Life In A Non Metro

The movie Queen and this ad reminds me a lot of 2000 and Kota. And let’s face it Queen is no Sholay but an IMDB rating of 9 is due to us finding her character very endearing because we all identify with her. All this might seems laughable or cringe worthy now but back then it was the life. Going out with friends meant eating Kachori in one of the famous shops, everybody had a teri wali, which meant one girl who we have never spoken to once in a life but we could recite her phone number, house number, Scooty number and tuition timings; Hero Puch was a good way of travelling but the real cool guys had a Hero Honda Splendor; everybody wanted to have a Sachin Stance or Glenn McGrath’s run up and action but all this had to stop before dad got back home; Letters to Penthouse was a Bible; and finally though everybody said they wanted to get into IIT / AIMS but we all secretly hoped that our college had girls in skirts dancing in the basketball court.

 

 

 

 

EAT

Every town has a ‘best’ shop for everything. You want to eat Samosa? the best ‘Samosa’ is made by Ratlam Sweet Shop. Kulfi? The best Kulfi is of Shrinath, or the push cart which used to come in front of your house ringing a bell selling Matka Kulfi. Kabab?  Ahmed has the best kakori kabab. We did not have restaurants specializing in any cuisine; most restaurants sold Masala Dosa, Chowmein and Dal Makhani, they were only differentiated with what they had the best of. Ambience be damned. I don’t think any of us knew what it meant back then back there, only whether it was a ‘Family Restaurant’ or not. Having a bar in a restaurant was unimaginable and people who had booze outside were either denied entry or given the stink-eye by every table in the restaurant, though most alcohol aficionados either went to a ‘Pack and carry’ place and had their food in the car or went to some dhaba outside of town. And having knowledge of what is best where is today’s equivalent of having a mobile phone, dialogues like “Ye koi Malai Kofta hai? Mere saath chalo aap ko main aapko Ambar Restaurant (pronounced as Rest o rent) ka malai kofta khilata huun” were quite common.

But most of our life was spent on the small road side places which specialized in small meals. Those were the pick-me-up or ‘Har choti khushi ka celebration’ places. Flunked the last test? Go dig in the Hot Pyaaz kee kachori at Jodhpur Namkeens and the pain lessened a lot. Aced the test? Let’s have a pineapple pastry at Bakewell. Got your pocket money? Let’s go Shiv Bakery to have patties. Distances were less, time was ample (Sigh!) 

Of course most of the real food came from the vegetable vendor’s push cart. ‘Aaaloooooo, tamaaaatar’ cry at the top of their voice were their CRM strategy and I actually used to wonder if they went to some sabjiwaala school, because the volume they maintained throughout the afternoon did not look humanly possible and every sabjiwaala uncannily sounded like the other. Then the ladies of the came out in the battlefield or rather that’s what they thought it was. Every vegetable was sniffed, scratched, analysed from every angle and sometime even cut to see if the claim was genuine. After that was settled the second battle was started of bargaining for the prices; there was no information asymmetry in this market, the women knew the current prices of vegetable and fruit in every mandi in town. I tried to fake this by asking every vegetable vendor “Bhaiya ye kaise diya” whether he said 8 or 18 made actually no difference to me I will buy whatever was asked by Mom at whatever price he or she was selling it. And the final battle was the Nimbu Mirchi battle, nobody bought Nimbu or Mirchi or Dhaniya it just came complimentary with the other vegetables you had bought.

PRAY

I don’t think we were more religious than sixteen year olds anywhere is the world are but we did pray very had sometimes :– 

Before an exam – Well we were students, exams and results mattered. And of course the bigger reason was in the exam time going to the temple was the only outing allowed on those days, so went to the temple to pray. There was one near my house which most of us preferred, because it was near my house, and we could play cricket in my driveway, also that temple had a pond where we could play skipping stones or temples also offered, how do I put it …. Let’s just say other kind of darshan as well.

