Chapter 6: Playing Along

Falling for a girl isn’t the smartest thing one can do. Especially when she’s in a relationship with someone else. And especially more so, when one is already in a relationship with one’s own girl.

That being the established flow of thought, Ayesha and I, quite conversely, thought we were smart enough to swim against the current.

The circumstances in which we were brought together were completely ingenuous.

I had been asked to score the music for a Nouveau Recital in college, in which Ayesha was to play a character whose soliloquy role was to be the basis of my instrumental music.

Our individual parts were scripted so as to extract the best from each other’s performances.

(And it’s a wayward mind that would interpret that last sentence in a wayward manner.)

As things turned out, the show was a raving success and the entire cast drank the night away.

Strangely enough, ‘strange’ by the measure of my past inebriated exploits, nothing happened between Ayesha and me that night. Or the night after that, which was flushed down our gullets and dismissed in the same manner as the previous night.

Instead, we toasted each other’s talent and returned back to the way things were before the play.

Curiouser and curiouser cried Alice.

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Of course, we didn’t stay with the way things were for too long.

Fate and her pet dog Timing had felt compelled to make their little onscreen burlesque appearance.

Both the people Ayesha and I were involved with had to leave town on account of their personal pursuits. One had to take part in a debate competition and the other was off to participate in a campaign against genetically modified crops.

And quite like Alice with her bad grammar, Ayesha and I were curious about each other.

So we decided to act like we were dating each other.

This was tricky, considering that Ayesha and her boyfriend were doted over by many in college and shielded as an exhibit of unblemished love.

But all the bizarre attempts at subtle eye-popping glances that our hand-in-hand-walk-around-the-basketball-court charade attracted made the two of us laugh the happiest laughs that we had laughed in a long time.

To celebrate what was turning out to be our second successful play, we went out drinking again. Just the small cast of two of us this time.

She bought me a doll. And I double checked my profile later in the mirror to find out what the friggin’ hell was doll-loving in my getup. I silently cursed my big nose.

And then it happened. Just when I was settling the bill.

She mumbled that she loved me.

I kissed her a fatherly kiss on her forehead, which really wasn’t my way of saying, who’s your daddy.

It had all happened both suddenly and in super slow motion, her quiet admission and my fumbled response.

I grasped that I was staring at Fate and that her pet dog had just bitten me.

We ran out of that pub, Ayesha and I.

No, I did pay the tab. It was on a different occasion at a different pub with a different person that I ran out without paying up. But then, that’s a different story.

We jumped into an autorickshaw to get us back to campus. I kissed her hurriedly. And I realized that I had kissed her teeth.

Dammit. This was going bad.

First, a part in a pretentious play; then, a kiss on her forehead; and now, a rapid-fire kiss on her upper teeth.

That made me a gay old guy without any experience.

Dammit.

And that’s when she kissed me. Fairylike.


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But we were living in a crowded house, Ayesha and I.

We were both really good company for each other, but having Fate and Timing as flat mates was aggravating for both of us. Especially Timing. I wanted to hit that smelly dog with a T-rod.

Ayesha and I soon conceded that the two of us had had a whole lot more fun swimming with each other in flirtatious undercurrents rather than in the predictable open sea. Also, all those eye-popping glances that we were getting, were getting to us.

And so, we decided to script, act and direct our third and final play. We were to behave like we were not interested in each other.

Somehow, getting into character wasn’t all that easy this time around. I hated her and I hated myself for doing this to us.

But Fate laughed and Timing barked.

Days later, Ayesha’s boyfriend and my girlfriend returned.

Our interlude was over. And there was no mention of us in the credits.

Chapter 5: Fraternal Angst

Soon I lost my sense of humour, which made the manner in which I overreacted to everything all the more funny.

But more than the crappy mess food and the noisy locals, it was the systematic ass-licking in college that made me want to hurt someone, Rajnikant-style.

Most Law Schoolites, I soon found out, would do anything and say anything to get ahead... and not just in terms of their grades. There were ridiculous instances of people cleverly out-maneuvering other fellow applicants in order to get into the Bathroom Cleanliness Committee.

Whenever I came in direct contact with this well-entrenched practice of sycophancy, I felt especially eager to practice my cigarette-flicking-twenty-times-kicking South Indian movie moves.

More often than not though, I avoided confrontation.

Almost everyone seemed to have been plugged into the System… and the irony is that this was 2 whole years before Keanu Reeves finally figured it out in 1999.

Leading the toadying pack in my class was Biceps G (Leela Ganapathi), a broad-shouldered girl with a pair of small balls.

I had initially put her down as a Hell Wench, but Cabby had given me the inside info about what lay within. It was a completely different thing altogether that he had tried to ascertain this fact firsthand during a 5th year farewell party.

Somehow, Biceps brought out the Contender in me.

