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vicissitudesoflife-blog · 13 years

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A day with the batch of ‘96

This story is part fact, part fiction and has been a work in progress since the awesome reunion Kogya organized some time ago. The characters, nevertheless, are real. Please don’t sue me.

My day began, as it usually did, at the law college road bus stop where Anand Kagal, Nikhil Karkarey and I patiently waited for the PMT’s tin box on wheels that would take us to a distant land, 6 full kilometers away from home. There, at the foot of a hill, surrounded by nature on one side and St. Joseph’s Girls School on the other, lay the place that would transform us from inky faced boys into men. Men for others. We would call ourselves Loyolites and the world would be at our feet. And girls would adore us. Girls…girls…yes, they would ado…

I realized suddenly that someone was shaking me from my reverie. It was Karya.

“Abhinav girls going for PT”, he said.

There, in a straight line, walked the girls. Lots of them. In multicolored clothing.

“Shit!” I thought. We have PT today as well, which meant that I would be wearing my black PT shorts inside my regular shorts thereby looking like a kid suffering from an early onset of prostate enlargement. Since every single girl would probably be looking at me, or so I thought, I needed to look cool. Suave, if you may. Like James Bond. I folded my arms, shifted my weight to one leg, and having stretched the other one out with a sort of indifferent attitude, stared nonchalantly at the PCO-STD-ISD booth next to me.

“What, exactly, is this?” Kagal asked. I seemed to have reminded him of Yuvraaj Kelkar, a.k.a. taklya who, contrary to belief, is actually a high functioning robot. This was affirmed by us on a daily basis when taklya rode his bike past us at constant (and I mean really constant) speed, with or without German Glossar on handlebar.

“Nothing.” I said. “Just trying to divert their attention from my shorts.”

“The bus has come. So drop the pose and get going…unless you want to travel by PCO today.”

The bus ride to school used to be fun unless we had a Unit Test or Finals to take or Mrs. Samant’s homework to submit. Moreover, the chances of our survival had recently gone up because kids above 5th standard were no longer allowed to ride the school bus. This was good because the school bus driver in charge of our route was perpetually sloshed. There was a greater chance of finding the PMT driver sober.

We picked up Preshit Kadam on the way. He had oiled his hair as usual. Having given him enough time to drop his bag and entangle his water bottle to the seat handle, all of us exchanged expletives and updated our knowledge of their meaning. With this done we revised the terms a few more times, our minds adding the 70mm graphical details. As the bus entered the school driveway we reluctantly prepared ourselves for yet another day.

At the assembly, as was customary, we lied to the Eternal God, Creator of All that we firmly believed that we were now in His presence. Having done that we were herded to our respective classrooms. Mrs. Matthew, our class teacher, took the attendance and announced that Dilys Thomas and Jason Carlo had to go attend Mass at the school church. This was totally unfair because I know Jason rapped to the tunes of ‘Informer’ during Mass. They got to goof off in a church while we would be listening to stories about how Hans of Holland plugged a stupid hole in a stupid dyke with a stupid finger.

Before we dug into our Gul Mohars, however, Mrs. Matthew announced a surprise check to see if our shoes were polished. I had been made to sit on the first bench next to Sagar Kogekar with the objective that I might influence him for the better. Clearly she did not know either of us. Kogya had not polished his shoes. He never did. His mind raced furiously for a solution. He extracted a large blue bottle of Camel Gum from his bag. It had a black cap with a brush to aid application of the bottle’s contents. However, Camel had not described in detail the surfaces to which the contents could be applied. Here, Kogya found an opportunity to think outside the box. He slithered under the bench and started vigorously applying the gum to his shoes. If I could have fathomed his intentions, I would have promptly reminded him that his plan, although pure genius, would not work because we were on the first bench. The space under it was as open to public view as Pamela Anderson's assets. It might have been easier for him to pull this off on the teacher’s table. Nonetheless I must admit, and truthfully too, that it was one of the most creative ideas I had witnessed. Terrific resourcefulness, I thought. Matthew, however, did not share my point of view. With a red pen, of which she had ample stock, she forcefully asserted the same on Kogya’s calendar.

The day drudged along with information about properties of ammonia, the distribution of cash crops in India, Shekhchilli (who, to my utter annoyance, was not an Arabic spice), and similar things that are currently under scientific investigation for their anesthetic properties. Our only hopes to prevent an irreversible loss of sensation were Sandeep Hegde’s discussions on the effect of excessive sweat on Sabatini’s shirt during Wimbledon, Kapil Mistry’s efforts to prevent his shoes from mysteriously wandering around the class and the kinesiological dynamics between Kapil Pashankar and Sayeesh Nayak. We managed to sustain ourselves until the PT period eagerly awaiting a half hour of football. All our hopes were dashed when we discovered, instead, that we would be marching in the sweltering heat under the vigilance of a vengeful traffic hawaldar who wanted little kids to understand his misery.

There are typically 3 ways of getting out of marching practice:

1. Feign sun stroke:

This one is quite clichéd and perhaps no one other than Nikhil Bezalwar and Vishal Wable has pulled this off effectively.

