But I was telling you about making it to the abandoned shack, when -

I told you to stay tuned.

Anyway, I was trying to slip away when I saw Khatri striding down the field. We were all in rows, and the small field size meant that the girls’ rows followed after that of the boys. This was done with the wise realisation that a bunch of boys at the back meant a lot of stones thrown to the front. But there was a maneuover that gave us boys a brief window for retreat, which was precisely what Khatri was looking to obstruct. Thanks to the evening heat, some children were getting sun stroke and making for the cool corridors. Khatri decided go over there to slap them on the back of their heads for their malingering. They, after all, were real rule breakers, while the drill escapees hadn’t yet done anything. A brat in hand is worth two making for the bushes. I slipped off at the maneuver, making sure that the class monitor caught sight of me.

I shall now describe the class monitor.

She was a class monitor.

Description done.

I had made it to the shack. About now the song would start. A. Miss was so clever, she was going to start her show in medias res with the wolf’s prevarications. The song started. I had to work fast. The smell was overpowering. The crow was now only one in name. It was an abstract impressionist work in dry and wet decay. My masterplan had a flaw.

I was supposed to kick the damn thing in the way of the entrance, so that the class monitor would at least freak out immediately on entering. My initial idea had been far more elaborate, with me tying up the crow from a string and pulling it when she came, etc etc. Now I realised that I had to actually either touch the damn thing, or use my feet. And then I remember the shoes I wore were not the black leather ones, but the ‘Tennis’ shows that are painted white. They squeaked like fuck in the worn stone of the shack. This was looking like a retarded plan by the minute. I remembered why I had even formulated it. I had seen some little pest handle the crow before by the beak on a dare. At that time it was barely dead. Now it was an expert at smelling. I was a Brahmin! Look for sticks…. then I remembered! The gilli danda stash. Near the shack was a small hole dug out of the earth and covered with stone, in which we secreted the beloved rose wood sticks, polished plank bits, large pebbles and one precious bail that the winner of the gilli danda match got to use in the next round as his gilli. Time to get to the arsenal. I removed the stone. This stash was a secret very carefully kept from the girls, who were of course, maddened with curiosity. I sometimes wonder why I didn’t just set up an on demand kissing routine promising the girls I would show them the stash. Never paid for it, never will.

I took the lousiest danda from the stash, already rotting at the edges with moss, to push the crow. God forgive me, but I realised it would be more sensible to kick it in the path of the monitor the moment she entered the shack, rather than keeping it there for her to see a mile off. So I waited. It was dusk now, and I realised the long opening dirge to the Darjee would have made an excellent collection if it had been sung in trains. My love for A. Miss intensified. All this planning was for you alone, A. Miss! where are you now? How blind are you with cataract, how arthritic are you now!

I had gotten used to the smell by now, and the uncanny dusk rays made the shack look like a sacrificial altar. My expression of vulpine anticipation would have made Dostoevsky shiver. I could hear the squeak squeak of Tennis shoes, coming ever closer. I knew now that it wasn’t a teacher, and that I had been missed, and it was the monitor making the lone journey to the shack and its hideous predator. Thank you, Sherlock Holmes, I thought.

The bait was in place, I regretted not having the gumption to place a pebble or stick under the crow to give it greater leverage when the danda would launch it. Squeak, Squeak, Squeak. Breathe, Breathe, Breathe.

SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK. It was time. It was dark now, quite dark, and the Darjee was now singing his own song, an inspired reworking of Chitti Aatthi Hai from Border. Hehehe….I thought ‘Chutti Aatthi Hai’ when -

No need to stay tuned, cause today is a holiday so I can write.

When the lights went out and I screamed for dear life. Note: You may wonder how an abandoned shack had electricity and a rotten crow at the same time. It didn’t. But as it happens in all school festivals, powerful halogen lamps were strung around the perimeter so that there were no shadows. Now that all the lights were out, there was nothing to see by, and my inhuman scream must have scared the life out of several predators near by. And by predators, I don’t mean spiders and garden snakes, but fucking leopards. The Kolshet K.V had made news during the summer holidays by discovering a full grown leopard in the school. The SQUEAKs stopped. I called out her name, in what I hoped was a firm manly voice.

‘Monitor!’ I said.

‘Haan?!’ She said.

‘I was looking for my drawing here.’ I said.

‘Did you find it?’ she said.

‘Yes’ I said. This was going super smooth. Scared out of her wits, she had no time to think of how she was going to tell my name to Miss. and Khatri and just wanted to get back.

