A year full of possibilities.

He's home, finally. It's ten o' clock. Even the dog is annoyed but neither of them say anything. He's been coming home late everyday for a week now. He blames it on his boss. He walks in, removes his shoes, keeps them in front of the shoe rack, not inside. He throws his socks carelessly beside the sofa and slumps down in the armchair.

"Where's the remote, Shubha?" Sentence number 1.

She hands it over to him. The TV is on. He changes the channel to NDTV, doesn't ask his wife before he does. He has only started watching NDTV recently. Till about three weeks ago, he was a loyal CNN-IBN fan. But his heart broke when Rajdeep Sardesai quit and he feels Bhupender Chaubey isn't up to the mark. 

"Are you going to change or should I give you dinner now?"

"No, I'll have now." Sentence number 2.

They're having dinner. They've switched back to Zee TV now. There's this new show on, EVEREST, about a girl who wants to be a mountaineer. Both of them like it. Or at least, she likes it and he watches along. Mihir the nephew calls. He picks up and starts talking. She can't hear the dialogue now but she doesn't mind, she's gotten used to it. From what she can gather, he needs career advice. Something's going on with the girl who wants to be mountaineer and her best friend and it sounds serious. One fo them is crying. "Yes yes. See, If you ask me right now, I'm happy with my job. I enjoy it. And at the end of the day, that's all that matters". They keep talking. EVEREST gets over and Satrangi Sasural starts. They're still talking. "See, I'll talk to him. I'll talk to him... No, I think he's still in Jamshedpur". 

He finally hangs up. It's twelve. She's looking at him. "Happy new year," he says. She smiles as he sits beside her and puts an arm around her. Then her gaze slides down to the sock curled up near her leg and she frowns. "When is that Agarwal fellow coming?" she asks. They're getting new furniture and carpets. It's the carpeting part she's all excited about. The floor's going to look all wooden now, like it looks in Abha's house. "He'll be around 11:30. He said today it might take two more days," he says. She doesn't mind. So many things to look forward to now. Sonu will be coming over in March, there's still three months to go for that. But in the meantime new carpets, new furniture, and maybe new TV! Her life is going to remain the same after all that, she knows. You buy a new phone and you think "Maybe this is going to change something, maybe this is going to make my life a little less miserable". But in reality, nothing changes. Stuff like that happens only in advertisements. It's going to be the same old life till she grows old and dies. Unless grandkids. But that looks unlikely. But enough about all that. It's a New Year! It's time for a fresh clean start! Anything can happen, right? He nods.

Harvard K. Birla and the Intricacies of Bromance - A Story

Halley's Comet: Harvard K. Birla and The Intricacies of Bromance

Part I: The Sidekick

It was the summer of 2013; an ordinary day except for the sense of uneasiness in the air. It was the sort of day where stuff happened; but Harvard K. Birla did not know that. He just sat under the Peepal tree by the Physics department waiting for his phone to ring. Harvard’s sister, who was supposed to pick him up after school, had had a little accident on the way. She had called her mother who had dutifully panicked and rushed to get her car keys before her daughter could mention about her little brother stranded on the other side of the city. As maternal feelings rushed and the mother drove like a racecar towards her wounded daughter, poor Harvard was left frustrated in the lonely high school where he had come with yours truly for the physics quiz. We had lost the quiz (we had not even qualified for the finals) and I had let him know in not so subtle words that it was his fault. So Harvard was in a bad mood and his sister’s phone was switched off and his mother wasn’t answering. His dad did pick up on what was probably the fifteenth try but Harvard had to hang up as soon as he did for he had only 60p remaining in balance. Woes of having a prepaid connection. His dad didn’t call him back. 

It’s one thing when your friends don’t pick up. Maybe he’s on a date, maybe she’s studying. It’s an entirely different thing when your parents don’t pick up. The former is irritating; the latter, is just depressing. Harvard’s parents had never ignored his call. His father, even if he was in the middle of something, would ask his colleagues to excuse him for a moment and tell his son he was slightly busy and ask him if it was okay if he called him back a few minutes later. He did not know he could send one of those instant “I’m in a meeting” messages but that is not the point. The point is that there is nothing more depressing than not having anyone to talk to. And Harvard was going from What is wrong with them annoyed to Is there … something wrong with me existential crisis. Okay, I do not exactly know what an existential crisis involves but if I had to take a guess, I would say it was what Harvard K. Birla was going through then. It was in the middle of this transition from Bruce Banner to Bruce Wayne (Nolan wala. Hulk is angry, batman is sad; angry to sad, get it?) that I decided to do it. I had gone away to the canteen after yelling at him and now an hour later, he was still there, his eyes full with all the melancholy of the world. This was my time.