Smoking a cigarette in a back alley – That was our rebellion. Our badge that we are not a kid anymore. The access card to the bad boys association. And the test every Childe had to give, it went like this – The big boy moved the cigarette to you, filter first and said “Piyega kya?” you could chicken out here and say “main cigarette nahi peeta” and get the disapproving ‘this guy is a still child’ look or you could take the cigarette upping you ante; but to cash in your chips you had to inhale the smoke and puff it out without coughing; if you could do that then that was your knighthood, otherwise what you got was a resounding laugh from everybody and the dialogue “Ye baccho kee cheez nahi hai bacche“ and the tag of ‘wanna-be’ for your whole life. But these tough guys were scared shitless when their neighbour uncle’s scooter passed through this alley and they prayed on to every god there is that either the uncle didn’t see them or won’t report it to their parents. What they did not know that their mothers already knew they smoked; not in spite of the supari and mint they chewed but because of it.

Porn – I remember one teacher telling me that in her hostel they had hollowed out a wall in the common toilet to serve as a library, that is where they stored their Mills & Boons. Being an all-girls college in the middle of nowhere (Laxmangarh) this is what they sustained themselves on. And the book store which used to import the Mills & Boons was near a temple, the risky task of smuggling the book was left to the final year students and all the girls took the book first, then prayed in the temple for not getting caught and then went to the hostel. I found this whole action plan very familiar, we also did pray very hard whenever we were smuggling Mastram in the school or the ever popular worth-shedding-blood-over ‘Letters to Penthouse’ and dreamed of going to America where everybody’s wife was blond, 34D and a stunner; and whenever your car had a puncture in the middle of nowhere she was more interested in having a tumble (thrice) in the empty cabin nearby (which always used to be there) rather than nagging you to death that she had reminded of getting the spare tyre repaired two weeks before.

But these were the pursuits of lesser men, the Big Kahunas dealt in motion pictures. And the highly revered guys were who knew a guy, who knew a guy who could get the real hardcore stuff. In which ‘upar ka aur neeche ka dono dikhaate hai’ they were the small town equivalent of drug dealers. And the boys understood more about the universe in those one and a half hours what Copernicus and Hubble did in their entire lives.

TB6 deserves a special mention here. It was Russian channel which suddenly was started being broadcasted here in India and used to telecast Adult movies late in the night. It was inspiration to a million teenage to ‘Study’ till late night in the TV room.

Cricket – Enough said. Back then Sachin was in process of attaining the status of God,  Azharuddin was un-tainted, the sight of Kambli in tears was fresh in in our memory and everyone prayed extra hard for us to win the Super Six against match against Pakistan in 1999 world cup, the cup be damned, that was our World Cup !

LOVE

Now you gotta get the scene first. The place is a middle sized town, the time is Circa 2000, the rich boys wear Reebok instead of Action, Maruti 800 is still an aspirational thing and parents have this habit of making you call every girl more than your age as Didi or making them call you Bhaiya if they are even one year younger.  Co-ed are the exception rather than the rule. Teens Today is the progressive magazine where girls complain that their 21 year old boyfriend after 6 years of relationship now wants to get physical. Nobody has Swag. And carnal knowledge is equivalent of Sainthood, nobody except the most blessed get it. Get it?

But of course there was no lack of trying from our side. And all techniques (also known as seetbaaji back in those days) came down to these –

Stare a lot – This was the most basic of all and practiced by everyone, you just sit behind her in class and keep gawking at her, you can even touch her hair if you were close enough  but the real jackpot was when you could find one day that one of her bra strap was showing, that would make your day and become the topic of conversation all evening.

Follow Home – This one required a mechanized mode of transportation and thus excluded the base of pyramid who had cycles. At the end of school there was a mad rush and throttles were sent to their maximum at the war cry of “Bhaai teri waali abhi nikli hai . Chal !” Thus you followed your waali back to her home, honked a lot, and overtook her once or twice just for fun. One anecdote here is worth mentioning (without going into names of course), our pack mate once wanted to go beyond the follow home routine and overtook the girl and braked right in front of her to make her stop, she did stop but not in the way our guy hoped, she panicked, braked too hard, skidded and fell down, what happened after that is not worth telling the tale of, but you should understand even this routine wasn’t without this risk. Another side of this routine was the stake out, this is when you spot the two wheeler of someone’s waali either parked or in motion and dashed out to his house to inform him that “teriwaali wahan hai, jaldi chal !” 

