Tales of Moni - Chapter V

He walked with the vigour of a Sepoy, and the caution of a spy. He walked till he could see two silhouettes in the distance, walking slowly, the girl holding on to the guy's hand as she staggered and walked like a deer just shot with a tranquilizer. One look and Moni knew it was them. Naina was now walking with her head on Andy's shoulder and her arm around his waist, and Andy had his arm around her back, his palm resting on her shoulder. They walked till they reached a bench on the far corner, barely visible to anyone, unless someone knew they were there and therefore made an effort to see. They sat there, looking at the mighty sea, all powerful and enigmatic, probably more so than any other creation on earth. There are few other bodies that hold the power and the might of a raging ocean, but it wasn't the ocean that was throbbing that night; it was the blood in Moni's veins as he stood against a tree, smoking his last cigarette and looking at Naina and Andy in the distance, mere shadows that could vanish any time, like an awakening from a dream. "This was before Clinton's visit, and they hadn't cleared out the beaches and there were huge spikes and piles of stones strewn all over the beach", said Moni. The government had been making an 'effort' to clear all of that for the last six months, but not a single stone had budged an inch. "Once they knew Clinton was coming, the entire stretch was cleared out in two weeks flat!" said Moni, emptying a packet of Shikhar into his mouth back in his flat in Safdarjung. As he saw those spikes, it felt like they would pierce through him any minute, as he felt himself drawn closer and closer to them and the sea, till he refocused on the purpose of his mission - his main agenda - doodh ka doodh aur paani ka paani! For a long time, they were just holding each other and she had her head on his shoulders, and Moni thought that he was right about her - that she wouldn't cheat on Jigme, not her, not this fragile creation of God, this fine piece of art, no, she couldn't be so heartless. As the tide receded that night, though, it took along with it Moni's belief in this lady on the pedestal, as her idealistic sculpture in his head melted much like cheese on a sandwich being grilled, as her hand first went from Andy's shoulder to his head, as he pulled her closer and she looked up towards him, and they looked into their eyes, the moon shining right behind them, between their faces, illuminating their silhouettes just enough for Moni to be able to see them clearly; and then there was an eclipse, as their faces came together, blocking the moon, and at the same time bringing mountains of chemicals swirling into Moni's head,  clouding it and beating a thousand drums onto his dumbstruck ears, as the shirts came off and the double-backed beast was created, before the slenderer back slid down the bench and her head disappeared, while  the other beast had his head thrown back in throes of passion.

Moni did not know how it ended, for that is all that he could take, as he looked at the cigarette that had  burnt itself to the butt, leaving a long trail of ash that still stuck to it; he had forgotten that he even had it in his hand. He could barely feel his feet as he looked around, with the look of an abandoned dog, a similar vulnerability stamped upon his face; and then the blood gradually started flowing back to his head, as he flicked the cigarette with a sense of vengeance he had not known since school days as he walked off, even as the first rays of the sun were just about beginning to show and as people started climbing out of bed for their morning walks and jogs. He could not take his mind off what he had just seen, and did not know if he would ever be able to face Jigme again without betraying himself, especially if he were sitting arm-in-arm with Naina, with that look of Achilles upon his brow. He did not know how he would react when Andy came back and boasted about his 'feat' in the hostel the next day, the way most guys did, using the most demeaning terms about the girl they had successfully managed to get cozy with. He was furious and thought he would shove Andy's head down the shit pot and press it down with his foot, like he had done once during his school days. Yes, that is exactly what he wanted to do right then, venting all his fury till Andy choked and coughed and begged for mercy; like he had then with Rakesh, in St. Paul's Darjeeling, an event in his life that defined his life in a way. This was before he was lured to the charm of Bombay, the very charm that he now cursed as he walked back to his hostel, defeated at the sight of his friend's girlfriend cheating on him. This was way further back in the reaches of time, when he still had hair on his head, curly and thick, almost Afro-like, except it was thinning even then, during the days when all the big boys would come back for their vacations from their public schools and play golf and tennis in the tea estates, have mad cocktail parties that Moni used to go for, parties where bands from all across the north-east would come and play - bands like Mojo & the Great Society (the erstwhile name of the Soulmate singer-guitarist Rudy Wahlang), Shiva, Crosswinds, Skinny Alley - Moni used to hang around with girls from Sophia's, guys and girls from Xaviers and Elphinstone. "They were pretty cool in their own way, back in the day. It was nothing compared to what happens in parties nowadays, but it was pretty cool for the 80s" Moni mused, and then he briefly paused his story as he went to spit the Shikhar into his white wash basin that was now a Shikhar-stained maroon in the centre with a white halo on the periphery. These parties were where he had learnt to love Bombay - the city that never slept; he was awed by the mere possibility of such a city's existence, where people went out at night and there were cars and auto rickshaws on the street till the wee hours of the morning, that there was something like that out there to look forward to - the neon lights of Bombay had spun a web around his imagination. As he looked at all the college-going crowd smoking cigarettes, going to pubs, and dancing to songs like Glenn Frey's 'The Heat is On', Moni's notions about life were just beginning to form, lost without a care, being pinched on his cheeks by girls he would spend endless nights dreaming about, dancing with them and living a surreal life, complete with the sprawling solitude of the tea gardens, broken every now and then by the sound of a solitary elephant searching for its pack; and then school would begin again, and he would head back to Darjeeling, a beautiful town situated in the upper reaches of West Bengal, almost cut-off from the mainstream culture of the state and turbulent in its own way amongst slogans and protests of a separate Gorkhaland.  "I left school after tenth, and never went back". Moni now had his head comfortably perched on a pillow, as he seemed to fade further and further away into his memories, going over the prints ever so carefully stored in his dark room, cleansing them, processing them, picking the best ones out to be shared. School was a lot of fun for Moni, as it is for most others- an age without care, where the smallest of emotional bumps felt like avalanches, bringing down mountains of beliefs and reshaping them into new ones. There are indeed few emotions that can stand up in stature to the chemical imbalances in an adolescent mind.

One such character that seemed to have left a prominent mark in Moni's life was Ian Myers, the rector of St. Paul's, Darjeeling, whom Moni had called a motherfu**er on the day he had last set foot on the campus, before he had turned his back on the campus forever, to never go back, and thereby closed a beautiful chapter of his perpetually adventure-filled life. Ian Myers was a very 'proper' man. He would smoke a cigar during his classes, wear a tweed coat all the time, and was good at dramatics and phonetics and all those things Moni used to run away from. His class was where Moni first encountered the phonetic symbols of the IPA, and where he was forced to articulate the phonemes of English properly, like a gentleman ought to. His batch at St. Paul's was, though, one of the most notorious and yet one of the most united batches ever, and Dr. Myers would urge them to let go of their bestial characteristics and learn to transform themselves into gentlemen from the 'ragtag population' and the 'chokra boys' that they were. Moni and his  friends, though, had no intentions of becoming gentlemen, since they knew this would involve becoming a reflection of Myers himself. His friends were mostly guys from Nepal and Sikkim, and were always like wild horses in their school days - they fell, they fought, played in the mud, cut themselves just to be able to skip PT, and so on. They would, understandably, also always get into trouble. Hira was the only exception. He was an all-rounder, always good at everything he did, the best spinner in the school cricket team, an excellent swimmer, a part of the school football team, and also one of the toppers of his class. With this exception, all the other 'chokra boys' were always either kneeling down outside some classroom or being put through some other forms of what the teachers thought was teaching them a lesson, but what for them was just another means of amusing and entertaining themselves, calling each other names and cooking up stories about which teachers had affairs with each other, and which of them had incestuous relationships with their mothers.

