THE FIFTH PEG OF OLD MONK
Everybody lives in denial. The enlightened live in a state of managed denial. At eight in the evening, every evening, Yishan Chatterjee sat down to choose the appropriate level ofengagement with reality.
He believed the inner weather can be controlled precisely. A shaman in the prairies could control the weather with incantations. Yishan did not have spells. His tools were Old Monk, coffee and exercise. Coffee and exercise were for things that could no longer be procrastinated away. Old Monk was for when he wanted to lose himself.
He was forever afraid. Of what, he did not know, nobody knew. Truth be told, he was afraid of everything. Professors scared him; his father did. There were girls, women, Mondays, the next day, the coming semester, the current semester, a phone call he had been delaying a week; there
was checking the balance on his bank account; there was the group over there whose norms he didn’t quite understand though the only thing that made them different was that they were in a different hall of residence. There were no smooth segues in Yishan’s life. Movement was slowed down by the rigor mortis of reflection.
Ergo, alcohol for Yishan was what the spider bite was to Mr. Parker. He sometimes chose coffee, but he mostly chose Old Monk.
He believed the fifth peg is when the mind acquired something of the nature of orbital velocity and became unmoored from Tuesdays and semesters. That evening Yishan elected to pour himself the fifth peg, a seemingly inconsequential act involving rich, red liquid and an
upper meniscus and a lower meniscus. But that pouring of the fifth peg would come to haunt him forever. Of course, Yishan did not know it then.
“Let’s get fully knocked out today”, said Bhaskar.
“Why today?”, asked Yishan from one of the two metal cots in the tiny 9X10’ room. “Why not today, it’s Thursday. We never really attend classes on Fridays”, said Mithilesh.
Mithilesh was standing between the beds, panting. There were prayer flags of sweat on his forehead from cranking out 50 push-ups between the cots minutes before. It was three more than his previous best.
Alas, that wasn’t enough.
Yishan had had two more, 52 in two minutes. Questions were raised about his form, though. As Mithilesh and Yishan were dipping their chest four inches below parallel for every repetition, Bhaskar had kept a strict vigil for violations of push-up norms.
He delivered the verdict. Yishan had won.
At an indeterminate point in the evolutionary journey of higher primates, direct phallic comparisons became unseemly. The need for proxies rich in semiotics arose. Grandiose structures – colosseums and minarets, civilization, and push-up contests followed.
It was Thursday afternoon, four past noon. The push-up contest was the last item on the boys’ list of things to do during the day. They now had to invent a new item or move to the list of things to while away the night.
The entries on the list read like activities. But it merely read like that. It was a resemblance of form, not function. Every entry, allegedly an activity, had a name, a venue and an intoxicant but did little more than alter the backdrop to the eternal, invariant theme - banter.
Push-ups contests were full of insults and laughs. Blackout whiskey shot binges were insults and laughs. Table tennis matches. Discourses on classic rock, 90s Bollywood, Krautrock, and the 90s Seattle scene. So were long walks. But the activities and intoxicants were necessary. No man cannot say to another that the latter’s company is pleasurable.
In the tyranny of masculinity men run themselves, no man can meet another man without The Excuse. The excuse could be a single stick of cigarette. The cigarette would be shared more out of convention than need. Hurried puffs, not more than ten frenzied drags each.
It just had to be a cigarette. An admission of a connection between hearts and minds wasn’t acceptable. The boys did not always talk though. Sometimes it was simply ennui. Their life was a thick,
splashy blob of nothing.
Yishan said, “Next time we should do the dand baithak.’”
He proceeded to demonstrate a few repetitions of the perfect dand baithak, with all the coiling and uncoiling of the feline.
Breathing heavy, he said, “The dand baithak is better, much better.”
Mithilesh said, “In what way, are they better for lower pectorals?”
“No.”
Bhaskar asked, “Then, the shape of the chest?”
Yishan said, “No, the movement has more parts, more stages, so you can feel it more. The standard push-up is just up and down, like a spring toy, like an automation; there aren’t enough stages and transitions to feel the exercise. You know, you need that… sort of milestones. Like when we smoke up…when we get stoned… there are drags and joints.
That’s punctuation. So, there are stages and transitions, so we can better understand the Path to getting high.”
