My Boyhood Pedestrian Friends

My Boyhood Pedestrian Friends Part I

My grandmother's quirk was to give me castor oil once a month. As a little kid, I hated it. Sitting on the toilet for hours, I'd dream of putting ants on her bed just to get even. To her my system was a cesspool of bacteria and she was preordained to disinfect it.

"When was the last time you had yucky stuff shoved down your throat, Paati?"
I'd ask her angrily in Tamil.

It's good for boys like you. No worms will grow in your stomach."

"Kiran's mother gives him iron tonic for his muscles and cod liver oil for his eyes. No wonder he has huge biceps and a keen vision. And no purgatives on his menu."

But she had a way of dismissing my complaints. "Kiran will grow up to be a hairy ape like his parents using extracts from dead animals, thoo, thoo!"

Frankly, I wanted to look like "Ape Kiran". As a nine-year-old growing up in South India in the late 50's, I was puny with the muscle tone of a wet noodle. And my system had been flushed more often than any public toilet in Asia.

My father was terrified of his mother, my Paati. My own mother had her hands full with my baby sister who had matriculated from her terrible two's to her horrible three's.

I was too young to know about Murphy's Law but felt instinctively that anything that could go wrong always did. A case in point was the street we lived in housing only girls, not boys. The odds of that happening were a zillion to one. I had skipped ropes with the girls, played hopscotch, whirled around holding their hands and even let them paint my toenails, unaware that it was not a macho thing to do.

As the only boy around, the task of playing the mother/father game similar to playing 'doctor' was exhausting. I had to be the husband to all the girls, yet stay monogamous. I had to kiss their baby dolls in clay, wood or celluloid.

With Neela, my role was that of a circus performer taming elephants, lions and tigers. I'd be inside a cage with ferocious animals using no whips, only my courage. She'd melt watching me make the animals sit, stay, tumble, stand up on hind legs, show teeth and roar. I'd even insert my head inside a lion's mouth just to impress her with my bravado. Then she'd make the tastiest delicacies in her fantasy kitchen and giggle while I juggled her imaginary ladoos.

Meena was fun. I drove the fastest bus and she was the conductor. Our journey took us to the Himalayas and back. I'd navigate through the worst curves and the severest slopes in the nastiest conditions like monsoons, cyclones and avalanches. We had simple rules. Throw out all babies that cried or wet their pants. Old people who had gas or snored had to be kicked out. Any passenger smoking, chewing betel leaves or using snuff had to be expelled. Meena enjoyed tossing people off the bus. I always got hysterical hearing her curse as she ejected each passenger along the way. She had a vocabulary of swear words that would have made her forefathers cringe.

Koma was no fun. She came from an orthodox family so I had to play the temple priest. She'd make me attend all sorts of weddings to chant mantras. It was tough making up Sanskrit words. And she'd breastfeed her doll in public, asking me to burp it later. It was sheer torture.

Kavita was nice but her parents were nasty. Playing the police inspector, I arrested her toddler sister for interfering with our game and threw her in jail--a mosquito net--where she got all tangled up. Her father yanked me off the floor by my left ear. I avoided going to that household again.

Playing husband and father in the evenings from the age of 6 had left me gasping for fresh air. I badly wanted to play cricket with the boys on Kamal Street, parallel to ours. But there was a major hitch. 'RASCAL!' Yes, he was one big mean dog and I didn't want to become his dinner.

My father, an accountant, always questioned me on numbers. So I had memorized multiplication tables all the way up to 20. His way of chatting with me was to ask "What's 19 times 14?" but never "How was your day? Can I read you a bed-time story?" Besides, he liked quizzing me in front of his friends. While I impressed them, I did not know that these fathers went back home to torment their kids with such questions only to ask them to drink my urine and grow a brain. My schoolmates hated me for that. Thereafter I learned to answer every question wrong, disappointing my father but winning back my friends.