Unruled Notebook

And so, The Ivory Tower got off to a flying start, with smirks and perks, just like our friendship.

So much so that the guy with whom I started this magazine occupied my life at one point, almost all of the best part of my waking days.

That comes to about three hours per day, everyday, for six years. That’s a lot of occupation that I could charge him a hefty bill as rent.

Every evening, from our college to his home, from his home to mine and from mine to his and me back to mine, we walked a few kilometers (fewer miles for ABCDs), discussing animatedly. To the point that the challenge of predicting and evading the crowd in the dreaded crowded labyrinthine Main Guard Gate streets and in between our houses was lost on us while walking. We trundled and talked, scuttled and spoke about (t)it.

He is a pious theist who believes God created me, an atheist. So he takes me to temples. And I liked going with him. I anyway reasoned since I was an atheist, I should all the more go to temples since I anyway didn’t believe the God that was supposed to be there. We never agreed upon the other but that’s why we stayed together. And visited temples, whenever we get the chance, which is daily.

He is good in debating, almost polemical. While I commit all of the mistakes that you get pinched for at a JAM event (stutter, stammer, lisp etc.), he had impeccable vocabulary and excellent fluency in English, a language I never learnt formally and correctly. To my surprise, after two years into our friendship, he even scripted and enacted a humorous skit in his college in English. For my part, I used to collect all sorts of trivia and was good in quiz, another youthful fantasy that one time was silently putting the skids on my career. Anyways, during those five six years, we were almost the uncrowned “local kings” in our respective avocations.

He had benign eyes that were bespectacled into enlightened focus. I could get for myself only the spectacle part, with a Lennon inspired granny glasses that I pinched from somewhere. But I looked and behaved too showy and sarcastic and never genuine with these paraphernalia. Maybe I actually am phony or things deserved it.

But our friendship continued to grow, perhaps only out of these incongruities.

He is impeccable in his dress style and things suited him to the hilt. He could wear an informal half-hand shirt like a formal full-hand shirt. An ordinary pair of leather sandals looked golden covering his legs. I used to clad myself in khaki uniform that is compulsory for workshop in the engineering campus. Everybody hated it and I had five of them. I wore a pair of dirty canvas shoes on with “boot lickers beware, I taste bad” scribbled in bold.

At any time of the day, or night, or the time when he just wakes up from bed, he had a combed hair that covered a head that contained more principles than friends. I hastily had my brain and hair covered with a cap that said “Entropy, Stop Increasing!”

I should say he tolerated me in these things because he basically is very decent and civil and courteous and gentle and clumsy and honest and gracious and naïve and…so I thought.

While he was cynical and celibate and principled and pure, I flirted with almost everybody who was not my gender or mother. At one time I had more girl friends than friends who were girls. Much to the chagrin of my mother.

He was a mother’s boy. Every mother liked him and his guffaw of a laugh. I could smile. And I am too silent for the comfort of those mothers.

He had a flute that he never played and everybody including those mothers respected him for that. I had a guitar with which I never learnt to play ‘Let It Be’ correctly. And ‘when I found myself in times of trouble,’ it is because Mother of Mary was coming to me as I had tried playing with Mary.