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Did you know that Bruce Lee was in town???

I guess I was in 3rd or 4th standard, I don't remember. Many of us have tucked the Khadi towels in the back of our vests and jumped from the compound walls hoping that there surely was a supernatural power in ourselves that we did not know. I almost broke my kneecap once after being convinced that I was a Superman. After all, I had all the things that he possessed- a brief, a new vest and a Khadi towel. What else could it possibly take to make a Superman, right?

Everybody knew at least the first two stances in Karate. First: You would squat a little and bring the fists close to the waist. Second: You would throw out one fist at a time in to the opponent- air. But when it came to fighting with real enemies like those guys, who would not field after having batted, Karate invariably took a back seat and the filmy style stunt would commence. But, once the fighters realized that the very essence of filmy fighting- mid air somersault was missing, there would be an unspoken agreement to resort to warfare closer to the earth. The fight as it intensified took the flavors of many kinds of combat techniques known to men. There would be the crossed-legged attempts to topple the opponent in the conventional Kusti style. There would be scratching of the face with long nails in the improvised Kung Fu style. There would be hurtling of good-sized stones at each other, uniformly brown canvas shoes that earlier resembled those worn by the ballerinas in the ‘Swan Lake’. There would be pants torn in wrong places and parents in the principal’s chamber. Of course, the last scene would be one in which the hero’s mother twists his ears so hard, he sings the all time hit from Dharwad- "Ayyo~ Yappa~". But all said and done, there was no denying that the guy who knew the first two steps in Karate had an edge. It was an age that thirsted for a true hero!

It was then that he came! The news spread cautiously among the blood-friends. What! Don’t you even know blood friends! They are those who prick their finger tips with pins, mix blood with blood and swear to never let anybody hurt each other. Apparently, one such blood friend defected. In the next half-hour or so, everyone knew more about this new arrival than the blood-friends themselves. Bruce Lee had come to Dharwad! People spent heated sessions at ascertaining the credibility of this rumor. But you just could not deny that he was here! So where was Bruce Lee? Of course you could not find him walking with a retired schoolteacher in the evening or squatting idly in front of some ‘Girmitt’ stall on the station road. Nevertheless, he was close by.

There is a hostel behind the "Mathura Bhavan" restaurant near the Railway station. Here dwelled some Tibetan students who could be seen practicing Karate in the mornings. Now, these were a peaceful bunch that did not mingle much with the natives and hence not much light was shed on this place. For that matter, the two or three huge Banyan trees between the restaurant and the hostel were enough to make the area look dark in broad day light. This itself was enough for speculations for the nearby folks. For instance, a couple of my friends had seen a woman in white saree, white blouse and white Hawaii slippers walking in the passage along side the restaurant and towards the hostel on the new moon day making the trade mark "hawaii chappal clatter". What else, one could see through her! No wonder we wrote this place off from our list of activity centers that typically consisted of big bungalow-compounds with no/few dogs and lots of ‘Ilaichi’, ‘Dalchinni’ and ‘Hunachi kai’ trees. But this was a forbidden place. It was here that Bruce Lee came to visit his own childhood blood friends.

Within a day or two, many of Dharwad’s future nation builders began building action plans to get a glimpse of Karate’s absolute divinity in flesh and blood. One of such high-risk missions was that of Mahboob alias Maabya. Now, it was a popular belief in those days that Bruce Lee was a savage man and that with single jabs, he killed people who irritated him. Forgive me for the extent of our imagination but he would pluck your intestines out by piercing his steal tough fingers in to your bellies or pluck your eyeballs out etc. With this background you will appreciate the intensity of planning of our high-risk mission. Maabya was a year or two older than me and nearly twice as tall. Nevertheless, he still wore the Dharwad’s universal standard- Half Chonna. One can picture him as two long poles in open air on top of which the pair half pants were tied to dry. In short, Maabya was tall. We discussed at length how we would go about this mission. We knew that almost every morning, the guys in the hostel practiced Karate in the space between the hostel and the restaurant. It was only natural that Bruce Lee would be obliging enough to show them a trick or two during this time. There was a hedge, about 10 feet high that separated the hostel and the restaurant from the house of one of my classmate. It was so thick; you could not see the other side through it. There also was an electric pole that stood next to the hedge on the side of our friend’s house. It was decided that early in the morning, we would position ourselves at the base of the electric pole. On hearing the voices of the men in practice, Maabya would climb up this pole till it was just enough to look down to see on the other side of the hedge. My role in the espionage was to provide back up support for Maabya in case he was caught staring at Bruce Lee. Who knew, if an irritated Bruce Lee took a leap across, our intestines and eyeballs would be in the gutters.

