Potato Chips

by Anshuman Mohan

  While my friends always crib and fuss when we are asked to stand up during the national anthem at the cinema, I actually enjoy those fifty-two seconds. And I always get goosebumps when Lata Mangeshkar goes ‘Jaya hey! Jaya hey! Jaya heeey…’ The beauty of the national anthem being played at the cinema is that it allows complete strangers to unite in a moment of respect. A Bengali aunty, popcorn in her hand. A Muslim family, the eyes of the women sparkling behind their burkhas. A super-cool, turbanned Sikh dude and his girlfriend, both of them having just entered the hall and still near the door. Kids bunking school. Vendors selling snacks and drinks… Nobody could explain this to the bunch of ruffians making fun of me. I pushed the thought of their jeering away from my mind and thought of something that always made me smile.

  Once, I had gone with my family and our friends to watch the film Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (add a few K’s here and there) at Fame. There was one scene in the movie where a kid sings the Indian national anthem in front of a thoroughly British audience. In the movie, the Brits stand up when they hear the strains of the song, but the audience here in India was not so amiable. They lay lazily slumped in their seats in various stages of drowsiness. I was feeling very upset about this, but I didn’t know what to do. However, Shebonti Aunty, one of my mother’s friends, obviously felt no hesitation. Up she sprang like a mousetrap spring and ushered us all up. The guys behind us, whose view we were obstructing, objected.

  ‘Sit down!’ they demanded, tugging at our clothes.

  At this, plump, pleasant Shebonti Aunty got really worked up. She bent down and pulled up the withered old guy seated in front of her by the collar.

  ‘Oi! Oi! You “older generation”, get up!’ she screamed, addressing the poor old man’s wife. ‘You keep cribbing that the younger generation is disrespectful and what not, but look at you!’

  Hearing the altercation, our entire row stood up, followed by all the guys behind us and the guys in front of us. Shebonti Aunty looked pleased as punch. At the end of the show, quite a few people complained about the incident to the management and we probably all got banned from the theatre for life. But we weren’t disheartened. Everybody has his or her own priorities and beliefs.

  I smiled at the memory and dismissed my classmates’ moronic comments.

  We were allowed to leave at eleven itself because of the commotion the whole school was making. Rohan, Ankit, Sameer and I ended up going to the ever-overpriced yet ever-cherished Flury’s and eating little tricoloured pastries and cookies that they had specially prepared to go with the Independence Day theme. Jai ho!

  Eight

  Reading Between the Lines

  The Independence Day programme in the middle of the exams had broken my concentration. At home, I couldn’t concentrate on Physics at all. I just kept thinking of Siddhu and Sohan’s hilarious show. Short phone conversations with Rohan, Ankit and Sameer revealed that they too were as unprepared for the next paper as I was. The programme had left us all thoroughly distracted.

  ‘I am just praying for a holiday,’ said Rohan. ‘I’ve even kept an ulta broom outside my house for good luck. Do you think it will rain hard enough for us to get a holiday? They said the exam would be held after all the other exams if there was an unanticipated holiday.’

  ‘Let’s poison Father Prefect so that they close down the school. I vote for potassium cyanide,’ suggested Ankit. ‘It’s supposed to be the most painful death imaginable…’

  ‘Shut up!’ I told him. ‘You’ve been reading too much Agatha Christie.’

  ‘I’m praying that a national leader dies,’ said Sameer.

  ‘I know!’ I cried. ‘We’ll make a hoax call to the school—now! We’ll tell them that we’ve planted a bomb on the campus. That’ll scare them!’

  ‘Brilliant idea!’ said Sameer. ‘But who will bell the cat?’

  The rest of the gang thought the same. But we were desperate. Anything was okay by us as long as it guaranteed a holiday.

  Amazingly, our prayers were answered the next day. The silence of predawn was interrupted by a loud thunderclap. Rain poured down like cats and dogs and the streets were flooded in no time. It was four in the morning. I flung away my Physics books and hit the bed. I could foresee that the rain was in no mood to stop, which basically translated into a rainy-day holiday.