Mithilesh looked at Bhaskar, who looked back, and then both men proceed to look at Yishan.
Bewildered stares, deliberate, purposeful, and long.
Mithilesh said, “Is this one more of your theories, a philosophy of exercise? What else, do you have a philosophy of sex?”
Yishan said, “Matter of fact, yes. Why do you think oral works better? There is control, Variation, an exchange of feedback through words and eye contact; it’s more deliberate. The tongue is more dexterous. It’s the change of pace and mode that makes oral more pleasurable.”
Mithilesh and Bhaskar let out a collective sigh.
Mithilesh said, “Do you think Maradona had a philosophy of football when he dribbled past those six English players?”
Yishan, “Oh!, If we were born just a few years earlier, we could have seen that match live.”
Bhaskar, “Did Doordarshan telecast the Mexico World Cup? Do you think Maradona could
have dribbled past those six English players if he had a philosophy of football?”
Mithilesh, “OK, back to alcohol. What’s our situation?”
Yishan said, “There is a problem. We have no money.”
Bhaskar, “Let’s raise some.”
Yishan, “I have a 50 rupee note that mom had given me last semester – but nothing else.”
Mithilesh said, “I got 20, I think.”
Millionaires with wealth tied to public stocks (and there were many such millionaires among NITI, Hijli alumni ranks), know their net worth precisely. One imagines they know them to the quarter, to Friday’s market close, to the minute, to the nearest tick. So do paupers: the
inventory of coins in the tin box, a twenty-rupee note under the mattress, two ten-rupee notes in the front pocket of the denim that hasn’t seen a wash in years, and a five-rupee note in the wallet. It’s those in between who are muddled.
Yishan said, “50 plus 20 won’t even get us Old Monk.”
Mithilesh said, “Can we borrow some?”
Yishan said “From whom? The only idiots left who will give us credit are the cigarette-waalas
and the chai-wallahs.”
Bhaskar laughed and lit up a Wills Navy Cut, his sixth cigarette of the day.
Mithilesh said, “Second.”
The three friends, like most smokers of NITI, Hijli, played the game of claiming turns after a cigarette was lit. The first to say “second” got the second puff, and so on. Good cigarettes were short. And many smoked. It was said the life affirming nature of nicotine was bestsavored in the first few puffs. Life in the university was about small things, each small thing made large with an ancient lore.
Yishan said, “Ok, third.”
“What do we do about drinking?”, said Bhaskar.
Mithilesh, “How many rooms do we have?”
Yishan, “250. Why do you ask?”
Mithilesh, “Let’s borrow five rupees from every Pterodactyl Hall resident. No more. Nobody’s
going to say no to five rupees. We get to drink. Tomorrow, everybody says we are geniuses.”
The cigarette was passed, before Bhaskar was through with his turn, to Mithilesh. Genius cannot be allowed to go unacknowledged.
The boys divided the hostel into equal-sized rectangles. While the scheme’s rationale ppealed to intuition (nobody would say no to five rupees), the timing wasn’t opportune. It was mid-afternoon. Fifty percent of the residents would be in class. Ten percent in siesta. Some would be in stupor, their minds seeking lullabies and siren calls not of this world.
But the Old Monk beckoned. The boys sauntered off in three directions.
The hall of residence was made of parallel blocks of buildings spread over – if not an entire football field, certain a monster’s bite off a football field.
Each block was three floors high and 25-single rooms long. The buildings were yellowish for the most part, yellow in their better days, and covered in large patches of moss. In the monsoons, snails climbed up the walls, sometimes as high as the second floor, each leaving
a perfect straight-line trail of slime. Between every two blocks there was some shrubbery at the peripheries, much wild grass everywhere, and at the center—a bit of manicured grass and football goal posts, or a cricket pitch. Pterodactyl Hall, one of the six halls of residence for male undergraduates of NITI, Hijli, was home to 173 trees. The boys knew this number, to the precise 173, not to the nearest five or zero. All incoming residents had to memorize such trivia as part of the induction ritual.
Every block had an alphabet for a name. Bhaskar’s assignment was Block D.
