That Time I was Forced to Kiss an Old Man (I was 6)

Bet that title grabbed your attention, didn’t it? That’s why you’re here - astonished, disgusted, sympathetic and or just plain hungry for a bit of gossip. Well, now that I’ve got your attention, here’s the story with every sordid detail. 

I was six in a boarding school tucked away amongst the woods on a blue mountain. It was Halloween. For the seniors of the school, this was an exciting time. They got to arrange a spooky party, dress up (mostly as witches for some reason) and scare the living daylights out of their juniors who were forced to attend it. Although they went easier on the junior-most kids, most of whom were terrified and in tears the moment they stepped into the eerily decorated hall, they would make a beeline for the braver and feisty ones. It was good-natured bullying. And I, being somewhat sassy and precocious, was already a marked child. 

We’d heard the tales. Anything could happen during these parties. Things could get pretty wild. People had been locked in trunks. Almost every year, someone accidentally set their hair on fire. And one year, the police showed up because some smart arse decided to ring the school chapel bell at midnight. Hearing the bell tolling at midnight alarmed the gentle and caring townsfolk down the hill. Thinking there was trouble at the school and someone was ringing the bell for help, they summoned the police. Halloween parties were banned thereafter. 

As I stepped into the dimly lit smoky hall with the windows all blacked out, I took in the painstaking decorations – the hall had been transformed into a spooky woods of sorts. There were trees, rocks, candles, ‘burning embers’, creepers, artificial bats, cobwebs – the whole shebang really; you get my drift. And right in the midst of it all, was the pièce de résistance – a dingy little cave with a rickety chair placed in the middle. I knew it had my name on it.

A coven of witches descended upon me, cackling away, dangling rubber spiders and snakes in my face and demanding to know if I was scared already. I sniggered. A mistake. I was quickly dragged off to the dingy cave and unceremoniously pushed into the chair. 

“We’re not going to let you go!” they shrieked. I was a bit perturbed. Not out of fear but the dank and slightly musty smell – some of their costumes were out of the school’s drama costume cupboard which was rarely aired out. These witches, they smelt of mothballs and neglect. 

“We will not let you go until you kiss HIM!” they reiterated and pointed behind me. Surprised, for I thought I was alone in the cave, I spun around in my chair and noticed HIM for the first time. 

Sitting there quietly, his bony arms resting on an emaciated lap with a cigarette between his knobbly fingers, his spindly legs crossed, all his yellowing teeth displayed in a grimace and hollows of madness where his eyes should have been. There, in all his osseous glory, sat the skeleton from the Biology lab.

Now I was perturbed. This was not how I’d imagined my first kiss. This man – or what was left of him – was far too old for me or for anyone living, really. And yet, kissing him was my only way out of this cave with the shrieking teenagers blocking the exit. 

“Kiss him! Kiss him!” The witches were now chanting. I kept shaking my head, refusing with a growing sense of revulsion for my skeletal companion. Seeing as how we’d reached an impasse on the negotiations, one of the witches decided to end the stalemate.  

Reaching over, she plucked something from the languid skeleton. And then I had a bone shoved in my face. It could have been an ulna. Or a radius. I was in no mood for the finer details. The incessant shrieking and the rank odours abounding had assaulted my senses enough. 

I did it. Holding my breath, I kissed the bone. Triumphant screeching laughter rang out as I dashed out of the cave, not once looking back at the gaunt recipient of my affections who was, no doubt, having his bone reattached. 

And that, folks, is how I, as a young innocent child, was forced to kiss a fossil of a man. Or woman. I never checked.

For the next 10 years, I’d look into the glass cupboard in the Biology lab and know that we had a history – just me and that grinning skeleton. A secret from beyond the grave.

Happy Halloween!

Here a Quack, There a Quack

My first ever report card, issued at the end of my first term in school, read: “She is an asset to the school.” The word “asset” boggled my young brain and I asked my mother what it meant. “It means ‘little donkey’,” said my mother and I never doubted her for a second. I wasn't even hurt because I believed this to be true of myself.

Birth order is said to play a huge role in psychological development and I’d be a fabulous case study for that theory. As the second born and youngest in the family – I lost that race to my brother by a narrow margin of six years - I quite naturally assumed the role of imbecile. Everyone has a natural tendency to tell the youngest what to do and how to do things. Decades later, nothing has changed.