We slept the night at our friend’s house (he convinced his mother that we would study faster together). It was 5.30 in the morning and we woke up. Maabya started getting nervous and I could see his thin legs shivering like the loose strings of a guitar. A morale boosting session seemed be in place and it was dispensed intermingled with quotes from the latest action movies. It worked. In about the time it took Jerry to escape from under Tom’s paws, Maabya was right up the pole, just high enough to see across the hedge. Some time passed and as expected, a couple of the inmates of the hostel came out with their Karate sticks and started jumping around. I could see traces of nervousness in Maabya’s legs again. Nevertheless, he stuck to his position. A few more men came out of the hostel and started doing the same thing. We were growing impatient, as there was no signs of Bruce Lee coming out. Moreover, it was an irritating sight to look at Maabya from the bottom considering that there was a wide gap between his pants and his bones. We Indians are a tolerant people. I tolerated. Just then he appeared. Yes, Bruce Lee came out.

(Maabya later told me) He wore just a loose pair of pants and did not have any thing on top. He came out with a cool confidence about him. There was this air of divine ignorance about him (or so Maabya thought). With him came his friends too. Now, it was a little funny going by the Maabya’s narration that Lee did not have those tight ab muscles. Well, one would sympathize with him that being in Dharwad has it’s own disadvantages and people, however strongly they are built, tend to get drawn in to eating Mirchi, Girmitt etc and can’t help seeing their tires growing to be radials. Something of this sort must have happened to Bruce Lee too. Anyway, these two men started doing their warm ups and Maabya was so excited at being close to Bruce Lee that he was breathing heavily. It was then that a fateful incident happened. Maabya got it in the face from a crow. The crow having completed one more digestive cycle flew away leaving a startled Maabya just when his concentration had reached the peak. He yelled out "Ammaa Ge~" before realizing that it was nothing but a crow’s blessings. The scream was strong enough to override the morning Namaaz that came from the Masjid from across the rail way station. It won’t be necessary to say that Bruce Lee suddenly stared at Maabya in the face. Could any one take a thunderbolt in the face and live through it? Maabya’s grip suddenly slackened and he fell down with a thud.

Maabya was not seriously hurt by this maneuver physically. However, it took a psychological toll on him. Even though, he is now a father of a girl, a husband of two and owner of three rickshaws, he still does not look me in the eye when I rarely come across him riding his auto rickshaw on the roads of Dharwad.

Well, that would be the end of the narration of a little incident that took place a long time ago. But I would not do justice to the art of story telling if I did not narrate what happened to Bruce Lee. I would be cursed in the generations to come for holding a secret that should have been Dharwad’s Karate heritage. What happened to Bruce Lee??? What happened after Maabya’s historic fall was this: The same Bruce Lee was spotted two days later cycling lazily towards Karnatak College through Gopalpur with a commerce text book and a couple of notebooks on the carrier. Slowly, the secret of Bruce Lee became clear to every body. There was no denying that the guy looked just like the Bruce Lee we had seen in ‘Enter the Dragon’. But then if you looked closely at these guys, you would have said every one else looked the same too. Anyway, after about two years, I learnt that Bruce Lee had failed in the first year in BCom.

Well, I never heard or saw much of Bruce Lee after that episode. But there were occasional taunts thrown at Mahboob by many of our friends. I finished my studies, went out in search of a job, crossed oceans in search of a better life. But I don’t know what happened of Bruce Lee, our own Bruce Lee. Who knows, one fine day, you may find him in Mathura Bhavan sipping from a cup of tea.