Friends part 3.1: The six gems

This is one more glimpse to the nostalgic memory lane in the city of my life. We are six, rocking, sturdy guys extricating fun from our lives. Stating us as rocking and sturdy has an evidence and its not a boast.

The lane starts with our school days, it starts with my langotiya yaar, Siddharth. We were the bestest friends since birth. The only distant thing between us is age, a couple of months, nothing else. We first met when I was nine months old and he was six. It was the occasion of Haldi Kunku at my home, when his mom had come to visit my place. I cannot remember our chat that time, I guess it would have been a recitation of a couple of vowels like aaaaeeeeiiiiioooouuuuu, as most of the infants do. The next time it was a general visit to each other's places as we also used to stay quite close-by.

In school we used to sit besides each other, ate our lunch together, and play together as well. I still remember that he always used to bully me and make fun of me, and that was always related to my studies and my lack of interest in sports. We never had a fight on that issue, and he still does that. I knew and I still know that all that he did was to help me realise my potential and be a sturdy guy in school. I still remember, it was my 1st grade, when he admonished me to beat up a guy who was making fun of me. I had beaten up the first person in my life. As days passed on and as we reached higher grades, I was quite strong and well in academics.

I still remember, we used to sleep during boring periods in spite of sitting on the first bench. There was a technique, keep your hands on the sides of your eyes, rest the elbows on the desk and put the related textbook between the elbows. Now we used to close our eyes. It appeared as if we were reading notes, but we were actually fast asleep. The interval bell was our alarm.

We also used to steal chalks from the teacher's desk and we had around 200 (approx.) chalks at the end of the year. We used to bully a thin guy from our class and we had also complained that he stole all the chalks. We used to push each other from the desk and empower ourselves. The best thing I still remember was, two of us had started planting trees in our school ground after a lecture by some ecologist. We used our water bags to pour water everyday in the recess.

We both were die-hard fans of the Batman cartoon serial on cartoon network and that was the prime topic of our discussion after reaching school each day. We were so influenced by the powers of batman that we had also planned to start our own detective agency, post graduation. We planned work schedule, finances and strategies to make the country a better place. The name of our project was HB. We had sketched how our costume would look like and the secret weapons in it. It was a top secret for us. We used to exercise hard everyday, measure our biceps and count the repetitions.

We used different unique telephone etiquette. We used to blow air and make a kind of farting sound on the speaker instead of saying hello. This started when we learned about the invention of telephone by Alexander Graham Bell and also discovered about the early telephone etiquette.

We separated for our careers in different streams after school, but our friendship's track didn't go separate ways. I can compare it with a rail track, which is always equally distant from each other but still goes parallel till the end. This distance can be stated as freedom or independence. We never enforced our views on each other. We gave each other the respect for our own views and also well understood our needs from each other.

We always had fun together. We rode Sid's bike at 80 kph on the busy streets of FC road just to reach a movie on time. 75% out of all the movies I have seen, were with Sid. Once we disobeyed 5 signals, we tricked 3 policemen and we exceeded the normal speed limits to 80-85 kph, on our Pulsar DTSi 150s, on the busy streets of the city in the morning at 9 am, just to watch Die Hard 4. We were influenced by iron man and recalled our HB memories. We laughed in the theatre loudly while watching Dhoom 2. We recently invented 4th, 5th and 6th law of gravity after contradicting Newton existing laws. Those laws are high in vulgarity and hence cannot be elaborated here.

He was always there for me whenever, wherever I needed him. Just a call away was the distance. He would just put behind his existing work, degrading its importance if I am in any trouble. The only worst thing is when he's angry. He won't speak a word, pick up a call and hide somewhere when I go at his place. He would take his time to calm down and then put a message, full of emotions and bitterness. This was for me only. If someone else, not amongst his friends-list, is a victim of his anger that person would never ever dare to call or meet him again. Sid would either beat him up or if its a girl she'd have a neat firing of words. That also doesn't mean that he's rude to others. He's just right at the right moment.

We never cribbed nor we sought or boasted our friendship in front of each other and others. Its an unspoken, unwritten understanding between us. We are HB, the Hardy Boys.



To be continued...