The Wrong House

Tezpur, Assam. 1995.

  “Hello Amit,” said Bruce in a sing song voice. “It’s 7 o’clock in the morning, and I’m sure you’ve forgotten to do Chatterjee’s homework.”
  “Nnnnaaaaaaahhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnn,” yelled Amit in the perfected and patented tone used by Hindi film heroines, accompanied by some bangle breaking,  on hearing that their husband’s dead. If you had known Mr Chatterjee, it’s highly unlikely that you would go cartwheeling on learning that you’ve forgotten his homework, because a wooden ruler would gleefully go whack! whack! on your hands without fail. And this in class IX, in an enlightened age when corporal punishment is generally frowned upon.
  “What am I gonna do?”
  “Don’t show up in school for a couple of years and hope that he forgets about it.”
  “Any more brilliant suggestions?”
  “How about telling him you were ill?”
  “Won’t do. That doesn’t count with him. I think I won’t go to school…why the hell didn’t you remind me earlier!”
  “I forgot.”
  “Does that mean you haven’t done it either?”
  “Yup.”
 “Hee har har! What’re you going to do now?”
 “I’ve cooked up a terrific story. I’ll tell him that while playing cricket yesterday, I made a heroic dive at extra cover and took a superlative catch that’ll go down in the history of local cricket, but in the process injured my thumb rather badly. And I’m going with a crepe bandage.”
  “Not a bad idea for somebody with negligible grey matter.”

  At school, Bruce’s crepe bandage and the absolute straight-facedness with which he told Chatterjee his martyr’s story won the admiration of the class.
 A few minutes later, midway through Chatterjee’s lecture, sports coach Mr Karuna Doley came into the classroom.
  “Boys,” he said, “Today we’ll be having the selections for our school cricket team. So be at the field after school.”
  Bruce was thrilled. For a long time he’d been wanting to be in the school team. The previous year, he’d been something like the sixteenth man.
  Guess what happened. Coach Karuna noticed his crepe bandage and said, “Bruce, what’s happened to your hand?”
  Bruce looked at Coach Karuna, and then looked at Chatterjee. Somebody had put superglue inside his throat.
  “Ulp…er…uh…nothing much, Sir, it’s just a…”
  Chatterjee butted in. “He got injured while taking a legendary catch yesterday. His thumb’s all but broken.”
  “Oh, that’s too bad, Bruce. You bowl decent leg spin.”
  “I…uh…” And the superglue stuck Bruce’s throat completely.

  Amit’s laughter could be heard on Mars when Bruce told him the story.
  “What an idiot! Har har har! Crepe bandage! Ho har har!”
  If this conversation weren’t being conducted over phone, Bruce would’ve probably attempted to cause Amit’s windpipe some temporary harm. Then he remembered something gratifying.
  “What’re you laughing so much about? You weren’t at the trials either. Boom go your chances of making the team this year. I’ll laugh now.”
  “Oh crap! The team! The team!”
  “Serves you right.” Then after a dramatic pause, Bruce added, “Be thankful that I’ve been thinking about this. I’ll tell you what we’ll do: we’ll go to Coach Karuna’s place, tell him why we weren’t around and ask him to check us out tomorrow. He’s a bit liberal, so he shouldn’t rat on us.”
  “Where does he live?”
  “Anand knows. I’ll call him up and find out. Come over immediately and we’ll go.”
 Bruce called up Anand and asked him where Coach Karuna lived.
 “Somewhere in Faaltu Police Line,” he said. “I think it’s house number 14. I pass that way very often.”
 “Are you sure about 14? Pranjal told me it was 40 or something.”
 “Pranjal is also the one who said that Colombo is in Chennai.”
 “You’ve got a point there.”
 
