Boyz at large

By

Vaibhav garg

About the Author: English is not my first language. I am not a writer, I havent written anything of value or had any education in the literary field. Infact anything I write of value is in non-human langauges and the receptacle for it is void of feelings so that doesnt count here (I am a software solutions developer by profession). I write these stories just for fun and due to an urge to tell a story, my story. Personally I consider my life's purpose to be the best consumer of new experiences and ideas. I am 28 years old and live in a lovely town called Dehradun in India.

About Boyz at large: This is my attempt at story stories based on my school, my school friends and my school life. There is another story I wrote around 2003, in the same universe, which follows this one. Hopefully I will write some more about the boyz at large in the future.

Misclaimer: Memory is a tricky thing. It changes with time and adds layers that darken things we didn’t like and highlights things we liked such that the things under question are not the original things anymore. My memory is just clinically too good at that and thus anything I emit, consciously or unconsciously, partially or wholly, may or may mot be real, in the real meaning of the word real but real in the unreal sense of my real desires and timeworn memories.

The golden days

written in 2010

Rocky and Subi were my closest friends in boarding school. We were very mischievous and did everything together. We were the usual suspects in our class whenever anything out of the ordinary happened. The teachers hated us but only when we played a prank on them. Crackers taped under chairs and squirrels inside drawers were our usual low profile missions.

Rocky was a genius but of the mad kind and crackers and crazy spring loaded contraptions were his speciality. Subi was more of a hot head and once he had his mind set on something, there was so other way. I always got caught up in between those two and their fights and arguments because I was branded as a know-it-all wise-guy with a funny bone that didnt help my case. More often then not I was forced to be the judge of their arguments, which I hated, as I would inevitably make one of them mad with my judgement. But secretly I loved to pull my own private pranks on the two by slyly injecting words that would cause an argument.

So according to one categorization, Rocky was the genius, Subi was the muscle and I was the underdog and according to another Subi was the green beret, Rocky was the infiltrator and I was field support. We came up with all kinds of categorizations after watching Saturday night movies or while talking endlessly under the stars on our dorm’s roof.

Our main objective, besides enjoying ourselves, was coming up with crazy things to do and not getting caught. It was a good time in our lives and we enjoyed doing things together and laughing at inside jokes. Everyone thought that we were nothing more than three monkeys and we were happy to oblige them as that gave us a good cover story for goofing around and not leaving evidence of our primary mischief.

Life in Boarding was simple, scheduled and sometimes sad because everyone missed home. Keeping the schedule was a bit tough sometimes and if one kid got sad with homesickness then it wouldn’t take long before everyone became gloomy. But we did out best to keep our minds occupied with fun stuff at all times.

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Our school, The St. Georges School is situated in Mussoorie which is a small town in the hills with great views and sweet little shops around it. The best thing to me was the clean air and the solitude for the taking. The school is situated at the top of a small hill and it had it all. Football grounds, a rickety old bridge, a church, a graveyard, a clock tower, lots of kids of all ages, a stream, jogging path around the hill, a gym with a swimming pool, TVs in class rooms, a great auditorium, great architecture, just the right amount of old people, a lot of rumours and lots and lots of places to discover, to hide in and to do fun things in. But one had to be creative to do anything unusual under the strict but good natured teachers and wardens and not get expelled in the process!

A usual day started with waking up at 6:30am in the dorms, which was sometimes funny as there was always someone being tickled in the feet or a straw up the nose or a feather in the ears, if they didn’t wake up with the buzzer. One had to switch-on like a light bulb to avoid the craziness but it was always very funny when happening to someone else. Then we ran to the showers with tightly held PJs so that no one could pull them down from behind. It was also a race to the bathrooms as there can never be enough of those in a boys dorm. The bathroom stalls were obviously designed by someone stupid as the doors were too short with too much space on top and at the bottom and even the latches were flimsy but, even so, there were silent protocols in place, as everyone know that pranking someone in there will only bring them back to do even worse on the next day for retribution so it balanced out.

Then came the showering and putting on the school uniform and, most importantly, filling the pockets with little treasures. Surprisingly, there weren’t that many pranks in the shower room. Only god knows why. Mussoorie being a hill station the normal water temperature was very cold, the showers were powered by a solar water heater and so on cloudy days it was crazy with a lot of screams and giddy laughter. There were a row of partitioned shower stalls with curtains and the water pressure was always perfect. After talking a bath everyone rushed to the adjacent locker rooms and started getting dressed and then we head out.