  The monsoons in Kolkata can’t be compared to anything in the world. A few claps of thunder, an electric-blue bolt of lightning and half a minute of low pressure is all the warning we get before the heavens drench the city with hydro-ammunition, driving us all indoors, slowing down traffic even further and turning dirt to mud. Schools have holidays spanning days at a stretch, exams get cancelled, offices run with minimal staff, drains get blocked and are sprayed with fungicide for ‘security measures’… But Kolkata is still the City of Joy.

  The city of rosogollas, mishti doi and yummy roadside phuchkas. The city of Ma Durga and Ma Kali. Kolkata is a multidimensional city that throbs with the life force, spills over with poets and sports-crazy fans. It is a labyrinth of art, culture, history and politics. The city of Tagore and Netaji, the city of intellect and sentiment, the city of warm, friendly neighbours. A little bit of rain—or even a lot of it—was not going to dampen my love for this wonderful, wonderful city.

  Though the rains spared us for a day and our papers were postponed, the ‘joy’ factor of the city was coming into question at school. A thief was on the loose.

  One day, someone’s clipboard went missing. The invigilator lent him a spare one for the duration of the exam, but the original was never recovered. The next day, someone’s geometry box was suddenly empty of all its instruments. Although the guy blamed his desk partner wholeheartedly, the invigilator followed the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ rule and arranged for a few spares. Shortly after, when Sriniwasan’s thick spectacles disappeared, the whole class started to play blind. You couldn’t walk the length of the room without banging into at least five people who were ‘as blind as bats’.

  The next day, Rohan’s designer Tissot watch went missing. I expected him to turn the class upside down looking for it, but he didn’t even tell the invigilator. After that day’s exam, he just made an announcement to the class at large. ‘Whoever has my watch, listen up. Use it well.’

  I understood what he was playing at. He was trying to awaken a sense of guilt in the thief. However, our thief seemed to be either very deaf or very hardhearted. If Rohan had expected his watch to be lying on his desk the next morning, he was disappointed. I felt rather sorry for him.

  However, the worst was yet to come… and it came to me. I’d brought my stamp collection to school that day. The idea was that I’d show it to the examiner—the longer it took him to appreciate it, the more cheating time the rest of the class would get. The plan worked well and some people actually offered to pay me if I got it the next day and the day after! But I refused their tempting offers. Which was all very well because they would have been very disappointed—my stamp book went missing that very day, probably whisked right out of my bag.

  I was shattered. I had spent years collecting all those stamps. I had begged, borrowed-then-forgotten-to-return and stolen those stamps from my friends and relatives. The most precious of the lot was my Inverted Jenny, rarer and more valuable than the regular Jenny.

  The next day, I walked into school armed with a bad temper, a lot of swearwords and a letter from my mother to Fair & Lovely requesting—rather, commanding—her to hold back the class after that day’s exam and facilitate a search of everyone’s bags. The bag search yielded nothing, but the thieving stopped mysteriously. However, I was determined to catch this magpie even if it was the last thing I ever did. So Rohan, Sameer, Ankit and I joined forces and formed a detective agency of sorts. I was Sherlock Holmes and they were all Watsons. I was Hercule Poirot and they were all Hastings. I was the Famous One and they were all Timothys.

  We asked everyone what they had seen on the afternoon of so-and-so day of so-and-so month
of so-and-so year. The month and the year obviously remained the same for every question and every person, but it made us feel important and more like real detectives. We made people retrace their entire day and threatened them with dire consequences if they ‘refused to cooperate’. Rohan the Hyper went crazy trying to find ‘cigarette ash’, ‘shoeprints’ and ‘fingerprints’. We tried to ignore him as much as possible.

  Ultimately, by the process of elimination, we narrowed our list of suspects (basically, everyone in school that day) down to one person. Everyone else had been spotted away from the scene of crime at the time of its occurrence by someone or the other. Our culprit was Chetan Bhaduri. He was a class six student who had been seated in our classroom for the exams.

  During one of our ‘surprise raids’, we found a toilet cubicle locked. We waited there for a solid hour—on a rotational basis because of the smell—banging on the door continuously, threatening to pour water into the cubicle and yelling ‘NYPD, freeze!’ throughout. Finally, we acted like we were going to call Father Prefect—and he popped out in a jiffy.

