Sibling Inequation

The other night, I had nothing to do. My sister was working on her term-paper, and I was trying to enjoy the drizzle, listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd, and munching on lemon-biscuits. The very fact that she and I were in the same room was a rare occurrence, not because we are estranged or are not fond of each other, but because despite lodging under the same roof, we lead such stark contrasting lives, that our paths hardly cross, which is weird in a city like Calcutta, where everyone knows everyone and she and I are separated by just three academic years, and have been in colleges whose students’ lives entwine quite often- J.U. and Presidency. We do chat once in a while. But on an average day, our interaction stays limited to three sentences in the morning, four at night.She and I have always been remarkably different people. Despite fundamentally advocating to similar views, having been brought up in the same atmosphere, we are as dissimilar as siblings can get. For most of our childhoods, she and I attended the same school. Throughout school, she was the quieter kid. She had fewer friends and she stuck to books and cartoons longer than I did. She was always a class-topper and retained that position with unflinching grit, never for once letting it out of her kitty. I, on the other hand, got along famously well with all of my classmates, I was definitely more outgoing, and more popular among my peers. I had my books and cartoons as well, but I shifted to Prime Time Television sooner than her. Though neither of us was particularly fond of the teachers in our school, she definitely avoided trouble with greater adroitness than I ever did. I was always at loggerheads with my teachers, most of whom found my presence in their classes severely distressing. Academically, I managed to retain my position within the Top-Three of the class and topped my class several times as well. However, Priyadarshini Goswami always remained a steadier example of a scholar for younger students of the school. We did certain things alike though. We hated returning from Calcutta after vacations. We collected Pokemon 3-D figures and tazos, shared a distaste for Mathematics, and I replaced her as the school’s safe-bet for Extempore/ Debates/Creative Writing Competitions.
She passed out of school with an all time record-high percentage of marks in the science stream (Sample: A ‘99’ in Physics) and went on to take up English for her graduate course when the norm was Medical/ Engineering for Science Students. This was another one of the few similarities between the individuals that the two of us are, that when I too passed out of school with a decent enough percentage, I wanted to follow her example and take up English too. But my destiny sent me into the Vortex of Economics and well, since then, we have grown further apart.
She and I have hardly ever had mutual interests. She hated Bollywood movies, while I went gaga over them. She was the first woman (and the only one, for a long time) I knew who hated Shah Rukh Khan. Neither did she ever realize my passion for World Cinema. Yes, we read the same kind of literature – Marquez, Ray and the Victorian Era, but she reads a lot more than I shall probably ever be able to fathom. I thrive on Country music, Queen and The Beatles, on Vintage Rock, and lot of obscure stuff, on 1960’s Bollywood music- Geeta Dutt and Lata Mangeshkar while she has been, for a long time, been unyieldingly devoted to Death Metal, Thrash Metal and all the other brutal musical genres. Back in our childhood, she and I would vote diametrically opposite sounding songs of a particular soundtrack our favorites from the soundtrack. Also,throughout our childhood, we were surrounded by non-Bengali people who she always disliked. She hated the language Hindi and never cared to learn to speak it.On the other hand, many of my best friends were Punjabi/Gujarati/Marwari and I got along with them effortlessly. Infact, my knowledge of Punjabi was far greater than hers though she was the one born there. And I've always adored Hidni. On an aggregate level, she was always the more 'phoren maal' and my inclinations have always been chiefly 'desi'.Also over time, we have changed remarkably as people. Ever since she joined college in 2006, she opened up progressively. And after I relocated to Calcutta in 2007, I started mellowing down. Now I find it quite difficult to make conversation with a stranger. In other words, my social awkwardness is slowly reaching its pinnacle while she has almost completely erased off any such un coordination.So, the other night, we spoke for a long time. I got to know a lot about her life, her boyfriend, her music, her clique, her addictions. And we both had another epiphany regarding how different our lives are and how little we know about each other despite seeing each other speak on the phone, move around, work on the Internet and have dinner everyday. I still can’t relate with her life at all and I’m sure neither can she with mine. Yet, despite the love-hate relationship we’ve shared, the obvious rivalry that follows, and the mutually-acknowledged nonchalance about each other’s day-to-day affairs, I definitely am very fond of her and I know she feels the same about me.

