Nostalgia - Darius Mistry

Nostalgia

All it takes is a couple of hours of being bored at 3 am to put your entire life into a bit more perspective...

Wake up lazily at 6 am, eat one or two toasts with a morning coffee, and cram textbooks like Yuvakbharati, Sulabh Bharati, and Whorebharati into a dorky looking schoolbag, arrive at a stop just as the bus leaves, and chase it for four blocks on foot, while the kids in the bus cheered you on. Once you got on the bus you were united though, and spent the next half hour of the journey to school looking out for other school buses, chanting shit like “Bus number 4 Khatara Bus!!”

Spending every single second in that classroom through all the nine or ten Periods, wishing that you were someplace else, like outside tossing a Frisbee around, or playing football with the ten rupee rubber ball.

Or to cause just enough mayhem in a classroom that you’d manage to piss the teachers off but would still just get away with only a remark in the bluish grey calendar. Although the Pink Floyd incident could have landed me in suspension perhaps (if I had been caught *chuckles*)

Taking the mickey out of classmates for the smallest of things, teasing and getting teased about crushes and girls. Being apprehensive about even borrowing a book or a cassette from a girl you knew well. Hehehe

Who could forget Sports either…? Struggling with a heavy kitbag from GM (Gunne and Moore, not General Motors) filled with pads, gloves, abdo-guard (Safety first) and a heavy Larson’s bat in the middle of the afternoon in the sweltering sun. Feeling rally kicked if you got the new ball to bowl with in the nets as the coach tossed them out to us fast bowlers. Writing your name on the back of what used to be your last years white school shirt, in blood red ink, and feeling really pleased with your work even though some letters seemed larger and darker than other. Practicing forward defensive strokes and square cuts in front of a full length mirror back home, and fantasizing about a crowd at Wankhede cheering every shot. Friggin high hopes I know.

Guitar lessons every Wednesday afternoon to nice Catholic Rita Hubert Aunty, straight after school, lugging what has now become a very small and very sad black Hobner. Feeling spiffy about having mastered a new chord or a new riff, to go home and practice it for hours on end into the night, and then to progress into songs you love. Hunting on the internet for chords and saving them in text documents because you’re too lazy to actually fiddle on the guitar and find them for yourself aren’t you!

Tutions at Aldo Sir’s little row house in Sector 6, where everything was chilled if you toed the line and did what you were told. If you were good, you’d be rewarded with perhaps with some of his foreign chocolates stacked in his small Kelvinator refridgerators, or if you were really good, you could even share a meal with him and his wife and two daughters. If it was a Saturday morning, then she’d make the most exquisite masala dosas. There was something about having south Indian food that really helped me tackle Algebra and Geometry at his place. Algebra…a subject with so much hypocrisy. Giving you an equation or a set of numbers and letters in brackets and one above or below the other and squared or square rooted, or in sets. And at the top of the page in the question paper, the ONLY one word question that you would find in the entire school or in any school…Simplify! And every single time you look at it, you are thinking this looks simpler than anything it could look like after YOU have dealt with it. And if you didn’t toe the line, woe betide you.

Coming home at 4 or 5 in the evening, going for a quick and rather redundant shower, because 15 minutes after it, I’d be downstairs playing cricket with the colony kids. Here is where we’d add to the dictionary of the already vast number of Hindi gaalis. Words like Bhosadpappu were heard on a regular basis, if someone let a catch slip or the last man got clean bowled with one ball to spare and a run to win.

Coming home every day with bleeding knees and sore bones a couple of hours later, trudging up to my place, swearing that that time would be positively the last time I ever dived for a catch. My mother’s sigh as she opened the door with the Iodine and cotton in hand perfectly ready for my arrival, asking me patiently where it hurt most. My muffled yells as the tinctured iodine named Benzoin (a name that I feared as a kid) dipped in cotton, merged with my torn flesh and blood, creating a blackish brown mark. Watching a blackish green scab grow in that area over the next few weeks and eyeing it with the deepest self esteem and pride.

Of course if any injuries took place at school, there was always the RED Medicine, hehehe. The Red Medicine was nothing but a mercurochrome solution in a large old style dark brown large glass bottle that was stored in the teacher’s lounge. It was well, red…and it did nothing else. So of course, even for a small cut from say a sharp pin or any deep mark from a pen would tempt us to go for the red medicine. It gave out a fascinating odor to go with the color red. We’d apply clinically insane amounts of the stuff on knees, elbows foreheads and bandage them with white handkerchiefs so when we got back to class, it would look like we’d survived a war. The best part was, the Red Medicine, even though was used by virtually every student in the school at least once, was never kept locked or anything, and we’d see a new bottle virtually every week. The Red Medicine remained red on your skin for at least a week. So of course, at school it was fun and all, but when you walked home is when you’d only start to think about what your parents might say when you got home with blood red spots all over your body.

Family life was interesting as well. The brother and I were like generals waging war with our GIJoes and Cobra action figures. My favourite GIJoe was Snake Eyes. He was totally silent, never said a word, but goddamn could he do his work well. Among the Cobras I was in love with The Baroness. She was a hot chick in glasses with a black leather suit and a red cobra symbol imprinted on her tits. We’d make booby traps all over the house that would infuriate our parents with strings and wires. Of course Lego was also a very famous attraction. Castle Lego was the best. Fortresses four feet tall with defence towers facing each direction. It was really interesting to combine the two though. Making a GIJoe HQ with Lego pieces, and making their vehicles with TechNic. Painstakingly long, but rather worth it. And collecting the gizmos was fun too. I was most jealous when the youngest cousin bought the Skystriker jet, with attachable missiles and warheads and a detachable canopy.

*sigh*

It’s been a helluva long and interesting ride…