Niranjan Sharma was the pick of the lot. "He was the craziest amongst the whole gang", in Moni's words. Niranjan was a Meitei guy with his hair grown up to his ears, was athletic and had an entirely whacky sense of humour. He was always making people laugh and pulling tricks on the unsuspecting, and was always entertaining to say the least. They used to enroll themselves into the chapel choir and the prayer group in order to be able to miss the morning assembly, as they could just go and kneel down on the chapel benches and fall asleep for half an hour, pretending to be in deep conversation with the Almighty. This was infinitely better than having to stand in assembly and follow the everyday drudgery of speeches and rigorous drills. They would have turns at the chapel, where each person had to go and read out verses from the Bible and talk about what it meant to them. This usually was only a check-mark activity with nothing special to look forward to, and most of the students would just spend it kneeling and dozing away as the poor soul with the task to deliver his speech would grunt and groan through the sermon. However, once it was Niranjan's turn, and he spent an entire week rehearsing his verses, from section to section, imitating various personalities - from Elvis Presley to Clint Eastwood - no one was spared. They used to be in three sections - 8 A, 8 B and 8 C. "8 C was the naughtiest, since they were the farthest away from the staff room. 8 B was kind of moderate, and 8 A were the watchdogs, and they always had a couple of sentinels posted to inform the others of when an ill-fated teacher was to come and try to educate us." said an enchanted Moni, his eyes still far into the story, as if he could still picture Niranjan prancing around and performing in front of him while they waited for the teachers. He would go from section to section, standing on the teachers' tables and jumping on to chairs, reading out verses from the Bible, making sure he was perfect for his turn at the altar the following Wednesday. He was an awesome impersonator and did a really good job of reading out the verses, as he would start off with his "and the Lord says..." delivered like Elvis Presley's spoken lines in the middle of 'Are you Lonesome Tonight' or like Eastwood in 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly'. People expected him to be quite entertaining when his turn actually came, but they were nowhere close to expecting what actually transpired when that Wednesday finally arrived. They were made to wait about 5 or 10 minutes before Niranjan finally decided to appear, walking in impersonating the bursar of the school, his hips moving forward and backward as one foot dragged behind the other. the students muffled their laughters and Moni literally had to bite into the song book to prevent himself from bursting into hysterics right there. Niranjan had parted his hair in the middle, like the bursar did, and wet his hair with a liquid that was still dripping from his head. They thought it was water, maybe oil at best, but it was only when he came closer to them, as he gyrated up the aisle, that they realised that what was dripping from his hair was the liquid from a bottle of Camel Glue (the one that is available in those blue bottles with black caps)! Niranjan Sharma walked up to the pulpit, cleared his throat, and started off, "The Lord said... hahahhahahhaha" No one knew what he was tripping on that day, and no one knows yet, but what happened there made the entire chapel burst into a chorus of laughter, Moni being the first one to explode! Niranjan would say a few lines and then start laughing hysterically, go on a little further and continue guffawing away, till the chaplain actually got up, pulled out a can stick and thrashed him till he realised he just couldn't bring him to stop laughing. Moni got a piece of the cane too, as he was rolling on the floor of the chapel, in between the benches, holding on to his aching abdominal muscles as he laughed away, even when he felt the cane on his buttocks, for that didn't make a difference at all... (to be continued...)

Tales of Moni - Chapter IV

We were done with our food and decided to go up to Moni's room to complete the conversation. Just as we were about to exit the place, a group of really cute Manipuri girls walked in, and Moni's face changed shape - his eyebrows went from straight to parabolic, curving to form two little question marks above his eyes, what began as a frown progressed into a look of complaint and dismay, and a whine escaped his mouth before he said, holding on to my arm, his fingers digging into my flesh and his face buried into his own arm, "It's the story of my life man!" he groaned, and kept groaning and whining all the way back up to his room, refusing to even look at the several cute girls who passed by, till one of them actually stopped and said hi. She was an old friend of his from school, a cute Assamese girl who lived two rows away. They had a brief conversation as I went to the grocery store to buy some Hajmola, and when I returned, there was another guy with them. The girl introduced him as  her boyfriend and said that they were going out for a movie and left. Moni was even more heartbroken now; "Why can't I find a good girl like her, man? All the losers on this planet have girlfriends and the only girl I love doesn't even want to talk to me!" He hurried into his lane, opened the lock on the iron gate downstairs, and walked upstairs with heavy footsteps, still groaning and complaining and mumbling something that only he could hear. "It always happens with me man. Everyone gets the girl, except me! That's what happened in Bombay too!"

Andy stayed had studied in Welham boys. He was a good friend, was a lot of fun, was always partying away, running after women, and was a total faff. "He could lie till his pants fall off; he used to talk absolute crapshit, and he used to get all the girls, man!", Moni said, all of this in half a groan and half a whine. Andy was actually a Bengali guy whose actual name was Anand, but people called him Andy. Andy stayed in Moni's room for all three years of their graduation, and loved organising parties and was always the life of get-togethers. If anyone wanted to score some hash, or coke or anything else, he was the one to go and get it for them. He would organise everything and do a good job of it; all people had to do was give him the money.  He used to be found stoned in someone or the other's car most of the time. He was a fun person to be around, except when Moni was broke and did not have enough money to buy some beer or score some hash, Andy would just not be around anywhere; plus he got all the women. So Moni was not particularly happy talking about him. "Crapshit!", he he exclaimed, clenching his fist at an imaginary collar in front of him, a look of anger and misery coupled with a smile on his face. Andy was known to be a smooth talker and could talk a whole lot of nonsense about anything under the sun. "He could talk about the Indian Army and their deepest secrets, about the CIA like someone from Langley had actually called him and told him about them!" That night he was hanging out with Jigme's girlfriend, Naina, who like we have mentioned earlier, was a beautiful girl, much like Aphrodite. She had curly hair that ran up to her shoulders and was an Indian version of Demi Moore, and like with Medusa, one look at her was enough to make most men hard as stone. Andy was hanging out with her and Moni, having heard stories about Naina, wanted to put an end to all speculation and figure out if she really was cheating on Jigme or not.

"Let's go for a walk", she had come and whispered in Moni's ear that night, but before Moni could respond to the request, Andy volunteered to pitch in, so all three of them went for a walk. They were drunk and it was 11 PM, and most places had shut by then. Naina was wearing white that night, a sleeveless dress that hugged her as the sea-breeze blew against her, defining her well-formed contours that Moni couldn't stop looking at. She knew the attention she was getting and would smile each time she caught Moni staring at her dress with that puppy dog  look on his face, like a dog who just spotted the juiciest bone, only to see it being licked and taken away by a faster and smarter dog. Then it started raining. They got a little drenched as they stood under a tree for a while before they ran into the Oberoi and sat in the lounge area till the rain stopped. Naina was quite drenched by then, but since it was summer time, she just let it be, enjoying the effect she was having on the men, with her white dress drenched in the first shower of the monsoon. By the time the rain stopped, Andy and Naina were pretty cozy on a couch, looking at pictures of each other on their phones, while Moni sat on the couch opposite to them, and flicked through a copy of a travel magazine and a couple of other coffe table books kept over there. He didn't know whether he should hang around or if he should leave. Finally, he decided to tell the two of them that he was sleepy and wanted to go back to his hostel. Andy did not insist, but Naina did. She wanted him to hang around, but Moni was in no mood to stay; hurt as he was witnessing his close friend's girlfriend leaning over Andy's shoulder, scrolling on his touchscreen phone. 