Indian society is fascinatingly mired in the belief that seniority is the only criterion one needs to be able to play advisor to anybody younger. It doesn't matter what the issue may be – irritable bowels, financial woes, marital strife, ingrown toenails…

And since I was born into the role of the little ass, I seem to attract counsel – wise and otherwise – from just about everybody. No word of a lie, I don’t even step on the weighing scales at the gym anymore. I just walk in and some podgy woman who can’t stop belching each time she stretches tells me whether I've gained or lost weight. If she's feeling really generous, she'll even tell me exactly where that weight has appeared or disappeared. One particularly charming elderly gentleman told me I ought to “do exercises to grow taller” as only then could I “get a good life partner”. He was really tall so I presume his wife struck gold in his eyes. Imagine his shock when he walked out the gym and realised it was the 21st century, riddled with emancipated women.

These self-professed counsellors are everywhere and if you are lucky enough to have that neon sign above your head that reads “space between my ears for rent”, you will receive innumerable perils pearls of wisdom. I don’t know why the West makes such a fuss over therapists and shrinks and all that mental health jazz. Please, people, just come to India. We have pro-bono counsellors crawling out of the woodwork. No appointments. No venues. The counsellor is omnipresent and omnipotent. The world is your couch.

There was this fad where people would do crash courses in “counselling” and then scour the world for last-born children, younger people, the unmarried, the childless by choice, non-vegetarians, non-engineers and other such non compos mentis individuals to “counsel”. There must have been a mark on my front door for I entertained a fair number of these dubiously certified shrinks.

My split with my ex, for instance, brought them hammering at my door, eager for glory – to be the one that patched up the ill-fated relationship and saved the day (I’m not sure for whom). Considering that that relationship itself was born of ill advice, it was but fitting that it should end with bad counselling too.

You know how you’re supposed to go to a counsellor of your own free will and volition and talk to them with complete privacy? Yeah, we did away with all those formalities. May be the crash course crashed before it covered that part. I remember being cornered on a couch at home while my concerned folks looked sombrely on. The self-appointed counsellor gazed at me solemnly. I wasn't entirely sure this wasn't some sort of exorcism. Looking at me intently, she cleared her throat and in a stage whisper asked her first question: “So tell me, BB, why is it that you think you’re better than everybody else?”

I had to bite my tongue to stop from hollering, “Because I am? Ha!” The sarcasm would have been wasted. (Rapport building – 0, defensiveness building– 1). At least one thing’s for certain: my report card from society is never going to read “she is an asset” any time soon. As far as they are concerned, the “little donkey” is now a full-fledged ass. 

Why Travolta Can Hang On To His Disco-Dancing Crown

When I was a little impressionable doe-eyed girl of six, I found myself jostled along with a running mass of other little impressionable doe-eyed girls of six to the auditorium of my beloved boarding school.

It was my first week at boarding school and I loved every bit of it. Contrary to popular belief that boarding schools are these hell holes of punishment and torture for naughty little children, I firmly believe that it was the best thing that happened to me. I wouldn't ever wish my childhood were any different. In fact, if more clueless parents would send their misbehaved spawn to boarding schools, this world and those of us who have to live in it would be much improved.

I digress. So, this was my first week at boarding school and I was excited with the host of new activities being presented. There were fun-filled classes, story-telling sessions, games and sports hours, reading sessions, handwriting and art classes and whatnot. Add to this the routine and discipline. Bells that sounded for everything: waking up, exercise, meals and end of a class. I had a spanking new uniform with shoes that required to be polished every day so that my beaming face reflected in them. My world was alive and exciting. 

Where was I running to? Well, someone had just come in and announced that anybody who was interested in learning dance could make their way to the auditorium. For some reason, my six-year-old brain automatically took this to mean disco dancing. It was the only dance form that I was aware of at the time.

I could have hugged myself with joy, only, I was too busy running to get ahead of the others so I didn't miss my one opportunity to make my mark in history as the best disco dancer there ever was.

We assembled in the auditorium. A lady, draped in a bright orange saree and a shocking red sweater that gave me conjunctivitis just looking at it, gave her new recruits the once-over. I noted her carefully oiled hair pulled back in a severe bun held in place with a dozen hair pins and took in her dramatically kohl-lined eyes that failed to distract from her crimson red lips. Something wasn't right. Little me sensed it. 

