CHAPTER 3- BACK STREET BOYS,GUYS FROM THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Now let me describe my friends from the neighbourhood, the funny blokes, the guys who provided me with all the ammunition to attack my school mates with my sarcasm, the boys who thought they were the coolest. The strangest character among the group was Muez, he was cheap, crass, naughty and did not know what to speak and when to speak. That used to get him in a lot of trouble with Geetha Madam and the other tutors. All the boys called him Habeebnala, not just because he lived there but because he had a constant runny nose through out the year and would flow just like the nala. Other than him there were three guys named Shehbaaz, which is like the most common name in the community because every third guy is either a Shehbaaz or a Akbar. So all the Shehbaaz’s were given nick names. In my group we had Shehbaaz Billu the one I introduced to you in the first chapter. He was the guy who had the first personal computer, the first internet connection, the first walk-man, well, let’s just say that he was the first one to get a lot of things, I think he even reached puberty early. It may have been a coincidence or maybe the personal computer and internet connection had a hand in that. Nobody dared to say anything to Billu because he possessed two qualities a killer smile and an even deadlier sense of humor. He used to humiliate his rivals with ease and then just smile at them while the others cried with laughter. Then there was Shehbaaz Kaalu. Indians are the biggest hypocrites in the world I must say, we cry foul at the way the western world treats us and call them racists at any chance we get but if one of us is a bit darker than us brownies we label him as Kaalu, kaalia or other derogatory terms. Kaalu was a terrific sportsman, a born athlete, good at any sport he chose to play, be it badminton, table tennis, cricket or kabaddi. He used to be a big show off when we were younger because he got the most pocket money and had his own chetak scooter which was like a status symbol when we were kids. But his biggest problem was he could never make up his mind on what he wanted to do and he was never satisfied with what he had. If everyone else was playing cricket he wanted to swim. If he was given bowling he wanted to bat higher up the order. If everyone wanted to go to a restaurant he wanted to watch a movie. All of us used to get very irritated with this attitude but we came up with a plan, we used to tell him the opposite of what we had planned and get him to do what we all wished to do. The third shehbaaz was Shehbaaz motu, he was plum and fat and ate at the drop of a hat. Motu had a love for all the best things in life expensive food, expensive clothing and expensive women, about whom I will tell you in the later chapters. Everyone picked on Motu because he wore unusual colors like pink, orange and yellow and had a penchant for trying out new things like new hairstyles, piercing his ears, wearing jewelry and stuff. He also was pretty dumb and never ever accepted any of his mistakes nor did he change his style. But his heart was pure and he never ever lost his temper no matter how much he was teased. He was the first metro sexual man I knew, even when being metro sexual was not considered cool. All these guys became my friends later but one guy who was my friend since childhood was Salman or Sallu as we called him. We went to the same Montessori and lived in the same apartments until my family moved out to a bigger place. Sallu was a bit of a geek earlier but became really handsome and good looking as we got older. Now he looked like a jock but was really shy and hardly spoke to anyone. He only had fun and was his true self when he was with us. All the girls in the tutorial stared at him was a glint in their eyes that I did not understand back then but none of the girls spoke to him ever because he was with Billu always. If Broke Back Mountain would have released then they would have surely been mistaken for gorgeous gay cowboys. But we knew that was not the case because of Billu’s website preferences. My cousin Abrar or Timmy as everyone called him was a part of the gang too. He was a year younger than the others but got along really well with all of us. He had just moved to colony and came to know the others because of me. Initially everyone knew him as Murad’s Cousin but later on he became quiet popular especially with the ladies.

CHAPTER 2-SCHOOL DAYS

Now let me tell you about how most of our time was spent in school. We used to finish our lunch boxes during the short recess itself so that in the lunch break we could play soccer with a rubber cricket ball with twenty players on each side. By the time the bell rang to signal the end of the recess we would have our neatly ironed and tucked in shirts wrinkled and out of place, our ties would end up in our pockets and be used to wipe the sweat of our brows.

As I was the goal keeper my trousers would get torn from the chins and my knees would bleed. After the first three or four times I had gotten immune to it and so had my mum who had to take me to the health center for first aid and my maid who was given the difficult task of removing the blood stains from my trousers and get them repaired. The next class after the lunch break was always social studies and the ugly and boring Suzie miss would put us all to a sweet slumber. The last period was for extra curricular activities, which I loved as I was the vice captain of the school cricket team and we practiced every day. Similarly Hardik, Andy and Jogesh headed off for basket ball practice while Dhawal and Chottu were stuck in the class for some stupid activity like debate or elocution. Till the previous year Tarun was also a part of the basketball team but as he had gotten very poor marks in biology and physics his name was withdrawn from the team. Tarun now attended remedial classes with people who were mostly repeating the class for a second year, goons and bullies. I thought it was very funny until one day we were having net practice after school and a couple of goonda type people with hockey sticks came to me and asked,

Aye Babu? Do you know who is Tarun?