***

I remembered the first time we had met. We had both ordered cold coffee. “I’m Supreeth,” I had said and extended my hand which had stood there uneasily for two seconds before he thought of relieving it. 

"Hi. Harvard." he had said. "I saw you buying bananas in Gokhalenagar".

I had simply stared.

***

He was tapping his legs impatiently, fidgeting with his phone while it still tried to reach his Dad. “I knew the answer to the Dettol question,” he said to the watchman standing behind listening to his pocket radio.

“I’m sure you did,” I said. The watchman turned towards us for a second, raised an eyebrow and resumed listening to Shubra from Radio City.

“Glenn Seaborg and Americium was as good a guess as any.”

“Yes," I said. "Except that it was wrong.”

“And Peter Higgs does look like Hugh Hefner.”

I did not reply to that. We sat awkwardly for five minutes.

“Which book is that?” he said, still not making eye contact. He was staring rather non-discreetly at a couple going full PDA in an empty classroom across in the department building. I had not seen him notice the book.

“Which book is that?” he asked again after two minutes. The couple were still going at it.

“Why Dan Brown sucks,” I said.

“Bullshit,” he said and pried the book from my hands. “An Evening of Long Goodbyes? Ewww.. How do you even find these books, let alone read?”

“Bandar Kya Jaane…”

“What did you say?”

“Nevermind.”

“Dan Brown is awesome by the way.”

“Okay.”

“Fuck off. His books are well-written, well researched… You know what, I’m sick of your Oh I’m so better my tastes are so classy everybody else is a dumbfuck attitude… It’s It’s motherfucking annoying.”

“Um, you thought the Holocaust was a Marvel character”

“That was A LONG TIME AGO. Fuck off” 

This was how it was with Harvard. His taste in movies was awful (dude, you watched 21 Jump Street? You’ve not? I feel sorry for you), his taste in books non-existent. Dan Brown was the ONLY author he had read. And his vocabulary, on his best day, felt like that of a six year old who had accidentally binge-watched all seasons of Two and a Half Men. But still, he had an opinion on reservation (it’s stupid), on homosexuality (it’s all psychological), on philosophy (it’s stupid) and everything else in the world. 

There were times when we had had more amicable conversations. Once we had spent hours in Chocolate Heaven talking about the Higgs Boson and super-symmetry. We had had quite a discussion. All I knew had come from a couple of popular science books and newspaper articles and all he had said had come from Veritasium, the YouTube channel. But we had both respected our secrets and had been as arrogant and complacent in our arguments as any two people could possibly be.

“That cannot possibly happen! Nature likes equilibrium!” 

“Don’t tell nature what to like. You’re just not getting it” 

Everybody had stared at us, most in annoyance, some in wonder.

And there were times where we fooled around, actually had fun. Once we had walked into to a medical store asking “Bhaiyya, face ka charger hai?”. The other time, we had gone asking for a shampoo – “Woh jo Virat aur Anushka use karte hai”. But those were all my ideas. And they weren’t so much fun in practice as they were in theory. We were just a couple of bored teenagers. But the thing is, apart from these moderately bright flashes, our whole time felt like a string of dull moments where absolutely nothing happened. Well, nothing good happened. 

Friendships which last, I’m told, are usually built upon solid foundations of mutual respect. Holmes and Watson, House and Wilson, The Mentalist and that cop lady, Adrian Monk and his assistant... They worked because they respected each other. Each of them had a skill the other lacked and together, they complemented each other. The only good thing about Harvard I could think of was that you could make fun of him, then feel bad about it, say sorry and he would go “For what?”; No no, okay, yes, I was being jerk but Harvard never got that he was being made fun of. You see, nobody had taught Harvard sarcasm. When he bragged “This is such an easy problem; why is it taking you so long? Here, give it to me,” and people replied with “If you solve every problem, how are we going to learn,” he actually believed them. When I called him the George Costanza of our group and told him he was a famous architect and marine biologist, he didn’t doubt me. When I would tell him over phone that I was going to hang up because he was boring me to death, he would think I was joking. When I would tell him I was not, he would laugh and keep on talking. I wasn’t being mean; I was just trying to see how far I could stretch the line. 