  Like dutiful income-tax raiders, we checked the bag that he was carrying. To no one’s surprise, we found everything that had been lost in there. In fact, the only person who seemed surprised was the kid himself.

  ‘Wh-wh-what is that?’ he squeaked. ‘Where did it come from?’ His eyes were wide with shock.

  But we saw through him at once.

  ‘Stop all this naatak,’ said Rohan, taking his watch back and putting it on even though Ankit didn’t want to ‘disturb the evidence’. ‘We know what you’ve been up to. Now do all your explaining to Father.’

  I quickly rifled through my stamp book. All my stamps were there, thank god. We returned all the other tiny, almost inconsequential stolen items to the other victims. God knows why he had been stealing things that had next to no monetary value, but this guy needed to be punished. And he needed to be punished so severely that it would serve as a warning to anyone else who did the same thing.

  We had Chetan by the collar and were just about to drag him to Father’s office when Sriniwasan decided to show off his monitorgiri.

  ‘What are you doing with that boy?’ he demanded.

  ‘Mind your own business,’ Sameer said nastily. He was angry about the fact that Sriniwasan had thanked Chetan when we had returned his spectacles and not us. Somebody should have told him that a little appreciation goes a long way…

  ‘Don’t be so rough with him,’ Sriniwasan said, his voice strangely gentle. ‘Maybe he didn’t mean to…’

  ‘What “didn’t mean to”?’ I yelled. ‘He stole the stuff. Nicked it. He didn’t drop it on the street!’

  ‘He could be a kleptomaniac or something…’

  ‘Klepto what?’ I’d never heard the word before. We continued towards the office, Sriniwasan following.

  ‘Kleptomaniac. It’s like a disease. You have a compulsive desire to gather and hoard things. Most of the time, you aren’t even aware of what you’re doing—ahem, nicking, as you like to put it.’

  ‘Sriniwasan, please don’t interfere,’ I said. ‘What if I hadn’t got my stamps back? Would you have bought them for me? They’re rare and priceless!’

  The situation was beginning to take an ugly turn. I didn’t want to make an enemy out of Sriniwasan, but I was really annoyed about his willingness to defend the thief. We were just about to march into Father Prefect’s office when the bell rang. Damn! Since our carpool dadas wouldn’t allow us time for a full-fledged argument with the principal, we let the boy go for the moment. But not without noting down his phone number from his school diary.

  When I reached home, I related the incident to my mother. She was very relieved at the recovery of the stamps.

  ‘Maybe your monitor is right, you know…’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I cried. ‘No, it can’t be. You have to be very smart to do all this. You need planning.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Mum said. ‘Just don’t punish him too harshly, okay? He’s just a kid, maybe he’s learnt his lesson…’

  I rolled my eyes.

  Later, I sat at my computer and researched kleptomania. It took me a while to get to the right subject, though, since I didn’t know the correct spelling. I went through all the information that Google had to offer. I read the articles on Wikipedia, coming across phrases like ‘compulsive disorder spectrum’, ‘usually begins at puberty and continues till late adulthood’, ‘the stealing is not committed in response to anger or revenge’, ‘increased tension immediately before committing the theft’ and ‘pleasure at the time when the theft is committed’.

  ‘Wow, do such things actually exist?’ I wondered out loud.

  When I thought carefully about it, everything seemed to fit. If the boy was so smart, why would he keep all the stuff in his bag? He would hide his stash at home, wouldn’t he? Or he would sell the things or pass them off to his friends as gifts or something. Why would he even steal things which were almost worthless to anyone other than the owners? And he could have planned everything better—it hadn’t been difficult at all for our ‘detective agency’ to track him down. Besides, he had looked genuinely shocked when we’d dragged those things out of his bag. Maybe the exam fever had got to him? God knows, it was certainly driving me crazy. The kid needed help, not punishment.

