CHAPTER-4 yeh dosti..... hum nahin todenge...............(part-one)

me and my best friends!!!

      

                               So there I was, in class 4, aged 9 but heartbroken twice. I found myself spending days gloomily and with little fun and frolic. It is at this crucial juncture in my life that I would like to introduce you all to the central characters of my plot, my best friends who made this journey of mine a lot more comfortable. Friendship they say is like a rope given to a drowning man in sea. Drowning, I certainly was. Though the entry of these friends into my life is not simultaneous, it would not be wrong to admit that the sweetness of their friendship never allowed me to keep track of it either. I deem it GOD’s will.

                             

               First among them is……………

                      Prady Menon alias (PAPA) is an excited extrovert from Cochin, a fire cracker, multi-linguist, talkative and above all my dear FOOLISH friend. I say foolish because in the six years of his stay in our school, he tried his luck with six different girls and all with some weird strategies. But what surprised us (his friends) was that those six strange girls have all fallen for those weird strategies and were madly in love with him. Anyways what makes him foolish in this whole issue is that, when a girl is about to buy his stupid strategy, he would jump to another girl and start calling the previous one his dear own sister. And coming to his strategies, they are not even worth mentioning. The girl whom he finds himself interested in, he would start abusing her, fighting with her, calling her all names like..... @#$@#$% (oh! My God what not) and finally one day he realizes that he always had true love for her and starts going behind her. He believes the best way to strike love is to start it with a fight (the old bollywood way or is it the SALMAN KHAN’S way?). Given the fact that most of my class girls were  Mr. Sallu’s diehard fans, I guess it wasn’t such a bad idea though. However the problem is, when these girls start to appreciate these stunts of my friend, he would by then find another girl interesting. This thing went on and on till the end of our schooling. So guys, if you ever meet this guy anytime and finds him abusing and complaining about a girl, be sure that this girl is his next JULIET…..

                      The funniest moment that I can recollect about him is as to how that name PAPA (a telugu translation for baby girl!!!) got christened to him. On one friendship day evening, all of us went to one of our class girl’s house (precisely prady’s new love). The story goes like- he goes inside the house, with all of us accompanying him, encounters her servant maid and blurts out in pure telugu…..

                     “PAPA  INTILO  VUNDHAAA?” ….. The servant maid was like “………….” Now who was that papa supposed to be? This, the maid had no clue. You can’t blame the maid for that because you don’t need education to let you know that a girl studying in her class 10 is not a papa (a baby girl!!!). We were like rolling on the ground for his appropriate use of language and the name ultimately got stuck to him forever.

                    That was my foolish friend prady, foolish yet innocent, fire cracker yet soft and kind within and above all my dear dear friend. At hindsight, I believe that it was with him that I fought much, times when we were reluctant to talk to each other for months together after those fights, yet it was those fights that brought us both even more closer and bonded us eternally. I can’t help but think of one such incident, the last of those series of fights that I probably had with him and one that kept us both at bay for 6 long months….

                    It was in my class 10. Those were the times when everything in our class seemed not so smooth. There was misunderstandings and arguments in the air. And prady was one who would never fail wanting for one such. He yapped (he still denies he hasn’t) something bad about my then crush (MISS. ANONYMOUS) which actually brought tears to her eyes. And like any sincere and foolish boy friend, I immediately sensed that something was wrong with my friend. Rationale betrays man when he is smeared with love of his opposite sex. So there I was- losing the little common sense that I had, I barged into the class room to find prady cooly sitting in the middle of the room. “I was born DECENT, but education ruined me and made a ROGUE out of me.” So I used all my knowledge about slangs which I learnt in my 10 years of schooling and started hurling them at prady. Prady was no less. And as we did what we were both best at, quite a few girls surrounded us in anticipation to learn new Sanskrit words, some of which they were quite familiar with, while others as new and strange as their boyfriends were. As the incident was picking up acceleration and shifting to the last gear, my friends came to our rescue and pulled us both apart. So, as the incident was to come to a closure, I had decided to use the ultimatum. With all my strength, I showed him our youth’s symbol, that which comes to our help at times of frustration and helplessness, the MIDDLE FINGER…

                   This act of mine, I came to know later, created some interest in some of the sections of my class, GIRLS. One such enthusiast was Bhimaja , my neighbor in class. After I got cooled down, she pokes me at my desk, to get clarity over confusion. She says, “When you were angry, you used some slangs, those I understood. But what about some symbols? Was that some kind of innovation or what? Especially, what was that middle finger supposed to be?”

                 ‘How am I to explain to her what that meant? Do I need to cut across all boundaries of decency today?’ I thought to myself. With some thought into her question and with best efforts to find a way to explain to her and quench her thirst for knowledge (I don’t know how this was going to make her more knowledgeable), I finally came up with a solution. In the meanwhile, she sensed that I was feeling a little uneasy about her question. Anyways finally I told her, “In a crude way, it talks about first night” (oh God!!! This was how I tried telling her what  F**K OFF  meant?)

               “Is that all, why do you give build up as though you were to tell something that is unheard of or not to be talked about? We girls also know about these things, but use different symbols to communicate the same meaning”, she frowned. How am I supposed to react? On one side I lost my best friend (I know that this time it’s gonna take a lot of time to patch up) and on the other side, this senseless talk. I just nodded. For your information, six months later the patch up did happen after a lot of effort, but this time it only aided in making it unbreakable. We became the best of PALS…..