I was not one of those groupies, you know – Those people who hung out in packs with an unhealthy male: female ratio of 3:1, spent most of their time sitting in the parking lot instead of the classroom and spoke in English the whole time. I was a one-man guy. Groups made me feel insecure. It’s hard to be the centre of attention in a group. If the group wants to play paintball, you play paintball. If the group wants to watch Interstellar, you watch Interstellar. If group says the movie was mindblowing, you nod your head and agree, even if it is rated only 73% fresh on rottentomatoes. If you disagree with the group, you’re a spoilsport, a buzzkill, a bore. And nobody wants to hang out with a bore. As some great man rightly said, two is company, three a crowd. When you’re only two people, you have equal share of the spotlight. You say something, he replies, you get to reply back. Your reply won’t be squished with half a dozen other replies and you won’t end up feeling sad and dejected. But the best part of having only one friend was that with the right amount of cunning, you could maintain an Alpha-Beta relationship. You could be the Alpha and he could be your sidekick. I finally had my sidekick. 

***

Part II: Halley's Comet

Aristotle once said that there were three types of friendships. There was friendship based on utility – I hung out with Madhu Varman because he was rich. There was friendship based on pleasure – I liked Neha Karandikar because she was good-looking and funny. And finally there was friendship based on virtue – Where you did not really have a reason to be friends. Where your opinion of the other party did not depend on your current well-being, where you genuinely wished well for each other. But I realized that what Harvard and I had did not fit into any of those. 'Sidekicks' was not a category. Besides, sidekicks are only fun if your job is to prowl about the town in the night and save the world from bad guys. If I went by Aristotle, Harvard was certainly not useful to me; in fact, it might’ve been the other way around. I did not derive ANY sort of pleasure from his company. And I most definitely did not wish well for Harvard. In fact, I wished ill for Harvard. He was stupid. He tired to act smart, you had to give him that but it clearly did not work. If you had to commit suicide, all you had to do was climb to his ego and jump to his IQ. But everybody else thought was in the impression that we were the best of friends. People would see me and ask “Where’s your boyfriend?”

This always raised two questions:

1. Could nobody see I did not really like him?

2. Why was I always the woman in the relationship? 

What exactly were we then? What would you call a relationship whose raison d’etre was that you were too lazy to opt out? People still thought we were best friends. And so we pretended to be. A lot of people I knew pretended to be best friends. Snehal and Yash, they had nothing in common. Absolutely nothing! And yet, they were always together. And so I put on an act. I'd shout out "Harvard, my soulmate!" whenever I was around other people and could see him coming from a distance. And people laughed. But I didn't. And that was bad. Soon, this was growing into something way more complicated than it was supposed to be, threatening to blow into a Mean Girls type scenario if not paid attention to. So I did the one thing I do best when faced with a difficult problem – I avoided it. I went all the way around the main building and library to avoid meeting him in front of canteen. I blocked him on Truecaller, did not reply to his texts or his Facebook messages. I did this for two weeks. I would get an average of two calls every day and I resisted the urge to call him back and ask “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you so hung up on me?”

10:30 pm, Sunday, roughly after three weeks: 

“DUDE Y RNT U ANSWRNG MY CALLS?”

Take a hint, genius.

Three months later, I got a call from my mother. I was in college. He had come home asking for me. I'd rather be miserable and alone than pretend to be happy with someone I don't like. So, I asked her to send him to the college canteen, the very same place we met. It was only appropriate.

“What the fuck, man!” he shouted at me, as he settled down. “Why the fuck haven’t you been picking up my calls? You’ve blocked me, haven’t you? Why would you do that?”

“There’s an explanation,” I said.

“Then it better be a damn good one,” he said with a glare and ordered cold coffee. “You’re paying right?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Just like old times, huh?”

"Yes, just like old times." Sigh.

I searched his face for a sense of premonition, at least a faint breath of a feeling that something did not feel right. Nothing. It was as blank as always.

“So, what is your explanation?” he said, making quotation marks with his hands. It made him look more stupid than usual. We were the only people in the canteen. It was almost six and they were going to be closing soon. I had to finish this.