  My mind was in turmoil. Suddenly, my thoughts turned to Shubho. It had been months since I had seen him, weeks since I had thought of him. I felt a bit ashamed—was I so fickle that I had forgotten about one friend because I was hanging out with others?

  Nine

  No Competition, Please!

  The day the exams ended, half of Xavier’s went to Forum, the shopping mall nearby. We pigged out at the food court and many guys watched up to three movies back-to-back. We had a three-day holiday before classes started again. It was a pitifully short break, but we had decided to make the most of it. Hardly anyone was staying at his own house any more. Sleepovers, all-night parties, watching movies all day was how we were spending our time. So it wasn’t really a surprise that we all went back to school feeling rather the worse for wear—sleepy and heavy-headed.

  In the middle of the zero period one day—a daily ‘free period’ when we all did our pending homework and generally made a great deal of noise—Rohan appeared out of nowhere and stood at the door. He had evidently been out, but no one had noticed his absence.

  ‘Okay!’ he said. ‘Who’s the monitor around here?’

  ‘I am,’ said Siddhu. ‘And you know that—’

  ‘I am the monitor,’ interrupted Sriniwasan. ‘What is it?’ He was playing along, pretending he did not know that Rohan belonged to the class.

  ‘I have a very important announcement from Father,’ Rohan said, raising his voice so that the whole class could hear him.

  We all sat a little straighter in our seats.

  He held out an old-fashioned brown clipboard with a piece of paper pinned to it. It looked just like the boards that the peons carried from class to class, asking the teachers to read out the notices. In a very sober, serious voice, he started to read out from the paper.

  ‘Two priests decided to go on a Hawaiian vacation…’

  The class exchanged incredulous looks.

  ‘… They were determined to make this a real vacation by not wearing anything that would give away their profession. As soon as the plane landed, they headed for a store and bought some really outrageous shorts, shirts, sandals, sunglasses and a surfboard each.’

  Rohan was speaking in a monotone, just the way a real, long, boring notice from the headmaster was usually read out.

  ‘The next morning they went to the beach, dressed in their “tourist” clothes and accessories. They were sitting on beach chairs, enjoying a drink, the sunshine and the scenery, when a drop-dead gorgeous blonde in a topless bikini came walking straight towards them. They couldn’t help but stare.’

  Most of the boys in class started to snigger. Rohan continued to speak, a
s if oblivious to what was going on around him.

  ‘As the blonde passed them by, she smiled and said, “Good morning, Father. Good morning, Father,” nodding and addressing each of them individually. The priests were stunned. How in the world did she know they were priests? So the next day, they went back to the store and bought even more outrageous outfits. These were so loud you could hear them before you even saw them!’

  The class was laughing so loudly by now that you could hear it before you saw it.

  ‘Once again,’ Rohan continued, ‘they settled down in their chairs to enjoy the sunshine, wearing their new clothes. After a little while, the same gorgeous blonde, wearing a different topless bikini, approached them. Again she nodded at each of them and said, “Good morning, Father. Good morning, Father,” and started to walk away. One of the priests couldn’t stand it any longer. “Just a minute, young lady,” he called out. “Yes, Father?” she said. “We are priests and proud of it, but I have to know—how in the world do you know we are priests, dressed the way we are?”’

  We waited eagerly for the punch line. ‘The gorgeous blonde said, “Father, it’s me, Sister Kathleen.”’

  The entire class howled crazily with laughter—including Madras-Calcutta, even if only to avoid looking left out.

  ‘Signed, Father Jerome Francis,’ Rohan called out, completing the notice-reading farce. He then turned smartly on his heel and half-walked-half-ran towards the door.

  ‘JUST A MINUTE!’ screamed Siddhu, red in the face. ‘I don’t think that message actually came from Father!’

  ‘Oh, you think so, do you?’ said Rohan, grinning cheekily and walking back into the classroom.

  ‘I will complain to Father about this, just you wait and see!’ Siddhu shouted.

  ‘Okay, okay, do what you will!’ Rohan yelled back at him.

  They stood glaring at each other, fists clenched. And that’s when we suddenly noticed that Reebok had crept in silently for his class—no one had heard the bell go off at the end of the zero period—and was now standing by the door.