Childhood memories

The rickety ride from the 'self-contained enclave' that I have been a resident of for the past month on our office bus brought back a lot of interesting, although not-so-pleasant childhood memories.

My flatmate and I were pitying all the poor kids that had to travel along the approach road to our apartment complex that housed an ICSE syllabus school on some really shady transport buses on a road that had more craters than the Lebanese airport runways did after the Israeli onslaught on them.

Talk changed from the usual mundane routine stuff of how much I owed my flatmate, who has involuntarily become my ATM, since I feel too lazy to go all the way to one to withdraw any money, preferring to transfer funds over the net instead, to something more interesting.

I was telling him of how traumatized those children would have been, with being thrown around in the bus on that road like a sardines in a can, and of how they would all probably turn out to be disgruntled future managers of some tech company, ruining the lives of all those around them. It wasn't too late, all they needed was better transport to prevent their delicate psyche from getting injured.

We then began discussing about how it was in our school days, when we had huge TATA buses that picked us up from our designated stops, where the younger ones would be waiting with either of their parents in tow, and the older ones would be alone, this freedom of going to the bus stop on their own after being taken there by their folks for the first few years of school, being something worth looking forward to.

Our school had only two route buses that covered two halves of the city and managed to make it to school in time for us to reach the morning assembly. Mysore was a small city a decade ago, and that made life easier for a whole lot of people - parents, school authorities as well as us children.

The rides were eventful most of the time, as eventful as a whole bunch of children on a bus without parental control could be, and there were the usual fights for seats, and for opening and closing the door for children to climb in, a duty that was usually entrusted to someone who was deemed competent enough by the 'driver-uncle', and consequently, the alpha-male in the bus.

Yours truly did get the honour of being the 'door-keeper' quite a few times, until someone's nose got in the way of an opening bus door, and the driver-uncle thought I was incompetent of that task, and the role of the alpha male of the bus would then be passed over me to go to the puniest female in the bus who wasn't even capable of turning the handle, but was forced to do so nevertheless. Anything, to avoid me damaging more nostrils.

I learnt something from this incident that most of you are probably learning on the job or through shady email forwards - if you do something badly, chances are, you will not be asked to do it again. This is among one of the best case scenarios to avoid work and still get paid for coming to the office to blog and abuse your co-workers in a code language that they cannot understand. Or for that matter, a language that nobody else can understand. We all like to be that way sometimes.

The school bus was also an interesting place for pre and post school hours socializing and fighting. This was the place where some of my friends found out that I had a crush on this girl who was a year ahead of me, and decided to make my life miserable about it because they were in her class.

Apart from the fact that I thought she was cute, I also thought in class 2 that she had nice shoes (which seemed to be among the criteria for my ideal woman back then), not the usual navy-blue canvas shoes that we were required to wear to school as part of our uniform, but some thick-soled, cool black shoes that I was surprised she could wear without being cautioned by our teachers who checked for errant uniform violators and made them run around the school grounds twice before packing them off to class.

In a fit of foolish chivalry, I had even made up my mind to run around the school grounds each day on her behalf, should she ever have been caught for her offense. But I guess that never happened because she could, like most other women, get away with most things. Us men wrongly assume that women are the weaker sex.

I am being engulfed by a million little memories that are pouring through my mind about everything that transpired in my school-life, though the one that my folks talk about most is my first among many forays into delinquent behaviour, which caused my family a lot of shame and embarrassment (or so I had thought back then) and even drove me to a point where I thought of thinking about quitting school and running away to join some farm.

The blogging universe would have been a better place, had I been strong-willed enough to do that.

As kids, an inherent fascination with catapults was but natural. An attempt to ask my folks for one usually resulted in them fantasizing about the worst case scenarios of buying me one. 'What if you take someone's eye out with that thing?' or 'What if you hit someone and that person beats you up for it?' and so on and so forth.