As Moni walked back, he thought about the previous night, when he had had his first encounter with the Bombay cops. They had just left Aby's place, a guy who had messed up his life completely by getting addicted to Spasmoproxyvon and Nitrosun. "If you're on Spasmo and Nitro, your life is ruined. If you're hooked on to these, you're like the biggest loser on the planet", he said thinking about Aby. "He was so messed up that he was scared of leaving his room, man!!". They had gone to check on him - five of them. Andy, Wang, a couple of other guys from college and Moni. They tried to convince him to go see a psychiatrist, but he was adamant that he was okay, and wanted them to leave immediately. So they left him at his house and went back to their bikes. Those were the days when petrol used to be 20 rupees a litre (1998/99). Moni, Wang and Andy had come there on Dorji's Yamaha RXZ, which had a flat tyre when they got out of Aby's house. The other two friends (Riz a Maurtian guy and Alok from Bangalore) had their own bike, so they decided that they would ride back while the other three would walk back to the hostel, enjoying the evening breeze over some whiskey. They were carrying Wang's pocket music system and had a bottle of Royal Stag which they purchased from a theka nearby. they walked past the Tower of Silence near the Walkeshwar Hanging Gardens, and tresspassed intro the forested  areas there, walking around the forbidden zone for nearly two hours with a bottle of whiskey. He kept telling Andy to not make much noise, but Andy was the carefree type except when actually in trouble. He behaved like he knew all the powerful people in the city and that no one would dare to even come close to him if he didn't want them to. Thus he sat there making a racket, singing songs, talking out loud, shouting and yelling. He even broke the bottle of whiskey on some rocks near the stream they were sitting next to, their feet dipped into its cool water and enjoying the joys of a forest in the heart of Bombay! 

When they finally got out of the enclosure, they were too drunk to want to keep walking any more. Plus they were walking uphill for a while. They trudged on for a couple of kilometres when they saw two bikes parked on the roadside - a BSA Bantam Sports and another dirt bike, and both of them had their handlebars unlocked. Moni doesn't remember if it was Wang or Andy who had that idea, but they wanted to  ride the bikes downhill, which was about another three kilometres, and then leave the bikes there and carry on. Moni kept dissuading them saying that one can't just take someone else's bikes downhill and leave them there, but they called him a chicken and asked him to build some courage and and take things on when life gave him chances. They told him that's why he never got Naina, because he was always worried about what was right and what was wrong and would never take the practical way out. That was it! Mention a pretty girl's name to a drunken man and any remnants of reason, caution and common sense fly out the nearest window available. Wang and Andy got on to the BSA and asked Moni to imagine that he had Naina with him on his bike and to just take her downhill because she was tired and her feet were hurting. Moni could not let that happen of course, the chivalrous knight that he was - the eternal Kshatriya. They got onto the bikes and started pretending they were racing, with their feet still on thee ground, making vroom-vrooom noises with their vocal chords and tilting the bike left and right. They still hadn't taken the bikes downhill, when two men came by,and asked them what they were doing on the bikes. Fearless Andy got off and asked them if the bikes were theirs. They replied in the negative, but told them they weren't supposed to just sit on someone else's bike. Moni, who didn't want the imaginary Naina to feel that he was chickenshit, got off and hurled a bunch of abuses on the guys and asked them to disappear before they made him angry. He also caught hold of one guy's collar and was about to push him when he produced his identity card - Jadhav Waghmare - Constable,   Malabar Hills; and then the imaginary Naina flew away, and so did Andy's confidence. All three of them started apologising to them, but the cops asked them to come with the police station. "Police pe haat uthata hai? Bike Chori Karta Hai? Bhadve Saale!" Turning to Moni, he said, "Tu hai inka Ring Leader?". All the three of them could do was apologise and call him Mama throughout the journey to the police station. Moni had another friend whose local guardians stayed right opposite the police station at Malabar Hills, and he started thinking of how he could get in touch with him in case things went really out of hand. "He was calling me a ring leader, man! What Crapshit!"

Malabar Hills was one of the areas where Mumbai's elite stayed, and Moni was confident that the policemen stationed over there would at least know how to deal with educated folk. He was hopeful that he wouldn't find someone who was an encounter specialist or a totally uneducated rascal just out there to vent his frustration on criminals.He hoped he would run into a kind and loving soul. When they walked into the police station, the officer in charge there "looked like Kumbhakaran, with curly and oily hair; a saand of a character, like a character from Durga Pooja!!", in Moni's words, as he lay there on his bed in his 1 BHK flat in Humayunpur, wrapped in a towl, wearing a VIP baniyaan, trying to decide if he wanted to have a bath first or complete the story first. He decided to go on with the story. They frisked all of them, confiscated their phones, and asked them to produce their wallets. The other guys' wallets were clear, but Moni's wallet produced certain questionable substances, and the following scene took place, which can only best be described as a one-act play. Moni, throughout this conversation had a look on his face akin to that of a dog that has just been caught tearing apart his master's favourite shoe, and is being questioned about it - droopy eyes, wrinkled forehead, plaintive tone, etc.

Officer in Charge (OiC): (Pulling out a pouch with some powder inside) Yeh kya hai?

Moni: Yeh Kumkum powder hai

OIC: Kumkum powder? Kahan se aaya?

Moni: Woh Tirupati gaya tha darshan ke liye, wahan se leke aaya, Meenaxi Temple se

OIC: Tu Brahmin Hai?

Moni: Nahin, Kshatriya

OIC: To Tirupati kyon gaya tha?

Moni: Darshan ke liye gaya tha

The OIC gave him a bemused look, still stern and angry though, and pulled out the next item.

OIC: Yeh kya hai? (Pulling out a dried stem of marijuana that Moni had kept with him just for a rainy day, when they couldn't find any hash or weed to smoke.

Moni: YEh Shivji ka prasad hai

OIC: Bahut prasad khaat hai tu haan? tirupati jaata hai, Shivji ke paas bhi jaata hai! Hawalaat mein jaega kya?

Moni: Nahin sir, sahi mein prasad hai

The OIC continues diggin into Moni's wallet, and this time pulls out a condom

OIC: Yeh Nirodh kay ke waaste?

Moni: mmmmmm

OIC: Randi ke paas jaata hai?

Moni: Nahin randi ke paas nahin jaata hun

OIC: Phir yeh kay ke liye hai? 

Moni: Woh mere gaon mein meri mageytar rehti hai

OIC: Toh? Yeh kay ke liye rakhta hai tu?

Moni: Woh men kabhi gaon jaata hun to usse milta hun

OIC: Kay ke waaste milta hai re Nirodh leke?

Moni: Nahin sir, waisi baat nahin hai

OIC: Bhadwa saale! Chutya banaata hai? Bol, Randi ke paas jaat ahia ki nai?

Moni: Nahin sir, Randi ke paas nahin jaat hun

OIC (Slaps him on the head): Bol. 'Jaata Hun!'

Moni (his hands on his cheek, speaking in a really low volume now): Haan sir, jaata hun

OIC: Gullfreynd hai teri?

Moni: Nahin hai, sir

OIC: (Another slap on his head) Bol, 'Hai!'

Moni: Hai sir

OIC: Jinz pehenti hai teri gullfreynd?

Moni: Haan sir, Jeans pehenti hai

OIC: Tu park mein jaake taple dabaata hai uske?

Moni: Nahin sir, nahin dabaat hun, (As the OIC raised his hand again) Haan sir, dabaata hun.

