A lifetime in law school contd....

Chapter 2: Fitting in

I got by the first month of law school without any major hitches. In fact you’d be quite impressed with what I had done so far. I was the captain of the class football team, the front man of a band in college and a member of the Cultural & Fine Arts Committee of NLS. Academically, I was coping. I had also made quite a few friends within my batch as well as amongst the Fifth Years. All in all, I was managing to hack it, or so I thought.

That’s when it happened. BOOM! Reality had to go and do its bitchy thing.
Captain of the class football team? Well, consider the facts.

There were two seniors in college from my hometown who were the best footballers in college. And so when I landed up in college with football boots and shin guards, the team assumed that I was of the same stock and appointed me captain. It’s a different matter that I had played football only on the bench back home.

I felt good about the farce though. With the inter class football tournament scheduled for the second month of our first trimester, I was of the opinion that it was necessary for the team to wake up early in the morning so as to run laps around the football field while I yelled at them to put some effort into it.

Of course when the tournament actually got underway, things went quite wayward.
In the first match I blamed my lopsided kicks and rapid fatigue on ill health. I got away with it with only a few snide comments voiced about my overall effort from some of the better players in the team.

In the second match, however, I was captaining the team adroitly – from the sidelines. I had been substituted. Mutiny! In a different age I would have had those landlubbers flogged and on a slimming diet of bread and water.

Anyway, it turned out that the team played better without me. And so that pretty much ended my run as captain of the team.

__________________________

Musically though, I fared much better.

I had played in a band back home before joining college. Here’s a confession: the only reason I was in that band was because the equipment belonged to me.

Nonetheless, playing in that band helped me learn a decent amount of guitaring, although I didn’t advertise this fact in my initial days in NLS. Being the worst guy in a band has this effect on a person. Besides, I figured that my classmate, the fat Assamese guy with long hair and horn rimmed glasses – Amar Das – had got to be miles better than me.

As things turned out, this wasn’t the case.

In two words – Das sucked. His timing was all off and he knew half a scale. His huge beer belly and long hair masqueraded his ineptness just as my football boots and shin guards inspired confidence in my non-existent soccer skills.

His true talent, however, lay in story telling. The more incredible the story, the greater was Das’s conviction in recounting it. So if he was telling us about the time when a leg landed in his soup in a restaurant after a powerful bomb explosion, Das would be adamant in explaining the minutiae of the incident until we swore we believed him.

Das, who we called Sad-Das (pronounced: sad-ass) because of his perpetual scowl and the inversion of his surname, became a good friend of mine once the band was formed. He was the bassist and I handled lead and rhythm guitars.

On the drums we had Nitesh Modi, a questionable inclusion since he was even less gifted than Sad-Das when it came to timing. Right from the start our drummer and bassist didn’t quite get the harmony going between each other, in all senses of the word. When I asked Sad-Das why he felt the way he did about Nitesh, he told me that he couldn’t trust a pudgy ‘Bong’ from Calcutta. That was when I ought to have pointed out that Nitesh was in fact a Gujarati.

On vocals we had a screecher called Karthik Arun. His ghastly voice got him his stage name – Kroon.

Our band was an amplified disaster.

The only positive to come out of the venture was that my minor talent managed to dazzle the audience in the backdrop of the cacophony the band engendered. I lapped up the mileage.
_________________

And then there was the whole deal with the Cultural and Fine Arts Committee. As a first year member of Cul Comm, I was given all the slave work that went into organizing Committee events in college. True to self, I shirked it.

Somehow, the whole eager-first-year-enthusiasm thingy didn’t feel normal. Instead I was pissed off with all those pseudo do-gooders who were only fooling themselves in their attempts at fooling everyone else. Assholes.

_________________

And academically I was coping, didn’t I already mention that? Well, I lied both times.