…
Bhaskar stopped a boy passing by - someone he had a sparse recollection of knowing. The boy was neighbor to the boyfriend of the campus rock chick who smoked cigarillos bought cheap from Park Street, Calcutta with the abandon of a true bohemian. Beyond that, he
didn’t know him at all. But it was NITI, Hijli. The line separating the stranger from a lifelong friend was entirely chance, a passing remark, a joint passed, trifling change borrowed.
He asked, “Hey man, got five rupees?”
The boy smiled, picked a five rupee-coin off the sole remaining fold of what was once a wallet, and handed over the money.
To look the part Bhaskar cultivated a scurrying, purposeful walk, an impersonation of one running an errand. Most prospects did not get more than a few minutes of Bhaskar’s time. A few rooms had nobody this time of the day, but over a wing with 14 rooms he would score
five, totaling the grand sum of twenty-five rupees. Not a bad heist for ten minutes of work. With friends and acquaintances some talk was unavoidable. He had to remind himself of the mission. Score money. Always be moving.
Bhaskar spotted a boy he didn’t know at all, someone who could have been a best friend if he was three and not five minutes late to the first lecture years ago, and had entered the room from Gate C and not H. “Hi, got five rupees?”
He said, “Yes, and how’s your Angrez gang?”
Bhaskar said “All right, and you are no less of an Angrez, ha?”
Both smiled.
Bhaskar, Mithilesh, and Yishan were from schools named after dead Catholic saints. OrJesuit saints. The boys did what was rare in those parts—speak English in conversation. Itwasn’t just that. Theirs was a kind of English where the words were borne of thoughts in thesame language.
The English language was an ocean. The vast azure waters brought in flotsams of ideas from the world. Some had the gravitas of driftwood. Stories of the rise and fall of civilizations. Novels from a soot-covered London. A story set in the moors. A burnt down city, a gin-soaked people. Sometimes the seas brought in flotsam of green leaves on tender branches. New ideas about music. Elvis, then the Beatles, all that classic rock…the unfortunate lapse into disco…the Seattle alternative scene. The Pterodactyl Hall had a music room with shelves full of vinyl LPs. They were decades old, rarely played at the time of the three boys. Each record bore witness to a NITI, Hijli alumnus’ journey – by rail to Howrah and then to Free School Street, Calcutta, a negotiation,
some fumbling with notes and coins, and the return with the loot.
The English language was good for the most part. But the seas also brought in the plastic bottles of faraway lands and myriad other junk.
NITI, Hijli had addictions. The addictions made their case, seduced through stories. Tales of men and women in Grateful Dead concerts inhabiting a commune of minds. This wouldn’t have happened without English.
At the entrance of the right wing of the first floor of Block D, Bhaskar ran into a group known as the Floydians, who insisted Pink Floyd was more than a band, and who claimed to have known about Pink Floyd all their lives. Night after night in their smoke-filled rooms they stared into PC monitors, seeing and hearing things in 24-minute songs that neither Roger nor David did, feeling the laser, smelling the guitar riffs, sensing the drumbeats pound the back of their neck.
One of the group’s Beta males was rolling a cigarette, and the others were clustered around the group’s unquestioned Alpha some distance away.
Bhaskar said, “What’s up, what’s new with the Doors and Floyd?”
Beta male said, “The last six months I have been tripping on other stuff.”
Bhaskar said, “Such as?”
Beta male said, “Don’t know if you will like it. You might not have heard of them.”
Bhaskar said, “Try me.”
Beta male said, “There is a band called Can. You are a Nirvana guy, if I remember?”
Bhaskar said, “Isnt that a German band with a Japanese vocalist? I love Mother Sky.
Krautrock is what the Gods played.”
There was pause, and a tiny reshuffling of the leader board among young men in that corner of the universe. Music snobbery – that’s what early adulthood is made of.
Beta male said, “Yes, Mother Sky is lovely. What is Mother Sky, by the way?”
Bhaskar said, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe those German rockers meant there is always a
canopy over us.”
The Beta said, “What is this canopy?”
Bhaskar said, “It’s Krautrock, who knows. Maybe we together build the canopy we live under, all the words, all the music.”
A stare, of the kind that used to happen before ritualized duels.
Bhaskar said, “How is everything else? Do you have 5 rupees by the way?”
Beta male said, “Here, take.”
Beta male waved at everybody and soon Bhaskar was inside the cluster around the Alpha.