 So Amit came over and the two of them went bicycling to Faaltu Police Line. They soon came to house number 14. By the way, it deserves a mention here that 14 was not the correct number. Anand the overconfident jackass had got it wrong.
  Bruce knocked on the door and a maid opened it.
  He asked her “Is Sir in?” She said he’d be coming shortly, and asked them to wait.
  They sat down in the drawing room. The room was well done and tidy and blah blah blah. What was special were a lot of trophies, mostly for dancing and singing, in the name of Anushka Talukdar. Probably his daughter, thought Bruce, but then why a different surname? He was about to voice his doubts, when Amit spoke first.
  “Talented girl, eh?” he remarked.
  And then the talented girl walked in. She was quite tall, about 5’9″, and indeed very pretty.
  “Hi. You’ve come to meet father?” she said.
  “Yes,” said Bruce. “I’m Bruce. This is Amit.”
  “How do you do, Amit?”
  One look at Amit and you could see all the symptoms. Amit had some criteria for a girl to be classified as good looking. One of them was a minimum height of 5’6″. When a lady matching this and some other criteria walked across the horizon, he ended up forgetting everything including his planet of residence. Anushka was much above the danger level. As a result Amit had superglue in his throat and an I’m-a-dead-fish glazed look in his eye. He said:
 ”Fow dyou.”
  I’ll translate that. He was going to say Fine, then he thought of How d’you do, and he mixed them up and got it wrong altogether.
  “Which class are you in?” Bruce asked.
 ”Ten. You too?”
 ”Yes, we are. You seem to be into a lot of song and dance.”
 ”I am.”
 They made small talk, or rather, Bruce made small talk and Amit made very small talk for a while. Then Anushka went in to get them some refreshments, much against their false protestations. They were ready to eat anything anytime anywhere.
  Presently Anushka came in with some tea, chips and some extremely poisonous-looking til ke laddoos. Bruce didn’t like til back then. In later years, they were to discover that it goes amazingly well with pork.
  “I made these myself,” she said. “Have some. I’ll just go and check if father’s on his way.”
  She went in, and Bruce said, “Those laddoos look life-threatening to me.”
  “She’ll be offended if we don’t have any. She’s made them herself.”
  “If you care so much try one yourself. If you see a bright light and some ancestors let me know.”
  Amit gingerly put one in his mouth. The expression on his face was a demonstration that Anushka was not as hot in the cookery department as in the song and dance.
  “Urk! It’s cyanide.”
  “That settles it. I’m not gonna have any.”
  “But she’ll be offended.”
  “You bloody seniram! Put them in your pocket then.”
  “My T-shirt doesn’t have pockets. And they’ll stick out in my jeans. Put them in your trouser pockets.”
  Bruce gave Amit a look as black as possible, and then put about four of the poisonous things in his hip pocket.
  As they began sipping their tea, a funny looking man walked in. I don’t mean he looked funny, actually. I mean he looked at them funnily, as though they were newly discovered comets that might or might not collide with planet earth. He was slightly bald, had specs on and was dressed in kurta-and-pyjama. At that moment Anushka walked in and said to him, “Father, these boys want to meet you.”
  That was when the first ray of realization dawned.
  Amit was still under the spell, so he wasn’t thinking fast enough, but Bruce began to realise they’d indeed made a horrible mistake.
  “Er, no,” he said. “We’ve come to meet Coach Karuna.”
  “Who Karuna? What Karuna? When Karuna?”
  “Er-Coach Karuna Doley.”
  “What on earth are you talking about? How Baruna? Who’re you?”
  “Um-er-we’re students of Don Bosco.”
  You should’ve seen him explode at that instant. His eyes grew miles in diameter.
  “Don Bosco! You’re from Don Bosco!” he said in a tone which was equivalent to saying “Tihar Jail! You’re from Tihar Jail!”
  He continued. “I know why you’re here! I know you boys are the scum of the earth! The doom of this generation! It was one of you who took a photo of my daughter in the market! And now you’ve come right home to flirt with her! All under the pretext of meeting some Garuna! The nerve! The absolute nerve!”
  Then Bruce realised who this chap was. He was Kamaleswar Talukdar, famous as the foremost anti-Bosconian in town. Somehow, he happened to be in all the wrong places at the wrong times when fate or Bosconians decided to play tricks. Recently one of their classmates had accidentally jabbed an umbrella into his posterior, sending him jumping into a peanut vendor and upsetting half of the poor man’s stuff.
  Bruce and Amit were pretty close to sweating by then. Bruce tried some last ditch techniques. He said, “Uh, isn’t this house number 14?”
  “You don’t fool me with your asinine tricks! This is house number 14, but no Garuna-Shoruna lives here!”
 “Karuna?” Bruce said.
 “Whatever!” he yelled.
 “Oh, sorry. Our mistake,” Bruce said as apologetically as possible. “We’ll just go then.”
  And then, out of sheer force of habit, Bruce did the really dumb thing of reaching into his trouser pocket for his bicycle keys. Along with the keys emerged two black laddoos which bounced twice and then contentedly rolled over to Anushka’s dad’s feet. He took a deep breath as though he was just about to dive under water, and hissed “What is the meaning of this?”
  Amit’s chances of creating any favourable impression with Anushka went bust with the popping out of the laddoos. Even she was now staring at them rather coldly. Amit, the blithering idiot, had been silent all along while Bruce faced the storm. But now since it was a question of staying out of a tall, pretty girl’s black books, he decided to do some damage control. This is what he came up with:
  “Uh – er – we liked them so much we thought we’d take some home.”
 It didn’t work. Anushka’s expression didn’t change. She opened her mouth to say something, but her father exploded first.
  “Out! Out! Before I call the police!”
  Out they did go, with extremely bruised egos and reputations. They felt so sunk that they didn’t go to Coach Karuna’s place. Nor even to slaughter Anand.

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