OIC: Syaana hai re tu! Kahaan ka rehne waala hai tu?

Moni: Sir Assam ka

OIC: Baap kya karta hai tera?

Moni: Tamil Nadu mein chai ke bageeche mein kaam karta hai

OIC: Tu abhi toh bola mereko to Assam ka hai? Tu Taamil Nadu ka hai?

Moni: Nahin sir, mere pitaji wahan kaam karte hain

OIC: (looking at Andy) Tera baap kya karta hai?

Andy: Mera baap bhi iske baap jaisa hi hai

OIC: Iske baap jaisa matlab?

Andy: Chai kle bagaan mein kaam karta hai

OIC: Taamil Nadu mein?

Andy: Nahin sir, Assam Mein

OIC: Tu Assam ka hai?

Andy: Nahin sir, Tamil Nadu ka

OIC: Saala, khopdi phirata hai! (then looks at Wang) Ai, tu kahaan ka hai be, Assam ki Taamil Nadu ki Nepal ki Nagaland ki kahan se hai?

Wang: Sir, mein Bhutan ka hun

OIC: Woh kahaan pe hai?

Wang: Nepal ke baaju mein

OIC: Baap kya karta hai tera?

Wang: Woh aapke jaisa hai?

OIC: Mere jaisa? Kya matlab?

Wang: Sir, woh police officer hai

OIC: (In a harsh and sarcastic tone) Kahaan pe? Taamil Nadu mein?

Wang: Nahin sir, Bhutan mein

Then the OIC went to the barrack room inside, a room that looked straight out of the 18th century, with canes and batons kept in a rack along one wall, a wooden chair with straps on it, reminding Moni of torture scenes from several movies, a bench, a light bulb dangling over a solitary table, and a drunk constable lying on the bench with just a shawl for a mattress. The OIC and woke up a constable who was sleeping there. The constable was drunk and reeking of alcohol, and came outside, extremely pissed about the fact that he had been woken up. He came out, folded his shawl and threw it on a vacant chair, scratched his hairy chest through his unbuttoned shirt first, then his armpits, and then ran his hands down his pants, scratched his balls, sniffed his fingers and then pulled out a pen from his pocket. They made them write a confession stating that they were walking around drinking alcohol in public and that they were a ring of thieves and that Moni was their ring leader. they slapped them on their heads a couple of times, as they laughed and joked amongst themselves. They made them re-write their confessions six or seven times, a they did not like the way it was worded. Wang was also behaving like it was all a joke, laughing and talking to them even when they were slapping him around, but  the situation got a little tenser when Moni refused to write a confession stating that he was the ring leader. "Saale day time student, night time ring leader! Encounter kar dun kya tera yahin pech?" They made him confess a whole bunch of crimes orally as they laughed about, slapping him on the head every now and then to ensure that he didn't forget that this was still an interrogation, and this went on till Wang distracted one of them, who saw him standing and staring at the photographs of wanted criminals in a board near the entrance of the police station. The OIC walked up to him:

OIC: Kya dekh raha hai be?

Wang: Yeh photo dekh raha hun

OIC: Inmein se dekha hai kya kisi ko tu?

Wang: Haan, isko dekha hai shaayad (pointing at a guy who it turned out had an amount of 1 lakh rupees on his head)

OIC: (getting a wee bit excited) Kahaan pe dekha tu isko?

Wang: Chowpatty mein dekha

OIC: Chowpatty mein? Kya kar raha tha yeh chowpatty mein?

Wang: Pani Puri khaa raha tha

OIC: (Turning around when he thought he heard a stifled laugh emanate from Moni, and then back to Wang) Kaise pehchaana tu isko (Now looking closely at the guy's picture, considering the possibility of Wang actually having seen him)

Wang: Iska Moonch hai na, usse pehchaana

OIC: (Looking carefully at all the pictures on the board, slapping Wang on the head) Abbe, Moonch toh saare photo mein hain sabke!

Wang: Haan, woh toh meine dekha hi nahin, shaayad galti ho gayi

That was it! Kumbhakaran's hand came down with all its force on little Wang's cheek, and it brought tears to Wang's eyes, and when the first tear drop flowed out of his eyes, almost magically, as the last falling leaf of Autumn beckons the song of the cuckoo, the teardrop brought a loud guffaw out of the officer's mouth. The cops spent the next 3-4 hours lecturing them about morals and cultures, joking and finally let them go at 6 in the morning. All this flashed by in front of Moni's eyes as he walked back towards his hostel by himself, while Andy and Naina were headed towards Marine Drive. "It can't be. Naina is not that kind of girl, man. I can see love in her eyes!", he exclaimed to himself as he decided that he had had enough. He did not want to be in love with a girl without finding out who she actually was. Were all those rumours about her true? He decided that he must find out right then, as he turned around and walked back in the direction Andy and Naina had taken, as a cocktail of fear and hope enveloped him, running through his veins and making his heart race and his blood boil (To be continued...)

Tales of Moni - Chapter III

Bombay, the fourth most populous city of the world, is the city of dreams, a city that can make a millionaire out of a pauper, and yet a city with an underbelly that can swallow you whole without even belching after ingesting you, as the locals put it, "Khaake dhakaar bhi nai leti!" The city that never sleeps, a sobriquet earned on account of its fast paced life and the ever-bustling crowd, no matter which hour you happen to chance upon it, has been a fatal attraction for many and also been the elixir that made several non-entities a part of day-to-day folklore. Amitabh Bachchan, Shahrukh Khan & Sachin Tendulkar are only a few examples in this star-studded city that smells of fish at any point of time in the day or the year.. Yes, that is the first overwhelming experience people get when they visit this city - the smell of Bombil - or the Bombay Duck  - a fish that is dried and salted before it is consumed, and hence fills the entire city with a pervasive stench, along with the other varieties of sea-food, and especially if you are anywhere near Crawford market, it is so strong that you can get high on it. Be it through Bal Thackeray and the Shiv Sena, Dawood Ibrahim and the underworld, or Govinda, Mithun and the other film-stars of Bollywood, Mumbai, as it is now called, after the Koli goddess Mumbadevi, has always been a constant source of enchantment for people all across India. A city that is made up of 7 islands and is the commercial and the entertainment capital of the country, Mumbai could well be the most sought-after place in this country for all, from the eager, bursting adolescent raring to take on the world to the drooping middle-aged man whipped by the rigours of time, an eternal lure for many ambitious millions.