He explained the purpose of his visit. “I am out of money, loan me five bucks.”
There was laughter. Alpha Male smiled the practiced, faint, indulgent smile of the elderly statesman. Boys dug into their pockets and handed Bhaskar crumpled notes, even some
coins. Alpha Male was lost in his thoughts and walked away. A few in the cluster hobbled along.
Bhaskar asked, “What’s up with him?”
Beta male 2 said, “He has been chatting with an American lady. She is a Wiccan priestess and a member of the Triple 9 society.”
Bhaskar said, “Ah. So, is he graduating this year?”
Several Beta males laughed. It had a touch of pride.
Beta male 3 said, “He doesn’t care.”
Beta male 4 said, “He came back from a mid-semester paper in 30 minutes.”
Bhaskar said, “Why?”
Beta male 1 was incredulous that the import of his words had not been conveyed.
He said, “Because he had to talk to that girl?”
Beta male 3 said, “His IQ cannot be less than 200. What is a mid-semester paper for such a man?”
It was said with the sincerity of the believer. The bizarre is the farce. Tragedy is when the bizarre recedes and stops registering as such. Bhaskar thanked the group and left with a slow, inelegant almost jog.
YISHAN MEETS THE DARKENED-WINDOW GUY
Yishan’s last visit to room C-213 was a semester ago. The room had changed in these months. His host had not, which perturbed more than it reassured.
Yishan remembered the room as a standard NITI, Hijli room with a tin cot, a tin table, and little else besides.
An Indian hostel room is what happens when you start with Japanese minimalism. You then strip the minimalism of all grace and tranquility. To what remains you add Soviet austerity.. You take the progeny and let it commingle with South Asian material impoverishment. An Indian hostel room follows. You briefly consider adding a swastika, the Vedic and not the antisemitic. Or a rose motif. Or a single stroke of vermillion to light up the life of the young resident. But you don’t. It is an Indian hostel room. The cot and the table still occupied their usual spots. The bong and the pipe were where it had always been, but the window had changed. Months ago, the three-by-three window framed a small football ground. It was now covered in black paper. The coverage was corner to corner, and not a single pinprick of the sun came
in. It was afternoon and room C-213 in Pterodactyl Hall had no natural light. Instead, it was lit by a single red bulb. The host explained sunlight was kept at bay to help him ‘think’. Yishan declined to do him the courtesy of asking the question. The wise do not ask questions whose answers could set off a stream of thoughts that might be transcribed into a holy book in a future epoch -or captured in a resident psychiatrist’s scribbles in ten years. The host’s fixations had been discussed before. They ranged from Godel to the history of the abacus, but seldom had a connection with university coursework.
Mr. Red Light volunteered:
“French history. I have been studying French History.”
That triggered something within Yishan. The devil urged him to stay put and talk French history until the Sun collapsed into a supernova or the Old Monk ran out. The angel perched on the other shoulder exhorted him to flee.
Mr. Red Light had been ruminating on Camus’ debt to Kafka for twice the time it takes the average engineering student to graduate. Yishan collected his Rs. 5, mumbled a goodbye, and took off at a pace closer to a trot than his usual waddle.
MITHILESH AND THE MEN OF MUSCLE
Yishan, Mithilesh, and Bhaskar were known as the three eccentrics who trained with barbells and spoke a dialect of English that died out everywhere but lived on as an anachronism in a few quaint Indian towns across which the Raj curiously still cast a long shadow.
They were not the only ones who trained with Olympic barbells and 45-lb plates though. Scattered across the 1,600-acre campus were young boys who lifted weights. They spoke about exercise techniques and Nautilus machines, of amino acid profiles of chicken and fish, and the protein content of arhar and moong. They had funny handshakes and pleasantries, and strange habits.
One gentleman with 16-inch biceps signed off emails with ‘strength and honor’. Another with similar musculature wriggled out of small talk with a ‘The Iron Cave calls me’.
The group was pre-ironic.
Mithilesh’s collection drive for alcohol led him to the most extreme of these bodybuilders.
Nine boys with oversized rear deltoids and pectorals had organized themselves into a wing reserved for the committed mesomorph.