This whole deal about submitting research papers, or ‘projects’ in NLS terminology, never settled well with me. Especially when there were submission dates to adhere to.
Mid-term exams, compulsory attendance of classes, end-term exams – it was all one big conspiracy to trip me up along the way.
______________________

It is the friends that I made in law school that made being in Shaggerbhavi worthwhile.

Con artists, all of them. True diamonds in the rough when I first met them. But by the time they did their time in Nags, they were set to dazzle all with their honed skills.

Kabir Singh, ace poker player. “You have a poker face, I can tell that you’ll make a great poker player…” Cabby worked the con on all of us, although he perfected it on B. Sampath.

Roman Banerjee, ace politico. “See, tsk, elect me, tsk, and things will be different…” Romba worked the con on all but us and an angry young Sardarji.

Mahesh Maan, ace arbitrator and our local Marijuana dealer's favorite client. “Arbitration seeks to find a joint solution to all conflicts…” Hash worked the con on himself and the arbitration world beautifully.

The others were characters in their own right. And getting to know all of them got me through the eons I spent in NLS.

A lifetime in law school

Prologue

“Son, don’t panic, but the brakes aren’t working.”

I was on my way to NLS with my father on Orientation Day and we were already late because he had decided to take a shortcut.

Don’t panic?

“Fucking asshole! It’s all your fault!” [The thing is, my father and I have this healthy relationship – I get to abuse him and he takes it all nonchalantly.]

We both were in a really old Ambassador and the brakes didn’t seem to be the only thing that was wrong with the vehicle. And well, my old man being a retired artillery officer, he gunned for the culvert opposite the main gate of college so as to stop the damn car. It’s amazing how he didn’t take out a whole group of seniors sitting nearby, catching up on each others’ cigarettes, tea and lives.

In hindsight, the whole incident was God’s way of telling me to drive on and not waste the best years of my life in Law School. I didn’t listen to Him though, and He took it very personally, as I found out during the 8 arduous years I spent doing the 5 year course that I signed up for.

So there I was, a year older than most of my classmates, trying to act and look intellectual and polite at the same time. Instead I felt constipated and looked it too. I had always thought that lawyers in India, at least the ones I had seen, had awful lives. All the Hindi movies that I had watched so far only pressed home this point further, with their “Me Laards…” and so on. I was, therefore, completely clueless as to why I was in India’s most hyped-up law school.

Fortunately, I soon discovered that I was not the only one who was pretending to have worked out life, the universe and everything. Sure, many mini-Buddhas thought they found enlightenment because they believed they knew what they wanted to do after college and more importantly, what they wanted to do with their time while in college. But no one really knew for sure.

Take, for instance, my first year roommates. Panty (Puneet Mathpathi), who was from Mangalore; Bose (Sanjay Bose), who was from Nagpur; and Uriah (Ranjan Shinde), who was from Mars. We were a motley bunch bunched together in a 4-man dormitory that was originally designed to be a small kitchen. ‘Harvard of the East’ the prospectus had said.

Panty had no idea as to what he wanted from his 5 years in NLS. When he finally came out of the closet in his 4th year, all those free back massages he gave me in our first year didn’t feel so free anymore.

Bose was quite unlike Panty. In fact, Panty could have got all his missing Y-chromosomes from Bose without making any serious impact on Bose’s testosterone levels. All Bose wanted in life was to French kiss, no French bite, everyone on the planet. That included all the guys in the dorm, all the girls in class, and even you!

Uriah would have given Dickens’s Heep a complex. He epitomized the thin, weird, scheming character in a way in which the forbearer of his name couldn’t quite. Uriah cribbed the most from amongst the four of us about how sucky college was. Ironically, in his last trimester in NLS, his newfound sentimentalism about the place turned out to be truly infectious – it made people sick.

Bizarre roomies. But then, that was par for the course. Law School was full of randoms and to be brutally honest, I fitted in.


Chapter 1: Day 1 of a lifetime in Law School.

