Mrs Godse was a 38 year old widow who had been a teacher for over 15 years with Chembur English Academy and just this year had been rewarded for her loyalty with a promotion to Head Mistress of the secondary section.
Medium height, medium built, fair and eye- catchingly buxom, it was rumoured that her
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loyalty as well as reward was the result of a clandestine affair with Mr Mehra, the Head Trustee of the school.
“Roy, you are in Standard X, Board Exams are just a few months away and you are climbing down from the second floor… What on earth do you think you were doing? You could have easily slipped off the greasy drain pipe you were hanging on to and fallen to your death … or at least broken your bones! It is hard to believe that you are Mark’s younger brother. Mark is always so responsible.”
“Sorry Ma’am,” Roy looked suitably apologetic.
“I would have called your Dad, but I know he will never turn up! I ought to speak to Mr Mehra and have you rusticated … the only reason I am not doing it is because I do not want to taint the reputation of this fine school.”
‘Fine school, my ass,’ thought Roy, ‘you are not rusticating me because your daughter has the hots for my brother.’
“What are you smiling about?” yelled Mrs Godse “Get out of my room and into your class before I change my mind!”
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Roy thanked her and slid out of the room and as he climbed up the stairs to his class, he was thinking…
‘What knockers … must be a size 40 ‘D’ cup at least and how they heave when she gets angry and excited!’
In the class room, for the remaining 3 periods, Roy was in a daze.
All he could think of was Chief Trustee Mehra burrowing his face into those voluptuous breasts and rubbing his lips, nibbling and suckling on those enormous hard pink nipples!
‘Old man Mehra is one lucky dog!’ he thought, ‘Three heart attacks down, still plenty to live for!!’
After school, when he reached home, Mark was at the door smiling at him.
“Heard you were caught monkeying around in the school”, he laughed.
“Yeah,” Roy retorted, “I missed Lace Maker at Rajhans because your mother-in-law was getting hot flashes!”
Mark was just under 6 feet tall and had inherited all his mother’s good looks and fair complexion
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along with his father’s broad shoulders and athletic physique.
In contrast, Roy was shorter by a couple of inches, dark, wiry with dark brooding eyes of his father.
Yet, there was no sibling rivalry between them. Mark was more of a father than a brother to Roy. Ever since Philomena’s death, George had found it very difficult to cope with his younger son and had submerged himself in cheap military rum.
Mark had stepped in beautifully and taken over the guardian’s role. Roy appreciated it. Mark was always by his side when he needed him. Though only 18, Mark was far mature for his age.
Every morning from 6:00 to 9:00, he worked as a life guard cum swimming coach at the municipal swimming pool nearby, and attended college in the afternoon.
His athletic physique and good looks were some of the reasons for the success of the municipal pool’s coaching scheme, especially amongst the ladies and the teen-aged girls from the area. The tips and the salary he received, ensured that Roy was always well provided for.
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His girlfriend Rita Godse, was easily the prettiest girl in Shastri College. A year older than Roy, Rita was tall, slim and well-endowed like her mother. Well aware of her looks, Rita aimed to be a model first and actress later.
Mark was kind, sincere and well-liked by all and sundry. Though he got a lot of lucrative offers of the carnal kind from fat, rich women who frequented the swimming pool and the attached restaurant, he was never swayed and remained loyal to Rita.
Roy would often wonder what he would have done if he was in Mark’s place and an evil grin would get plastered on his dark face.
Every time Roy would get into trouble with the local bullies or teachers in school, Mark would come to his rescue.
Roy hero-worshipped Mark and thought he was indestructible.
A week later, as they were lowering his coffin into the grave, Roy could not fathom why Mark had to die?!
As it turned out, it was a particularly hot October day, and the heat coaxed Mark to fiddle with
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Mr Parab’s table fan that George had brought home to repair and got himself electrocuted. He was alone at home at the time and died an excruciating death.
For a guy who was so spectacular in life, Roy had never imagined such an unspectacular death for Mark. He could accept that Mark was no more, but just couldn’t digest the fact that Mark was killed by of all things … a rundown table fan!
‘How could such a worthy life be terminated by something so worthless?’ The thought remained with him throughout his life.
A pebble sailed right through the open window and landed painfully on Roy’s forehead.
“What the fuck…” cursed Roy rubbing his smarting forehead and sat upright. It was just daybreak. He could hear someone call out his name from under his 1st floor housing board apartment window.