“Yeah, about that… Um…”

“What?” he screamed and abruptly fell silent. And then he was hysterical with laughter. “You barged in on your mom and dad having sex kya?”. He was literally rolling on the floor laughing. Okay, not literally; but he was pretty close.

I could not believe this guy. He had the attention span of a teaspoon – his mind simply could not stay on one topic for too long. He sensed something was wrong and then his mind switched to a visual of my parents having sex. Perfectly normal, nothing wrong with that. This guy simply did not function like other human beings. But it had also completely ruined the mood.

“Listen, it’s late now. There’s this physics quiz tomorrow at Bishop’s, eleven' o'clock. You wanna come?” I was still going to do it. It just had to be done at the right place at the right time. Or so I told myself. I got up to leave.

“Yeah, why not? I'll be there.”

He still was not done laughing. And he had simply skipped over the fact that we were seeing each other after three months.

***

Young love was leaving campus and Harvard was still staring at them. his phone rested face down to his side. He seemed calm. 

“Harvard, there’s something I need to say to you,” I said.

He looked at me, but whether with amusement or indifference, I don’t know, I’m not sure. Can there be amused apathy? I resumed before he could say anything.

“I… can’t do this anymore. I … I don’t know why we’re doing this.”

Harvard was yawning. He thought it was another one of my I hate myself rants. But this was slightly different. This was I hate myself and I hate you and I don't want to see you ever again.

“We’re clearly … not … uh … compatible,” I said. This was not working. This was probably an unprecedented scene in history – No trashy romantic comedy or crappy novel would come to my help telling me how two heterosexual former Best Friends Forever of the same sex could … break up. So I got to the point. “I don’t know why we’re friends. I don’t think we should be friends anymore.”

“Wut?” he said, squinting his eyes. I was not prepared for this reaction; I was sort of expecting a “Yeah… I think you’re right, I guess we need to move on”. I had been too optimistic. But at least I had his attention.

“I said I don’t know why we’re friends.”

“Yeah, I got that. What the fuck are you talking about?”

“We have nothing in common. NOTHING, do you get me Harvard? No-fucking-thing. We’re chalk and cheese, sofa and … curtains we’re … oil and water. Why why did we become friends?”

“What do you mean why did we become friends?”

“Yes, why are we friends? There needs to be a reason, right? Most friendships are based on mutual appreciation of a certain common thing or sometimes even mutual hatred of something or someone. What did we have in common, Harvard?”

Harvard’s face had morphed from a bored nonchalance and assumed a sudden seriousness which I had only seen happen once, when my father had caught me watching porn. It was scary.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “Not all friendships are based on mutual appreciation or whatever… Some just happen. Like Halley’s Comet. You know Halley’s comet?”

“Yes Harvard,” I sighed. “I know what Halley’s Comet is. What are you talking about?”

“Yeah, so this guy Halley, he didn’t go around looking for the comet. He was just watching the sky one day and you know, it just came to him and everybody was like “Woah, man you’ve found your comet we’re gonna name it after you” but in reality the comet just happened.”

“What are you trying to say, Harvard?”

“That friendships just happen. You don’t choose them. Sometimes you meet people and they either shtick or they don’t.”

That was the single most dumbest thing I had ever heard. But I did not say so. I also knew Halley did not actually discover the comet. I did not say that either. I just stared sadly into the distance, which in retrospect was an extremely bad move. I was thinking of possible escape routes from this awkward stalemate when his phone rang. His sister was in hospital but was doing okay and his dad was outside the college waiting for him.

“Okay, I’ve gotta go now,” he said. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. We’re friends, okay?”

What? I looked at him. This was all wrong.

“And dude please, do something about those hairy hands. Wear a full shirt or something. I can’t... ugh.”

He was actually leaving. He had also not asked me what this whole thing was about. He simply did not care. I found it hard to believe but yet, there he was, walking away.

"Hey, do you need a ride?" He was yelling from his car.

"No, no I have my bike." For probably the first time in my life I felt shame. 

“Hey Harvard,” I caught myself yelling. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” he yelled back. He seemed genuinely confused.

THE END

Free ebook: Mystery Man by Colin Bateman

Mr. Bateman, you're an excellent writer. Suing me would be a mistake for we both know you don't have anywhere close to the readership you deserve. Maybe someone stumbling across this link in the future will love it the same way I did and buy imported editions of Jack Russell and Dr. Yes. (They aren't available in India. Maybe your publisher can do something about that.)