A whole lot of tries to come up with handmade catapults using rubber-bands and Y-shaped branches meticulously broken off trees that we could reach up towards also came to nought, since they weren't anywhere near the robust ones that I had seen other kids have, which their parents managed to buy them, or nearly as durable, since either the rubber-bands or the twigs broke within one or two tries of intending to take someone's eye out.

Us suppressed pranksters on the school bus then resorted to one thing. We used to take strong rubber bands and roll up paper torn out of our 'rough notes' book and hit passers-by on the road from inside the bus. The feeling of hitting some poor unsuspecting person on the road when he least expected it, with a tightly-rolled wad of paper gave us children on the bus an incomparable adrenaline rush.

Back in class 6, we took this activity of ours very seriously, and performed extensive R&D during our lunch breaks to come up with the right kind of rubber bands and the correct type of paper that was light and could, at the same time travel a substantial distance as well when released, without tearing up when we would eject it off the rubber-band.

Coaxing my Mum that I needed rubber bands for playing during our lunch break was quite a torrid task, since she suspected that I was up to no good, a Mom-radar that each mother has right from the time she manages to give birth to us ungrateful wretches. However, being susceptible to the pleadings or her kid, she gave in and was convinced that this was a new addition to our 'cops and robbers' game during the lunch break wherein we would also hit each other lightly with these paper projectiles.

Harbouring a fantasy that her good-for-nothing kid, who did not show any promise or propensity towards anything that wasn't anti-social for the first 10 years of his existance, might still be able to do something good like join the state-level archery team or something, my Mum relented and actually went shopping with me for the 'disco' rubber bands, the same ones I used a decade later to tie up my pony tail, during which she accompanied me to shop for them yet again. Some wonderful things, thankfully, never really change. Touchwood.

We had a points scoring system of sorts, I think, on the school bus, and took great pleasure in reliving each moment of each passer-by's reaction who was stuck by our blows. We, naturally were the good guys, out to teach the bad people a lesson. The bad people were usually pedestrians who couldn't chase the bus, and were not concentrated in the vicinity of any of the places where our school-bus used to stop.

When paper and rubber bands were not enough to vanquish the forces of evil, we resorted to using unripe sapotas and tamarind seeds that were painfully collected from around various places like the school nursery (for plants, not kids) in small polythene bags and sun-dried to perfection so that they could cause maximum damage when thrown out.

The gulf war in Iraq happened around the same time, and we started calling these 'missiles' that we threw out as 'scud missiles' and 'patriot missiles', or whatever else caught our fancy. Sometimes they were even called the 'Bhramastra', if the previous sunday had a particularly gripping episode of the Mahabharata shown on TV.

Our reverie was invariably short-lived, and came to a crashing end when one of the people in our army chose to hit a cyclist with a fruit on a road that was very close to our school's. The evidently angered cyclist decided to give chase, and stopped our school bus and told the driver about our shenanigans.

To cut a long story short, our bus driver did not have to do much to identify the guilty ones, and our parents telephone numbers were noted, and they were called for an audience with the headmaster, at school. A special announcement was made in the school assembly that the school bus would now be running only for children from classes 1 to 4, and everyone else had to make their own arrangements.

The teacher also did mention that those who really wanted to have target practise could join the NCC a couple of years in advance and play with rifles, and please could we leave the passers-by alone.

The next few days until the end of the academic year were absolute hell on the school bus, with the driver making us sit next to him in front, and giving us dirty looks all the time and rubbing in the fact that we were caught red-handed.

My folks were also terribly disappointed with me, and felt that I was on my way to being a terrorist. This was before Al-Queda happened, though I made sure they would take their words back, once they figured out that flying planes for target practise would never be my thing.

I had thought that my world as I knew it would never be the same again, specially after being caught and punished so badly for something I knew was wrong, but did all the same, to explore my anti-social side. I found out later, though, that everyone places information unrelated to them in the short-term memory part of their brains, and that things got back to normal at home and at school in a couple of weeks, though I never did really think of throwing something out of the school bus at someone ever again.