chr(c)tr 1: the bridge player

13Jan09

[an introduction to chr(c)tr series:
the series features various characters i have come across in urban public places… these characters are simultaneous real and imagined, as they are inspired by actual people but since i have not conversed with any of these ‘original’ people, clearly my descriptions of them are based upon my imagination…
the begnali/hindi/sanskrit word for ‘character’ happens to be ‘charitra’… the words have this curious resemblance… so i removed the vowels and bracketed the ‘c’ in between…]

‘bridge’ is this very difficult card game… mastering it requires keeping mental track of all the cards that are getting played by all the players, and what the act of each card getting played reveal about other possible cards in the hand of that player…

this person is not a bridge player… anymore… he used to play… but nowadays, he watches other play… he watches and at the end of the game takes pride in pointing out the mistakes committed by each player at various stages of the game… and does that without having direct knowledge of even one hand of cards (since he is not playing)… for last several years, bridge players from his ‘para’ (‘mohalla’) has won each and every bridge championship in kolkata…

we find this character traveling in a bus… clearly not a place to play bridge… but he simply cannot keep his mind at rest from bridge… so he has invented this game for himself… he calls it ‘bus bridge’… everyday he travels on this particular bus (say 215) to work… throughout his one and half our journey, he keeps track of all the buses that this particular bus meets/passes by… he keeps track of all of them and in 5 minute intervals he makes the announcements:

’12C/2 6759 is late by 2:30 minutes today’

[12C/2 being the route number and 6579 the registration number of the bus]

‘they should throw 2985 out of the 45A route, for 3 days in a row it is coming after 7180’

[apparently 2985 and 7180 are both in the 45A route, and though 2985 leaves the stand 15 mins before 7180, for 3 successive days the former has reached gol park (a bus stop where both 215 and 45A buses pass by) after the latter one]

so he not only keeps track of all the buses (route numbers and bus numbers) that his 215 bus should meet at various points of its journey, but also keeps track of those buses which his bus ends up meeting when either his bus or the other buses are running late… so in his mental map of circulating buses through the kolkata city streets (instead of circulating cards through the players’ hands) he sees all those buses that not only meet his bus, but also might meet his bus, in case of various beyond-routine circumstances… especially keeping track of this beyond-routine possibilities helps him to exercise his mind to consider various possible consequences of a bridge player playing a wrong card, which ends up giving wrong signals about the other (yet-to-be-played and hence unknown) cards in his hand, and changing the course of the game…

people say that bus owners call him up to get info about their buses, but this seems unlikely to me…

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Tags: bridge, bus, chr(c)tr, kolkata