I sensed something was wrong and answered, Nahi Bhai, I have never heard the name before?

Apparently Tarun had called Sunny, the classes bully a failure in front of the whole remedial class and had threatened him not to ever try and take his pen. We were quiet used to Tarun’s rants by now but Sunny hadn’t taken it too well and called a couple of his cajjins (that his how Sunny pronounced cousins) to teach Tarun a lesson which was “You never call a failure, a failure in front of all the other failures.” Beats my logic but who was to argue with a failure with goons for family.

I ran to Hardik and told him what was going on and he lost it. He was very possessive about his friends and wanted to tackle the goons himself. But better sense prevailed and Chottu convinced him to let his Body guards handle the goons. The sight of a gun made Sunny pee in his pants and his cajjins run like Usain Bolt.

Someone has said that “everything happens for the best” and I thought that someone was either really stupid or really drunk when he said that but even this ugly incident brought about something positive.

Tarun wowed never to take his studies lightly ever again.

That was class 9 and everyone around us, our parents, and teachers and subconsciously even we knew that this was the year to have all the fun. Because next year we would have tenth class board exams and since the 6^th class we were told about sixty thousand six hundred and sixty six times that, that would be the most important year of our lives. So every Saturday Hardik would arrange for us to go to Dream Valley Resort, where a delicious lunch buffet and unlimited soft drinks were kept ready for us. We used to play cricket till it was dark and then reach home around 7 in the evening.

For others in the gang that was only fun they had all week but for me things were a bit different. I used to live in Karimabad Colony where all the residents were of our community. It’s a small Shia Muslim community where everyone knows everything about everyone else.

In the evenings a lot of the children my age used to go to tutorials run by Geetha Madam and her Husband Sirish sir who lived near our colony. I had a group of friends here too. After tuitions all of us used to gather in the colony grounds and play hide and seek or just stand there and share our school lives. So without even meeting my school gang all the boys knew about them through my stories. We went home only when one of the parents came looking for us or it was 10.00 pm as that was the deadline set for us. On Sundays we used to go to the Nizam College Grounds, Basheerbagh where half of Hyderabad came to play cricket with a hard tennis ball. There would be around 50 matches going on side by side and one would get confused as to who was fielding for whom. It was great fun nonetheless and was part of our Sunday routine. Sometimes we would play amongst ourselves but mostly we used to play against the other groups from colony or the boys from the neighboring Netaji Nagar Colony. Am describing all this because I want you to understand how difficult it was for me to concentrate on my studies with so many friends and distractions all around me. I had the best of both worlds, friends to keep me company at school and friends to keep me company when school was out.

CHAPTER 1- INTRODUCTION

It was the lunch recess in Little Flower High School in Hyderabad, (Andhra Pradesh or Telengana-only time will tell) I sat on the teachers chair, surrounded by my buddies, Tarun, Jogesh, Dhawal, Andy, Chottu, Hardhik and others narrating this story;

Few of my friends from my society and me had gone to Treasure Island Resort on the outskirts of the city this Sunday. As we had only one car and there were seven of us Tillu, who was actually very huge in stature and I had decided to go on my Kinetic Honda(which was a lie as I did not have a Kinetic Honda back then nor did I know how to ride one). On our way back after a fun days outing we had lost sight of Shajjad’s Thukkar maruti van and lost our way. As the roads were all deserted and it was getting dark we began to panic. Just then we saw a lean, short guy with a briefcase in his hand standing on the road as if he was waiting for some one.

Seeing him there was a relief and we went near him and I asked,

Bhai, How do we get to Abids?????

The man Replied: Abids is too far away but I can show you the way till Mehdipatnam if u give me a lift. I need to be somewhere by now and I cannot find an Auto rickshaw anywhere.

He didn’t look too harmful so we decided to give him a lift.

So now I was the meat in between Tillu and the Man’s Sandwich.

After traveling for a while, Tillu thought it would be funny if he teased the guy a bit as he was getting really bored and the crack in his arse was beginning to ache after driving for such a long distance.

So he asked the man,

Bhai,whats in your Briefcase????

The man did not reply.

Tillu repeated the question, Bhai,whats in your Briefcase????

The man chose to keep quiet again but I could sense he was getting a bit uncomfortable as he started to hold my shoulder a bit tighter.

I was a bit scared but Tillu was relentless he repeated his question again but this time a lot louder BHAI, WHATS IN YOUR BRIEFCASE????????

The Man Replied, it’s My dick, Do you wanna suck on it??

I was taken aback by the response but Tillu thought it was funny and started laughing out loud.