The crazy part about the locker room was that there was only one small door for an exit and Sister Valentine stood there like a scary general looking at her troops. She looked at everyone with squinted eyes thru her cat eye glasses and a cane in hand, moving it such that it hit her other hand, slowly and threateningly. Even the meanest of the boys walked in front of her with heads bowed down, hands in front and in small steps. She gave everyone a quick glance and weeded out the ones who were trying to skip the shower or didn’t comb their hair properly or didn’t clip their nails or didn’t polish their shoes or didn’t tie their tie properly. It was impossible to pass her blockade without a perfectly groomed outlook. No wonder our school looked so neat and the yearly photos came out so nicely.

A about 8am, everyone assembled in the dining room for the breakfast. It was the best mean of the day with milk, break, peanut butter, samosas, bread rolls, eggs, jam, buns, chips, apples and what not. We were free to sit anywhere and talk as loud as we wanted. Everything was allowed as long as we didn’t start a food fight. But that was rare at breakfast as everyone was so hungry in the morning and it was all so tasty. It was easy to spot a double-decker sandwich or jam-peanut-butter-chocolate-milk-shake. We weren’t allowed to take any food with us but almost everyone try to hide away food, specially if anything solid and not so sticky was served. The trick was to take plastic wrappers with you beforehand.

Then, starting at 8:30am, there was a lot of boring stuff like morning assembly, a few PT exercises, morning attendance etc, then the classes began at 9am. A couple of 15min breaks were there between every 2 classes and I for one was very glad of those. It would be impossible to sit awake in more then 2 classes in a stretch. For the most part, the classes went smoothly with stern teachers and boring lectures. Any smart-mouth or mischievous activity sent us to stand in front of the principal’s office so everyone was rather good. However, all the fun was barely contained and it took very little to turn things into chaos.

The desks in the classrooms were very interesting as they had a small latch that could be locked, even though we were not provided with locks, and seating arrangement were not enforced so it was normal practice to lock things in or push things thru the cracks, that would get one into trouble and then declare that it is not my desk. Random messages to each other and silly drawing of teachers were routinely found in the desks as they were hurriedly pushed in like money in a piggy bank when the teacher came close. Other then that, there wasn’t that much to put in the desks because they could easily be broken into and everyone had separate lockers for books and personal stuff.

There were however a lot of ways to use the desk in missions and Rocky discovered most of them. These kinds of things were like high-value merchandise and one could get a lot in exchange from the person in need so we routinely tried finding various hiding places or tricky things and even had to exchange with others if they had what we want and we had what they wanted. It was very hard to show the value of what we have as we couldn’t as well tell the other exactly about it or he wouldn’t tell us his secret place or trick and have ours for free. I was the default salesperson of my group in such cases and it was so much fun that I will never forget it.

But getting back to the usual day at the school, we had lunch time at 1:30pm which was, with a general consensus, the least good meal. It may be also because everyone was so sleepy after lunch and, consequently, the classes after lunch were very difficult. It was like working thru a haze in one’s mind. This is the time when smuggled food was in high demand. There was only so much we could do before the classes ended at 4:30pm and then we again headed to the dining halls for evening tea. Evening teas was great and everyone was so charged and ready for the play time and free time coming up.

We had to go on a compulsory jogging on a, torturous in my opinion, path which snaked around the whole school and went thru the soft jungle just below the crown of the hill on which the school was situated. We had to complete the circuit in 20mins with the trainer, Mr Sukhpal Singh running at the back, hitting the slackers and keeping an eye out for boys skipping out. Then we had an attendance, after which we got 2 hours to do anything we wanted. There was basketball, football, table tennis, tennis, volleyball, badminton, cricket, baseball, running etc for official games and hide-n-seek, Catch-em, exploring the school, reading comics, trading stuff, thapley(a local game), Panch Pathar(a game with stones in hand), rolling about in the grass, playing cards etc for un-official games. It was not required to participate in any of the official games but everyone was allowed if they wanted to. Football was our main school game and it was tough to get into any of the teams. But anyway, Rockey, Subi and I were not around most of the time as we were off somewhere on some exotic adventure or making plans for some prank.

