Bappa

It was the eve of the Cost Accountancy entrance exam. The paper was GK, and a shell shocked B was sitting with an open quiz book on his lap, his mouth slack, rounded eyes staring vacantly into space. He had just discovered that Indira Gandhi wasn't the daughter of the Mahatma!

There are a zillion stories about B but till date I haven’t had the courage to write about them. Some won’t pass the censor board, some will lose their flavor in translation and some are so unbelievable that no one would believe them. But I would make an attempt anyway, else these stories would get lost in the damp corridors of my alcohol soaked brain.

The time was 1988 to 1992. I had met B when he joined Xavier's in class 11 and we somehow hit it off immediately. Bh and Bu were his pada friends, and soon the four of us became inseparable. And B was the star of the show. He was the original eccentric who used to perform antics that used to leave us spellbound. At a time when our sexual experiences were limited to having fantasies about the middle aged neighborhood ‘kakima’, B was going through relationships like he was born in the free-loving swinging 60-s, picking and dropping gorgeous girls at the drop of a hat, selling his cycle to assist a girlfriend through an abortion, ‘accidentally’ getting into a physical relationship with a girl he had brought home to teach her yoga, carrying a nan-chaku to his tuition class to ward off rival suitors and so on and on. The list was endless and to us he was absolutely larger than life.

Those years were probably the best of our lives. We were so damn content with each others’ companies, least caring about the rest of the world, cocooned in our absolute belief that we would be together forever, and that life would go on just like that, no worries, no ambitions, no plans, just the fact that we would meet again the next day and the next and the next.

Bh got married and broke off all contact. B is in the US and he doesn’t take a step before consulting his wife. Me and Bu are carrying on, wistfully remembering those days whenever we get together and wondering why we ever grew up and grew apart.

PS: Bu, I really tried to write about the cassette library, the confrontations with Kaku, the walking with his underwear locked around his knees, his conversations with Bh...its impossible. Either I am not a good enough writer, or B is too large to be captured on the pages of a blog.