2. Need to practice for upcoming interschool competition:

Amit Pol, Kuldeep Sawant and I tried this one. Pol, a natural at this, suddenly started running around the ground, his head tilted backwards as always and the front of his nose making an angle of 13.8 degrees with the horizontal lest his glasses fell off. We always wondered how he knew where he was going. But he did make every turn correctly and he did always slow down during the St. Joseph’s section of the lap. It was really quite fascinating to watch him run. Kuldeep and I, in an attempt to add variety, chose Shot Put, also because we were physically built for the same. Our 5 ½ inch biceps glistened in the heat and the hawaldar realized not to mess around with us.

3. Become Jatin Atre:

This guy is the only one to have been deliberately left out of marching practice for having perfected the art of marching with complete lack of coordination. The mathematical condition for the Atre march is

fLH ≠ fRH ≠ fL

where

fLH is Frequency of Left Hand

fRH is Frequency of Right Hand

fL is Frequency of the Legs

I say, from having tried this on several occasions, that it is not easy.

The period ended with the bell for lunch and we all sped to our respective dabbawallas. Belzi and Wable suddenly felt the effects of sun stroke going away and a minute later were completely devoid of any signs indicating prior physical duress. Nikhil Nambiar went to the canteen. I always thought he owned the place. There was a separate stock of food reserved specifically for him. He had his own table with a label ‘Reserved for Nambi’ on it. Students automatically made way for him in the canteen – a scene which was later condensed into the line “Hum jahan khade hote hain line wohi se shuru hoti hain” by Amitabh Bachchan. You never saw Nambi without a wada pav. Presently, Ramesh Menon holds the prerogative on this. This might come as a surprise to those who haven’t met him post school since he was as thin as Tejus Chincholkar at the time. I don’t know how the switch came over but it seemed that one day he just went “Damn! I will eat everything in this world!” The acronym BYOB originally meant “Bring Your Own Butter-Chikaan, Nainde moona!” and was coined by Ramesh when I attempted to taste a bit of the gravy. Honestly, I would love to see him go head to head with Nambi but no one has invited them together at a party yet. The rest of us, during the lunch break, would be happy to get pepsi cola at 50p a piece or the striped piece of candy we called bull’s eye at a more affordable 5p a piece. These would be consumed well outside Nambi’s radius of influence.

Post lunch, the remainder of the break was dedicated to play. Kedar Pathak effectively played all sports at the same time. Someone could tell me that Kedar is wearing spikes and dribbling a basketball in a swimming pool with a hockey stick in the other hand and a football between his feet and I would believe him without any doubt. Puneeth Ghodgeri was a specialist long distance runner from Kenya. He would first run towards Black Rock at a speed that would make Usain Bolt cringe. From there he’d dash off at a tangent swiftly covering the mountainous terrain and after reaching Four Poles, decide that he would simply run down to the school from there instead of taking the truck route back via NCL because he didn’t quite feel up to it that day. Yes, we were quite sure he was from Kenya.

The bell rang indicating the end of break and we all sauntered back to our classrooms at our own pace because the next period was Mrs. Dafre’s drawing class. I actually cannot remember much of what we productively did in Mrs. Dafre’s class. We never had any specific purpose to fulfill during that class. I think, personally, I had mastered the art of drawing a sun with lines or hair or something coming out of it indicating its rays. My accomplishments as an artist ended there. Shushrut Joglekar used to draw fantastic cartoons. Later in life he became a doctor. Definite link there. There were, nevertheless, 2 people who always attended this class with mindful direction. One was Ashutosh Bhutkar who competed on the same platform as Picasso and Van Gogh and was the only guy I knew who got better than a ‘C’ in his Intermediate exams. The other person was Rahul Chhabria (now Raoul Chhabria) who put dedicated efforts each class in setting a new record for the time it took Mrs. Dafre to suffer a nervous breakdown.

Mrs. Samant’s class was next. She was not very tall. If one stood erect it would be impossible for her to slap one across the face – something she dogged to do for the littlest of reasons. Shushrut used to find great gratification in exploiting that fact. In Raoul’s case it was a completely different story. He was exceptionally tall and consequently Mrs. Samant’s voice used to get totally attenuated by the time it reached his ears. Raoul has never heard anything she has said till date. Still, Samant was strict. No one dared to thwart her. No one, except Amol Kane. Samant had given us stuff to read during Hindi class. Amol wanted to sleep. And so he did. When Samant asked him the reason he simply told her that he’d stayed up late last night watching Wimbledon. It was a very intense scene and I began to wonder if Amol was losing it from a hormonal imbalance due to PMS. I cannot fathom any other reason.

The day ended with me once again musing on the paradox of the after-school prayer where we heartily apologize for having offended Him, firmly resolve not to offend Him anymore and come back the next day with the same apology.

Well some of us never change while some of us do. But what I do know is that we all, at some point or the other, wished that time never changed. Perhaps David Blaine could conjure up a trick and put us all back to that place we both hated (during exams) and loved (during football). This “little” story is my effort to bring us back together, perhaps in a more plausible online reunion sort of way as Saket Jamkar had once suggested ;-).

#schooldays #loyolahighschool

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