"Call it Bombay! It will always be Bombay for me!" said Moni, full of passion and emotion, like someone who has been greatly wronged in love. He landed there for the first time in 1996, the year it was re-christened as Mumbai, by the Shiv Sena. There were anti-British sentiments involved in the re-christening, a pan Maratha sentiment, in that Bombay needed to be eliminated, as it reeked of a smell worse than that of fish - that of colonial residue, although it originated from the era of Portuguese colonisation  (meaning the good bay in Portuguese). "Call it Bombay, or you're not getting my story!". Hence, we will call her Bombay from here on. He first heard about her when he was really young, playing in the tea gardens of Dibrugarh, he would meet older children who had gone to study in public schools. The tea-garden employees and their children were hardly in contact with the locals; and they had an entire social set-up of their own. There was not many really good public school in Assam (Mount Carmel being the best), so most of the kids from the tea-estates went to Public Schools like St. Edmund's Shillong, St. Paul's Darjeeling, Lawrence School Sanawar, BCS Shimla, Doon School or Mayo college Ajmer, where they stressed the importance of social etiquette, forms of ball-room dancing, and dressing  appropriately by wearing jackets complete with a cummerbund around their waist. The girls were taught several skills as well, like tatting with buttons, cross-stitching, embroidery, etc. Thus it seemed like it was a complete colonial set-up oozing with colonial residue! Once they completed their schooling, the would go on to good colleges in Delhi, Kolkata, Pune or Bombay, and it was when they came back for their vacations that a young Moni would meet them and interact with the culture they had assimilated while in their respective cities. "I always found the Bombay crowd to be the coolest", said Moni, reminiscing about the first time he had heard tracks by Queen and some of his favourite bands, Radio Gaga and Walk Like an Egyptian in particular. They would throw pool parties at their houses, and a 12 year old Moni would go and hear these songs and be really impressed, aiming to go to Bombay to study some day. Whether it was the song, 'Ai Dil Mushkil Jeena Yahan' or all the Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar movies aired all across India on DD - 1, the only TV channel in operation then, Moni was always fascinated by the idea of being able to one day visit Bombay, so when he actually got a chance, he just took his back-pack, booked a train ticket, and went! It was for his graduation, for which he did not even have a confirmed seat in a college when he reached there. After running around for a week, he realised that it was too difficult to be able to get admission in Sydenham, or any other college without knowing someone powerful or influential, since he was already late in applying. So, he sat there on a bench in Marine Drive, looking at the sea trying to climb on to the land, its tentacle like waves just not influential enough to climb on to the land and take possession. He decided to walk up to a minister's office and take an appointment.

He got in touch with the then health minister's office and went in and waited there for 5 hours. He sat on a bench in the corridor outside the main office, as the khaki clad peon with a khaki cap on his head and a white handkerchief sticking out of his pocket walked in and out of the office. He was offered some tea, which he accepted, and then got into a conversation with the peon. After almost 2 hours of talking, the peon told him that he would get him an appointment with the minister, which he did a couple of hours later.. He entered the room, which had a red carpet with patterns of grass embroidered on it, and a table in the far end, where a bespectacled guy in his late forties was sitting, reading some files and drinking a cup of tea. It was around 4 o clock in the evening when Moni entered the room, asked if he could walk up to the desk, pulled one of the wooden chairs with the nylon crisscrossed pattern netting for a seat, and explained his situation. The minister looked at him, his spectacles at the end of his nose and still pointing towards the file he was reading. He took them off, wiped his lips with the back of his palm and listened, increasingly amused at the fact that a total stranger had come all the way from Assam and come to him to seek help with admissions. He wanted him to get him a seat in any college in Mumbai, just like that! No contacts, no references, no relationship - just walked into the office with a file full of documents and a heart full of expectations. The minister took his papers and said he would look into the matter when he had the time. Within two weeks, he got a call from Sydenham, asking him to submit his documents and pay the fees. Thus begun his tryst with that wonderful city, with a small yet the first of his many adventures in the city.

His Thukpa had arrived in the meantime, extra soupy as he had ordered it. It was May and the Delhi heat was getting unbearable, with people dying in the heat wave, with even some air-conditioners giving up in despair. Thankfully, the one at Rosang was quite effective, although customers kept walking in and out, letting the heat in, swirling in and entering us through our nostrils, the first organ to sense the invasion. When the door opened again, Moni looked towards it to check if a cute girl had walked in, and was disappointed that it was only a guy with a laptop bag on his shoulder, who was there to order some momos His focus went back to the Thukpa as he continued his story. He had been in Bombay for a year or so when he met some juniors from Bhutan, a tiny country to the north of India well known for its picturesque landscape, peace-loving culture, and their king Jigme Dorji Wangchuk, famous for his coining of the term ‘rgyal-yongs dga’a-skyid dpal-‘dzoms’, which translates to Gross National Happiness, a term he used to evaluate the quality of lives of his subjects, as opposed to the GDP, which was his way of showing his his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values. Moni used to hang out a lot with the Bhutanese crowd, and was quite comfortable in the city by now, and used to show the guys around and take them to his favourite hang outs around Colaba. He used to even stay as an illegal guest in the International Students Hostel, as he used to pass himself off as a Tibetan or a Bhutanese student. Once they were sitting at Gokul - Asia's largest selling bar at that time, opposite Bade Miya. There were three of them there - Jigme, Dorji and Wangchuk - along with Moni. Once they had had a few beers there, they picked up 5 bottles of beer and started wallking toward the Gateway of India. The sat by the sea near the gateway and started rolling a joint and drinking the beer, when some cops arrived at the scene. Moni was done with his beer by then and rolled his bottle towards the sea, but Jigme and Dorji still had their bottles in their hands. The cops started asking them where they were from and what they were doing there. "Charas peeta hai?" they asked them, noticing the joint that Wangchuk was holding in his hand. "The sad part was that none of us had any money in our wallets except me, and even I had only 50 rupees", said Moni, chomping away at his Thukpa. This essentially meant that they couldn't pay their way out of this mess.

Wangchuk was a cute looking guy with an innocent face. but known to do crazy things like smashing an aerosol can and asking his friend to light a fire as soon as he smashed it. He nearly burnt his eyes as the flame erupted and went straight for his face. He put his hand across his eyes just in time and ended up with a burnt forearm and a thin horizontal burn mark on his forehead that didn't go for many months after that. His girlfriend was a petite Sikkimese girl whose local guardian was Danny Denzongpa. She was Hera, the faithful, always by Wangchuk's side, waiting for him, tolerating all his nonsense; she loved Wang, as he was called by his friends, very much. Dorji was a stout guy, about five feet eight inches, almost as tall as Moni was, but was built like an ox. He could bench weights of 100 kilos, worked out regularly and played football. Although all the Bhutanese guys played football, Dorji had played for his school and for the university. He was never with the same woman for more than three months and loved rising bikes and cars. He had a CBZ that he would rip down Marine drive in the evenings, along with some of his racer friends on their bikes. Jigme was the quiet one. He never spoke much, except when he was required to, and would sit and read philosophy books, and had read everything from Plato to Derrida to Wittgenstein. He had an extremely well-endowed girlfriend from Chandigarh who was quite his opposite. She was Aphrodite, about five feet five and with a body to die for, and she was a complete flirt. She dated Jigme, but rumour had it that she had been around with almost everyone in that group, except Moni. Moni, of course knew about this, but since Jigme was not very appreciative of any conversation that portrayed her as a flirtatious character, he never brought up the topic when he was with him. He did find her attractive, and all his friends would often tease him as the only guy who hasn't been with her, but Moni had his principles, or at least he had a few of them. "I am a man of few principles, but when I have one, I have one!" he'd say, even as he watched the other guys take turns taking Jigme's girlfriend out, while Jigme stayed seemingly oblivious of this, immersed in his books. Moni even suspected that he knew, especially when Jigme sometimes spoke about Kierkegaard's ideology about women, that it is only in a negative relationship with a woman that a man can truly arrive at the realm of essence and ideality; of how if you got a woman, then you became the general of an army, but if you didn't get the woman you loved, or especially if she cheated on you, you became not just a mere general, but a hero, much like Achiilles or Alexander!

