“A bald headed man cannot grow hair by getting excited about it.”
(The proverb from Belgian Congo – 7 July, 1984)

One day, Father used to be God and my mother, a Goddess with somewhat restricted powers. Whenever Dad used to be home it would feel like Sunday. Sometimes he would take a wooden chair and a bamboo stool out in the lawn and conduct the male ritual of shaving under a warm sun, while I would hover around to watch his deft fingers flick the razor and remove the sweet smelling lather from his face.

I would look at the blue sky above and think of a possible trip to Police Bazaar for shopping in the evening. I would ask him and he would sometimes reply with a gentle nod, “Hmm.” That would fill me with an inexplicable joy and something exciting would stir in my little tummy... just the thought of going to Police Bazaar - the place filled with wonderful things, lots of people and cars. Some jilebees¹ from Delhi Mistaan and a taxi ride back would make my day a red lettered one. THAT was bliss!

Then there were those spring morning trips to Fruit Garden, holding my father's hand, secure in its safety from everything malicious that ever existed. Or getting into those blue-yellow city-buses and head for Barabazar. But first a haircut in a saloon near Firebrigade to chop off those unruly strands that nearly touched my eyes. It was only the other day we did it, Abba would say. He was happily bald because mice had eaten all his hair, or so he said. Only to be lucky enough to get a seat by the window and watch the town pass me by was pure bliss. In the busy market place we would be greeted by throngs of disorderly shopkeepers everywhere. I still remember the EXACT smell of lighted tobacco from the pipes protruding from red betel stained lips of chinky-eyed men with Khasia² toupees on their heads, speaking a funny accent of Hindi, who sold an assortment of things from bamboo baskets. Whenever we brought anything it would be wrapped in squared banana leaves and tied with a thin strip of bamboo. Pure and simple, unlike today.

Allan was my first friend in the neighborhood. He was a local fellow full of pranks. Attired in pale tee shirts and half pants with small rubber sandals, our days were spent doing many things... like stealing another neighbor's bird cage, catching tadpoles by the stream nearby and avidly discussing the mysterious differences in the anatomy of our sisters. All doubts were cleared one day when I discovered two great pictures in the rubble of our bachelor tenant's room when he was away. They depicted a lady stretched by a swimming pool without even a swimsuit! A few surreptitious glances was all that we could safely afford before we stacked it away in the fear of getting caught red handed.

However, we soon found a better way. Another boy had a sister who was slightly younger than he. That boy told us he had had a good look under his sister's frock at home in the night when no one was looking. We soon coaxed him to ask her. It was mutually agreed and the place was fixed under our house. She readily lifted her frock and pulled down her panty while we also pulled out our little treasure for a close scrutiny. That afternoon our curiosity was amply satisfied. The greater mysteries would gradually be solved and this was a good beginning, we averred.

Playing under the sun and playing in inclement weather often brought chills. And any fever cum cold meant an inevitable trip to the doctor's clinic, which was nearby to my kindergarten. The doctor would place a very cold stethoscope on my chest and prescribe some quick remedy. Sweet tasting tonics would make me very happy but then, one would have to resume going to school. Fetching me from there was mom's duty. It was also her duty to buy me those pink pieces of toffee sold in the tiny shops outside my school and kept in empty Horlicks bottles, costing 5 paisa each.

Soon I switched to another school and then to Allan’s school where I had another favorite pal. He was the one who pointed out to me that our class teacher, with whom I was madly in love, was quite heavy across the chest. Soon afterwards, I was booked for being talkative in class. But that did not stop me from ranking first in the final exams and jumping a class to be at par with Allan. Now we were together in school too!

Allan was not so fascinated by books, at least not as much as I was, so he often got caned at home for not doing homework and playing marbles too much. I would often find his face tear stained in the evening and a running nose, which he pulled with gusto every now and then. He also took help after school from our sweet smelling teacher who sometimes smoked so she had a great aroma. One day Allan had a tale to tell. It so happened that he was waiting for our miss outside her bedroom at her residence and she was late in coming out. So he took a peep. There she was with her boyfriend and they were getting intimate! Unfortunately, she spotted our peeping Tom and hastily dismissed him for the day.

My parents sometimes told me not to play with Allan as he was a bad boy and his father was a drunkard. Other friends entered my life and removed me away from Allan. When they left our neighborhood, I only saw him occasionally when he came to visit his granny who stayed close by to our place. About fifteen years later, Allan the taxi driver, died a rough death in a scuffle with some policemen.

I went on to class 6, section C so we used to call ourselves “sexy.” I had another love affair with a bright eyed teacher who used to tease us when we forgot our homework. “So where is your homework? You gave it to your girlfriend?!!” And the poor student would go red in the face.

The game of marbles that we played on the school grounds when the bell rang to announce the arrival of lunch hours. Each group of boys would rush to the sandy field as soon as the class doors were opened and the attendant teacher had gone out. With pockets full of jingling round balls of glass, each with its pleasant color, but light green was one of my favorites. The game was not taken lightly by the middle class lads - it was an all consuming passion.

