'Gonduranga-Ponduranga'

Exercising in the dry patch outside Chinese Hut during the monsoon

Can there be anything more nonsensical than ‘Gonduranga-Ponduranga… Poh’? Well, the credit for this goes to Nafisa Sayyad, in whose dictionary the words mean ‘Very Good-Very Good… Yeh!’ And today, while transiting from one round of exercises to the next, we all joined her, clapping lustily in chorus to this bizarre expression that sounded suspiciously like an obscenity. Before long, everybody felt guilty.
Trouble was we had run out of all versions of ‘Very Good’ that we knew (including the Hindi ‘Bahut Achche’) – the self-congratulatory exclamation we have been raising to punctuate each round of exercises. So in the past few weeks, we had clapped to ‘Khoob Chhaan’ in Marathi, ‘Dadu Sutho’ in Sindhi, ‘Khoob Bhalo’ in Bengali, ‘Rumba Nalla’ in Tamil, ‘Bohat Vadiya’ in Punjabi, ‘Khoob Srs’ in Gujarati… and suddenly today, we found ourselves at a loss of words. Srichand Arora suggested helpfully that we say, ‘Teri Aisi Ki Taisi’ – the idea being mainly to pull off a laugh.

Muthu (in red singlet) disrupts the exercises

But Nafisa, in all her wisdom and sense of propriety, coined ‘Gonduranga-Ponduranga… Poh’. At that point, we found it more sensible than ‘Teri Aisi Ki Taisi’!
But there is a back story to this. Nafisa was obviously inspired by the Garden’s great unglimaster, Muthuswami who had interrupted our exercises for a few minutes earlier. He sleepwalked as usual through the gate and like an automated robot, chose to divert his line of motion towards our circle. To make matters worse, Arora hailed him, ‘Kar ke aaya, na?’ Have you done it? Now Muthu wanted to understand what was he supposed to do. So he walked right in.
Arora hinted loudly the origin of Muthu's name. In other words, had he answered nature’s call before coming to the Garden? This was a private joke between them to which a few others like Ved Prakash Grover were privy to. Rather than make a scene over it, Muthu chose discretion over valour and made a dignified exit. But from Nafisa’s perspective, the South Indian Muthu could only be a Gonduranga or Ponduranga – if not both.
Jagmohan Papneja:
Sometimes life becomes fairly monotonous and routine. Well, try to do something different. That's exactly what Nafisa attempted to do today by using new words and phrases that made us happy.