Trivia: She and I often joke about how she should have been born a boy and I a girl.

November and December 2009, and January 2010

To start with, my sister just knocked on my door asking me to leave the door open. Flustered by the prospect of a sudden, random intrusion into my privacy, I asked her the reason behind the demand/request. She said, she was feeling scared in the other room, alone. It’s 2 in the morning, and my twenty-one year old sister with a chin piercing and death-metal inclinations is feeling scared of being alone in a room.

Of late, I’ve been going out quite a lot. Birthdays, festivals, random socializing occasions, movie-marathons, I’m doing them all. Well, studies was supposed to attain ultra-importance right from the beginning of 2010, but that, I guess, is not happening soon. So, on one hand I’ve been keeping the company of culturally-inclined Bangali kids, the ones who love World-Cinema, and indie music, folk-rock and Bob Dylan, the ones who understand theatre and can perform an autopsy of Orhan Pamuk or Franz Kafka’s style and body of work, and get high on marijuana under the moonlight, while on the other, I’m finding myself around Marwari and Gujarati kids, in little black dresses, and expensive black shirts, ones that ‘chiggy-wiggy’ to Hindi music at ‘raat ke dhaai baje’ and drive around the city in expensive and huge cars, and choose to watch ‘Chance Pe Dance’ over ‘A Christmas Carol’ and garnish their vocabulary with ‘like’ and ‘yaaa’…
I mean no offence to anyone though. I’ve grown up with lots of different kinds of people around me, and so, these little limitations of both clans never bother me much. I derive the best of both(or more) worlds.

At the birthday party I hosted along with Aritri and Nisha, at my uninhabited Rajarhat apartment, a lot of spilling happened. I was scared about the walls, but thankfully, the freshly painted ones didn’t get too badly stained, and I didn’t really un-build the ones I construct for my own privacy. What was extremely strange was, seven-and-a-half(one of them- a ‘patiala’) pegs of ‘Magic Moments’ did almost nothing to me. I remember speaking with a hushed voice, and serving food to the guests after the intake. Having a high capacity is one thing, and not getting affected after seven-and-a-half pegs is something at an entirely higher level. Scary, much.

Strangely enough, among the people I’ve been regularly meeting of late, are some guys from my batch of St. James’, ones I’d never ever spoken to for more than five-minutes-at-a-stretch while in school. While the closest friends from De Nobili continue to fizzle out(interactions with even Aritra and Anindita have dropped drastically, blame it on my non-acceptance-of-phone-calls-policy ;the others having disappeared from my life even before), the ones from St. James’ continue to grow more-and-more prominent in my sphere of school-friends. It’s strange, really. I’d honestly never thought that I’d pursue communication with anyone apart from Ajju and Ikshaku after school, but these things, I guess, just happen.


There has been another satisfying turn in the flow of events. I’ve got myself involved in LOK- a forum created with a vision to help promote young talent in Calcutta- help unravel precious talent in the fields of dance, theatre, movie-making, music, elocution, painting, photography. The idea was conceived by a friend, Soumyajit, and he invited me to be a part of this hugely ambitious venture. The official inauguration was held on the 3rd of January. For the event, the team got a folk-theatre group from Chhattisgarh to Calcutta. Apart from a performance(Raja Phokalwa) by the group, a myriad of talent was up on display in the form of a photography exhibition, some live skits, songs and dance sequences, live-painting, self-composed poetry recitation done by friends from LOK itself. The modus operandi of the entire event was maintained strictly at ‘constant-interaction-with-the-audience’.

Also there has been a series of deaths this winter. This winter(2009-10) has by far been the coldest winter I’ve ever experienced in Calcutta. It reminded me strongly of the ‘interior’ majestic winters of North India, the six-degree celcius mornings in Maithon. The temperature dropped to ten degrees one day in December 2009. Apart from Dadu, Himumashi(Ma’s only sister)’s father-in-law, a very healthy man(as opposed to Dadu’s fifteen long years’ suffering), the winner of the Mr. Calcutta pageant a few decades back, passed away to a double heart-attack. He was fit enough to enjoy a normal game of cricket one evening, and the next morning, he had gone up in smoke. The others that breathed their last were a classmate’s grandmother, an old lady in a neighboring building, an aunt of a friend from LOKtheatre, and the illustrious, longest serving chief minister of any state of India, the man who was betrayed by his party from becoming the Prime Minister- Jyoti Basu.