There were two cops, one fat and chubby with a pot belly that made it impossible for him to look at his own toes without bending forward, and another malnourished looking guy with a lathi in his hand. It seemed like one ate all the food while the other just sat and watched, by the looks of it. They looked a lot like the ghati version of Laurel and Hardy, and Moni would have laughed out loud if the situation had been any less serious. They put all of them in the patrol van, which Laurel was driving and drove them all around Bombay that night. they even picked up a petty thief on the way, slapped him on the head a couple times, because he had been pick-pocketing a lot of late, and then let him off at another gully nearby. "He must have been a local informant or something", said Moni, checking to see if a cute girl walked in this time. It wasn't this time either. It was just one of the cooks coming in for his shift. "Nepal ke ho?" Hardy asked them, taking them around the red light areas, inside the network of small roads and by-lanes, as the prostitutes stared into the van, looking at who these oriental guys in the van were, throwing kisses at them and biting their lips, trying to entice them. One of them even pulled her blouse down a little bit for a better view. Wangchuk's father was the police chief of Bhutan and he knew how to deal with cops. He had also studied in Calimpong during his school years, and could therefore speak good Hindi too. They asked him if he had ever been to one of these brothels, and he said he hadn't. "Randi ke paas nai jaata hai toh phir kya karta hai? Gullfreynd hai kya?" Hardy asked. They somehow managed to answer all the questions without being able to piss the Hardy off. They drove around all night, patrolling the city, and then dropped them off at daybreak. They still had one bottle of beer in their hands, and the cops wanted them to throw it away. Moni asked them to keep it if they liked, or to let them take it with them, as he did not want to waste it. "Paisa bhi nahin hai. Jugaad karke khareeda. Phenkne mat boliye. Aap hi pee leejiye chahiye to" he said. "Padhai karne aata hai aur jugaad karke daru khareedta hai binechot! Pee isko abhi! Gatak daal saara ka saara abheech!" Hardy made Moni gulp down the entire bottle in one go, and whacked him on the butt with a lathi while he did it, before they let them go. This was Moni's second encounter with the Bombay Police. (To be continued…)

Tales of Moni - Chapter II

I met him the following week near his house in Humayunpur, a suburban village near Safdarjung Enclave. He was sitting at Rosang, a small restaurant run by a Paite couple, where they served all kinds of North-east Indian, Tibetan and Chinese cuisine, with framed pictures of their culture hung on their walls, along with some cultural artefacts like shawls, traditional hunting spears and knives, pipes, etc. One of the Zomi tribes of Burmese origin, Paites are one of the 33 officially recognised scheduled tribes of Manipur. The restaurant did pretty well in that area, since there were a lot of students from North-East India who stayed in the locality, and had an appetite for some good food from back home. We sat on a corner table and he ordered his favourite pork chop while I ordered an egg chowmein as we sat there and exchanged details of what transpired after we were separated at the police station. "I just wanted to quieten him down, so that I could take him out of there" he said, wrinkles appearing on his forehead. It turns out that he was in the middle, trying to negotiate with him, when Ranbir struck a cop again and all the policemen converged in on them. He got slapped and kicked in the middle, but he kept quiet and ran to the nearest wall and spread his arms above his head and stood there facing the wall, much like a seductive Urmila Matondkar from Rangeela or Madhuri Dixit in Tezaab, except there was only self-defense on the agenda instead of seduction. Once they pinned Ranbir down and put him behind bars and they took us into separate rooms behind the head constable's desk, he knew they were in no mood to listen. "Every police station has an old, much-respected constable. If you can get him onto your side, the rest of them will not lay a finger on you", he said, the wrinkles on his forehead growing deeper. In that room behind the desk, an old constable, about the age of his father, with greying hair and a scar that ran across his ear, had walked up to him and asked him where he was from. "Aap toh acche aadmi dikhte ho. Yeh kaise dost banaa rakhe hain aapne?" he asked. "Charas pee rakhi hai kya isne? Yeh lambe baal waala firangi charas bechta hai isko?"

He sat there speaking to the old constable, calling him Veerji, and offered him a pack of Shikhar. When the constablke had reached his hand out for it, Moni saw that he had only half of the little finger on his left hand left on him. "He definitely must have been involved in a few scuffles with petty criminals", he thought to himself, While  Ranbir was busy abusing everyone who passed by the lock-up he was in, and even abused a lady constable who was sitting there, I was sulking in the room because a constable had slapped me for trying to be reasonable, and Moni was making up all kinds of stories right there, ranging from how his grandfather was a childhood friend of the Hooda family, and how he was invited to the chief minister's sons wedding, but couldn't go for it, to how the Haryana Police was one of the best police units in India, comparing them to the corrupt UP Police and to the even more corrupt police force back home. By the end of it, he won the old constable over, as was apparent when the gypsy arrived to take us for the medical check-up, for we were ushered in, Moni walked out behind us, but the old constable yelled at him and sent him back into the room. As the Gypsy drove away, Moni considered the possibility of being manhandled severely, now that he was all by himself. The lady constable, whom Ranbir had called all sorts of names, walked up to him, red in the face, with so much anger that there were tears in her eyes, "Yeh dost the aapke?" He knew right then that he had to choose his words carefully. In a tone akin to that used by a class four student being confronted by the principal over a broken window pane in a classroom, he said "Nahin, yeh toh mere office mein kaam karte hain. Who lambe baal wala mera dost hai. Is jaanvar ko toh main jaanta bhi nahin hun." The lady was ready to strike him on the face, but hearing what he said, she calmed down and walked off. He sat there for nearly three hours after that. He once tried taking his cell phone from the table, but when the head constable ordered him to put it back, he quietly complied and sat in the room for a while.

After a while, the sub-inspector of the station arrived. A couple of local politicians happened to be there to witness the fag end of Ranbir's defiance, and they narrated the incident to the sub-inspector. The sub-inspector walked up to Moni and said with a smile on his face, "Mere thane me aake, mere police waale ko thappad maarke gaya hai woh. Main hota toh uske g**nd mein goli maar deta". The lady police joined in, saying that if she filed a report about the things he had said to her, he would be jailed for at least seven years. (They would have actually done that if Ranbir's wife hadn't come later in the evening with their 9 year-old son and pleaded with them for mercy). Moni's only POA all this while was to nod and agree with everything anyone in there said. Soon, they seemed to forget that he was present there, getting involved in a couple of other cases that were being reported. An hour or so after this, Moni picked up his phone again, and the constable didn't stop him this time. He went out and called three of his friends and told them to come to the police station with their lawyer if he didn't call them within an hour and a half. The inspector joined him outside and offered him a smoke, saying, "Yeh to aapki zubaan ne aapko bachaa liya aaj". He then spoke to the sub-inspector about several issues, ranging from the degeneration of the modern youth, to the POTA in Assam, and how dangerous the situation there was, and how many of the people he knew were languishing in prison for years without even a fair enquiry. Fifteen minutes later, the sub inspector asked him to take his belongings and leave. With this, Moni nodded his head in compliance, collected his empty wallet and his bag, and left the police station. On his way out, he stopped by at the tea stall at the gate and ordered a cup of tea and a double-egg bread-omelette. When he was done, he asked the chai wala to put it on the police station's tab, and waved at the sub inspector. The sub inspector waved back at him, and that was it. He had just walked out of a potential night in jail and turned it into a free breakfast buffet!