PEOPLE OF THE INTERNET GOOGLING FOR "MYSTERY MAN COLIN BATEMAN FREE EBOOK", YOU'VE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9jG16QNm9kgX2dVQ245LTJvXzA/view?usp=sharing

Update: I also found the sequel, The Day of the Jack Russell.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9jG16QNm9kgNVg0bjl2cmk0V3M/view?usp=sharing

The Cuckoo Called. I didn't pick up.

I read the Cuckoo's Calling last week. I didn't like it. Now I need to find a way of saying it without sounding stupid, without comparing it to Harry Potter. I need to judge it by its own merits. But here's the problem - I haven't read much crime-fiction. The only detective I'm familiar with is Sherlock Holmes. So, do I get to go on and crib? What the heck, I'm angry and I NEED to rant.

I did not pick up The Casual Vacancy because I was afraid those scathing reviews it got might have some truth to them. Most of the ones I read were overwhelmingly negative and I did not want to take a chance. So when it was revealed that JKR had written another novel, I grew excited. It suddenly shot to widespread critical acclaim, I thought I might finally have my book. The JKR I was familiar with wrote fantasy. This was crime-fiction, so I did not know what to expect. I picked up this book with an open mind.

Buddha said that there cannot be disappointment without expectation. But Buddha was wrong. Buddha didn't come across Paulo Coelho or Dan Brown or Madhuri Dixit's movie scripts. For if he had, Buddha would've known that if a piece of fiction is truly horrible, nothing can stop you from crying your lungs out and hurting yourself, not even if you put on the most condescending and patronizing expression you can muster and force yourself to laugh derisively at the end of every chapter. No, this book isn't that bad. But it's pretty bad.  

Let me begin.

"The buzz in the streets was like the humming of flies".

That is how it starts. The first line. The buzz in the streets was like the humming of flies. I don't know what she was thinking. I really really can't help thinking of how sorcerer's stone starts:

"Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

I know I'm not supposed to do this but how can one possibly go from the latter to the former? She wrote with assurance, the JKR I remembered. There was a sleepy humour to her sentences, a cocky nonchalance most unique, the combined charm impossible to resist. And then came this book.

"Photographers stood massed behind barriers patrolled by police, their long-snouted cameras poised, their breath rising like steam."

Long snouted? Srsly Rowling? We want JK Rowling. (Get it? Srsly and JK? Never mind. #sorry)

Lula Landry, a supermodel, is found dead in front of her apartment building. One page down, we're introduced to a detective inspector Carver, whose face is the colour of corned-beef and a "boyishly good-looking" Detective Seargent Eric Wardle, both of whom seem to think this is suicide. Then we meet Robin, "pretty, tall and curvaceous with strawberry-blonde hair which rippled as she strode briskly along". Robin works as a temporary at Temporary Solutions Ltd, and her next weekly assignment is with private detetive Cormoran Strike, our main man. (Cormoran Strike. Of course his surname had to be strike. All detectives have cool surnames. Sherlock HOLMES, Richard CASTLE... Cormoran STRIKE. It'll grow on me, you say to yourself and you move on.) Lula's brother doesn't buy the police theory. He believes it is murder and approaches Strike to seek help. Will Strike be able to deliver Justice and help Bristow avenge his sister's death? In a situation where virtually everyone is a suspect, where does one start? Well, this guy starts with google searches. No, really. This is the new age, man. 

Cormoran Strike is not particularly good looking. 

"Strike had the high, bulging forehead, broad nose and thick brows of a young Beethoven who had taken to boxing."

Maybe JKR really liked those lines for we see another one -

"He was massive and looked like a boxing Beethoven, and had curry sauce all down his T-shirt."

Boxing Beethoven, I see. 

Strike has just broken up with his girlfriend, who is indubitably real; beautiful, dangerous as a cornered vixen, clever, sometimes funny and fucked to the core. He moves out of her place to his office, because he's broke. In comes Robin. Sexual tension Dha Dha Dah... Robin is pretty, smart, subtle and super-resourceful. She's basically an adult version of Hermoine Granger. But But Robin's engaged. And her fiance disapprovres of her working for a guy who lives in his office, annoying Robin, for whom this is a childhood dream. Fiance acting like a jerk gives Robin doubts about her future marital life, which is reflected in a frozen pea getting stuck in in the setting of her ring as she's washing dishes at the end of the chapter. You think that's silly? The book's just beginning.