I woke up and was completely spaced out as to where I was and what I was doing wherever I was. When I could focus, I realized that Ranjan was standing naked beside his bed, which was next to mine, and his manhood, or more precisely, his boyhood, was about a foot away from my face.

I had to know whether this was a one-off peep show or whether this was an alarm clock from hell routine that would be employed in vain to arouse me every morning. Cock-a-fucking-doodle-do.

“Um… Ranjan, what the fuck are you doing?”

“Nothing. What do you mean?”

How does one respond to insouciance? It’s the stuff international spies and world poker champions are made of. The art of a straight-faced, detached reply.

“Dude! You’re naked and… and you’re like the first thing… I just woke up and… Dude! What the fuck?”

So much for eloquent persuasion on my part.

Ranjan had studied in an all-boys boarding school where community showers were the norm. I had had a more contented time as a day scholar in a co-ed school.

Well, in short, the end result of our brief exchange was that Ranjan from then on stripped down only to his briefs.
_________________

A crap and a shower later, I was marching off to the Boys’ Mess with my roomies, Puneet, Bose and Ranjan to get breakfast. Me being me, I decided to initiate a get-to-know-each-other conversation.

“Listen, we need to get to know each other.”

I wasn’t what you’d call a swaying orator, clearly.

Thankfully, Puneet responded.

“Yeah. You guys can call me Punty, that’s what I’m called at home.”

This cracked Bose up.

“Your mum calls you Panty? Ha ha ha… Sure, we’ll call you Panty as well.”

“No, not Panty, Punty!”

But by then, it was too late. We had met up with a few more classmates who were also on their way to breakfast and Bose was already introducing all of us to them.
“… and that’s Panty, right behind Ranjan.”

More laughter. I felt bad for Panty, but the name kind of fitted in with his effeminate personality. And so, it stuck.

We kept meeting small groups of First Years who were heading towards the Mess. By the time we got to the Mess we were a sizeable herd. We learnt instinctively, like the African Gnu, that stragglers would be preyed upon by predatory seniors.

On entering the Mess we formed a queue at the food counter. An inane move, because the queue was bypassed by every senior. When we finally got to the Mess Amma who was doling out the food, we were running out of time and she was running out of food.

Ranjan, deceptively skinny, wanted an additional glass of milk and asked the Mess Amma for another glass.

“NO EXTRAAA”
she bellowed in a voice that would have stimulated Pavarotti. That, of course, drew a lot of attention to us. Not really what we wanted.

“Oye! You. Yeah you, you fucking idiot. Come here.”

I was being called by a senior who had eyes that looked like they had popped out and then popped back into his queerly shaped head. Mentally, I was cursing Ranjan, the Mess Amma and goddamn cows in general as I walked up to the senior.

“Cut your smile.”

You have to appreciate that this struck me as severely odd on two counts. Firstly, I wasn’t smiling, so what was he talking about? Maybe it was those eyes of his… Secondly, even if I was smiling, how does one cut a smile? And so I just stood there, trying to avoid eye contact.

“Aare! Cut your smile bastard!”

“Um… I’m not sure I know how to… cut my smile… mutter mutter ….”

The guy lost it. He looned out.

“You don’t know how to cut your smile? Here’s how you cut your smile.”

He fixed a grimacing smile on his face, and with his fingers imitating a pair of scissors, he began to cut his smile. As he did so, the smile faded away.

“Now, cut your smile.”

I mimicked what he had done, to his dissatisfaction. Then, like a seedy art-director in a one-room film production, he said,

“Now shove it up your ass and go ‘uuuhhh’…”

Someone’s palm has been chafed with overuse, I thought, but if it’s a show he wants, it’s a show he’ll get.

