Elvis and a Bass Guitar

Friday evening can be too taxing if you pretend that you do not have much to do, and shove away all the academic backlog that has built itself over the two and more years that you have spent in college. So I suggested to AD, "Let's go out man."

Asking AD out is easy, he never says no, so he said, "Okay lets go and get the bass fixed."

The bass in question was/is an old relic that he has sort of inherited from a senior since he left it in the college as the plug-in socket was kaput. In the summer holidays AD had got the guitar and pick-ups etc fixed but the old deaf and blind mechanic that he had employed for the job had used a socket much akin to his age as such that a lead for it could not be found anywhere in the world.

We borrowed Divij's bike and head out towards Assi, the place where there was the promise of music shops. The music shops guided us to Agarwal radio which was supposed to be quite the hot spot.

With each destination my chagrin increased cause I can do nought but ride pillion, and I was holding the bass, which is quite heavy. And quite awkward to hold too, again because it is quite heavy.

Agarwal radio turned out to be a portal in another world, it had a dim lighted room with a very low hung ceiling and radio and machine parts that were stacked up closely near the wall. We showed them the bass and they refused to either recognise it or be any part of it.

Instead the man sitting behind the counter and scribbling in a yellowing notebook pointed towards a small door in the wall opposite to him. Inside was another man wiping seat off his brow and working with a rusty screw driver. We ventured to enter the room when the man spoke (and before that you would not have thought him capable of speech) and said that he was not referring to that room, he was gesturing towards the shop across the street which was also named rather unimaginatively Agarwal radio.

The clerks mistook the bass for some sort of a gun or something and backed off as soon as we entered the shop, they listened as AD and self spoke simultaneously about our base predicament and they too said that they were unable (and somewhat unwilling) to help us.

They directed us towards Awaz radio which they said was a certainty for fixing the bass, and all the other problems a man could face. We expected to find a magician sitting behind a desk of old wood with a black coloured table fan on it, instead we found a somewhat less congested shop with no magician and certainly no one to fic the bass.

Although the shopkeeper had tried to mislead us by displaying a poster of a girl in a red mini skirt holding a guitar, he said he did not deal with guitars at all.

We went back to Agarwal Radio once again and bought a socket from them, they said we had to go to Bass-fatak to get the bass fixed.



(Bass-fatak for the uninitiated is a part of Godowlia, which is a region in Benares that has been in a permanent state of traffic jam ever since man invented the wheel. Navigation in Godowlia and regions near-by is tough, especially when one has to compete with man, beast and beastly men)

We made a rather electrifying entry into the bass fatak region with several transformers exploding behind us. With the bass in my hand, we almost made a perfect glam rock band at that instant (long live KISS),

When the transformers finished their exploding bits, the area was awashed with darkness. And the bass guitar found its saviour (as predicted a bit earlier) behind a creaky wooden table with a fan. There was no electricity so we waited in the dark with the bass in the corner waiting for the light to shine.

The bass-man fixed it up for us using borrowed electricity from someone's inverter, and we headed back to the hostel..

And to conclude this long and largely pointless exercise in writing, while returning to the hostel on the way near Assi I saw a board which said

----------Elvis Guest House---

The King lives!!!