The jail was an hour's drive away from sector 56, where all this action took place. As we approached the driveway. it looked like we were heading into one of the top universities in the country, till we reached the huge iron gate guarded by cops with guns, the check-point as soon as you enter the gate, where they could make you strip naked and even probe your orifices if they wished to, or if the cops who got you there gave in a 'special word' about you. Thankfully, Ranbir had quietened down once he realised that he was inside the jail (I don't know if it was owing to his growing sobriety or if his better sense prevailed, but I was glad either way), and even when the constable he had been messing with throughout the day delivered a couple of well-aimed kicks on his backside, he took it in good spirit, and so the cops inside did not frisk us more than was necessary. Once this was done, they made us sweep the floor till they deemed it clean. There were some others who were doing this as well, and we found out later that some of them had been at it for more than two hours. We even got kicked on our buttocks a couple of times while doing this. Post this, we waited in a long corridor for them to make a record of us, watching many criminals being brought in and taken out - some bleeding, some limping, some with a look of complete resignation. I waited nervously for close to two hours before we were summoned and the formalities were completed. It was twilight and getting dark very quickly when we were eventually escorted for the medical examination, where our blood pressure levels, height and weight were measured and form that took note of our medical history, ailments, allergies, etc. was to be filled up, and the resident doctor okayed us to proceed. We were then moved to our respective wards, where Ranbir and I met the warden, a life-sentenced prisoner himself, with his salt-and-pepper hair, clad in a brown khadi kurta and a pair of jodhpuris. He was in there for having shot his brother-in-law over a property dispute. We discovered that he had already spent ten years in there, and had been appointed as the warden in return for his good behaviour. He was even allowed to leave the jail every now and then, when he went to meet his family over the weekend, and return to resume his duties on Monday. He had been appealing for a pardon in the Supreme Court for the last few years, and when he heard that I knew a certain magistrate in the Supreme Court in person (something Ranbir started announcing to everybody as soon as we entered the campus), he was extremely nice to us. The night was relatively uneventful, except for the greasy dal, the unbreakable rotis that had to be softened with saliva for them to be eaten, and the scary gossip doing the rounds in the room, amidst all of which we slept off, as a strange sense of loneliness crept in under the blankets, caressing, licking and wrapping itself around me, much like a flame or smoke, bringing about a perspective that a lifetime of education may not be able to bring. Those last few hours of consciousness drifted into stony silence, through a varied field of contemplation in that near-dark, moonlit room, as I closed my eyes and wondered what fate would fetch for us the following morning.

We were woken up at 6 o clock with a whistle and the sound of a gong. I don't remember if there was a place to bathe; maybe it was quite far away. Either way, I didn't bother to explore that option. Once we washed our faces and had been to the toilet, breakfast with similar levels of grease as the dinner from the previous night was served. However, before we could pick up the greasy plates from the night before and make a crazy attempt to wipe them clean, the warden whisked us into his room, where he had laid out three plates and asked us to sup with him. His food was much better in taste and hygeine and felt like haute cuisine in coparison. He instructed us to remain in the room post that, and we soon found out why. One by one, various groups of workers would come in and take the prisoners with them - some to break rocks, some to pluck weed, some to sweep the campus, etc. The strongest and fittest looking ones went first, followed by the feeble ones. It somehow reminded me of the camel fair in Pushkar. From the safety of the wardens room, we these parties go their respective ways, after which the warden took us with him to show us around the campus. This is when we realised that the ward we were kept in was for the petty criminals who had to spend less than two days in prison, or where the graver sinners were kept only for the first two days. Post this, across the huge play field where the prisoners came out to play all kinds of sports in the evening, they were taken to the main prison cell, which is where most of the disturbing action took place. We were, as we realised, just at the base camp, so to say, with a wonderful view of the Everest, and that was about as far as we wanted to go. He told us how he spent ten years of his life in there for just a spur-of-the-moment reaction, where he pulled out a gun and shot his brother-in-law three times. He said that a lot had changed in those ten years, and that he was not even the same person who pulled the trigger anymore. "Zindagi mein har cheez badi soch samajh ke karna. Ek galti zindagi chheen sakti hai, aur kabhi dubaara mauka bhi nahin deti", he said, with the voice and demeanor of a person humbled by time, by age, by an environment that could squeeze the childhood out of anyone. I imagined how it would feel to have to spend ten whole years in there, and I was almost glad that I had come in there, for it made me a whole lot more thankful to have all the blessings in life that we so take for granted and often abuse. Ten years without friends or family, where all you have for company is goons and hooligans, trapped within the four walls of this fortress, a prisoner of the state. I shook myself out of this reverie, shook the tears that had welled up in my eyes and thanked my stars that I was getting out of there soon. Yes, soon it was, for by evening that day, Ranbir's wife had found us, and so had my friends, and having hired a lawyer together, they bailed us out of that mess.

Maybe it was pure luck that had saved Moni out that day, but maybe there was something he had learned from experience, something he had done just right. "You were being an ass that day!" he said looking his bowl of pork, and then suddenly turned towards the waiter and asked him to get some fermented bamboo shoot from the kitchen. "You should have just shut up and agreed with whatever they said, but you went on about policemen and their responsibilities towards citizens and how they should not have slapped you because you hadn't done anything. There is basically just one rule with all policemen, particularly when you are in a police station - 'The police are always right!'. I had to learn it the hard way during my college days in Bombay." He seemed to go into a trance for a couple of minutes after that, as if he were reliving some of those experiences in his head, eyes wide open and gazing into the distance of a decade. He then picked up his bowl, emptied its remnants down his throat, and ordered a bowl of Thukpa to follow it up. "Olop paatla ku ri bi" he said to the little Naga waiter in Nagamese, a creole based on Assamese that is widely used in Nagaland, a state inhabited by several tribes that speak mutually unintelligible dialects. He looked at me and realised that I was eagerly awaiting his story, so he took out his handkerchief, wiped his moustache and his lips clean, and took me back in time - to his college years and his several encounters with the Mumbai Police. (to be continued...)

Tales of Moni - Chapter I

A night spent in jail can teach you a lot, put in perspective a lot of things you take for granted, and can make you be a lot more thankful for the smallest of blessings life has to offer in abundance each passing day. It can make a monk out of you just as easily as it can make a warrior out of you - the greasy plates that stay greasy no matter how much you scrub them without any soap or Scotch Brite, the mess of thalis from which you have to pick up your greasy piece of stainless steel without knowing who has used it before you, or what his medical history or even his current medical condition is, the dal that looks like it was cooked in grease, the rotis with an elasticity that test your deltoids, the bedbug-ridden blankets laid on next to another, slept on by numerous unwashed people before you, the hard, matressless floor beneath these dusty blankets, the thought of sleeping in a room where the average inhabitant has been to jail more times that you visited the college library, the dreadful stories you hear in the 'gossip' going around the room or the guy who's been there most often telling you ways to stab a person without getting more than 6 months of imprisonment, with his favourite takiyakalam being "g**nd kabhi mari hai? subah dholo phir hari bhari hai!" - yes, it can definitely at least begin to make a warrior out of you.

This brings us to the story of our hero, a warrior by birth - an Ahom Kshatriya. Kshatriyas are the warrior clan according to the Hindu Social Order prescribed by the Vedas and the Laws of Manu. These were the fighters of the community and were in charge of protecting the people of a society during war, or guarding the city during peace. They were thus supposed to be extremely brave people with a penchant for adventure. Our hero could easily fit into this description, although we will strip him of his warrior outfit and adorn him with a pair of jeans and a Tshirt, and a pair of floaters. His noble steed would be replaced by a Royal Enfield and the warrior-like physique could be replaced by a pot-belly and a roly-poly appearance, and when he laughed, his whole body would tremor - not like the ground did when a herd of elephants rampaged around the tea gardens of Assam, but more like jelly. We will discover more about our Ahom hero as our story progresses. Ahoms are the descendants of the ethnic Tai people who descended into the Brahmaputra Valley in AD 1228. The kingdom established by the Ahoms gave the Indian state of Assam its name. Our hero was thus one of them, born there and brought up in tea gardens across Assam, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and travelled widely across North-East India, with a knowledge of the region unparalleled amongst the people I've met. He had a passion for History and Geography, but like most confused Indian youth, he went on to major in something he had no affinity towards. We shall enquire into this a little later, but first, as all heroes must, ours too must have a name, so we shall give him one.

