Professor Dr Sir MM

He solemnly placed his scrapbook before his bemused friends. "All my original work,” he said, with his usual deadpan expression. "Several of my articles and papers have been published in their journals by leading Ivy League colleges — particularly, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell,” he added. "Zoroaster was the first Cosmonaut;” "Smoking cures cancer;” "Tenth Planet discovered by Bombay amateur researcher;” and others covering a wide range of subjects from Mayan cuisine owing its ethnohistorical origin to the Parsi lagan nu bhonu (also served on plantain leaves; with kéra pur eedu being the principal delicacy), to how cataract surgery can be obviated by applying a paste of crushed fire crackers and red chillies (the world’s ophthalmologists are feverishly trying to prevent this remedy from becoming known to the public).
The scrapbook also contained photographs of MM with Indira Gandhi ("She consulted me before declaring the Emergency”), Morarji Desai ("regularly disturbs my afternoon siesta, seeking advice on the correct dosage of autourine therapy”), Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ("Do read my article, ‘How Nixon was unjustly framed,’ published by Princeton, in its Spring journal, 1979”) and also several, with a leading Indian jurist. His friends knew that the only genuine photographs were the last mentioned, as MM happened to be the jurist’s nephew. For decades, the jurist believed that a genius child prodigy had been born in his blessed family, and the lad was much misunderstood. MM, of course, made full use of the jurist’s name to open some very important doors, at least for a while.

Illustration by Farzana Cooper

While he was seriously delusional, he was certainly not unintelligent. His imagination may have been morbid and bizzare, but it was accompanied by an uncanny ability to produce tomes of tripe on diverse subjects. In his peak years, there was no cell phone and no internet and no Google. Everything flowed from his diseased mind, and was so elegantly fabricated that many a weak mind believed that he was sheer genius. This certainly required creativity.
He would invite a group of middle-aged ladies (mostly Parsis) to a meeting at the Cricket Club of India. They would be gullible enough to think that his scrapbook was genuine stuff. Adoration dripped from their wide eyes for this jewel of the Parsi community, until he shocked them out of their collective wits, by saying that he hated tea and coffee, his preferred drink being tomato ketchup. "Come on, MM, dikra, don’t joke!” they would say, and then be stunned, when MM nonchalantly dipped two plastic straws in a bottle of ketchup and actually emptied its contents. Processed tomatoes with lots of artificial colors and preservatives relieves you of chronic constipation, he informed his shocked audience.
"With your encyclopedic knowledge, you must be reading several newspapers every day,” his new victims would hazard a guess. "None,” he would reply, "but I eat them.” He smiled, tore a page from The Times of India, turned it into a ball, and swallowed it. "You must be from a different planet,” one old man mused. "No, Sir! I am from a different galaxy,” he instantly replied, "and I assure you it is not Andromeda. I am presently prohibited to utter its sacred name.”
He had a gargantuan appetite. This compelled him to gatecrash into posh weddings. Immacutely dressed, he confidently strode about, greeted with an all-knowing air, completed his mission, and exited. He would narrate his caper to his admirer No. 1 — his rather dim-witted mother — who sincerely believed that she had delivered a celestial being of sorts.
His fantasies about celebrities exceeded all bounds. He claimed that Donna Summer, the disco queen of the 70s known for her oomph, was so friendly with him that during one of MM’s visits to USA, Donna asked him to check out her muscles and "steely strong thighs.” When his friends burst into laughter, he informed them that since they disbelieved his Donna Summer meeting he was hesitant to even tell them about his encounter with Marilyn Monroe. "But you were hardly six, when Monroe died in 1962,” they exclaimed. "Time travel, my friends, time travel,” he exclaimed. His ability to time travel resulted in his claim that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. Ostensibly, for physics; though considering his multi-disciplinary talents, it could well have been for chemistry, medicine, economics, or even peace. He fabricated a letter from the Academy awarding him the Nobel, and had it certified as true, by some unsuspecting clerk in a foreign embassy. Thereafter, he called this publication to claim that he was the first Parsi Zoroastrian to receive it. Accompanied by his mother, he steadfastly maintained that this was not a hoax. The lady, convinced beyond the slightest doubt, that her son was a Nobel Laureate, thought this recognition had been unfairly delayed.
According to MM, Monroe had not only met him but fed him the most delicious caramel custard (lurid details of its exotic manufacturing process may best be left out). When his pals guffawed, and bent over in laughter, he gingerly asked his mother, "Mumma, Marilyn Monroe é mané caramel custard khavravéloo ni? Mè tamuné kahéloo né? (Ma, didn’t Marilyn Monroe feed me caramel custard? Didn’t I tell you?)” His mother regally sailed past in the room, nodded her head and said, "Ha! Kahéloon! (Yes! You had indeed told me).”
If his capers were harmless eccentricities, perhaps many would have tolerated him. Though MM’s father had a large flat in South Bombay, the family was not really wealthy. Initially, he sponged on the generous jurist to finance his so-called travel studies. Gradually all, including his uncle, realized that he was a fake, and not all that harmless. Friends avoided him. Lenders hounded him. Fabrication was his favorite pastime. He forged someone’s credit card (those days, in the absence of computerization, it was not that difficult) but was caught. The jurist had to use all his legal connections to bail him out. However, word spread that he was a small-time conman, to be avoided.
He literally disappeared for several years. Some said that he was in Australia; some saw him in California. Then, he occasionally surfaced to tell his circle that he had married a ‘Lady’, and thereby, he was designated as ‘Sir.’ On his letterheads, he called himself ‘Sir MM’. A few years later, he obtained a doctorate from a dubious organization which called itself a college teaching about a particular faith (not much guesswork required) and was designated as the college’s representative to the United Nations nongovernmental organizations. Since he lectured on this faith and wrote learned articles (published in esoteric journals worldwide, of course), his letterhead underwent further change. He was now ‘Professor Dr Sir MM.’
Some said he suffered from severe health issues (all those generous helpings of Kissan’s tomato ketchup with several unread pages of The Times of India, perhaps damaging his formidable intergalactic intestines). Later, none believed him when he said that he had nearly gone blind. For once, he was not inventing it. However, that line between reality and delusion had been so effectively blurred that he himself did not know as to what was the truth. Perhaps, he would ask Monroe, the next time he time travelled.