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Tarun was also a part of the basketball team but as he had gotten very poor marks in biology and physics his name was withdrawn from the team.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.