I have, as of now, despite several rounds of planning and yearning, not yet watched the evidently mediocre movie ‘Pyaar Impossible’. Well, of course, I understand and appreciate good Cinema, but there are times when the content doesn’t matter and this movie is one such movie for me. I know that there is nothing novel or innovative about the movie, but I still feel this immense desire to go and indulge myself because of the mere presence of the utterly-edible, the perfectly-awesome, totally-and-phenomenally-gorgeous Priyanka Chopra in the movie. Among the movies I’ve watched recently and loved, however, is the magnum-opus, the path-breaking movie, which took more than a decade to be created, the first-of-its-kind, entirely 3Dimensional movie ‘Avatar’. It was a totally new experience, watching this movie. I also enjoyed ‘Chungking Express’, ‘Juno’, ‘Rocket Singh’ and the predictable-from-start-to-finish-yet-thoroughly-enjoyable ‘Three Idiots’.

Other memorable events in the last three months include the annual fest of Presidency College, ‘Milieu’, that was held in the last week of December. For the ‘Impact’, our team, consisting of Biaas, Kaushik, Shahana, Taniya and me, had a winner right from its very conceptualization, with ‘Khoon Bhari Shaam’-a Indian version of the International tear-jerking, hormone-cycles-upsetting melodrama of a novel, ‘Twilight’. Also, the ‘Indian Ocean’ performance and sneaking in all of my non-Presidency friends into the Presidency enclosure for the same is something I’m not going to forget in a hurry. Also brilliant was the Christmas Eve, which I spent with some of my best friends, having an amazingly memorable time at various places.Another important event that happened in November was the mid-term exam. For the first time in my life, I found myself at the bottom of a class, academically. With a meager thirty-eight out of a possible hundred (and only five students below me in this chronology), I’ve obviously become one of the most scorned students of my department (Well, at least sharing a sour relationship with teachers is nothing new for me). I do not know whether my cataclysmic downfall was because my present classmates are more in love with text-books than any previous set of my classmates (quite justifiable, they are after all, students of the most esteemed Economics department of the sub-continent, their attachment with academics is sacrosanct), or whether I have sailed farther out in the dangerous ocean of ‘non-association-with-course-material’. I am hoping to make a come-back in the ‘toppers-of-class’ list, but the chances of that occurring appear to be very, very bleak. This fact should be clearly evident from the reality academics found mention at the very end of this post, after everything else. Which is to say, this note, ends right here, abruptly, like all of my other life-update notes

Happy Birthday To Me... and thanks everybody.

That belief just got re-iterated.

However much I might continue to try and find life-driving forces from my depression.
The fact remains, I’ve got(and always had) amaaaaaazzzinggg friends and an awwwwweeeesommmmme family.
I can never thank anyone enough for all of them.

Happy 19th Birthday to me…

Gloom and despair aren’t around the corner, Success is. Celebrations are.
Everything will fall into place. Everything will work out.. :) :)

Dadu, hues of sepia, and dusty old photographs...

Dadu passed away three days back, leaving behind an even more mitigated proportion of males in my close family. For, I’ve never had any uncle, and I never had the other grandpa. My mom and dad have a sister each, and both my grandmothers are very healthy and active. And also, I have a sister, and I was always closer to Ma than Baba. Even with this humongous amount of feminine presence in my family, I always had Baba and Dadu. Now with Dadu gone, I find my gender representation in my family at irredeemably serious peril.