He asked the man again, Bhai, Don’t play with us,Tell me what’s in your briefcase

The Man said, it’s My dick, Do you wanna suck on it?? But this time with a lot more aggression. That wiped the smiles right of both our faces and we began to talk in our native tongue Gujrati.(Have you ever noticed ,a man always starts speaking in his mother tongue whenever he is in trouble).But this was to make sure that he did not understand what we were upto

Tillu:He looks suspicious, we need to get rid of him.

Me:Gandu, why did you have to piss him off?

Tillu: we need a way to get rid of him.

Me: I cant think of anything and I hope he doesn’t understand gujrati. He does look a bit of a gujju though.

Tillu: You tell him you need to pee urgently, I will stop the moped on the side and when he gets down to let you off we will run away.

Me: I like the way you are thinking, lets do it.

After a few minutes I said to Tillu ,making sure the man could here me loud and clear

Tillu I need to pee, could you please stop somewhere so that I can pee?

The man said: Yeah, I too need to pee, stop here.

Tillu immediately stopped the vehicle and the man got down leaving his Briefcase on the seat and went to pee.

As soon as he went a bit far, I grabbed the suitcase and told Tillu,

Abe Gandu,Chal bhagaa!!!

Tillu drove as fast he could and both of us did not have the balls to look behind and see if the man was coming for us or not.

After a while, when we were confident we had lost him we started laughing hysterically. I took the suitcase home as a souvenir.

No sooner had I completed my last sentence My best friend and the butt of all my jokes Tarun exclaimed, What was in that suitcase?????

I loudly replied , it’s My dick, Do you wanna suck on it??

All of us went mad with laughter and tears started rolling down our eyes, Andy was rolling on the floor with laughter and thumping on his chest trying hard to breath.

I had got Tarun again. Once again he was a victim of my evil pranks.

The bell rang signaling an end to the recess and some respite for me from the angry glare of Tarun. I had not pissed him off so bad since I borrowed his handkerchief and wiped of the sweat from my armpits and returned it to him in front of his arch enemy Mizbah.

I knew I took Tarun for granted a lot, but by now all of us including Tarun and me were used to this and it all felt so normal.

That was what our lives were like in school. We all came from different backgrounds, religions and financial backgrounds but once we were together we were like brothers. Brothers who liked to have fun.

Tarun was a true Punjabi. Very good looking but short tempered and stupid, because he used his heart more than his brain. His dad was an engineer and his mom was an awesome cook. I can vouch for that as we used to hog from his Tiffin all the time. Jogesh’s father worked for the government in science department and looking at Jogesh you could easily say that he was a science experiment gone wrong. He was huge but with tiny feet and a squeaky voice. Andy and his family had lived in America for a while but returned for the comforts and nawabi lifestyle of Hyderabad. He went to the US of A as Amandeep Reddy and returned back as Andy, but the name was all that had changed, as they say once a Telugu always a rice monger. (He used to eat rice and yogurt with his palm, 6 days a week). Dhawal Wangadia was a Maadu(marwaadi), he lived in a joint family with his parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, half a dozen cousins, his ancestors and four buffalos. Their family owned three oils mills. It seemed that the whole production of one mill went straight into Dhawal’s hair or I guess he was just marketing their product. We used to tell him that even if there was a cyclone and all hell breaks lose his hairstyle would not be disturbed. Their most popular product went by the name of Ghar coconut oil which was ironic because his bungalow looked more like a dharamshala than a ghar. S.Abhijeet or Chottu as everyone called him was the son of a Real Estate Developer and only guy in our gang who was shorter than me, and by shorter than me I mean a pygmy. He was the one who used to laugh the hardest at all my jokes and pranks and had a really subtle sense of humor. Unlike me he would instigate mischief but never ever be blamed for it. And then their was P.Hardik Reddy, a tall, shy, athletic guy and the captain of the school basket ball team. His dad was the Home Minister of our State. Hardik used to come to school with two gunmen who stood at the gates and gave us a smile because we were Hardik’s friends, which I confess made me feel superior to the others. But Hardik hated all the attention and thus he hated his bodyguards. I think he hated my guts too because I made fun of anything that walked, breathed or showed any sign of life and I know he hated me when I made fun of his Telugu accented Hindi. Other than us there were 55 other boys in class and 4000 other boys in school most of whom were sons of the most prominent people in the city, jewelers, builders, hoteliers, engineers and business tycoons. I felt blessed that my father a Dry Fruits and Kirana Merchant from Begum Bazaar, a hard working, honest, middle class, common man had managed to pay twenty thousand rupees donation(which was like 5 lakhs in today’s world) to get me admission in such a prestigious institution with great friends, strict but good teachers and awesome facilities.

The best thing about all this was that our backgrounds did not matter to any of us and we never ever thought or talked about it unless we wanted to make fun or ridicule someone. There was no Hindu-Muslim; Rich-Poor divide in school. We all sat in the same benches, read the same books, and had lunch in the same dining hall. The outside world had not corrupted our fragile minds at all.