It was Zaheer. Then he remembered Zaheer’s grandiose plans to snare chicks, which he had discussed with him the night before.
“I have promised old Mrs Braganza that I will walk her Tommy and Tammy in the morning,” he had said, “there are plenty of chicks who come for morning walks at the park and dogs are sure-fire chick magnets.”
Roy liked dogs, but did not particularly fancy Mrs Braganza’s Pomeranians. He found them to be loud, restless and always ready to snap at the heels of the person in front of them.
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He quickly wore a sporty tee, track pants and slid on a pair of sneakers and joined Zaheer and the dogs. On his way out he could hear a hung-over George curse him for switching the lights on.
Once they reached the park, Roy had no choice but to have a grudging respect for Zaheer. The guy certainly did his research well. The place did have carnal possibilities.
Zaheer was a couple of years older than Roy, medium height, fair, slightly built, but he also had something the other boys did not have … a slight resemblance to the South Indian actor Kamal Hasan. Since, Kamal Hasan’s first Hindi film Ek Duje Ke Liye was such a super duper hit, even a slight resemblance got him a lot of admiring looks.
Zaheer’s father, Mr Sheikh, owned a small newspaper and magazine shop near Chembur railway station. In fact, his brother Shaukat had just returned from Dubai with a little money and dreamed of converting the shop into a VHS video library. He had already started collecting a pretty decent Bollywood and Hollywood pirated film collection thanks to his old smuggler buddies from South Bombay.
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Soon, Zaheer was chatting with two girls, both around his age. They were freshers at the nearby Somani College of Arts. Soon enough, he had fixed a double date with Connie and Aruna at the college canteen the very next day.
As they walked home, pleased as punch, they realized that they did not have the moolah to impress the babes. Roy sorely missed Mark’s largesse, but luckily the canteen was cheap and Zaheer promised to steal 20 Rupees from his dad’s wallet.
The date went fine, but the location was hostile. Connie and Aruna were not exactly pretty but they were pretty easy and gathered a lot of interest from the college toughies. Zaheer and Roy could feel their hateful eyes on them. The fact that Roy and Zaheer could speak English and converse with the girls, made the vernacular toughies hate them even more.
After sipping a couple of soft drinks and exchanging phone numbers, the girls giggled back to their classes. As the boys got up to leave, a couple of toughies deliberately barged into them and abused them.
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“Sister fuckers!” Zaheer muttere
d angrily under his breath.
“What did you call me?” Toughie No. 1 demanded, clearly looking for a fight. He was tall and well-built with oily hair.
Roy could see Zaheer quietly reach for the folding knife, he always carried in his back pocket.
“Nothing…” said Roy with a smile to avoid a confrontation, “we were just leaving.”
“Don’t you dare show your faces here again!” Toughie No. 2 growled.
“Can we fuck your pretty sisters somewhere else?” Zaheer growled back.
And that was it. Toughie No. 2 took a swing at Zaheer who ducked expertly and slashed his arm with his knife in one motion.
Toughie No. 1 came charging at Roy, who easily sidestepped and punched him on his ribs. As the toughie bent over, Roy head-butted his face, breaking his nose and making him scream in pain.
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“Run!” yelled Zaheer and both of them took off towards the college gate. After a momentary shock, half a dozen boys ran after them yelling. A couple of them had picked up knives from the canteen kitchen.
Just outside the gate, Zaheer found an auto rickshaw from their locality and jumped into it with Roy after him.
“Hurry!” Zaheer begged, “The Pantnagar gang is after us!!”
The auto rickshaw driver knew both of them and immediately flew into action. As the old Bajaj engine began to gather speed, Toughie No. 1 had reached the auto and was blindly slashing with the kitchen knife inside. Roy caught his hand and slammed it against the centre rod and pulled simultaneously.
As his head appeared, Roy caught his neck in a stranglehold and turned him around, dragging him along the road backwards, while Zaheer punched his face laughing and abusing, smashing his nose and lips and bloodying his face. As they gathered speed, Roy let go and saw him fall heavily on the pot-holed road.
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“That was fun!” laughed Zaheer, but Roy wasn’t feeling too good. He did not enjoy violence and he also knew how fortunate they were.
‘What if we had not found the auto rickshaw? It could have been us lying on the road all bloody!’ His mind wandered.