“Take off your socks and shoes,” she ordered. We complied. My heart was beating quickly, my sense of foreboding quickly dampening my initial enthusiasm. Where were the tight bell-bottoms, the flashy shirts and, most importantly, that shiny disco ball? I eyed the doors. They were shut tight. 

“Now, hands on your hips, bend your knees slightly, keep your heels together and your feet in a V-shape.”

She fetched what I thought were two drum sticks and began knocking them together, instructing us to stick one foot out at a time. Back. Forward. Sideways. Then she combined this with some hand movements. This was so unlike anything seen in Saturday Night Fever.

“Index finger and thumb together. Over your head. Now out in front of you.” Tha! Thai! Thakka-thai! Giddy-giddy-something-thakka-thai!

I glanced around me. The only ones who looked more ridiculous than I felt were the boys who also thought we were going to learn to D-I-S-C-O or moonwalk at the very least. Surely John Travolta didn't have to go through this sort of humiliation? 

Nonetheless, determined not to deprive the world of a future disco dancing star, I pressed on, braving the pinches of the dance teacher each time I goofed up. My little fingers would ball themselves up as I concentrated on the foot movements. Then as I tried to unclench them, my right foot would inadvertently kick the girl in front of me.

The 30-minute session finally came to an end. Our names were inked into a register. Nobody could back out for the next one year. 

I dreaded these biweekly sessions. Then we were told we’d be performing on stage at the end of the term for our parents who’d be picking us up to go home for the winter holidays. This meant more practice sessions. My arms were numb to the pinching. My dance teacher saw it fit for me to be moved to the front row on stage. I suppose even doting parents deserve some comic relief. 

Babu Sir took over our classes. He was a rotund little man, squashed into a tight woolen sweater and a striped woolen cap. He never danced - only his potbelly did while he barked instructions. Someone, probably in a moment of great weakness, had told the man he could sing. So he’d bellow into a microphone and beat two tablas to accompany our jerky little dance movements. 

D-Day arrived. We were put into some strange silk outfits they called “pavadas” – brocade-ridden blouses and floor-length silk skirts that had been tailored for 10-year-olds. I would have felt foolish, but my dignity had long since made a run for it despite the tightly shut doors. Our faces were doused with powder and lips painted bright red. My unruly mop of hair was slicked back with a jar of coconut oil and adorned with a hairband of jasmine flowers.

As the curtains rose, I spotted my beaming parents, nudging each other and pointing. A spotlight turned on us and a camera began filming. Babu Sir gave a perfect rendition of what I can only imagine is a moose’s mating call. I made it through the performance, tripping only three times over my ridiculously long skirt that had been rolled up at the waist.

I look at happy drunks falling over backwards at weddings, losing their dignity along with their shirt buttons, cling to friends as other footloose drunks pummel me at clubs, and dodge enthusiastic bobbing inebriated uncles at other social gatherings. And yet I know the world of dance could have been even worse off.

My debut dance performance was to be aired on national TV. Luckily, some state leader with an acronym for a name died on the day it was to air and they covered his funeral instead.  The sod will never know what a favour he did the world by choosing to die on that day. 

I quit dance classes when I returned to school the next year. And thus it was that the world of disco dancing was deprived of its brightest star and an unchallenged Travolta can afford to rest on his laurels.

On the brighter side, Bharatanatyam remains an unsullied art form.

[Footnote: Read how KO's grand Bharatanatyam aspirations were brutally quashed.]

The Doorable Blah Vocabulary

I have more or less established by now (assuming you’ve been reading my blog for a while) that my family is just a little bit cuckoo. And by family, I mean my immediate family – not including the likes of an aunt by marriage, who dreamt one night that her husband had swallowed their wind chime. She awoke in the middle of the night and attempted to push her hand down his throat to rescue her beloved wind chime, while he, rudely awoken from a deep slumber, gurgled for help. There’s a fine line between stark raving mad and quirky and we, the Blahs, have yet to cross it.

If a Blah were convinced of a prized possession being down a man’s gullet, he/she would tell him he had sheer “gumption” sending “bumf” down his throat. Now, while the dictionary shows “gumption” to mean “the quality of being sensible and brave enough to do the right thing in a difficult situation”, the Blah dictionary holds that it is the “quality of being cheeky, brazen and having the sheer gall to do the wrong thing in any situation.”