‘Come out now!’ she said.

I suddenly realised what a stunning deus ex machina this whole lights out shit was. She was all alone, and I was the only male within whole yards of her! And knowing K.V Teachers, nobody would have missed us yet, except Khatri, who would probably still be whacking kids randomly.

‘I can’t’ I said.

‘Why?’ she said

‘There is a leopard here’ I said.

‘WHAT?’ she said

‘Yes! I think it came here because of the crow’ I said, and said a silent prayer of thanks to Jim Corbett.

‘Is it big or small?’ she said

‘It is a leopard’ I said.

‘Waaaahhh’ she wailed.

‘Don’t worry, I will just give it the crow and it will go away.’ I said

‘Waaaaaaah’ she wailed

‘See its already gone, it likes the crow. It is a small leopard only, not like the summer holidays one’ I tried.

‘WAAAAAAAAAAH’ she wailed, remembering the summer holidays one.

‘Don’t worry I am coming out now’ I said.

‘WAAAAAA- ok,’ she said, tears stopping immediately.

I came out, feeling like the most unbelievable hero ever on this planet and all the three worlds. You could have floated Atlantis with my inflated chest. I brandished the danda like a policeman’s baton and stepped smartly over the threshold, beaming, waiting for her to run into my arms.

She didn’t. This is bloody India after all. I realised there was still some work to do. Here wipe your tears, I said offering my kerchief. She took it to wipe her nose, but recoiled instantly, shouting that it was papery!

My Sherlock Holmes was now covered in snot. What was to have been a gift to her as a possible bribe for not telling my name to miss, was now snot. My first artistic endeavour, my first pencil sketch of a man’s profile was snot. She instantly detached the piece of paper and threw it on the ground, and then started inundating my kerchief with her snot. She suddenly became all businesslike after having recovered her composure by losing her snot.

‘Where did you get that stick?’, she asked.

‘I won’t tell you,’ I said. Bad answer. And at this moment, I realised that the saviour always falls in love with the saved, but the saved doesn’t always follow suit. Especially if the saved is a goddamn class monitor.

‘You left very early! Why didn’t you come back earlier?’ she said

Maybe this was her way of hinting at how badly she needed me? Maybe she kept stealing glances at me?

‘I couldn’t find my drawing. AND YOU JUST THREW MY DRAWING ON THE GROUND!’ I shouted, braving armies of Khatris to come and ask me for my etikayt.

Like all women, she missed the point.

‘I didn’t see any leopard,’ she demanded.

‘Shall I call it for you? I read Tigers of Kumaon’ I said.

‘You said it was a leopard,’ she said.

Class monitors cannot be given a quick course on animal taxonomy when it is your intention to kiss them. By this time, I was trembling at the thought of the kiss that I had been so sure of getting. And here she was asking me about a goddamn leopard. Why couldn’t she realise it was a McGuffin?!

‘Leopards also come when little girls are around, along with the tiger’ I said. And then started scaring her with weird guttural growls that Corbett would have probably attributed to a boar. She started crying again and played her trump card.

‘I’ll call A. Miss!,’ she said.

‘More food for leopard,’ I said.

This was going all wrong. It had been fairly simple as a plan. Crow, scare, console, drawing, kiss! Followed by A. Miss’s solicitous remarks towards both of us and appreciation for me about saving the monitor from the dead crow, and maybe a peck on the cheek also.

‘You want A. Miss also to die! I will tell A. Miss definitely’ she said.

I was waiting desperately for another goddamn deus ex machina. There was no way this was going to lead to a kiss from anyone except Khatri.

What to do!It was all lost. I felt miserable. How was I going to ask her to kiss me! These things are instinctive. Parul was so easy, she was was very experimental. This class monitor was going to be a legendary marm when she grew up. I had to try the last thing.

‘I will show you where we keep our dandas if you don’t tell A. Miss’ I said.

She stopped crying immediately and asked me where it was. Maybe I could even wangle a kiss later after showing her our treasured armoury.

I led her to the back, where the Gear – hole was barely visible in the incipient moonlight. I prayed for a porcupine, or squirrel, or any damn little critter to rush past and scare her into my arms. I had no intention of showing her the real sticks of course. There was obviously a fake collection kept in another hole, which had grown disused after someone had seen a snake disappear into it.

To be continued.

The genius of a primary school teacher largely manifests itself in writing humourous lyrics for well known film songs, which are then performed by little brats whose command over their voices is as bad as, if not worse than, a preschooler’s command over his bladder.

