Pyramid of Virgin Dreams

Synopsis of Pyramid of Virgin Dreams by Vipul Mittra

“One by one, the dozen odd menials came forward customarilyto voice a few words of regret, nostalgia, repentance and sometimes even solaceand consolation. All of them shed tears adeptly, almost automatically.Kartikeya wondered if they had some unseen knobs behind their ears, which whentwisted, opened the valves of their tear ducts. There was first a tear from theright eye and then the left. These were real, salty tears, as real as the saltin seawater.”

Such is the predicament of Kartikeya Kukreja, the protagonist in the book, ashe haplessly looks on at the show of pseudo-grief while preparing for yetanother transfer. ‘Pyramid of Virgin Dreams’ is an engaging, if sometimestongue-in-cheek account of life in the bureaucracy with all its farces,inefficiencies and servitude. It is refreshingly candid and humorous, told byMittra, a bureaucrat himself. Set against the backdrop of mundane circuithouses, government-allotted residences and dull offices, the author comicallynarrates how the bureaucracy has the enigmatic capacity to draw the protagonistinto its vortex and have him conveniently entangled in it.
Several characters, including Kartikeya’s immediate family, his collegesweetheart and his very own conscience by the name of ‘Selfmusing’, find aplace in the narrative. Sometimes they haunt Kartikeya in his dreams, but everytime he wakes up, he finds that reality continues to remain as quirky as italways was. By the time he transforms from being a carefree boy to a typicalSaheb, Kartikeya realises without remorse that much of his idealism hasdisappeared within the labyrinthine bureaucratic pyramid. But will this pyramidalso devour his one true love now that he has found it? Kartikeya is uncertainof the answer.
In the witty and circumstantial accounts of his early years, the author throughKartikeya provides a glimpse into the world of hierarchies, promotions, fawningsubordinates and vacuous privileges that accompany growing status. They received humouring by idle cops when these chhota sahebs were taken fortheir first illegal hunt into the woods. Over the course of the huntingexpedition, Kartikeya and his friend, the two boys, in their bratty innocencediscuss their fathers’ promotions. Gagan, the young son of an IPS officerexplains to Kartikeya how the collapsible windshield of the police Jongaensured that the khaki uniform gathered dust in less than 15 minutes, thusenabling his father to proclaim his hard work.  “‘That is how,’ Gaganunveiled, ‘my Papa reached the level of a Deputy SP.’ He cooed, ‘And now, afterthe promotion, he has a white official Ambassador with closed airtightwindowpanes and an orange light on top, though just a blinking light and notthe rotating type as yet. Still, it is quite comfortable!’”

At school too, officers’ children were the privileged ones - the ones to getroomy classrooms when the small-town school had only three rooms. Kartikeyarecounts how this Government Model High School, far from being model or high,had phenomenally versatile teachers, where between them, the complete staff oftwo teachers could teach English,  Hindi, Science, Social Studies,Mathematics, Craft and PT.  English poetry was taught in the vernacularmode where even Wordsworth’s ‘Three Years She Grew’ was narrated in the Punjabilanguage. However, some lines were conveniently omitted due to the limitedtranslating capabilities of the teacher, and these, the teacher would say wereirrelevant and wouldn’t come in the exams anyway. Such exam logic, thoughtKartikeya, -helped abridge even the sonnets quite well, reducing them to a goodlevel of comfort and comprehension, thereby facilitating cramming.

A part of Kartikeya’s growing-up years was spent in the small, rustic town ofVarsa. During Operation Flood, Kartikeya’s bureaucrat father, Pratap had atechnocratic job thrust upon him when he was transferred to Varsa to look aftera milk plant. This obscure place, through decades of its existence, hadsteadfastly refused to pulsate or grow. It was much like the Himalayas,remaining enwrapped in a static, frozen, motionless state, sedating even itsnew entrants like the Kukreja family quite successfully. Although detestingevery moment of his job, Pratap managed to grasp the easier inanities of milkproduction, to the extent that he even felt confident conversing with the whiteDanish experts who were visiting the plant. ‘Whose claim to fame,’ he wouldconfide to Lingaswamy, his colleague, ‘is the breeding of cows with extra largeudders, and the designing of white steel milking machines with vulgar grabsthat clutch and jerk those extra-large udders.’ The milky existence, on theother hand, suited Kartikeya and his brother just fine. They found a cosy playarea in the cold storage where they could merrily while away their afternoonsplaying catch-catch and similar childhood games with butter-balls, cheese andother derivatives of milk.

Kartikeya cast off his semi-rural moorings when he entered college inChandigarh. By the time he had moved on to train for the AdministrativeServices at the Academy in Mussourie, Kartikeya had already experienced thethrill of lusting and the trauma of being spurned by his first love. Mittrawrites, “Kartikeya’s maiden experience of sitting thigh to thigh with hispretty classmates on wooden benches brought in inexplicable excitement. Themonotonous drone of lectures did little to distract Kartikeya from imaginingwith heightened sideways concentration, the kind and quality of body thequivering neighbourhood thigh would lead to, if he were to be transformed intoa male ant and crawl upwards, slowly: up, up, and up.” Later, once Kartikeyafinally finds his true love, Lulla, his only mentor on matters of love, adviseshim, “’My policy on girls says keep all options open; if not this one, then thenext one. If still not, then the next to next one, the next to next to nextone, and so on. A man’s heart is after all, quite large. In fact, the larger,the better!’”

Training at the Academy was physically gruelling with the freezing earlymorning jogs that only served to benumb the brains. Kartikeya’s batch matesreasoned that while civil servants were not supposed to use their brains in theface of political interference over the next 30 years, the neighbouring faujishad to be effectively jerked into psychic nothingness to confront enemybullets. Jogging long and hard day after day along the ascending, serpentinehilly paths thus served that purpose – of benumbing their brains. Despite thecongenial air of camaraderie that pervades the training, the Academy alsobrought with it important lessons in solitude. Cadre-related anxiety eclipsedvirtually everything else. As one of the faculty put it, “‘So, you see, formost of us, an inconvenient cadre means banishment for a span exceeding twicethe period of Lord Rama’s wanderings in the wilderness, which was just fourteenyears of exile.’”

Soon, before he realises it, Kartikeya finds himself having metamorphosed intoan IAS officer. Once a Saheb, he has to contend with his wife, two highly charged,energetic kids and his own conscience as he grapples with his climbing careergraph and transferable postings. Mittra humorously illustrates theprotagonist’s plight, “Kartikeya hurried over his daily bathroom rituals. Hebrowsed through the newspaper while seated on the pot, the most secure seatwhere no one could shake him off. He found a caricature of himself displayed inthe newspaper, drawn by a sub-talented, two-bit artist. His recent transfer toSachivalaya had made him newsworthy. He felt like a puppet that was dangled infront of the toilet-seated public by the colossal hands of the media, to beloudly and freely guffawed at from the top and bottom by the egestingsquatters.”

As the book concludes, Kartikeya, quite by accident, stumbles upon his firstlove - Revati - the girl he was smitten by in his college days. Both of themare well-settled in their own lives, but Kartikeya still feels irresistiblyattracted to this now grown woman. The meeting is fleeting yet they each feelthe palpable chemistry between them. He is torn between his feelings for Revatiand the very public life that he leads. Kartikeya tries to return to hisroutine life after that fateful meeting with Revati but finds himself unable todo so. He finally prepares to take the plunge and pursue his love - the onething that he knows for certain, and what he has yearned for all his life. Buthere too, he finds that fate has other plans.