Also, Baba wanted a photograph of Dadu for the Sraddho ceremony. Thus came tumbling out of the racks, the old, thick, ‘original-full-version-Oxford-dictionary-ko-by-great-margins-beat-karnewaale’ family albums. Well, I had forgotten about the existence of most of those photographs – we were leafing through the albums after that long. I was four, I was two, I was one, I wasn’t born yet, my sister’s birth, my parents getting married. Jodhpur Park, Picnic Garden, Ballygunge Place. Bokaro, Delhi, Ferozepur, Amritsar. Army camps and parties, Bangaali bonediyana , Jharkhand small-town tranquility, the Raybahadur Kumarnath Bagchi legacy, all the great family ethics and values, all the aristocracy-which my ancestors certainly do not hope to see surviving through me...Despite the fashion sensibilities having arrived and departed in cycles – (Floral prints, khadis, checks), the times only moved forward. My weirdly round face chiselled down, my sister now has straight hair instead of the ‘hujoorbujoor’ curls, Ma and Baba’s black tresses and glowing skin have been replaced by salt-and-pepper, and wrinkles. So many of the distant relatives smiling out from those old photographs have since, moved over to the other side. We lost some to accidents, some to diseases and some to old age, the latest being Dadu.

It is the same end which awaits us all. The Inevitable. Only we do not know when it is going to thrust itself across our paths. It is not scary really; rather there is something very poignant about it. And in those old photographs, people look so happy. They all look younger and better than they do now. Some have been married off, since. They all have their own kids- those aunts that were present for my mom’s baby shower( ‘shaad’) before I was born, they are mothers themselves now. Quite some of the people in the photographs have had messy divorces. And there were even a few who spelled their own ends.

Well, THIS wasn’t intended to be a sad and depressing note, but I’m afraid, it is turning out to be one. What I really want to highlight is, Change, truly is the only constant, so, despite cynics and elders and professors telling me off about my lack of a sense of responsibility, or about my immature and unconventional-and-disturbing way of life and thought processes, I am not going to fret about what will happen and when and blaady-blaady-blah. Everything will change, everything will fall in place. As Hagrid had said,”Whatever will come will come and I will have to face it when it does…”

Bon Voyage... An Early End For Me ?

My bed at the moment is ‘infested’ by stacks of unread notes. They look way more perilous than sharks in the Tasman Sea. I’m in no mood to confront them tonight.

I’m sad because the Rolling Stones magazine didn’t include Queen OR Pink Floyd in their list of Top 50 Artists of all times. I’m hungry too, but that happens every night, when I’m awake at this hour.

I’m randomly remembering past incidents. Like in De Nobili when Debadrita would rush out of the classroom yelling “Bulldozer, bulldozer!” on catching sight of a mighty yellow bulldozer passing our school by. And the school-rules didn’t allow us to set our feet in the corridor between the classroom and the road-with-the-mighty-bulldozer because apparently, the students could be causing a breach to ‘De Nobili Discipline’ by becoming visible to the passersby on the road. And yet, we would follow Debadrita into the corridor, ripping apart every little iota of the notion of ‘De Nobili Discipline’ our class-teacher expected from us.

Somehow, most of my pleasant memories have a cool-breeze coming in through some window.
With Thammu and Buiya, I would play “Chhush Chhush”(sound of waves against the hull of a boat) in the guest-room. The game would have us embark on wonderful Sinbad-ish adventures, where we would be required to do everything right from fighting for our lives to dancing weirdly in order to please local tribal kings. No wonder ‘The Voyage Of The Dawn-Treader’ remains my favorite book of the Narnia series. No one was allowed to enter the room when the game would be on.
And sometimes, we would also dance to ‘Koi Kahe Kehta Rahe’ or ‘Brown Girl In The Ring’. Yes, Thammu IS my dad’s mom.

Life has been good to me. I’ve always had what I wanted. But, I’ve always expected a catastrophic future for myself. I’m not pessimistic. I’m not an unhappy person. But this is something I see for myself. I will spell my own early end, I keep thinking. However, the notion might just be wrong. All these years, and I haven’t encountered the catastrophe still, right? Let’s see what happens. If I wither off early, at least I’ll not be an Eleanor Rigby later.

I leave you with these four posters that I’ve designed and though they’re just amateurish stuff, I quite like them… :D

This, I guess, is my last post in October 2009.

Rains...

“Now I, Now I wish it would rain down, down on me
Yes I wish it would rain, rain down on me now
Yes I wish it would rain down, down on me
Yes I wish it would rain on me” : Phil Collins


I have always loved the rains and have never been able to quite understand why all poets and singers and normal people associate ‘Rain’ to distress and despair. For me however, it has been one thing that has made me happy. Maybe it has got a lot to do with staying in a particularly hot, humid, over-populated yet brilliantly resplendent country, that I love the rains so much. It washes down the yellow, orange and red hues of this tropical country, and mellows down the ambience to soothing shades of blue, green and purple. It washes off the dust and SPM from the air , and the accumulated filth from the city trees, making the leaves appear lush green and fresh. I am seriously of the opinion that the smell of the wet soil after a rain is one of the best fragrances in the world.


