CHAPTER 6- ME, MY PALS AND NEPAL

Chapter 6- Me, My pals and Nepal.


We arrived in Nepal very exited and enthusiastic. We were hell bent on having fun our way especially because all the strict teachers had decided not to travel with us. I guess they had decided to let us live a little or were sick and tired of seeing and managing us even on a vacation. There were only two teachers traveling with us. One of them was the head of our science department Mr Venkat. He was a quiet and simple, typically south Indian guy who had really short hair that used to stand up straight at the back giving him the look of an exotic love bird. He was a nice guy who knew boys were boys and liked to have fun. He let us speak in our mother tongues when we were on tour and told us not to mention about it to anyone back home, because at school we had a strictly “speak in English” rule otherwise we were fined 5 rupees every time we were caught. 5 rupees may sound small change now but back then 5 rupees meant a perk or a dairy milk candy, it meant a postcard of your favorite WWF wrestler, it meant a new rubber cricket ball and most importantly it meant we did not give the school any more than the ridiculous amounts of money than our parents were already paying as school fees (and they told us education is going to get even more expensive in the future as if it already wasn’t). The other teacher accompanying us was our Hindi professor Mr. Radhesham or Shreemanji as he liked to be called. We called him chimpanzee or chimpu behind his back. He was a funny guy, not funny as in he made you laugh with his sense of humor but funny as in goofy and stupid. He tried to speak in English but pronounced all his E’s as O’ and all his A’s as E’s. I bet he would have lost a fortune if the fine applied to him because even his English sounded like Shuddh Hindi. One of his favorite dialogues was and I quote “When you was in the Sevonth kilaas (Seventh class) you was a very great baai(good boy) but now you have became the very naughty child, stend up (stand up) on the bench with you fingers above your lips.” Hindi had earned him his bread and butter and I guess English was not just his cup of tea.
Nepal was exotic and breathtakingly beautiful with its scenic beauty, mountains and pleasant weather but most of us weren’t really bothered if we were in Nepal or Nampally. All that mattered was that we were with our friends with no real adult supervision. We saw temples, trekked up hills and mountains, clicked pictures with monks but our minds were always elsewhere, the Nepali girls. While our tour guide was explaining us the significance of the silent hands temple or Katmandu’s history our roving eyes were looking at those beauties with tiny eyes and well rounded faces. All of them had great figures unlike 80% of the women in Hyderabad who are either too skinny or too fat and most of them cover their faces behind a burkha.
In school we usually stuck to our group and did not bother about the others too much but in Nepal there were just around 60 of us and we got to know each other pretty well as we spent all day and night together. The days were spent sight seeing and at nights we used to sleep in the huge assembly hall of a Govt. school and that was were we had the most fun. Our Sirs were given a separate room so we were on our own all night. The dark of the night is when you get all your stupidly brilliant ideas and Andy had come up with this one. While all the other boys were fast asleep, we were going to draw moustaches and other graffiti on their faces with our tooth paste and click pictures. All of us were skeptical and first but decided to go with it. So Tarun,Hardik,Dhawal and me spread to one corner of the room and Jogesh, Chottu, Dhawal and Andy went to the other corner and we started our art work and started improvising as we went along. From faces we shifted to hair and armpits as well and hair oil, gel and shaving foam were added to our armory. We got the most amazing pictures but then Dhawal messed up, he liked his art work on one particular guy so much that he couldn’t control his laughter and fell on the guy. That startled the guy and he woke up and saw what was going on. Thankfully he wasn’t the class bully or a senior. He too couldn’t help but laugh when he saw the designs on the others around him. This guys name was Abhijeet Shah. He was a gujju from the A section who got along really well with everyone one. We too were acquainted to him but he was not a friend up until then. Abhijeet or Shah as everyone called him looked more like a Shahlini to me. He was very fair, walked like a girl and had no body hair whatsoever. He was always smiling and could take a lot of shit from everyone. He was the most punished boy in school as he was often thrown out of classes and seen wandering around the Principal’s office more than he was spotted in class. His problem was that he was very talkative and laughed out loud at the smallest of jokes and that got him in a lot of trouble even when he was not the culprit. We exchanged pleasantries and befriended Shah that night. He was one of us now,a part of the gang. We stayed up all night and he talked and talked and talked about his classmates, teachers and how he had been to Nepal before.