And so I took my ‘cut-smile’ and did the best German porn simulation that I could.
I had the entire Mess cracking up and learned a crucial life lesson from that experience: If you want to survive, play along.
_________________

After gulping down an unsavory meal, we ran off to class and just about made it before the bell rang. Our classroom was divided into three rows rising up in a steady incline towards the door from the podium and the blackboard in the well of the class. I sat down in the middle of the central row, subconsciously indicating my political leaning. Interestingly, I later discovered that most people in class chose their seats accordingly.

There were the rich bratty kids on the right and the NGO pseudos on the left. The middle row, which had the most occupants, was filled with a random assortment of people who were unsure about fitting in with the crowd in the other two rows.

Scrawled on the blackboard was a question: “What is law?” The vandal, with the chalk still in his hand, was a rotund man with a huge mole on his cheek.

“I am Professor D.D.S”,

said ‘The Mole’ in a distinctively North Indian accent.

“And this is Professor S.K.L. and Professor P.R.G.”,

he explained, pointing at two other people standing sheepishly in front of the blackboard, like unwilling accomplices.

The class blinked back.

“What is law? Can anybody tell me?”

“I thought the point in coming here was that that asshole would tell us what it was and not ask us”, I whispered to the guy sitting next to me. “And what’s with their fucking acronyms?”

Busted! The Mole had spotted the jaw.

“You there. What we have to discuss, we can discuss openly here at the NLSIU.” [The NLSIU?!] So maybe you will repeat what you just said to your friend.”

Maybe I won’t. Are you kidding? I had to do something!

I stood up and immediately felt everyone’s eyes on me. The two sheepish looking henchmen of The Mole looked happy suddenly. Wolves in sheep’s skin.

“I’m sorry sir. I was asking him whether he knew what it was.”

Isn’t it amazing how one’s brain fails one in a seriously dodgy situation?

“Why? He didn’t understand the question when I asked it?”

Was that meant to be rhetorical? I was beginning to actively dislike The Mole. Also, I was beginning to wonder why I was being singled out for all the attentive treatment from the faculty and the seniors. Maybe it was the haircut. Fucking bastard barber.

I decided to answer The Mole so as to get him disinterested in my discomfort.

“I don’t think he did sir,” I said, looking at my neighbour disapprovingly.

As Profs D.D.S., S.K.L. and P.R.G. were keen on a one-upmanship debate over the right answer to the question on the board, I was allowed to sit down and squirm out of the line of sight of all the gapers in class.
_________________

Saved by the bell. Not quite actually. For our first break was when we First Years were made to brave an onslaught of senior interaction with us. We were putty in their hands, for them to mould according to their twisted designs.

The Second Years were a particularly sadistic lot, having been only recently interacted with. The Fifth Years were far removed from the whole process and the Third and Forth Years were involved mostly for want of anything more engaging to do.

It was a Third Year who came up with a fitting name for Ranjan – Uriah, because of his uncanny likeness with the infamous Heep. It made us wonder how Uriah’s parents missed out on the labeling.

Here’s typically how interaction with a senior went –

Senior: You. What’s my name?

First Year: Um…

S: No, it’s not Um you Fuck-head.

F.Y.: (Sufficiently abashed) I’m, I’m sorry. May I know your name?

S: Yes.

F.Y.: Um…

S: I told you that wasn’t my name. What, are you deaf or just incredibly dumb?

We soon worked out that laughing at their repetitive jokes got us a few ‘cut-your-smiles’, but once that was well executed we were free to go. Fellow classmates who appeared affronted had to endure an extended session where the grilling was upped from ‘medium’ to ‘well done’.
_________________

Things with seniors just got rougher as the day wore on. The lunch-show was an action packed sequel of the breakfast-show, but it didn’t compare with the primetime slot of the dinner-show. A few unlucky souls even had drunk visitors in their rooms after midnight for an uncensored late night telecast.

As I lay in bed that first night, going through the events of the day, I distinctly recall having felt that the NLS rollercoaster ride was going to be nauseating and thrilling at the same time.
I had no idea that I would be more often right about the nausea rather than the thrill.

_________________