Unlike the rest of the campus, here the role of Old Monk in shaping India’s youth was not acknowledged. A few allowed that rum was useful as a muscle relaxant after a hard day’s work with iron. The rest believed the blasphemy that all alcohol was evil.
Mithilesh fist-bumped and explained his visit. There were high fives, and some friendly but hard punches on Mithilesh’s shoulders. He collected a grand total of 45 rupees from the nine
gentlemen present. The matter would have ended if it were not for one Mr. Pisharody, who waddled in the exact minute Mithilesh was leaving.
Mr. Pisharody was fifteen years older than the oldest university student and had not yet graduated. Opinion was divided on what kept him in a campus that was nobody’s idea of a pleasant layover.
The pro-Pisharody faction hailed him as a hero. Allegedly, he had exposed administrative corruption once. He has since faced the full brunt of the establishment’s retribution. Less charitable folks dismissed such apocrypha and spoke about Pisharody’s laziness. The
bearded, portly gentleman with an unconventional approach to personal hygiene had on many occasions, preferred an extra hour of sleep to writing a term paper. One look at Mr. Pisharody would render improbable the idea the man ever lifted a pound.
The body was imprecise, amorphous.
He had little to do with musclemen as a group. However, he stepped out of his room once a week. And these weekly perambulations involved passing by the wing of the bodybuilders.
Mr. Pisharody always made small talk. Today he inquired about the reason for Mithilesh’s visit. After a chuckle and pat on the younger boys’ back he made twice the requested INR 5 loan. As a parting shot, Mr. Pisharody asked the boys to flex. When they did, squeezing so many biceps into hilarious little ice-cream scoops, the old man observed the phalanx of muscled specimens with faux wonderment.
He asked, “All that lifting makes you excellent livestock among cannibals, but what does it accomplish in this world?”
Mithilesh said, “Actually sir, animals reared for meat are not allowed to go muscular. The steak gets too hard. In fact, people like us will not make good livestock for cannibals. Too low. In fact, eating only meat like the kind I have will lead to what explorers used to call ‘rabbit starvation.’”
Bewilderment.
Mithilesh allowed his audience to recover from the gratuitous bit of wisdom, and retreated,profusely thanking the group that helped him raise a total of Rs. 65.
A
s he headed back to base camp, Mithilesh walked past a room playing Led Zepplin’s The Immigrant Song, and then down a wing where the green and gold Winamp spewed into the ether Knopfler’s assurance that Harry was doing all right, and then…and then, he stopped to
read graffiti he hadn’t noticed before.
The words on the wall said:
“It isn’t chess. Life is Calvinball.”
He was 21. It's a special age. Mithilesh walked past a boy in the canteen poring over a text on computational fluid dynamics. As he elected not to exchange pleasantries, Mithileshsquashed an unfolding universe where the boy and he would work on a dissertation together
in a college town in America. Once in his room, he dismissed a Yahoo! Messenger window full of exhortations of love; he swatted away the unfurling universe where the lady and him were arguing over wedding dates at Purple Haze, Bangalore.
But Mithilesh was 21. He didn’t know any of that. He was happy about the afternoon’s heist and the crumpled notes in his pocket. He pulled out a Classic Milds from a secret stash. Classics, of the Regular, Milds, and Ultra Milds variety were all expensive, reserved for special occasions.. He took a long drag. Nothing, nothing at all was better than Nicotine. Mithilesh could feel the waves of pleasure hit the neurons, his being, the homunculus exploding in glee, something in him that was grateful for the sun, the stars, and the quarrelling strays ten feet away.
NITI, Hijli was made of unremarkable buildings and remarkable people. For fifty years, men and women had lived through the late teens and early twenties in the 1,600 acres, infusing rooms, lecture halls, quiet corners of the terrace, banyan trees, tea shops with little more
than concrete slabs for seats - with stories.
A room on the ground floor of the Sauropod Hall of Residence had seen murder. A room in the Pterodactyl Hall was haunted. The ghost didn’t inhabit the room without reason. The former resident, an electrical engineering student, had killed himself.