At 7pm the dinner started and was served till 8pm. We were free to have our dinner any time in between. After all this fun we had to go back to the classes, at 7pm onwards, for supervised study time. There was no teaching but some teachers were always present to maintain order and help students as they completed their homework and tasks from the morning classes. It was however not forced to study and it was up to the students to do what they wanted but without noise and disturbance. It was also not forced to sit in your own class so we could mingle around with students from other classes and move around. On weekend this study time was turned into movie night and the TVs in the classrooms was switched on and a movie was put on. The movie was chosen by senior students, from standard 12th, in advance but if a class wanted to watch some other channel then they were allowed to do so. Some of the classes were designated as channel names, like a sports channel class or nature channel class or news and current affairs class which was usually empty of kids and full of teachers.

At 8:30pm onwards till 9:30pm, we were allowed to go back to the dorm and change and go to sleep. Very few kids stayed around the classes till the closing time but Rockey, Suby and I loved to either be at last or the earliest to leave. It gave us a lot of flexibility to prepare of missions etc. We had a attendance when entering the drom and them fell like a rock on the bed and slept. It was very tricky but Sometimes we snuck up the stairs and went to the roof and sat there, talking and laughing away the night…

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Someone asked me to define love

written in approx. 2003

When we are talking about love of our life I would like to tell my story too. But it is too long and may be boring to you. So I will just tell you the about the ONE time I felt true love in my whole life, yet.

I have studied in boarding schools from Standard 2nd to 11th. This school was the greatest thing that happened in my young life. The school is situated at top of a mountain of shivalik range (Third range of the Himalayas). Cool breezes, seasonal streams, Paper Mountains in clear view are some of the smaller perks of the location. The school’s name is St. Georges College and it is controlled by Irish brothers. Visit the school's web site here.

I love that school. I loved to wander alone in the woods and blend with the beautiful love-thirsty mountains of Mussoorie and every Sunday I would go out there to quench my thirst of nature. I am not a person with many friends and I took young pride in solely trekking those mountains on stolen fast food from the school kitchen. Now this incident is from when I was in Standard 8th.

And as ideally as in grandfather stories, she was a local girl and the daughter of a baker, from whose bakery I and my friends used to buy hot fresh bread and buns to eat whenever we went for an outing from school. She was sometimes as her father’s shop. There was something about her that I admired very much. She was not a beauty queen by any standards but looked so sincere and caring that I always had liked her. She was my age and I used to saw her sometimes in the jungle near school roaming around often on early Sunday mornings. We had come to know each other somewhat from a distance and without much talking. I guess we had become friends.

The reason I went to trekking early in the morning was because I loved to collect dew drops from the trees and flowers from the jungle that belonged to the mountain the school was situated on. Whenever I could get up early on Sundays (I am a late sleeper) I went to see the sunrise. Sometimes she watched me and followed me from a distance. One day when I was running after a squirrel I bumped into her and from then on we started talking but only a little bit.

I had been planning for a week now to go to the jungle in early morning and collect the dew drops in a crystal glass I had stolen from my warden's room. I wanted to collect the dew drops and keep them in it. I replenished my stash of chips and buns from the kitchen and then one beautiful morning I went to visit the jungle and somehow there she was standing under a huge tree having an apple. Even the sun hadn’t come up yet and the sky was getting orange.

I had been meaning to do this for a long time so I went to her and showed her the crystal glass in order to ask her to collect dew drops with me. I was a very shy person with girls at that time, so it took me a lot of weeks to collect the nerve to ask her to come with me. In turn she stretched her palm with the half eaten apple and I knew she meant to share it with me. Not a word was said and we both somehow understood what the other wanted. The apple was sweet and juicy.

There was some kind of bird sitting above us and it woke up as the first sun rays were about to hit the jungle. So we went about collecting the biggest dew drops on the biggest flowers and leaves we could find. I have to tell you it is a very hard job as the water dries faster than you can collect it. But that morning humid and colder was more than normal. So after a lot of climbing, stretching, tumbling and laughing we managed to fill a quarter of the crystal glass with dew water. We had reached the top of the mountain. At that time the 1st sunrays started to hit us. The view was so breathtaking that it looked to my young mind as if nature has painted one of its masterpieces just for us. We were very tired after so much climbing and stretching and very thirsty.

We held hands and lifted the glass towards the sun as if saying 'cheers'. Then we both had a big gulp each of the sweet dew water. The taste you might ask was pure love. What was really special was that after a few seconds she kissed me on my cheek…… That was love.

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My school life was very interesting to say the least. There were good time and bad times, there were broken noses and bloody fists, there were chocolate smeared shirts and running naked after the guy with the towel, there were crying faces with homesickness and laughing eyes with a gleam. My eyes well up with tears when I remember some of the more interesting times and I think, alas, the golden days. - Vaibhav

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