And so, during a Criminal Law class, I made it a point to refer to her condition when I asked our Prof. (when he was discussing Prison Sentences) whether in his opinion transgenders fell under the same definition of a woman.

“Sir, if Leela had sex reassignment surgery, wherein she had testicles attached to her, would the Law consider her a man?”

There’s something to be said about non-imaginative Professors, but I was asked to confine my questions to confinement.

And this was after I had even thrown in a good old fashioned ‘wherein’.

Unfettered education was still a distant goal in NLS.

Biceps meanwhile flexed, adjusted her little pair and made a mental note to fix me after class.

While the Contender in me vanished on account of messages from various sponsors, I shuffled out of class before the bell rang.
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Needless to type, but if Biceps is reading this, then there’s a high likelihood that I’ll soon be in pain.

And I’ve got a nasty premonition that it’ll be testicular in nature.

But that was the way it went. I was the angry young adolescent. Always ready to take on Nagarbhavi.

And ever so often, not really up to the challenge of being taken on.
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Till one day I stopped overreacting. And to a large extent, reacting.

I don’t know which was worse – losing my sense of humour, or acquiring the comfort of apathy.

The latter was apparent in the way I bumped into people in the corridors and didn't really care about what Cabby and the entire cast of The Matrix thought of them.

A lifetime in law school contd....

Chapter 4: Hostile Hostel

The local bars in Nagarbhavi were where one normally spent one’s evenings. Small, seedy, dingy, smelly joints with Kannada film music blaring out of out-dated transistors.

Heaven – after a strong ‘boiler’, which was half a glass of Captain Jack whisky (Engine Oil for the uninitiated) topped up with Knockout beer.

And it was always likely to be at one of these bars that trouble brewed, seemingly stirred on by the terrible brew.

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I still remember the time Sad-Das (Sad-Ass, remember?) had once insisted on a ‘home cure’ when I was down with a slight fever. This involved us strolling over to Sarovara, the closest bar, and ordering whisky with Citra. He muttered something about the lemon essence doing the trick.

Sure enough, after a couple of whiskies with C, I was toasting the ingenuity of this Meatloaf look-alike. I was so far gone that I actually agreed on rooming with him the next trimester! Him being medically astute and what not…

But when we were allocated a room in the third trimester of our first year, it was a disaster. Our room was on the ground floor of Himalaya Boys’ Hostel, right next to the common loo, with windows that opened out onto the hostel septic tank.

Aaarrgghh!!!

I cursed the collective stench that ganged up and hung out in our room. It gagged you speechless and then clobbered you as you walked in. I cursed it to a private hell of its own where it would’ve had to smell itself forever.

Sad-Das appeared less tormented though and seemingly had a sanguine approach to Life. I had never pegged him as a philosopher, and a philosopher he had to be, for it took a detached mind to live through a summer in that room. Just goes to show, I thought. You never ever really know, do you?

After a hellish trimester in Himalaya, we shifted to another Hostel – Ganga, which was about a quarter of a kilometer away from Himalaya. We had to, for sanity’s sake!

And so, I was both flabbered and gasted when I discovered that the sinister stench had shown amazing perseverance by managing to stalk us to our new quarters.

Meanwhile, old Sad-Das hummed on blissfully, as he unpacked and settled into his new cubicle.

Christ! It was then that I couldn’t help but give Mr. What-Smell-Are-You-Talking-About, a long hard jaundiced look and an ever-so-slight snuffle.

That’s when I realized that all the whiskies and C’s in Nagarbhavi could never keep old Bad-Ass and I together as roomies…
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Naturally, I spent a lot of my time out of my room. And most of this time was spent in the room adjacent to mine.

Kabir Singh, Sundaram Surendra and Balvan Bhupinder were my obliging neighbours in Room 105.

“Power Structure” was Balvan’s pet obsession and his attempts at house-breaking Sundaram ranged from ‘extreme’ to ‘excessive’.

For starters, he called the biddable guy – Susu.

And so, “Susu, what the fuck is wrong with you?” was the common refrain of the room.

Also often heard were, “Why do you drag your feet when you walk about? Why do you wipe your nose on your palm?” And the classic – “Why do you have to breathe so loud?”

Meanwhile Cabby, crafty old fish, would snigger away in a corner, loving the conflict but refusing to get drawn in.
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The only time poor Susu got any respite was whenever B. Sampath walked into the room.

It was always ironic to see Susu team up fervently with Balvan whenever the latter tried instilling the virtues of an efficient power structure in B.S.
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Living in the hostel was annoying.

Waiting for an empty loo in the morning, only to get an unoccupied loo that wasn’t quite empty.

The constant noise. It could drive you to chew on your pillow after you were done gnawing on your mattress.

The ever-so-long queues at the mess for the kind of food that even starving Ethiopians would politely decline.

The rules. And the assholes who tried implementing them.
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And living in the hostel was fun.