My mother’s vocabulary would be down to 50% if the word gumption were taken away from her. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gumption, and the Word was Gumption. A phone call from my mother is filled with anecdotes about the sheer gumption of the drunken woman labourer who ran amuck in the nude, the gumption of my boisterous dog who gave her a black eye and the gumption of the person who left a single slipper on the road and disappeared.

“Bumf” in a normal (archaic) dictionary refers to unwanted or uninteresting printed matter such as governmental forms, legal documents, The Times of India, junk mail, promotional pamphlets, Bangalore Mirror's Sexpert column etc. The Blahs have adapted the word to explain away any otherwise inexplicable junk. Bumf is a very handy term. It saves you the time and energy of having to supply long explanations about say, the contents of a drawer. “What’s in the drawer? Oh, just some bumf.” Nobody ever attempts to question any more. You never question bumf. You just accept it. “Some bumf” is good enough. It effectively qualifies everything from a speckle of food on someone’s chin to the putrid carcass the dog dragged in to the strange greeny-grey mold on an abandoned vegetable in the refrigerator.

Bumf is not to be confused with another Blah word “bum fluff”. Bum fluff refers to a scraggly pre-pubescent-type mustache. This word belongs to my maternal uncle, who maintains that such weak attempts at a mustache resemble the “hair on a bum”. I have never worked up the courage to ask anything further.

And if you happen to touch some bumf (or bum fluff for that matter), make sure you wash your hands with the “bum soap”. That’s right. The bum soap – the bar of soap placed on/near the wash basin meant for washing of hands. I’m not sure just how it came to be referred to as “bum soap”. I suspect my father coined the term and we children, thoroughly amused, adopted it. My mum faced the embarrassing consequences of such learning when my brother Scion once hollered from one end of the supermarket, “Hey, Ma! Do we need bum soap?” He remained oblivious to the stunned expressions of fellow shoppers while my mother tried unsuccessfully to bury herself in a sack of wheat flour while muttering something about God smiting firstborns. When he, convinced his mother was hard of hearing, shouted again about the lack of enough bum soap in the house, my mother responded with “Grr Wolf! I heard you the first time.”

“Grr Wolf!” for the Blahs is an expression of extreme exasperation. Attaching a growling animal to the otherwise meek and mild “Grr” sort of drives home the point apparently. No vulgar expletives for us Blahs. Grr Wolf usually works for just about any sort of aggravating situation. The need for stronger or cruder cuss words or commonplace vulgar expressions does not arise. However, for a particularly sticky situation, we do resort to the much harder hitting expletive “Shit ‘n molasses”.

Now, I am not sure how exactly this expression came about. But I suppose having shit in your molasses or shit and molasses are both bad things. “Shit ‘n molasses” is a Blah Code Red.

A “shit ‘n molasses” moment would be the opposite of a Blah “door you” moment. “Door you” is an expression of affection. Now, we aren’t exactly the most emotionally expressive family. Everyone keeps a stiff upper lip during any sort of upheaval, which would leave normal families blubbering a bit like the ones in Indian television soaps. However, as a kid, this was the one expression of affection we resorted to. When I was four, I would exchange “Good nights” and “Door Yous” with my folks last thing at night and then spend the next few minutes staring at the door, wondering what that plank of wood had to do with anything. It took me a few years to realise it was just a Blah way of saying “I adore you”.

The expression works for us. In fact, they all do – all these somewhat unique expressions. I door them all and no one can tell me any differently.

Letter to My Six-Year-Old Self

Dear Six-Year-Old Basically Blah,

Look what I found! Your first “published” article.

Remember how proud you were because it was the first article in the school magazine that year? I suspect this was one of the worst editorial decisions ever made in the history of editorial decision making. It would be safe to assume that this caused a considerable decline in the number of student applications made to the school the following year.

You ought to be ashamed putting something like this up for the world to see. Here are a bunch of reasons why:

Firstly, which kid in their right senses keeps tadpoles? Were two goldfish in a bowl not fascinating enough for you?

More importantly, where did you get these peculiar mutant tadpoles? They appear bigger than the dogs and even the cows. If indeed those odd hunched creatures with the unicorn horns are cows. What is your standard excuse - “The tadpole ate my homework” or "The dog that ate my homework was eaten by my tadpole"?

The big cow appears to be a paedophilic pervert. I will not go into the details.