In this corner of the world, suicide was accepted as a thing that happened. You murmured a prayer for the departed and lit up another cigarette. What made this self-annihilation
noteworthy was that the resident believed an apocalyptic event was around the corner. A comet would give Jupiter the miss, venture into the vicinity of the earth and get pulled in, causing fire and brimstone – rapture, and the end of days. Avoiding a redux of the event that
killed the dinosaurs would require human sacrifice. The resident, the day after a physics lab viva and a day before a C programming submission was due, did what we had to do. There were more. The buildings could not have arches, or gargoyles, or the gravitas of giant
pillars. Budgets. Grants. Committees. Professors. But they could have stories.
A spot on the terrace of the institute’s main building had seen an orgy at the time of the college festival. None of the participants – predictably – were from NITI, Hijli. Maybe there was indeed such a woman, and her five men. Maybe there wasn’t. The tiniest grain of plausibility, years of mythmaking, and a shrine on the terrace was born.
There was the swimming pool made by hand, in the 60s, a communal project led by students back when the college was small enough to be loved. Water polo matches were fierce. Boys swam underwater, and grabbed testicles, soft, vulnerable, non-metaphorical testicles to foil
the opponent’s moves. The pool, 50 centimeters short of the regulation Olympic size, had seen Mark Spitz-sized medal hauls. There were rumours of drowning attempts.
There was the Velociraptor Hall where war once raged between two factions. Ten cracked skulls on each side. A dozen careers maimed. Three deaths averted. Flying bricks, swinging hockey sticks, whirling cycle chains, a late March night of bloodletting, stains on the road
outside the morning after.
The disciplinary committee inquisition followed. One left NITI, Hijli, never to be found. For years, fellow inquisition survivors looked for the man deep inside Web forums, comment by comment. Inquiries were made in campus tea stalls across the country, without luck.
Decades later, the man was rumoured to be lurking on the peripheries of campus- a heavy, stooped, bearded, dreadlocked figure. There were reported sightings, but no definitive identification was ever made.
Then there were the love stories.
There was a tree outside the Parasaurolophus Hall of Residence (for female undergraduates) auspicious for lovers to meet under. Boys and girls, bodies driven mad by the toxins of early adulthood in their veins, explored every inch of the institute building’s terrace, even as they explored each other’s bodies – finding the perfect footrest, the ledge
that was just the right height, the perfect wall to rest delicate flesh against. Through years,decades…vows were made, vows were broken, the preface to families, dynasties, corporate empires written. Every pair on the terrace made love amidst the ghost of all lovers past.
In that small, small world where the sky sunk low, the sun scorched the earth through the day, the evening brought rains with metronomic precision, all that breathed were in the same pin code, swimming in the same swirl of words - some couldn’t get out.
Those years – 18 to 22. They weigh heavy.
One met former students who should have been long gone walking around like spirits entombed in flesh, empty of pocket, desirous of conversation and free cigarettes. Some of the spirits were said to be custodians of treasures, in the form of software patents or
software stocks. A gentleman with grey sideburns was found seated on a concrete slab, accepting offers of Wills Navy Cut from boys half his age with glee, speaking of conjectures from math history and the technological utopia just around the corner.
If someone in that imperial court got a tad impudent, the old man with sideburns, from histhrone that was the concrete slab on the ground, would say,
“Remember, you are talking to a CEO.”
NITI, Hijli was made of diverse genres. Ghosts. Romance. War history. Revisionist history. A library of people. Seated on a salvaged concrete slab inches from the ground, sipping watery, sugary tea a man would want for nothing. His mind was fed, even if the flesh was wanting.
A DANGEROUS IDEA IS BORN
Old Monk was more than a distraction at NITI, Hijli. It was the elixir that turned stray thought into action. The impossible, after a full bottle, became merely implausible. Whatever lurked in the sub-conscious as a proto thought could coalesce into a fully realized conscious
thought. What was merely thought could be said, what was merely said by the gadfly in the corner of the room could be said by all……and what was said could be done.
The boys were on the fourth-floor terrace. The Monk and the glasses were on the terrace wall. It was dark at one in the morning. The skyline of the tiny university town of Hijli had few dots of light—it was all dark. There was just an industrial gases plant sweeping across a 30-
degree arc of the horizon. The rest of the horizon had the kind of faint and shimmering light one sees through the Side Lower window of a moving train.
The first three pegs saw little conversation. Mithilesh broke the silence.
He said, “I got to get a teaching job. Papa’s business isn’t doing well. How about Bhubaneswar?”