Roy and Zaheer laid low, the next few days. They knew that the toughies from Pantnagar were waiting to get their hands on them. Even on the days he went to school, he would jump the wall and go out through another building. Zaheer, of course, knew about Roy’s exit strategy and was waiting for him outside, that day.
“We are meeting the babes at the Coffee House, this evening,” he beamed.
“CH?” smiled Roy, “rob a bank, did you?”
“That too … soon enough,” laughed Zaheer “as of now, we are meeting Bhuria Bhai, outside Rajhans Cinema. He has a business proposal for us.”
Bhuria was a local hoodlum who controlled the black marketing of cinema tickets at Rajhans. Since Roy was a regular there, they knew each other. Bhuria was tall, thin, and fair, with brown hair and eyes, in fact everything about him was brown, including his teeth.
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Bhuria had heard about their escapade at Somani College and was impressed. The Pantnagar gang and Iqbal “Shorty” who headed it were his mortal enemies.
Shorty controlled the black marketing at The Opera Cinema in Pantnagar and Bhuria at Rajhans. Their paths crossed often usually with bloody results.
Bhuria’s proposal made sense to Roy and Zaheer. It was a win-win situation for both parties. Roy and Zaheer would get the protection and weapons from the Bhuria gang while Bhuria would get two earnest black marketers.
The next 6 months were a breeze for Roy and Zaheer. It was a golden period for Hindi Cinema. A certain Mr Amitabh Bachchan would churn super hit after super hit and eager fans would form serpentine queues at the cinemas for a 3 hour escape from their daily drudgery.
Black marketing the tickets would earn them over Rs 200 a day which made them richer than their parents. The only minus was that the news of Roy’s new found profession soon spread and reached his school. He was rusticated.
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Bhuria and his gang were in constant danger from Shorty’s gang and vice versa. Hence, most of them carried switch blades in their pockets and Bhuria himself had a country made revolver which his cousins from Bihar had gifted him. It was his prized possession and he carried it with him at all times.
They also had an iron trunk hidden in a cigarette/paan shop nearby, which was full of choppers, iron rods and hockey sticks.
It was just a year ago that Bhuria’s younger brother Haria had gone drinking with a couple of his buddies. Somehow Shorty heard of it and the three of them were not heard of for a week. Then they were found dead at the wastelands near the abattoir in nearby Govandi.
They were barely in their twenties.
Every once in a while Bhuria would get a report that one or two of Shorty’s men were seen in a nearby locality without the rest of the gang members. Immediately the trunk under the cigarette shop would get opened and a dozen gang members would rush to the spot.
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Most times it would be a hoax and once in a while they would get lucky and some luckless teenage wannabe gangster would end up in a hospital or the morgue.
Roy did not like the typical gang mentality of outnumbering the victim or using arms on unarmed enemies. Zaheer enjoyed just that.
“That is the whole purpose of being in a gang,” he would tell Roy, “People are not afraid of an individual, but they are scared of a gang!”
But generally life was good. The movie business was going through a good phase and so was the ticket black marketing trade.
They had enough money to splurge on Connie and Aruna and to visit the ‘family room’ at the Irani restaurant opposite Rajhans.
The restaurant had ‘Family room’ cubicles built on the inside of the restaurant. These cubicles were rented out by the hour to amorous couples. The cubicles were compact and stuffy to the point of being claustrophobic. The steel table and plastic chairs weren’t exactly comfortable, but then the girls were
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nimble and the boys horny, so they had no complaints.
The Irani joint was actually owned by a Dayanand Shetty. He had bought the restaurant from the original Irani owners over a year ago and wanted to convert it into a bar. Unfortunately there were road blocks, since there was a school in the next building and Bombay Municipal Corporation rules did not allow a bar within 100 metres of a functional school.
Daya Anna as he was called by all, was in the process of greasing the right palms to get the authorities to look the other way and grant him a bar license.
Daya Anna knew how to get things done. He had come to Bombay 25 years ago and had started working as a waiter.
After a couple of years’ hard work, he went back to his native city of Udipi and got married to the ugliest girl he could find. His only condition was that he wanted Rs 25,000/- as dowry.
With the money, he took over the management of a small rundown country liquor bar. It was
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owned by an old Koli (original fisherman tribe of Bombay) family. He then seduced the owner’s daughter Rani and married her illegally. Using his status as a son-in-law, he bought the place from his father-in-law for a pittance and thereafter used his natural business acumen to acquire a proper bar license after renovating the place.
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