I think the first rains I remember are the Jodhpur Park rains. I was five I guess, and I can still remember that the verandah and the terrace of our flat on the eighth floor would be flooded every time it rained. I would be playing scrabble (mostly sitting beside my grandma,rather than playing) with my sister, grandma, mom and great grandmother when it would rain. Or rummy. Some other times when my mom would be away, my sister and I would erect a tent and would get my grandmom to play ‘Trekking’ with us, while it would rain outside.

The North India rains are pretty much the same wherever you go. They cool down the cities and are a welcome relief from the heated up city buildings. It, however, rains in winter in Punjab, so people there don’t like it much. It brings down the temperatures to one-digit figures. Delhi Rains from a Hauz Khas bungalow verandah are the only ones I remember of the capital.

The Bokaro Rains wash down all the coal particles from the air. The suffocating city air would freshen up and give us space to breath.. Dhanbad and Asansol rains are pretty non-descript, and hence I wouldn’t really recall them with any particular affection.

Then there are the North Bengal rains… On every visit to Darjeeling/ Gangtok/ Kurseong I have encountered this variety. It, in a way, spoils all the travel plans. Yet there is a romantic aspect about this variety of rain that makes one want to fall in love… not just with the rain, but with North Bengal, and Sikkim. A cup of hot espresso coffee, with a delicious burger at Keventer’s and the rain outside… These are some memories I’ll cherish forever.
There is a small town called Rabangla in Sikkim. The town is nothing to write home about, but the road along which one journeys, from Gangtok to Rabangla is one of the most haunting beauties of Nature I have ever seen. Add to it the rain, and the hot soup, the fear of leeches and the Army ambience of the Army Guesthouse that had been provided by Major Bakshi for our lodging made the Rabangla Rains totally unforgettable. If I ever shoot ‘Dark Truth And White Lies”, I’ll shoot the first half of it in Rabangla, for sure.

Of course no one can deny the existence of the Durga Pujo rains in Calcutta. It takes off most of the decorations from the elaborately done up pandals, and floods the city streets, making traffic conditions all-the-worse (and subsequently the Telegraph-Metro to rate the traffic conditions during pujo as 2/10 in its post pujo edition). It spoils the red sarees and the black shirts, the new cars and the crowds’ moods… Some wise people choose to stay at home and relish the Pujo over beer,vodka and shredded shuntki, or Aloo Paratha and Dahi(Punjabi Taste buds love this dish). However my darling parents have chosen to stay in Calcutta for every pujo. And not just that, we also go exhaustive-pandal hopping every Pujo… So the kadaa(wet mud) stains on my new dress and the hours spent holed up inside the car, watching it rain outside, and new lovers cozying up while walking, while listening to Anjan Dutta go “E Kolkata Sholo Amaar”… Despite these, I love the pujo rains too, and I was a tad disappointed when it didn’t rain last year during Pujo

I saw it rain from my Class 11 classroom in St James’ Calcutta. At that time I knew nobody in the school, and nobody knew me, so I would spend all of my time sleeping in class. Nobody bothered to notice, so it was fine with me. The rain outside would cheer me up however, and despite my loathing the grey sky, the grey buildings and the inability of the rain to make its way all the way to the ground, or the classroom window-sill due to the claustrophobically small distance between the school building and the surrounding buildings, I would be happy nevertheless. There was a garbage dump on the street beside the school,which would spoil the effect of the rain, but still…
I enjoyed the rain that transformed Calcutta into Venice in my 2nd week of St James’. I hated my new school so much that I was glad the rain gave me an excuse to miss school for four days.

I have enjoyed the rains sitting in Ballygunge Circular Road CCD with my friends (two of them mainly). I have enjoyed the rain in Park Street, from Bar-B-Q, Flury’s and KFC.