Make crank calls – This routine required more patience and hard work than the last one, you had to first find out the address of the house and then scan the whole directory by her surname until you zero in on the combination to find the phone number. This is when you started making the crank calls. Some people even tried to talk when the girl picked up but I don’t know anyone who got a decent reply from the other end. And since we are on this topic this killer line by our Dinh (read the dark tower novels to figure out what it means) is worth mentioning

Dinh: Priya ko bula do

Priya’s dad: Aap kaun bol rahe ho

Dinh: Main Raj

Priya’s Dad: Kaun Raj?

Dinh: Yahi to raj kee baat hai

*total silence for a minute and then we burst out laughing

Ask for notes – This one was certainly not for the faint of heart as this required having an actual conversation with the girl like a human being! Which very few of us could pull off.  No doubt the girls saw through this but I do know a few people who actually did get notes upon asking for it, and thus the staring of the whole class. And the people who were too far to understand what went down got the smile from the protagonist which Muhammad Ali gave the media when he won the gold medal and got back to USA.

Bash up the other lover – This technique was used frequently by people who had muscle power behind them. This is something what Komatsu had in mind when they had their motto as Maru-C, son instead of directly attacking the target you encircled them by knocking other pieces off the board. Conversations often went like this –

Guy1: Saale Priya ke ghar ke bahut chakkar laga raha hai

Guy2: Tereko kya?

Guy1: Mere mohalle kee ladki ko mat ched

Guy2: Kyun teri behan lagti hai wo?

This is when the fight started. The girl in most cases had no idea all this was happening because they did not know these two guys existed

Chat on Yahoo messenger – Finally, this is what the smooth operators did. The Johnny Depps of our times. They had already broken the ice and the girl had reciprocated, so now they sat in dingy Cyber cafes, logged onto their HandsomeGuy_84 IDs and chatted the hours away. And the final climax of this was when they sat in the same cyber café in the same cabin and … Let’s just say- did not chat

There was also this intermediate categories who had girls (or Aunties) in Philippines or USA and had their private show whenever they were online. I know one guy who even nearly 3000 dollars wired to his account by an Aunty from US.

Sigh! Those were the days!

A river runs through it

Warning : Long, meandering, spur-of-the-moment kind of post.

It is said that you can’t go home again; it is truer for me than for anyone. I have no home so to speak of in India, parents stay in Mauritius, we have our home in Jodhpur where all the stuff is kept and I had left from Kota when I left home last. 

It has been more than 500 days since I have left Kota, the night of 13^th July, 2010 to be precise when I had left for Bombay. I’ve gone to Bombay, Pune, Zaheerabad, Hyderabad, Calcutta, Delhi, Agra, Bangkok and Bangalore since but never to Kota again. In fact I had left Kota in a way on the morning on 18^th September, 2003 and I had told my mom that for practical purposes I am leaving home today and I never intend to come back. What my visits back home have been what my friend Chirag would call as Pit Stops. I never gave much thought to leaving, in fact I was glad to leave what my brother described as a ‘two storied town’ after the Bon Jovi song. My parents were in fact a little emotional, in fact more than they showed on the eve of my leaving, but I was drunk on the rush of finally being independent and with 3 bags, a big-ass music system , two thick novels and such excitement that only naivety could bring I departed for Bangalore.

Leaving home and especially going to Bangalore meant for me freedom, adventures, doing my own thing, not having to hide the booze on my breath, going where no one knew me and the exhilaration that only being totally on your own could bring. And I got all this, and more. I have drank sitting on the pavement outside a bakery right out of a Bacardi bottle, kissed on the dance floor of a crowded disc, been broke to the extent to be literally not able to buy food ,  been caught by police numerous times and spent time in the police station thrice, wheelied (jack-rabbited) my bike being drunk out of my senses, rode back on bike at 3 on the night in freezing Delhi winter after watching ‘Avatar’, played music out of the balcony on the farewell night and broke beer bottles in the college, got in fight with land lord at 1 o’ clock in the night, fell in love and got my heart broken, been made a fool of many times, humiliated and ragged. But I was happy; it was my decisions that lead to these, and to quote William Ernest Henley from my one of my favorite poems –

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

But leaving home is like any adventure sport, whatever excites you also scares the living hell out of you. The fear of having nothing to fall back on, no father to reassure you when you are scared, no mother to sympathize with you even when you were wrong, no one to rescue you when the shit hits the fan. And also the simple leisure in life that only your home can provide - not worrying about your next meal, the car always has petrol, the clothes are washed and leaking taps are fixed, the comfort and amenities of home, the familiarity of your surroundings, you parent’s name opening doors for you. And for all this and more I miss Kota.

