Yeah. Don’t. I am, right now, fighting with my girlfriend about this blog. She doesn’t know my wordpress user ID, but I can’t really imagine it will be long before she finds out. It might be years, it might be days. It might be never, as at least one failed post has taught me not to mention names, or even places, or even situations. Which leaves me wondering just how close I can get to erotica with such strictures.
More on this. I am a Tam Brahm, so I don’t expect my community to secretly revere or envy me. As like as not, they will all be disgusted.
I am also committed. I was committed to another girl before I got committed to this one. I was committed when I was committing to this one. I’ll tell you more about that later.
Though I was born a Tam Brahm, and brought up Fat, I never wore the poonal. My father was extremely liberal and my mother extremely accepting about this. She even allowed non-veg into the house, though she refused to ever cook it. We also moved to Bombay a few months after my first escapade (I don’t think anybody knows, even now, so I don’t think that was a factor) and then, it was all jolly.
Round about 9 I began to lose interest in womanhood in general and girls in particular.
I was in Central School, Kolshet, and played gilli-danda with the kids. We also used to crush tamarind fruits (the thing you make imli paste from, or our very dear Puliyodhare) into ‘balls’ and hit it with sticks of rosewood. I also learnt Hindi in a month or so, (struggling through phraseology like thauda thauda AATHA hai.) and then got hit around by the barbaric headmaster. This was the first time I was hit by a teacher with a cane. His name was Khatri and he was a huge fellow in a safari suit, and demanded my notebooks and my etikayt at the same time. I couldn’t get what he was saying until I realised he meant ‘etiquette’. I remembered I had read the word a week ago in some Sherlock Holmes story or the other. Since then, I have disliked that word. It recalls safari suits and huge hairy hands. That reminds me, it was Holmes, that fucking junkie, who first diverted me from my faithfully lecherous tendencies. Be it science, or books, or climbing mountains or playing tillanas, sex and women immediately take precedence. Kierkegaard said ‘My depression is my most faithful mistress. Hence I return the love’ I wish I had read Kierkegaard when I was in KV. I would have written love poetry and given it to Ashna, the only pretty girl in the whole school (she was Muslim.). She would come and talk to me quietly about adjusting. At Eed or something she gave colourful sweets to me. It was all very touching, especially as the sweets were bought at a fly infested Dhokali shop.
During Report Card collection, I would meet grown men arrive in white shorts. And white shirts. And white girls. I didn’t know what to do then apart from looking intelligent and say Hindi Thauda Thauda AATHA hai. Pretty soon all the girls knew that AATHA meant something very special to me.
You might ask, then, why didn’t I try English. Aah. Didn’t I. I tried like Yenything. I asked them to sit near my chAAYr and all. I asked them which Yair Force Post their father in the ridiculous white shorts belonged to. The main problem is the word ridiculous made no sense to them, but Yair Force was exposed by Mehmud long ago. Then they started calling me ridiklas. I stuck to Thauda after that. Mangle Hindi for a few years, and you’ll naturally start saying Thoda. But mangle English and you maximum learn how to violate it like a Bihari or Assamese or Mumbaikar.
So I had to do something without talking, without eating multicoloured sweets, and without getting anywhere close to the safari suittu headmaster, who I suspected didn’t wear any underwear, the last time I saw him bend over another mite’s notebook.
I tried pasting bubble gum tattoos on my arms. Nobody else in class had heard of bubble gum, and some of them had real tattoos (bearing their names, I suppose it was some ritual), so that didn’t work. Of course, Khatri hit me for the bubble gum tattoo. (I wonder why he didn’t hit the permanent tattoo wearing guys on a daily basis.)
I wrote small stories in English about Tom and Becky. She pronounced it Iom and ecky, my habit of cursive writing a total alien invention to her and even Khatri. Which meant I could write him disgusting bad names. I wonder how he made those out, and of course, hit me. I was after all, using really bad langwayge, like Stupid and Idiot and all. I once tried the B word…
And that was when I got to know what it meant, though Khatri also used me as an illustrative example.
I also tried to sing in Mehta sir’s class. He was blind, which meant he beat the boys at random like a machine gun. It was awesome looking at him swat everybody like his hand was a bat. I would shy away, feeling morbidly afraid of those swats. Later, after identifying that Jana Gana Mana was by Tagore (which nobody else knew), he made me sit close to him. I made sure Ashna saw it when I helped him to the toilet. But that created a prolem. I couldn’t very well go to the toilet while she was looking! Which meant I looked extremely pained whenever she did see me. She would vanish inside into the music room with a quick woosh, and I tried to get a look at her shoes and neat socks while the navy blue flared out of the door entrance.
Finally, I asked Ashna to play with me while I made the tamarind balls and hunted around for a plank. But tamarind is really sticky and children like sticky. She put some into her small pink face, and so did I and our hands stuck when I helped her up. It was all going very fine, as we didn’t talk at all as usual, and she went to bowl, giggling. She stopped giggling when I hit her very small very red mouth with the hard tamarind ball.
She allowed me into her house soon after that, where I stared wide eyed at a naked, I mean whole plucked chicken marinating in what I learnt, much later, was a cylindrical vessel used in laboratories.
Too bad she was an Air Force Man’s daughter, and left before I went out of third standard. I now had only Khatri to write notes to. But even that stopped, and I didn’t get beaten anymore. I passed out of third standard, and Khatri no longer taught me. I remember she kissed me on one cheek, the same that that bastard first hit me on. Bastard. Bastard. Bastard. ok, Bastard for nostalgia.
All this was very fine for the moment, as I was still prepubescent. After reading more Holmes stories, I decided it was stupid to like girls and clever to like smoking and violin playing. I decided on violin for the time being and my mom got me joined into a violin maami in Vrindavan, where we all stayed.