My favorite rains have been, no points for guessing, the Maithon rains.
There would be the school-time rains. It would make the school appear very much like the Hogwarts they show in movies. The lush green trees, the huge playgrounds, the dark corridors lit by light-bulbs, the rain drops coming into the classrooms through the huge windows. And there would be Parents’ Night or Sports Day practices, or Extempore or Debate practices. So I’d just skip classes at length and enjoy the storm and the wind outside. The nice thing about school and the town together was it was a huge school in
a small neighborhood, that wouldn’t even classify as a town, and hence it was very much like Hogwarts. The ChotaNagpur hillocks would give it a very Alpine/Scottish Highlands’ ambience, and the rains would make it appear like a place straight out from the fairy-tale books, a place in the surrealistic realm a la Narnia, Rhye, or Heidi’s grandpa’s cottage on the Swiss Alps..
And how can I forget the home ground rains. Every distant thunder would be a signal for us to get ready to go mango-collecting. The Kalboishakhi would get the yet-to-be-ripe green April Mangoes to fall to the ground, which we had to retrieve before the children from a nearby village had come and collected them. So the Mango-collecting(this sounds weird, I’d rather settle for ‘Aam-kurono’) sessions would occur while it would be still raining. We would make our way past the snake-holes and scorpion-dens, get down in knee-deep accumulated water, and collect the mangoes in our backyard-wood. When it would be dark(it mostly would be-kalboishakhis generally attack in the evenings, after a hot and humid day), we would even have to brave the prospect of meeting a few local ghosts and evil spirits.

Maithon rains would always mean opening of the dam flood-gates. Maithon would never be flooded, for it was hilly, but the West Bengal and Jharkhand districts surely would, when all the DVC dams let their flood gates open. While this action of DVC would invite a lot of criticism from state governments and newspapers, it would be a gala event for us, small towners. The release of the dam waters (sometimes the bridge connecting Mazumdar Niwas to the mainland would drown when the dam would be too full-much to the inconvenience of the Rao Parivar) would mean a local Niagara for us… Ooh! That would be fun! Pointing at the gushing water from the school-bus, politely asking the driver to stop the bus, and relish the view…

I have also enjoyed the Car- journey rains(the variety I would meet in some of the National highway journeys from Maithon to Calcutta or vice-versa, given that two such journeys would be made every four months). Stopping the car, and enjoying the tea/ snacks at a Roadside Dhaba would be immensely pleasurable…

I have always loved the rain for one more reason. There are beautifully picturised Bollywood rain songs… from Raj Kapoor and Nargis in Shree 420 to Saif Ali Khan and Rani Mukerjee in HumTum, I have loved them all and so the Rain songs bring a smile on my face-ALWAYS!

I have always loved the rain, and will always do so…Right now, sweating profusely in this hot summer afternoon in Calcutta, I have only one prayer… “Aay Brishti Jhenpe… Dhaan Debo Mepe..”

Ek Bachpan Aisa Bhi

I am in a playground. It is huge, with very many trees. My friends are frolicking all around me. I am not at all interested in the games. Is it not ‘Hide and Seek’ they are playing? Yes, they are… I busy myself in looking up at the next building’s terrace. The building is much taller than my two-storey school building. There are some faces I love, looking down at me, waving at me. Gargi Ma’am asks “Those are your parents, aren’t they?” I nod and reply in positives, with my chest broadened and my eyes glistening with glee. I am sure not many have the privilege of attending a school right next door to their homes. “Dola Ma’am surely has none of her parents so close to her at the moment”, I note with some amount of self-satisfaction. My pained heart is soothed at the very thought of this very misfortune of the lady who had minutes ago told me off for dropping water in the classroom.

My sister and I don’t get along with the children of our colony. We think we are much too superior for their standards, which we are… We both have our perfect playground just at the back of our home, within the bungalow territories. It is our Enchanted Wood, a wood with bonmurgis, squirrels, goat kids(the occasional one that has strayed into this territory), peacocks(common in the early mornings) and foxes(once in a month?) The only things that prevent it from being our perfect Enchanted Wood is that the trees don’t go ‘Wisha Wisha’ here, neither does any of the mango, jam, jackfruit, guava, or the numerous other trees have Lands visiting its top. We don’t complain though. We are satisfied with the serenity, the tranquility of this part of our home. The only disturbance is the ‘Kaho Na Pyar Hai’ songs from the just-released superhit movie coming from the distant outhouses.