It is no paradise let me tell you that; it has senseless traffic, bad roads, extreme weather, rains which bring floods, cunning people, rough sounding language, no natural beauty to speak of, a conservative mentality and the normal small town shit. But yes I miss it today.

Kota to me was my huge house on the outskirts; and it was big, especially by today’s metro’s apartment standards. It was a good old fashioned government quarter on the outskirts of the city, with three and half bedrooms, four bathrooms,  a garden in front and one in back, lots of trees and a separate servant quarter to boot. It had a huge driveway which doubled or rather tripled up as a cricket pitch and a basketball court.

Kota to me was the hustle bustle of Talwandi and Vigyan Nagar areas which had student on the streets as far as you could see all discussing which ‘Sir’ (teacher) had gone to which coaching institution, new books on the market, had yesterday’s DPP (don’t ask what was it if you don’t already know it) been done or not, which mess had the best dal and so on …. You know life for an average teenager in Kota, and I mean average in the Kota sense, life revolved around the coaching class you go to which prepared you for some kind of entrance examination, girls as the second priority, outing with friends as a distant third and school loomed somewhere back in list. And that was pretty much my life too for the last few years there. First preparing for N.T.S.E. (National Talent Search Examination), I crashed out in the final round and in retrospect I don’t understand what the big deal about it was. Then it was preparing for IIT, anybody half decent in Kota with Maths in his 11^th Standard prepared for IIT, and I was half decent, in fact I was above average so I prepared for IIT as well. I didn’t and nor did my parents probably knew at that time that there were more above average people in India than there were seats in the IITs. Especially in Bansal Classes which was like the Colosseum and the toppers of all cities of the neighboring states were the gladiators, and like in the fights, some of them got the thumbs down from the Caesar.

 But in the daily struggle it was meant to be we found quite a lot of time to do other stuff. Thanks to the fab 4 – Mr. Gaurav Mathur, Mr. Vaibhav Shukla, Major Kunal Sahni and Shri shri 108 Sankalp Vyas jee. And not to forget Mr. Tarun Bhatia, in his rented room I had my first drink. Vaibhav and Sankalp used to stay on the way from my house to place where the tests of Bansal Classes were held and we used to go together. And I back then I used to be late for everything, including that, so I used to rush to Vaibhav’s house with a few minutes left for the test to start and he would be standing on the road and curse at me, I would apologize and we used to go to Sankalp’s house, who at that panicked state (only of us two) would slowly come out and say “Abey jaldi kya hai? Kaunsa tumhe test mae kuch aata hai jo tum jaldi jaake kuch kar loge?” Then in our frenzied state we would give that test and in which we did used to get screwed like he had predicted every time, then we would come out the meet the other two; Kunal would then tell us about his elaborate plans of talking to a girl  “Aaj maine na apni bike us ladki kee gaadi mae fasa dee hai, aaj to usko bike hathane ke liye mujhse bolna hee padega”, Gaurav would then grin and then swear at us, the paper, the teachers and a few other people. Then we would wait for everyone to leave and chat in the parking or follow some girl and then would think to go for a pastry at Jai Shiv bakery or to eat Samosa or Kachori of Jodhpur sweets, Brijwasi, Ratan or others.  Or the Poha at Vigyan Nagar.

The mention of Poha reminds me, that I didn’t like it very much, in fact I never ate it home whenever my mom made it, I only had it on that Thela in the morning. And the reason for that is a long one. You see whenever I used to bunk school I had the same routine. I used to pick up my friend Siddharth from his house at around 6:30 or so, as I remember the school time used to be 7:15. We used to go this place by the river bank called ‘Mauji Baba kee Gufa’ or DP (Dying point) as he used to call it, though it was hardly any place to die from. We used to sit by the river bank and kill time; actually I have had my first philosophical discussion about life and its meaning at the age of 16, sitting by the river side throwing stones after bunking school. I had once thrown my Kiney’s key in the river instead of a stone and had to literally lift it from there to some other place, but that is a story for another time, back to my routine. We used to kill time till 7:30 or so as nothing would be open at this time, then we used to head back to that ‘Poha’ place and eat,  by then the pool parlors would open, so we used to play pool for an hour or so and I or we depending on the plan used to go to my house where my mom dad would have left for work and we had the house to ourselves and they wouldn’t realize that I was back at home by 10:30. There is this another ‘Poha’ story with Bengali, actually his name was Arjun Biswas and he was from Baroda but everyone called him Bengali. But for that story is for another time, speaking of Bengali -