Yishan said, “My Calcutta coaching last year wasn’t good. Yes, we could try Bhubaneswar.”
Bhaskar said, “Coaching will get us money to survive. But what do we tell our parents?”
Every year the three friends failed at least one paper each. The boys would then spend the summer on campus taking what was called 'supplementary papers’, while the rest of their NITI, Hijli brethren vacationed at home. In the cruelest months of May and June, the campus was a ghost town, with the usual haunts shuttered, and nothing but manic squirrels and undead professors with 50-inch waists for company. The boys couldn’t possibly confess toparents about their inability to clear routine four-credit undergraduate courses and ask for
money for board and lodging. Therefore, they had to make money somehow.All three, year after year, tripped on a subject each. It wasn’t a pact. It wasn’t a code of theCosa Nostra. Just an instance of one soldier’s retreat legitimizing – a little bit - everybodyelse’s.
Mithilesh said, “Tell them you are doing a paid project for the Indian Navy.”
Everybody laughed. The reference was to one of Yishan’s disastrous internships, which was – at least nominally – a project for the Indian defense forces. Like much else in his young
life, the project started with promise, but was not seen through the end.
Yishan said, “Parents are parents, they are not morons. If I lose a year…”
By then, Mithilesh was making the fifth peg for everybody. He lowered his eyes to check the lower and upper meniscus and looked at the brighter arc of the horizon through the Old Monk and the thick glass. The lights from the industrial gases plant melted into the liquid,
creating giant blobs of orange in the sugary red. Mithilesh smiled. After toasting to Jane and Bhaskar, he said,
“But coaching is after the exams. Let’s cycle to Digha on 5th April anyway.”
The three boys stood against the wall, Old Monk in hand. They couldn’t be weak in each other’s presence. There was the performance of vulnerability, like a long soliloquy on life’s
absurdity. There was stoicism, or its pretense, which is the same thing. But there were no tears. Their friendship was one-upmanship, comprising games physical and cerebral, games of verbal dexterity and rock music scholarship. A man cannot be human in the company of
other men. He can only be a man.
The boys looked somewhat alike too. All three were about 5’10, mildly buff in the manner of sinewy young men who work hard at building muscle, and fair complexioned. Mithilesh and Bhaskar were classically good looking. Their headshots amenable to quick charcoal
sketches, straight lines only. If Stan Lee made an Indian superhero, he’d look like either Mithilesh or Bhaskar. It’d be Bhaskar if Stan Lee happened to be upbeat and felt the world
was better served by a superhero with a smile and not a snarl. Yishan looked biracial; a trifle oriental. He had a grandmother from Tripura.
The boys respected each other, for all the wrong reasons.
Yishan liked that Mithilesh kept fear at bay and was the first to punch. Mithilesh liked Bhaskar because he was the first to say yes – to whatever; it just had to make a sharp break from the present. Bhaskar liked Yishan because he could spin a story that explained why
Mithilesh punched and why punching was the way, and why a clean break from the present had to be made. Yishan liked the way Mithilesh could light a cigarette in the middle of astorm. Bhaskar liked the way Yishan was always playing air drums, never air guitar, andsaying mad things.
Bhaskar would ask.
“Why do you play air drums?”
“Drums are crazy. Drums are the only way you can create beauty out of violence, like say murder by fencing, maybe with a samurai sword, a clean cut, with a marvel of metallurgy.”
“Murder is beautiful?”
Yishan said, “Yes, it could be.”
The three were always together. Sometimes, for an hour nobody would say a word as a playlist worked its way through the songs, one Winamp line at a time. The lull would be broken by:
“Can you change the song? Maybe a Nusrat this time.”
There was no Yishan that loved Nusrat before he met Mithilesh. There was no Bhaskar that knew German bands from the 70s before he met Yishan. In fact, there couldn’t ever be an exact Mithilesh, or Yishan, or Bhaskar outside of the group. They – the playlists, books, words, the distinct ways of lighting up a cigarette - were fictions that didn’t exist before thetrio met.
The boys authored each other.
Mithilesh said again, “Let’s cycle to Digha on 5th April. The exams can wait.”
Yishan smiled.
“Why is madness good?”
Bhaskar said, “Because it’s pure.”