Are all your dogs two-legged? And I use the term “dogs” loosely, since it appears the third such creature is actually a paramecium.

Your MOTHER keeps those tadpoles in a bowl? Really now. This is a bit of a stretch even for your family of oddballs. But congratulations on publishing that bit of fiction to all and sundry. I believe your mother resented attending PTA meetings for months afterward, having to deal with the shame of being called the ‘crazy tadpole lady’. You are quite the tale weaver. Would it be more truthful to say that your mother looks after your precious tadpoles when you go off for months together to boarding school?

Also, here’s a revelation: When those mutant tadpoles grow into little frogs and hop away, your sneaky mother replaces them with more before you come home so as to avoid your throwing a tantrum. You could never tell the difference, you pint-sized pinhead.

Here’s a little lesson about life while we’re on the subject of amphibians. Seeing as I am much older and somewhat wiser now. You are better off when frogs go away. You have far more trouble when frogs come hopping into your bowl…err…life. In addition to being slimy, they, most importantly, never turn into princes.

Well, don’t feel too badly about all this, 6-year-old BB. You will be glad to know that that precocious and loquacious little girl with the affinity for all little creatures of the animal kingdom still lives on in this woman who is now hurtling toward “old age” faster than your mother could replace those errant tadpoles.

Oh, and do keep writing! It makes your life far more interesting and eventful in more ways than even you can imagine. So brace for the years ahead, moppet.

(No kisses and hugs because I know you hate them.)

Cheers,
Present-Day Basically Blah.

P.S. Whatever you do, do not become friends with this KO person. She appears to be delusional and harbours suicidal inclinations, judging from her article in the same magazine:

Note to the school magazine editorial team:
I am totally baffled as to why you would choose such an article to begin your magazine. Was it because your other choice was this?

I suppose it stands to reason that this could cause some fears among parents about the safety of their kids, considering that their first grade teacher appears to be a molting, stilt-walking Sasquatch.

Read the exchange my discovery sparked off with KO here.

Mushroom & I

This post has taken a long time coming. The other day, I got around to reminiscing about the days of old with KO, who has known me since I was knee high to an ant. The conversation wound around to one of my best buddies from boarding school, Mushroom, who I still keep in touch with from time to time despite being separated by miles of ocean. In retrospect, Mushroom was the proverbial trouble maker.

The one thing that drew us together - a sure-fire reason that still draws me to some people more than others - was our shared craziness for all creatures great and small.

After returning from a weekend home, Mushroom ran up to me, bursting with excitement. Drawing me away from prying eyes, she showed me a biscuit tin with holes poked in the lid. Raising the lid, I spied a bunch of cabbage leaves with a whole lot of tiny butterfly eggs.

Thrilled to bits, we kept the tin in her desk in our classroom, waiting for them to hatch. And hatch they did. Right in the middle of a Math lesson. We suddenly noticed a sea of tiny caterpillar larvae swarming out over her desk. As inconspicuously as possible, we tried to herd them back into the tin, only to have them pop right back out through the holes in the lid.

Growing more adventurous, they then swarmed over to other desks, creating quite a row with girls squealing in horror and running for cover. Needless to say, we were thrown out with our precious biscuit tin to release the wannabe butterflies in the woods surrounding our playground. However, we kept finding stragglers in the classroom for days afterward.

Our foray into entomology didn’t end there. There was the matter of the housefly called Snoopy - held hostage in an empty glue bottle by a couple of curious eight-year olds. Snoopy, R.I.P.

Entomology aside, Mushroom and I were probably “wiser beyond our years.” Engrossed in drawing the Garden of Eden for a Scripture class, we decided to go all out and ensure Adam and Eve were “anatomically perfect.” When we sat back to admire our handiwork, it suddenly struck us, “What will the teacher say?!” In panic, we grabbed an eraser and hastily tried to erase Adam’s generous manhood.

Erasers, back then, were ineffective things that left an ugly black smudge on paper. Ultimately, we ended up with an erroneous Adam with a suspicious black cloud over his crotch area, which, when held up to the light, even boasted a hole in the paper.

A terrible giggle fit later, we found ourselves thrown out into the corridor once more, wielding our masterpiece; Adam now sporting green-crayoned “grass” scrawled up to his waist with Eve almost up to her eyeballs in misshapen foliage.