Rowling's cast of original characters stops at Robin. If you try really hard, maybe you can come to like Strike. But that's it. Everybody else is a caricature. The abusive husband, the gay fashion designer, the dumb model, the druggie boyfriend, the pervert producer and the crazy ex-girlfriend. 

About the crazy ex-girlfriend, now. 

"...Charlotte screamed at him, the ashtray catching him on the brow bone as he looked back..."

"Then the final filthy scene after Charlotte had tracked him down in the early hours to plunge in those last few banderillas she had failed to implant before he had left her flat ... clawing his face, (after which) she had run out of the door."

"Charlotte would not rest until she had hurt him bad in retaliation"

Absolutely nothing is hinted at as to what really happened between Strike and Charlotte, who he spends so much time thinking about. You just have to assume she's crazy, like chicks are. You could completely remove her character (which would easily take two dozen pages) and the plot would remain the same. No diference, whatsoever. But it'd still be a bad plot.

But it's not just her characters, it's her writing in general which feels unsure, amateur and awkward.

"The floodlit area was almost as long as the street itself, full of millions of pounds' worth of Ferrari, audi, Jaguar and BMW."

"It was overlooked by Canary Wharf, whose sleek, futuristic buildings resembled a series of glaming metal blocks on the horizon; their size, like that of the national debt, impossible to gauge from such a distance." 

The mystery isn't exactly new. The killer turns out to be psycopath with childhood issues. What a surprise. At the end of the day, this is not a bad book, individually. It's an okay book But it certainly doesn't deserve the acclaim it seems to be getting. I wouldn't have had a problem if this had cut out its pretensions and become just a whodunnit. But JKR clearly did not want that. You can see that she's trying to create something new, something fresh. There's a scene where Strike's searching Landry's emails on her laptop for clues -

"Her emails gave him the realization what the multitude of photographs had not; a realization in the gut, rather than the brain, that a real thing, living, laughing and crying human being had been smashed to death on that snowy London street".

If it hadn't been for strike spelling it out loud, I wouldn't have thought of it that way. That is what Rowling is trying to do. She is trying to create real people, not just a detecive and a bunch of suspects. And she's failing. I'm not one-thousandth of a writer she is. I'm just a sad 17-year old who misses the author who gave him the characters he grew up with. You're a pro, JKR. Act like one.

-Appropriate funny title to be inserted here-

So, I found a couple of my primary school friends on facebook a while ago. And it brought back a few interesting stories. I think I've mentioned before that my father kept changing jobs a lot. So I've never been friends with a person for more than four years, on an average. But I was part of many good friendships while they lasted.

There was this one guy called Parth. In my memory, he's always blonde; but it's highly unlikely he was. But he was very pretty. I guess the most good-looking in our class, now that I think of it. But when you're 6 years old, you don't think of such things a lot. (I was cute once upton a time; and the cuteness factor decreased exponentially as I grew older. If only I knew... I could've killed myself so people would have always remembered me as an adorable 3 year old. Wait, what? nevermind, coming back to Parth.) So, Parth, yeah. Parth liked to draw. And he was really really good at it. He drew Pokemon and he would invite us over to his house and we'd all gape at him in open-mouthed wonder. That black and white Sendaquil looked so real..

And one summer, I went back to Mysore for a couple of weeks with my parents; and when I came back, we still had a couple of weeks of vacation left. The next evening, I went down to Parth's place on my bicycle. We all had bicycles and that's what we did in the evenings. Cycle. I don't remember why it was so fun. But it was and we'd do that almost every day. The other days, we'd play bat and ball. We called it bat and ball because for cricket, you needed to have a stadium and wickets and spectators and stuff.. it was necessary to preserve the integrity of the game.

So, I rode down to his apartment and started yelling out his name. Usually after two shouts, you would hear an annoyed mother or grandfather shout to Parth saying his friend were here but that day, I heard nothing. I called his name again. 4 times. 5 times. Nothing. The sixth time, I remember this very well, an aunty answered "Arre wo chala gaya". "Kahan?" I ask. "Nagpur. Hamesha ke liye", she yells back.
I walked back to my cycle, without saying thank you. I rode that day all by myself. I don't remember what my thoughts were that evening. And I don't think I want to know what they were. I did have a faint memory of someone telling me his folks were moving. Was I sad? Was I emotionally mature enough to know to be sad? Or did it just not matter? And which was more sad? - A kid upset about losing his friend or a kid who just went "Oh. Nevermind" and moved on with his life as if nothing happened?