Bengali had broken up with his girlfriend of a few years with whom he was very serious and lost his marbles. Unfortunately the movie ‘Devdas had also come out that time which inspired him in strange ways. In one of those days he showed up my house at 11 carrying two quarters on cheap rum and a CD of ‘Devdas’ . Did I forget to mention that it was 11 in the morning? And he knew I was home alone. After half an hour of movie when Paro gets married and he is one quarter down he starts “Yaar <beep> ye ladkiyan bhi badi <beep> hoti hai pehle to <beep> pyar dikhati hai fir sala <beep> pe laat deke nikal leti hai…. <beep> unko to koi dusra mil jaata hai, maa <beep> hai to hamari”. Aa yaar ek peg to tu bhi pee”. Back then as now I was too polite to say no to man offering a drink, so I accepted. When we had finished that second quarter my doorbell rang. It was only 12 o’ clock and way too early for my mom to come in so we had the glasses and empty bottles lying around. I panicked. My nerves were calmed by the sentence “Abey chutiyon daaru kee mehak yahan baahar tak aa rahi hai, kya kar rahe ho be tum?” It was my friend Siddharth (the above mentioned one), he too had dropped in. It took only 5 mins of Bengali’s time to convince him to drink. So they both set out to buy more booze at 12 in the afternoon while I cleaned up everything and prepared the room on the first floor. We started drinking over there and I and Bengali being newbies spaced out in 3 drinks. Bengali was not only drunk but also stupid, he pulled out two bubble gums and tossed them to us and said “Ye kha lena is se daaru kee smell nahi ayegi . This infuriated both me and Siddharth, as it was a strawberry flavored bubble gum, not even a mint and even that wouldn’t cover the stink of cheap rum we had had. Siddharth exclaimed “Theek hai. Aur ye tattoo kya teri gaand pe lagaye?” waving that free stick – on tattoo that came with it. “Nahi ye saale iski gaand pe lagao” he pointed towards me. I said “kyun tumhari mae kya burai hai?”. What transpired next was that three drunk guys at 1:30 in the afternoon were wrestling on the floor trying to stick that tattoo on someone’s ass. Now Siddharth is 5’11” well-built guy and Bengali was an average gym goer too, so as you would have guessed it by now finally that tattoo found its spot on my ass.

After that it was only bits of pieces of good and bad stuff that I remember, of course the high and low points stick in your mind forever. I used to come home for 15 days every 6 months, talk on the phone at nights, eat home food and go back.

Then I shifted back to Kota for 9 months. I remember becoming good friends with Somya Shringi who in his own words is my mirror image (soul wise), getting drunk and eating food kept on the trunk of my car, on the road in the middle of the city at 2 o’ clock in the night.  Driving alone in the roads behind my house listening to Bic Runga’s ‘Drive’. Finding wine and cooking pasta for someone, and getting my hand cut while opening the bottle of wine (the scar is still there). A jinxed new year’s eve, courtesy Mr. Akhil Babel where we finished the Vat 69 before reaching the place we were supposed to drink it.

Of course here Mr. Prateek Bansal deserves a special reference, he was my perennially busy neighbor who never had time to talk in the 5 years I have known him, but used to talk standing on the gate for hours, discussing philosophies of life, movies, books, the psyche of people we knew and taking my advice eagerly but never following it.

I’ve stayed in Kota for 8 years this is the stuff I remember and I miss the most.

When I was close my sometimes I have transported back to that place, sitting on river bank in a foggy morning, where the only sound was the water flowing and cigarette puffs, no worries in life than who’s gonna bounce the stone off the water more number of times, the promise of youth and Siddharth’s question “Bhenchod koi bhi aadmi life mae kya chahta hai?”

P.S. – To the people mentioned in this post. I have linked your name to your Facebook account, if you want that despite your ‘Kaali Kartuute’ you should remain anonymous just tell me I will remove the names’