Of Misery & Nirvana

Of Misery & Nirvana 

Narendra Nair 


Passing through a less-frequented part of the city, we came across a road named Pote-dukhe Marg and it occasioned the teen striding alongside no little amusement. Literally translating pote-dukhe as someone with an abdominal pain, the kid took time off to squat on the pavement, doubled-up with uncontrollable mirth; it slayed him to think that someone would want a road named after a pain in the gut. He was a visiting American-born-desi nephew and he just could not get over the incident. American kids are the in-your-face kind who do not shy away from telling it like it is. Once home, he regaled his cousins and aunt with what he had seen and there were strained smiles on the faces of his hosts, because they knew that in our country, where names were of the most infinite variety and exotic flavour, such nomenclature was cause not for merriment but commemoration. But the boy was in the throes of what chat rooms call ROFL or rolling-on-the-floor-laughing and a distinct militant gleam came into the eyes of the cousins. They too had lived in the US and knew, like Robert De Niro in the 1993 movie This Boys Life , a thing or two about a thing or two concerning the USA. 
The cousins thought he needed bringing down a peg or two. So they buried him under an avalanche of cockeyed names found on American streets, compared to which Pote-dukhe was brilliant . Starting with Skunks Misery Road in Oyster Bay, New York, they bombarded him with road names like Pickle Dog Lane in Deer Lodge, Montana, Jackass Hill road in Littleton, Colorado , and made him blush with Triple-X road in Choctaw, Oklahoma . The intersection of Clinton and Fidelity in Houston raised a guffaw all round and he squirmed when they brought up the towns of Zook in Kansas, Jackson Hole in Wyoming, Mud-Lick in Kentucky and French-Lick in Indiana. The cousins went on relentlessly, How about your own address, brother, how about that He confessed hoarsely that while earlier they had lived on Shades-Of-Death-Road in Warren County, New Jersey, they had recently moved to Constipation Ridge, Tennessee. We had to intervene to stop the torture. That night, the young man was heard telling his folks on the phone that he intended, as soon as he returned home, to move to Nirvana, Michigan.