At the (tender, hehe) age of 10 I conceived a violent passion for Miss. A.

Oh yea. Really violent. Ms. A., or more precisely, A. miss, was I think my English, Maths and History teacher. She also took other classes, in fact, she ended up taking almost every class except for Hindi, which I think was taught by some ridiculous shastriji who didn’t know anything else. I had grown fluent in Hindi by then, to the extent of using words like yadi in the place of agar and (seriously) pratiksha in the case of ‘wait’.

‘Yaar mein toilet jaane tak tum mera pratiksha karoge?’ (wrong sex.) I am almost sure I didn’t use that word with a girl but with a boy.

Mehta sir was still blind as a bat and was getting a lot of trouble from us. We were all growing up, and tormented him. The girls also, which led to an early altercation with the class monitor, who had clear ideas about behaving in Mehta sir’s unfortunate classes. The little brat bitch never told the girls’ names to sir, but always ratted out the guys. Of course when this happened there would be a chorus of girls’ names, shouted out or muttered by boys getting ready for the blind justice of Mehta sir’s scale (its scale, always was, always will be, fuck you, ruler.). When these girls were called out, I would settled down happily to watch them flock to get whacked. No violet rose ever looked so bruised…

For some reason I said one day in class that I wanted to be a microbiologist when I grew up. I think I said it because it sounded like a big word that was about small things. A. Miss looked at me with that look all primary school teachers get when a kid who still doesn’t know his ass from his brain uses big words. Then she said she did MSC microbiology. Our love was secure. The Graduate was gonna get remade, desi style. She gave me a book on microbiology. I read a few pages, and then started looking at the pictures. It was awesome. Almost all the pics were basically cross-sections of tissues or cells. I searched for the female ovary, and then for the wolf’s blood cell, after watching Omen 2 one day and not sleeping much for the rest of the week.

Omen 2 gave me clear ideas on how a villain should behave, because the villain was such a little wimp in it. What a fail. You can manipulate all human minds, and you use it to take over the world? How about taking on some girls? He had his priorities wrong.

The class monitor was my next target. She was going to be mine. Like all children, I reasoned that intense hatred was only of course, a charming disguise for intense love.

There was an abandoned shack at the outskirts of the KV complex. It was seriously dirty, and a crow had recently breathed its last there, making it hard for all of us to breathe. We would go there sometimes during hide and seek. Essentially I would go hide, and wait for some girl to seek. It should have been the other way round, but I was confident of my abilities then.

I had a cunning plan formulated around the abandoned shack. It would work. The school festival or something (I forget what) was going to be in two weeks time and there were few classes and too much of Mehta sir, who was of course teaching us how to exert at least some control on the voice-box. He had already gone through three scales.

A. Miss had already written clever lyrics around songs such as Pardesi, Pardesi jaana nahi and others. It was I think some story about the Wolf that wanted a new coat of skin….I don’t remember the folk tale, some wolf amongst foxes or something? In any case, the foint was that the wolf would go to a darjee (tailor) and ask for the new coat, and then have some money issues or something, and then would sing darjee maamu, darjee maamu, mat kar phikar….mujhe dekh kar…mujhe dekh kar…This would also form an integral part of my cunning plan to correct the class monitor.

Watching the Titanic automatically made me draw. I am surprised nobody noticed the organic (hehe)  link between seeing a nekkid wimmun on screen and rushing to practice drawing the next day. Perhaps my parents sniggered about it behind their palms while appreciating my ‘drawing’. I drew, sigh, Sherlock Holmes. Not even the older, badass version, but the young Sherlock Holmes made by Spielberg. We had an illustrated book on that movie, you know, the ones with a lot of glossy stills and lame writing. I was going to use the drawing to shattering effect.

What of A. Miss though? After all, violent lou was for her. Why did the class monitor suddenly become the center of such an elaborate plan? Take A Wild Guess.

It was the day of the school function. Mehta sir was looking murderous, he had bought a special 1 metre scale to ensure good behaviour and better bruises. When he got impatient he would swing it like a whip, while we leapt out of the way into the girls’ rows, which were always very well behaved and never targeted by that randy blind bastard. I just ended up sitting with the girls.

I had to make my move pretty soon as it would be evening. It had to be done at dusk, when the man turns into the wolf, and the wolf into the hunter. I was about to slip out of the rows and make it to the abandoned shack when-

Stay tuned.