He was called Moni Barooah. "Moni means Pearl, and Barooah means a leader of 3000 men!", he would guffaw after a few bottles of beer, half choking and half squealing with a peculiar laugh that I haven't witnessed on any other person thus far. I first met Moni at my workplace, where he had applied to be a voice and accent trainer. This was when I used to work for IBM Daksh, a global BPO corporation. We used to train graduates with or without experience on neutralising their regional accent to be able to communicate with people across the world, and on basic customer service etiquette. There was a team of trainers that did this, and whenever a new trainer joined, they had to undergo a train the trainer (TTT) programme to learn the nuances of the job. So in walked Moni in one such batch (which I was conducting), an hour or so after the batch had begun, with a moustache and a balding head and a goofy smile, the warrior's muscles molten into pork-like fat owing to years of inaction and several tonnes of beer that had percolated into his bones. As he walked in and introduced himself, at first he appeared to be an extremely shy character with not much to say. We could hardly hear the words that were coming out of his mouth in his low pitched, muffled voice, but even then I knew from the spark in his eyes that he had lived many stories to tell. It took him a few days to open up, but once he did, there was no stopping him. He was all over the place, making people laugh till they cried, performing crazy antics in the activity sessions during the batch, and being grossly underprepared for each of his teachback sessions. He said he had nightmares about a personified Grammar coming over to him and examining him at gunpoint while he was asleep, asking him all sorts of questions.

"Aapne kabhi jail nahin dekha? Chalo ek baar zaroor dekhna. Wahan ki social life bhi badi alag hi hoti hai" were the words of a police constable ringing in my ear as we drove into the jail campus just outside Gurgaon. I had thrashed around all day like a Sitol caught in a net, trying to escape this episode, but eventually succumbed to the fate much like a panic-stricken deer that has been pierced in the foot by the hunter's arrow, or a victim of sodomy who has just realised the futility of resistance, closing their eyes to painfully await the end of the trauma. There I was standing in front of the Bhondsi Jail, about to spend the next 24 hours in there. I can't begin to talk about all the chemical imbalances my body was going through right then, and I'd rather not.

Several months had passed since the batch had graduated, and each of them had progressed to their respective processes, providing VASS (Voice, Accent and Soft Skills) support to the tele-agents on the floor, and I had moved on to training several more batches. Nearly a year later, we were out drinking on a Friday night - a few trainers and I, outside 444, one of our office buildings. After a few drinks, I called up Moni and he said that he would be free only at 3 AM. It had been a long time since we had met, and I was happy to be able to meet him that night. Little did I know of the adventures that would follow! We went and picked him up along with some more beer and came back to an isolated street near 444 and continued drinking. I was carrying my guitar that night for some reason, and hence we started singing, till 5 or 6 in the morning, stopping only to order paranthas from the redi next to the office. We were five of us - Akhil, Ranbir, Moni and I were trainers, and we were joined by a north eastern guy called Patrick from 444 as well. While Akhil left early, the rest of us continued for a while and then decided to leave. However, just as we were about to leave, I realised that I couldn't find my bike keys, and after some searching and some more contemplation, figured out that they must be in Akhil's car. We tried calling him, but he wouldn't answer. So Ranbir offered to take us to Akhil's house in his Maruti Alto with a Sylvester Stallone quote on his rear windscreen. All of us hopped in and after 20 minutes of what seemed like a roller-coaster ride, the four of us reached what Ranbir claimed was Akhil's apartment. Only, it turned out it wasn't.

An account of what followed must be preceeded by a brief description of Ranbir Chawla. Ranbir was a married man with a wife and a kid, very unhappy in his marrriage, had had an affair or two at work and been busted by his wife as well. He was a rugged guy with a stubbled face and a powerful voice which could sound like Amitabh Bachchan when he spoke in Hindi, or Sylvester Stallone when he spoke in English. His diction was very filmy, very angry-young-man-like, and when he was drunk, he could become quite a force to reckon with, as we found out that day. What started as an altercation with the guard of that locality escalated into an argument with a policeman the guard managed to summon, followed by four policeman, till finally a patrol van arrived and took Ranbir to the Sector 56 police station nearby. The other three of us did not know what to do, but we were sure that with his "Tum saalon ki aukaad hi kya hai, do kaudi ke vardi waale!" and "This is the khakhi shit that flows down the veins of our country!" and many other dialogues in both Hindi and English, he wasn't going to be treated too kindly at the police station. So we followed Ranbir into the station to try and reason with the police. Let me take a moment out here to tell everyone who's reading this. Please do not ever attempt this. Reasoning with cops, especially when you're drunk and your friend is behaving like the crassest ass-hole in town, and particularly if you have long hair, is not a good idea, as we soon found out.

I had to spend a night in the Bhondsi jail with Ranbir before some friends and his family came to bail us out. What happened with us is an entirely different story altogether, but the important point here is that only two of us went to jail that day - Ranbir, for being a total jerk, and I, as I later found out, for having long hair and a poney tail. The cops actually thought that Ranbir was on drugs and that I was the supplier who dealt those drugs to him. So much for perception management. Coming back to the story though, Patrick was probably the smartest of us, for he took one peek into the police station, and this roly poly Mizo guy from our office, who was grossly overweight at that time, ran with my laptop bag and my guitar on his back all the way to 444, which was at least 11 kms away from there. How he managed to do that is still something that cracks us up when we remember this episode. Moni, however, was inside the police station with me, and while I was being a stubborn principled prick about how the policemen should behave, and being slapped around for questioning their behaviour, Moni quietly sat down and waited for the situation to calm down. He offered some Khaini to one of the cops, and started speaking about the hometown, and how the Haryana Police was much better than the UP police or even the police back home. "Aap toh mere pita samaan hain sir. Aap maarenge toh bhi mein khushi se khaa lunga" is one of the lines I remember. It turned out that he sweet-talked his way out of the police station, and the cops even bought him breakfast and a cup of tea! All this while Ranbir and I spent the next four hours discovering the procedure to be sent to jail. That was also the day I was educated about the difference between a lock-up and a jail. Well, we got out the next day, after having experienced a night in  jail, which I'd actually wanted to for quite a while, though not for something as stupid as having long hair!

We met a lot of interesting characters in there - mostly petty criminals who were regulars, a couple of prisoners serving life sentences who were given the responsibility of prison wardens, an African guy who was arrested for buying and selling someone else's debit card, etc. We threw around the names of a couple of magistrates in the Supreme court that we knew of, and so we got special treatment in there. The life-sentenced warden was nice to us and didn't let us sleep with the regular criminals, but had a couple of mattresses laid out for us in his room. The funniest bit was that there was an India-Pakistan match on that day, which we watched in the tele in his room, while our cricket-crazy friends were looking for us, trying to trace us, hearing stories of Ranbir's dramatics at the police station, the medical check up centre (where Ranbir refused to have his blood checked till four cops pinned him down and injected a tranquiliser on his butt), and the district court (where Ranbir yelled out at the top of his voice that the judge was a 'sore loser'). One of my friends even got into trouble at work for not showing up, because he was busy searching for me. These friends had heard of the episode through Patrick, who had been smart enough to inform a few people that I had been arrested. Moni, however, was nowhere to be found for a few days, and it is only a week later that I met him to hear about what had transpired at the police station in our absence, and how he had managed to find his way out, and that too with a complimentary breakfast. (to be continued...)