The Incredible Mr. Sen

Mr. Sen is an ordinary man, an ordinary Bengali man to be precise. Slightly strange he definitely is, but it’s not evident to the naked eye. It is not his hairstyle, held in a constant off-centre parting with the aid of Olive and Keo Karpin oil, neither is it his ‘fashion’ sense. He is pretty much as Bengali as Bengali can be.
His prejudice against Jon Bon Jovi may seem strange to some, but that is not that grand enough on the scale of all things strange. He has a knack of inventing a new concept of utopia every week over a cup of tea (with a hint of ginger for his mild sinusitis). He is teacher of History and Political Science by day and by evening he dons the avatar of the mild-manner Kartik Sen, tutor of ‘Pol. Sci.’ (and history, English, Bengali etc.) to the hopeless youth of his colony. That too is done at a very nominal rate of Rs. 60 per hour, per child.
Well, the above description would make him border towards the banal, but it is in his life beyond 7 p.m. that the strangeness lies. Coming straight to the point Mr. Sen is a distinguished ‘fish reader’. He has a talent for reading the thoughts of people who have come in certain proximity of the dead fishes, or touched them. This does not imply that he has the useful power of foretelling the future or anything; he can just download the thoughts of people into his brain via fishes.
He does this fish-reading on a daily basis, during his daily jog at 8:30 p.m. He first runs from his house to the Kali Mandir and then to the local fish market. On reaching the fish market around 9:00 when it is mostly emptying out, he does his reading at his own leisure. He feels the fishes, dead, kept constantly wet to maintain their freshness. He runs his hands over the scales, prods them and at times (to gain access to some very deep thoughts) he put his hands under the flap where the gills are meant to be. He then makes his way back home.
On further analysis it would be evident that Mr. Sen.’s field of expertise will be restricted to Bengalis as it not often that you find any other species of humanity buying fish in a Bengali fish market. That does not bother Mr. Sen much though, not as much as the fact that the ability to read fishes (or human thoughts downloaded onto fishes) has to be weirdest talent on face of this earth.
And what does Mr. Sen do with this talent? Nothing, really. He jogs back home, en route he analyses all the thoughts of other people in his brain and separates them from his own. He then finds out the ones that are funny and has a laugh. By the time this process is over he is already home and then he forgets all of it with a glass off Royal Stag (with Coke or neat). He then muses over the pace, the imagination, the diversity, the convoluted nature and the depravity of the human thought process for 10 minutes and then has his dinner.
That is just another day in the life of the strangely talented Mr. Sen. He deems himself and ordinary Bengali man, which automatically implies that inaction is his birthright. For it has been that many times during his readings, that he has come across people who fall in the wrong end of the moral spectrum and has done nothing about them. Well what if he manages to stop one wife beater? That is not a big enough dent considering that the population of India is 1 billion, and a very optimistic assumption that only 1 out of every 10000 is a wife-beater. He’d rather discuss faults of Marxism in class when he is supposed to be teaching about the rise of the Mughal Empire.
One day, all that was to change. Mr. Sen on his general fish-reading trip came in contact with another strange man from the far side of the moral spectrum. Well, this one wasn’t a wife beater, but that was because he wanted to do away with his wife altogether. This somehow managed to arouse the latent emotion of standing up for what is right in Mr. Sen’s heart. He decided to stop this man.
So, he was going to follow this man and luckily he had got his Maruti 800 (1992 model, no AC, in desperate need of servicing) to the market. He got behind the wheel and started pursuing the man’s car (Chevrolet Optra LSI).
The man drove and drove and drove…evidently aimlessly. A usually very Mr. Sen was about to get bored and give up the chase when the Optra pulled over. The man came out and started to fiddle around with something he had taken out of his jacket. It seemed on Mr. Sen’s immediate analysis to be a gun (or a knife, or a hammer or a very old and big cell phone). The man fiddled around with it for some time and then got back in the car and started driving again. Mr. Sen followed suit.
“Suoererbaccha! He’s going to do it!” thought Mr. Sen.
“I have to jump that red light,” thought the man.
“I will have to stop him,” Mr. Sen said to himself.
“Maybe I won’t, that truck’s not slowing down,” the man thought.
The Optra halted ahead of the Stop sign at the red light. The truck was still speeding and coming from the other side.
“Shit! My brake doesn’t work!” Mr. Sen cursed.
The Maruti 800 didn’t stop and hit the rear end of the Optra. The front of the Maruti collapsed inwards (1992 model, insurance not renewed either), the rear of the Optra got a dent. But that wasn’t it; the impact made the Optra inch a little forward, so much so that it hit the side of the speeding truck, ricocheted off it and hid the side pavement hard. The man inside had just taken off his seatbelt, so he had no chance. Gone in 60 seconds.
The police came and after a thorough (yeah, right!) investigation deemed it what it actually was; an accident. There was nothing fishy about it. Mr. Sen’s Maruti sold for scrap value.
Mr. Sen later felt triumphant, some good had finally come of his fish reading skills. He had been the hand of God, of divine justice. He felt like a superhero. Well, he was no Batman, Superman or Hellboy, but he sure had the weirdest superpower on the planet. The mild mannered Kartik Sen by day and the ‘shorts’-wearing fish-reader by night he was.
“Good must always triumph over evil,” he would tell his students.
“Sir, what does that have to do with Sir Roger Dollar?” and impatient student would ask.
“It’s Siraj-Ud –Daullah son, you are not British mind you. And I ask the questions here not you,” he would reply with a sense of authority.

It is generally perceived that the great that give new directions to our society and it is the mediocre masses who push the train in that direction. Mr. Sen might have been one of them, the mediocre people, but now he felt that he was meant for greatness. A secret desire to break out had risen in him, one that had long been thwarted.
So Mr. Sen is now devising ways change the world with his fish reading skills. May God grant him the favour of all the fishes in the world.