Geetanjali Krishna: Not quite in the family!

“I’ve neither seen, nor heard of such a thing!” spluttered my friend as we pulled out of a busy south Delhi market in her car, “parking lot attendants smiling and waving you away, letting you park for free?” When we neared the exit of the lot, other attendants smilingly salaamed us, and my friend and I began to wonder if we were in a particularly self congratulatory dream-for-two. The driver cleared his throat when he saw our incredulous faces in the rear view mirror, “Madam, I’m sorry if the parking lot attendants have embarrassed you — actually, they never let me pay when I park here!” What had he done, we asked, to deserve such an honour? “I’ll have to tell you the story of my entire family to explain,” he almost warned us. Aware of the fact that we were a captive audience in the rear seat, we nodded.

“I’m the youngest of three brothers and my father used to be a wrestler in his day,” said he. When his eldest brother was born, he was such a big baby that his father decreed, “He will be a body builder like me!” Then the second brother came along, a tad bigger than his elder brother. The elated father decreed, “He will take the family name even further!” So the two brothers were taught to work out and exercise pretty much at the time when their peers were learning to walk. As they reached their mid-teens, their physiques were magnificent. The second brother was now six feet tall, beating his elder sibling by an inch.

“In our village, which isn’t far from Qutab Minar, body-building is a time-honoured tradition. We are Gujjars, and our community greatly values good physiques and physical prowess. So my brothers were feted by the best wrestlers of the area, all of whom wanted them to become their disciples,” said the driver to his now riveted audience.

But the brothers had something more contemporary in mind. So while they were in college they began working in local gyms as trainers. Then the elder one joined his father’s business, running two parking lots in south Delhi. “And that’s partly why they never charge me for parking here,” said he shyly.

“A part of the reason?” we queried, “tell us the whole story…” The driver cleared his throat again, and continued. “My second brother continued to work out and train, honing his physique to further perfection, if such a thing was possible,” he said. One day, when he’d come to visit his father and brother in one of their parking lots, he was spotted by the owner of a pub in the market. The next day, he had a job as a bouncer! “With his height and those massive shoulders, no one dared to mess with him,” said he, “and he was always at hand even when there was any trouble at the parking lot we just passed through…So now you’ll understand why they let me park for free!”There was silence as the driver concluded his family saga. “What a family,” said I, pausing as a thought struck me, “but why didn’t you follow your brothers’ illustrious footsteps?” He didn’t reply, as we’d reached our destination. The silence continued as he smartly umped out to open my door. When I saw him upright for the first time, I realised that nature, which had been so bounteous to his brothers, had probably been busy elsewhere when he was born. Standing tall at barely five feet and a couple of lucky inches, he shuffled his feet sadly and said, “I’m not called the baby of the family just because I’m the youngest…”