I am sitting under the ‘kaamini’ tree. The dew on the grass all around me glistens under the small-town December morning sun. The garden is not very maintained really. Its quite dangerous and is infested my numerous poisonous representatives of my garden ecosystem, especially during the rains. The kaamini flowers have the notoriety of attracting the snakes with their aroma(probably the best smell in the world) and hence I can hear my mother warning me not to choose that spot for myself. I don’t pay heed. The (bungalow-type)quarter is quite far away, anyway. I know Ma can’t see me from there. I lose myself, far away from the ‘real’ world with the possible perils of reptile-fangs piercing into my skin. I am transported to the world of Georgina Kirrin. I prepare myself to meet three new kids. Julian, Dick, Anne they are… Very soon we become good friends. Not after long, I am exploring weird ship-wrecks and discovering ingots of gold in some hidden dungeons in a tiny island called Kirrin Island. I think I hear a bell. Is it Anne’s alarm clock? Couldn’t possibly be … The ‘Famous Five’ have just hit their beds after solving a mystery and earning accolades from the local police. I look up. It is the lunch bell ringing.

Sir Fernandez ,our Class Teacher,and Geography teacher is the art-director for Teacher’s Day. He is not going to come to class. Rahul Aggarwal doen't have to tell me what we are to do. We rush out of class. Our classroom is the classroom in a secluded corner of the school, just beside the bookstore. So it doesn’t really come under the surveillance of the school administration heads coming on rounds. Today it is raining hard, and the rain water has created an artificial stream that leads straight out of the school premises. We tear pages out of our Science notebooks. Fifteen or twenty sheets. Then we create paper boats. (Leeza helps me with mine). We choose the unusual colors out of Rahul’s 101 color felt pen set… We use them on our boats… the Magenta, Cyan, Holly, Plum, Straw etc color boats are divided equally between us. We set them sail on the artificial stream. My first boat sinks even before I can wish it ‘Bon Voyage’. Almost similar fates make my other boats their victim. However, I see ‘Malena’ sailing smoothly past Rahul’s boats, most of which are still floating. It wheezes past them all and soon becomes the first one to go out on the streets. I jump up in joy, and Leeza stands beside me clapping at my victory. Rahul, with a pained expression on his face, explains the circumstances under which his ‘Magellan’ slowed down at the last moment. Leeza booes him. I suddenly notice how beautiful she is..

The Chemistry class is on. Mrs. Bhattacharya is explaining to us the circumstances under which the anode sludge settles down at the anode, and the pure silver rod, acting as cathode, goes on thickening. She is a strict ,but an expert teacher. I am not paying attention though. Sneha Kedia is holding up an interesting looking box and waving it at Nancy Rakhroy. I can’t understand what could be inside the box, and why Sneha wasn’t showing it to me(with her having the habit of presenting one gift to me everyday, all ‘Best Friend’ ones). I take it from her hand, almost by force and open the lid. I find numerous colorful easily-put-onable rings inside it. I get working. I put two rings on my lower lip, three each on each ear,one each on each eyebrow, and one on my nose. To avoid attracting Mrs Bhattacharya’s attention, I hide my face behind the ICSE Chemistry Part I book, and start making weird faces at my classmates. Rohit, Kunal, Ria, Mohana and Kankana break into suppressed giggles. I try desperately to make them stop. It’s too late. My favorite teacher throws one of her favorite students out of class. I stand on the corridor. My dearest mom is teaching Biology in the next classroom.


The Economics teacher asks the other students, “Does he smile all the time?” A mousy looking classmate, whose name I don’t know, replies, “Yes sir, Always. Even when he’s being shouted at. Or being made fun of.” Some intrigued eyes turn towards me. I feel uneasy. I’m not enjoying my time in this fifth school.

It is three in the morning and I am recollecting random moments from my eighteen year old life, not necessarily the most favorite or most important. My school final exams are over and I have absolutely nothing to do. I am severely bored, and hence type down these thoughts. Who says people can’t predict the future? I can! I know what character of the PC keyboard will be used after three words? A full-stop.