Catching up with floor mates as we brushed our teeth or shaved in an extended L-shaped basin. In this regard, nothing could beat the time we watched Cabby talk to himself in the mirror and promise himself that he was going to be a movie star. Or the time Susu actually managed to give himself a slip disk while cleaning his tongue.

Adding to the constant noise.
There was this pesky little senior who lived above Room 105. We’d make enough noise to get him running down so as to shut us up and then as soon as we heard him settle into his cubicle above, we’d make enough noise to get him back down. He just didn’t get it…

Food fights in the mess when the electricity went off.
Balvan earned his stripes and was called the Curd-Surd, after he hurled a bowl of curd on an irritating junior’s face.

And breaking the Student Discipline and General Management Committee Rules made all those inane rebellious teenaged stunts worthwhile.

After all, our battles against the vapid, evil minions of the SDGM were all part of the glorious war that we waged on Law School – for being the place where we were forced to change our inane rebellious teenaged ways.

A lifetime in law school contd....

Chapter 3: B. Sampath

“Hi, I'm Sampath.”

Twackk!!

Violent slap administered by violent auto driver.

Introducing B. Sampath.

It’s amazing how South Indian names have initials with no real name assigned to the initial. (No, I’m not misinformed. Village addresses don’t qualify as names.)

And so with B. Sampath, it was always just B. Sampath.

Of course, it was a different story altogether that he didn’t quite get a chance to explore the nuances of Tamilian naming ceremonies with Babu (no initial given), the violent auto driver.

But wait. We’ve gone too far.

Introducing B. Sampath.
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To understand B. Sampath, you must picture a handsome, South Indian boy.

See, now the chances are that you are picturing one of B. Sampath’s many hidden pictures of handsome South Indian boys.

Try keying in ‘Homely, Sheltered South Indian boy’ instead, and presto! You’ll get tons of image hits for B. Sampath.
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Don’t get me wrong though. B. Sampath was not gay; it was just that he loved Cabby.

So when Cabby and his roommate Balvan Bhupinder were off for dinner that fateful night, B. Sampath insisted on tagging along.

The three of them took an auto to this sorry excuse of a restaurant about 10 mins auto time from the Boys’ Hostel.

Here’s a tip for all those of you who intend on taking an auto ride in Bangalore: Concede the double meter argument to any auto driver double the size of you. Do it sportily. With sangfroid even. No sense in brooding over the issue like Balvan.

For old Balvan brooded on the matter of extra payment. And as if that weren’t enough, he dwelled on it.

Auto drivers in Bangalore are an amiable lot. That is, when they aren’t confronted by brooding passengers who dwell on matters of extra payment. They tend to get agitated when this happens.

And so when this particularly bulky auto driver reached out to grab Balvan’s shirt, he was more than agitated when Balvan decided to push him down and run across the road.

Now it was Balvan who showed Enterprise in his decision to leg it. Cabby and B. Sampath, however, remained transfixed to where they were.

When the auto driver recovered and looked at these two in the eye, he did so while they were both being suspended in the air – one in each paw.

Here’s where B. Sampath’s sheltered, homely mind decided to intervene. “This is all so wrong”, it reflected, “all remediable by effective communication and pleasantries.”

[You really ought to skip back to the beginning of this chapter right about here.]

Well, after both B. Sampath and the auto driver introduced themselves to each other, albeit using different techniques, B. Sampath decided to set out to look for Balvan, while the auto driver decided to introduce himself to Cabby.
___________________________________________


Balvan had managed to hide himself on the second floor of the building that housed the restaurant that they had intended to visit. And with his beakish nose stuck out of a small window, he watched the events unfold on the other side of the road.

The eye-opener that wrinkled Balvan’s nose, was the sight of B. Sampath heading towards the restaurant – his shirt in hand, and his banyan and hair in a mess.

When B. Sampath finally made it up the stairs to where Balvan was cooped up, he explained in his slow Carnatic accent that the banyan was a disguise.

Having thus placated his curiosity as to the case of the missing Surd, B. Sampath decided to go back and investigate on the state of the dangling one.

Balvan begged him not to. “He’ll make you tell him where I am,” Balvan bleated. “Don’t go back!”

But B. Sampath had his disguise on and nothing could stop him.

Approximately 3½ minutes later, Balvan watched on timidly, as B. Sampath, (still in disguise) with his right arm twisted around his back, led the visibly agitated auto driver up the stairs to Balvan.

“Balvan… a word of advice,” B. Sampath muttered to Bhupinder, “…take the beating…”

____________________________________________


Things were never too cheery with Balvan and B. Sampath after the whole incident.

There was a certain lack of reliance in the manner in which Bhupinder surveyed B.S.

Almost as if he half expected the latter to vanish at any point and return, complete with disguise and raving auto driver.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.

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