There is extremely little I remember about my few years in Chennai, except that M Miss was not South Indian.

Her waist was so soft and white, it made me think of the sand in the playground outside, thousand times finer, firmer, fresher. I remember her in some blue sari, very filmy (diaphanous, and cinematic), and her handkerchief hanging limp from her waist. It would sometimes wave and shiver in the wind and beat against her hips like a loving hand. She would brace it again against her yielding waist, and I would watch so hard my eyes would fill the space in my sockets like a swelling breast. Note that then, I was not even a beast.

Let me digress. Beasts are given a bad rep by humans. Unfair. Beasts never have sexual thoughts at childhood. They have them at the precise time when they have the power or the apparatus to sate the very same thoughts. What does a child know about Sex? nothing. So how does it respond to M miss’s waist? No clue. But still, it tries. Usually like Oedipus Rex.

Precocity is believed to be the ability to generate ideas far ahead of one’s age. It need not be a great aptitude at any facet of intelligence, like counting, or word building or playing with Lego. It is just the ability to come up with real world solutions before the real world comes at you. So when I had M Miss thoughts jostling with me whenever I had Benadryl, and I noticed that Benadryl made me sleepy, I say I was precocious. Not perverted. I also got her to feed me Benadryl, and envisioned myself feeding her same. Then we would float into an abyss of bliss, and essentially I would learn how to have M Miss in my arms, rather than the other way round.

Now M Miss liked creativity. I created for her a paper rose. Her chubby cheeks looked just a bit amused, as though she knew my intent. This is where it gets interesting.

Surreptitious looks in class. When I looked at her when she wasn’t looking. And she looked at me when I was looking. Of course she did. I can’t be sure, as of course, I wasn’t looking, but I am sure in the few minutes I didn’t look at her, she was looking at me.

Then comes the attempts to break my bones in the plastic ball game outside. There was this sort of cage filled with plastic balls that kids swam through and threw at each other. The basic idea for me was to destroy S’s weird palate. It was cruel. But then again, he had a clear spot on my head to aim for. My nose. It didn’t exist back then, so there was this nice round cavity in the center like a bull’s eye. I also aimed for M Miss’s handkerchief. I hit it once, and…

I was crying by the time she got up with the ball. Clutched very hard in my hand was S’s ball, which had just permanently destroyed any hopes of an acquiline nose. M miss rushed to me and held my nose against her waist. This is also known as comforting the child. Ever noticed mothers and ladies doing it? Just stuffing the kid into the waist region? I was a prime beneficiary of same.

Parul was in KV. She had thick lips that would moisten with each passing year, and by 15 would be sensual. I had an idea about such things. Precocity. I was now looking Chubbier by the year, and still remember A madam calling me Shaktimaan in class. Parul and I shared a bench. I was very witty then, as my notes to the headmaster would have already told you. I was so witty, I actually thought of pushing Parul’s bag from the back of the bench and giggle about it, to make sure the punch line wasn’t lost.

Also, when this happened, I got beat by A Madam. How amusing, eh? But that didn’t matter when Parul sort of well, caressed the beaten parts. I was 9 by then, and so not likely to be spanked on the butt. Interesting results would have been obtained if so.

Parul was also my first kiss, of course, and my first horrified lip cleaning on discovering the quivering wetness of a lip. If you ask me, in my asexual moments, what is my idea of the world’s scariest monster, it will be something like a rose. With each petal a wet warm lip. If you ask me in my sexual moments (which is almost all the time), I’ll just show it to you; if you are a woman I’ll need a well positioned mirror, thats all. Somehow, this went on for some time in the clean, warm and high grass that surrounded the so called ‘football field’ in KV. We had no footballs, so I used PT class well with Parul.

After some time, with my bro singing ‘Kya ada pe tolbe mere Paro! Ah Paro! Dil Ke Tukde ho gaye Hazaaron! Hazaaron!’ I had to ditch her, and she was very upset. I just know it. Just because she was laughing bravely doesn’t mean anything. And Tolbe means nothing, except that my bro’s Hindi still sucked, and he, like all Tamil boys, fitted meaningless content words randomly. In this regard, I really wish I had a recording of my singing of Alai Payudhe then. Some of the lyrics could have beaten Benny Lava.

Later, I’ll tell you about the 1994 incident. Much Later.

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.

I am going to attempt putting my libertine excesses in perspective. Maybe I just want to revisit them. Maybe I want to write them to laugh, and succeed.

The world I painted
on the moon
and found it my love’s face.