Road and was asking me about listing it online for greater visibility. I don’t know if Gopal Uncle is alive for he seemed quite old even then but you can bet that if he is, he’s just as witty and careless as he was when he was the quintessential “Captain” in the apartments and colonies of Choolaimedu.