Holding the marble was an art, deftly placed before the second finger on the right hand, catapulted by the left hand and anchored from the knee of a raised leg. One lucky striker would invariably keep winning. Rounds and rounds of this sport continued until the bell rang or somebody's reserves were exhausted and one had to buy more from the little shops of shawl draped kongs.³ The determination and grit written on the faces of my Khasi classmates was particularly marked. They displayed a real emotion - a fierce ambition to win on the sandy playground, something very different from their behavior inside the classroom. That domain belonged to other stalwarts, who were keen with the written word, while they would awkwardly take out their untidy notebooks and second-hand textbooks keeping quiet most of the time, frightened almost, feeling out of place and always anxiously waiting for the bell to ring and conclude the uninteresting periods that seemed to drag on and on.

We were crazy about adventure comics. Each of us had a small reserve, which was exchanged like blue chip shares on the Bombay Stock Exchange and read at break time or just about anytime. We also liked reading crime and detective stories from the school library. Every library period was a real hullabaloo, with each boy trying to grab a piece of those terrorizing pieces of fiction. They were surreptitiously read in class on the sly and at home under the blanket with a flashlight. Dejection often struck when in the middle of the night and in the middle of some serious action that dismayed our heroes created by the ilk mind of Franklin W Dixon, the batteries ran out. Sigh! Yawn... Zzz.

And eating a mouth watering concoction of muree, aloo⁴ and masala while a pale grey statue of Don Bosco looked down benignly. It was impossible not to notice that sparrow goo littered the faces of Don Bosco with the three boys standing on that pedestal, while we munched away those terrible things in front of the school gates but our appetite for all that never got satiated. I think the channawallahs⁵ really got a kick out of the melee of scores of hungry mouths that always surrounded them!

On the other hand, the only thing that concerned our parents and teachers was our performance at the obnoxious exams that turned up like an ugly monster as soon as we started to have some fun. Dreadful was the day the Report Cards were given to us, to take back home and face a violent spat over the measly marks in Mathematics. While more than half of the class was mainly worried about how to get through to the next rung in the ladder of scholastic salvation, I was caught in the insanity of maintaining my rank. The adamant expectation: Numero Uno, nothing less. How many times were we lined up thus. A clap for the top rankers while the rest were left to feel humiliated. The worthless morons!

The ghost of middle class survival was always nagging behind my eyes, and ears. Dad said something with a glare in the morning, mom added two more words that stung and then leaving home to be imprisoned for six hours with a worn out school bag one hated. Our innocence could never raise a voice against all that balderdash. Not even a rather harsh teacher who mercilessly caned us in class 8. He would hold a slim cane found by an enterprising boy from the shrubs behind the schoolyard and hit us on the knuckles for talking in class and rip our bottoms for getting late or not doing homework. We all silently cursed his soul to scorch in hell for his sadistic streak.

Occasionally some unscrupulous backbencher would bring a nudist magazine to class to show us how the female of the species looked like. Was it ugly or was it beautiful? No one could tell, but we were all curious as hell. My sisters and the girls in the neighborhood were the crab grasses in that lawn of life, always trying to catch us in the act of some pleasurable mischief, but they were addicted to another variety of nonsense. Photoromance and Mills & Boon. I somehow had the feeling, judging from the tempestuous storylines, that they got a real kick when the guy in the story turned out to be unfaithful, leaving the 'good' girl for the 'bad' one. Like all the boys were, or so they said. Then love is an ocean of tears, a valley of despair and all that crap. All because they would not be able to confront the deeper secrets of their desires, while for us, with a frequently stiffening organ, it was obvious.

That part of the body demanded a lot of attention for me then. Apart from sex education which was absurdly a part of Moral Science, a pace bowler hit me on the crotch when we were playing cricket against another class on a Saturday in the school stadium. I did not wear a guard and got stumped deliberately from the pain so we lost the match. Religious stupidity has always had eager followers so my folks decided to take me to another sadistic quack to get me circumcised. My school friends got a vague explanation for the mysterious absence of more than a week, while I recovered from the wound thus afflicted on me.

On the other hand, I had a good friendship with the Behari⁶ Superman, thus nicknamed for his wizardry with figures, and with whom I went for tuitions. My friend once asked another rough and tough fellow in an overcrowded room full of wary students, where he came from and the guy arrogantly replied, “wild wes.” “I come from the tame east,” scoffed my friend, incensed. Behari Superman is currently developing software in the United States, actually taming the wild in the west!!

About the same time, USA's Star Wars campaign was in full swing and I won a UN sponsored 'Letters for Peace' contest. I told Ronald Reagan to stop the madness and go jerk off but board exams slowly entered our consciousness leaving the frolic of innocence behind and take on to careers. It was all quite vague but dreams were bright. Our fascination for secs (I loathed Trigonometry) and horror stories continued, unabated. Those were the forbidden horizons where we could take flight into a more adventurous world, or rather, we were forced to live in a mundane illusion and the books of crime and nudity were our contact points with reality - to tell us that the world was still very violent, that man was still savage and women were still deceptive. Life was beckoning with the lure of adult maturity and compromising between what we really were and what we passionately wanted to be.

(.*_*.)

1. Jilebees, sweetmeat
2. Khasia, Khasi, one of the ethnic tribes living in Meghalaya in North East India
3. Kongs, young lady
4. Muree, aloo., puffed rice and potato
5. Channawallahs, peddlars who sell assorted eatables
6. Behari, resident of the Bihar state of India