Parth was not part of our group from then on but I don't really recollect any afternoon lunch-breaks spent missing him. My best friend was someone else. I remember my first best friend - Darsheel Safari (name changed, obviously).  I remember his round face with short hair, how his face would light up every time he smiled - like a small male Julia Roberts. Of course, we were kids. All of our smiles were adorable. I don't remember anything else about him except that whenever somebody used to ask me who my best friend was, I'd say his name. And I have some vague memory of a teacher telling my mother that we were inseparable. That might've been made up, I'm not sure. There is really only one clear memory I have of him.

I think this was in third standard. Let me remind you, third standard was when you came to school wearing shorts with suspenders. And you had different school bags. The wide ones, not the long ones you use now. And you wrote with pencils. Natraj/Apsara. Apsara was better looking, wrote darker, had fancy sharpners and smoother erasers. Yet somehow, mom always bought Natraj. Natraj was our like family pencil. And we had pencil boxes - Thick plastic containers in pinks and blues and greens. And for some reason, what the pencil box said on top mattered a lot to us. Most of the times, they'd be completely random; I remember one which went "Rock Lord 1987" with guitars and drums in the background. I mean, what? More importantly, why? But some boxes would have Spiderman or Goku or Ash Ketcham on them. And people who got those boxes would naturally be the center of attention of the entire class till about a week or so. So it was a big deal, to have a pencil box with a picture of a superhero on it. They said something about you, which superhero you chose. Even if those superheroes just guarded stationery, they made a statement.
(In my case, it was my mom who did the choosing. I think it was the same with my friends too. I don't think any 6 year old in middle class Bhandara was given the remotest sensation of free will. It was too dangerous at that age. But if that was true, nobody said anything)

And one day, some idiot bought a pencil box with a picture of a barbie on it and all hell broke loose. It started with some genius thinking it was good idea to smack the box onto someone's face and then tease the guy saying "eww.. you kissed the barbie.. you kissed the barbie! heeeheee". And soon the whole class was doing it, all retards, giggling as if they'd just come upon the most wicked plan for world domination. Now here, I'm the good guy. I'm trying to ignore all this, do my classwork silently, thinking what those nimwits do is none of my business and BAM! a box slams into my face and Darsheel goes "Hahaha you kissed her! you kissed her!". I slam my notebook shut and give him the deadliest stare I can muster. "I'm going to tell ma'am". "No you're not," he goes and tries to push the box to my face again. I manage to shove it away just in time. "THAT'S IT", I shout. I stand up and Darsheel realizes I'm finally serious. He pulls me back to my seat and apologizes hastily. "Oh no, but now it's too late," I say, shaking my head. He waits for me to smile, to call it off. But I don't. His expression changes into one of dread. It goes from "Kya ba, itte se baat pe kayko gussa hotae" to "Bhai, nai Bhai. Bhai please. Ek aur chance de do na bhai". I think about it. I decide that the best way out of this ethical dilemma is to let ma'am decide i.e. I won't accuse him of anything or give a biased opininon. I'll just tell her what happened. And she's grown up, she'll know what to do. I tell him this. He looks at me as if I just told him he's adopted. He begs me not to. "I can't", I say. "I have to tell her. I warned you. You left me no choice". Ek baar jo maine commitment kar di, uske baad to main khud ki bhi nahin sunta. 

So, that's what I do. I walk up to ma'am and tell her what happened. I think she slaps him. Or makes him Murga. You know, when you crouch and bring your hands from under thighs to hold your ears? Some smartass thought it looked like a rooster. But he did get punished in the end, one way or the other. Because I had to act like Eddard Stark. 

We still remained best friends, or atleast I thought we did. Because when you're that young, all you want is someone to play with. You don't care if he's a sleaze or a self-righteous cunt as long as he can swing his bat with a 16.66% or greater chance of hitting the ball. That isn't the case when you're grown up. When you're a kid, things always have a happy ending. When you're grown up, insults are remembered, exaggerated. It's a dark place, the world adults inhabit.