INTRODUCTION
These fictional stories belong to my very own Dassu Mohan series ( a name which translates to দস্যু মোহন or Mohan the Bandit in Bengali). This is a name I selected at random and adopted shamelessly from a crime series for children that I had read while in school. Thing is, while writing in English I found the name Dassu more appropriate than Mohan which is a very ordinary name otherwise. So I stuck with Dassu. Somehow it fitted the character I had in mind.
These stories are loosely based not on the characters or experiences of a single person, but of the scores of boys and men that I have had interactions with during my hostel life, roughly spanning over a period of twenty years starting from the tender age of seven till the time I got married and set up house.
Sometimes multiple people have elbowed their way into one single character in my stories and there was nothing I could do about it.
By the way, many of the stories are not for the faint hearted, because most real people are not really as simple and stuck-in-the- mud as we presume them to be. Practically, everyone has very interesting experiences to narrate in strict privacy which they normally do not admit to in public.
Dear Reader, you have been warned
As I have already mentioned elsewhere in this series Dassu Mohan had been a close friend of mine since early childhood . We studied in the same class in school and college for many years. As such, I’m privy to many of his daring, sometimes downright dangerous and sometimes extremely naughty and mischievous escapades. He was my Sherlock and I his Watson. Here I share with you, Dear Reader, some of Dassu’s adventures during our student days in the hill station of Shillong which was a part of the State of Assam at the time of which I speak. (Naturally, all the stories of the series are based on the confessions made to me by Dassu during his weaker moments.)
THE FIRST FLUSH
Part One. Mera Naam Joker
It was arranged by mutual consent that they would see Mera Naam Joker together the following Sunday at Anjali Cinema. In spite of all his prior experience of sitting in the last rows of darkened movie halls with Rekha Didi in Coimbatore, Dassu had completely forgotten to buy the tickets in advance.
The problem of getting tickets was compounded as it happened to be the opening show of the opening day of Mera Naam Joker in Shillong.
As such the place was already chock a block by the time Dassu reached the hall with half an hour to go before the start of the movie. The whole foyer was full of milling crowds of mostly hard faced inscrutable orientals in jackets, all smelling of kwai (untreated half dried betel nut), tympeu and shun. The place was full of cigarette smoke and Dassu was half choking and half nervous because there was no way he could obtain a single ticket, let alone two. He was in a mild state of panic already and on top of that the girl Mallika was nowhere to be found.
Suddenly she appeared in front of him out of nowhere. The way she stood out in the background of the rough and drab looking bunch of guys, she looked like the only person in colour in an otherwise black and white group photograph.
She had a very attractive oval face with large light brown eyes. Her thick and curly dark brown hair was parted at the center and cascaded down beyond her shoulders to somewhere halfway down her back. She wore a printed yellow, dark brown and maroon cotton sari with a narrow maroon border that made her look stunningly beautiful. There was a small but unusual looking decorative bindi on her forehead and just a hint of darkish brown and red lipstick on her lips. To Dassu’s unaccustomed eyes she looked good enough to eat. No, she looked absolutely delectable, to use a politically incorrect phrase – Dassu’s, not mine. Dassu was speechless for a moment before he recovered.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Actually this story began about a month ago when Dassu had met the girl for the first time. Today was just their third meeting, ever. They had formally ‘met’ twice before, in the company of a mutual female friend who was Dassu’s contemporary in St Mary’s College, and they had exchanged just a few polite sentences on those two occasions. Nothing beyond that.
It was after the second meeting that Dassu had got up enough courage to send Mallika a request through the said mutual friend to suggest the movie date which, surprisingly, she had accepted. And the game was on, so to speak.
Now, the game had to be called off without the option, to Dassu’s eternal shame and regret. This was not good at all. Particularly for the very first ‘date’. He was hard put to explain the situation to the girl which he tried to do, stuttering and stammering. The girl was quite sporting about it and suggested that they go somewhere else instead.
Once again it was Dassu’s turn to fumble. He had no Plan B in mind.
In the end he suggested that they take a walk to the Ward’s Lake and take it from there. So they walked the three kilometres to Ward’s Lake – which was no distance at all by Shillong standards. Once there, Dassu had another idea and took the girl to the house of a Tamil friend who lived close by in a small bungalow on a hillock near the crossing of Oakland Road and Beauchamp Road at the point where the Lake borders the Botanical Garden.
Naturally Manirathnam, his close friend, knew all about his ‘date’ and even though he had other plans for this Sunday afternoon he welcomed Dassu and Mallika with South Indian filter coffee and murukku.
After a few hours of easy conversation Dassu escorted the girl back via the undulating cement road lined with hundreds of pine trees, starting from near Lady Keane Girls College, all the way up to Garrison Ground, spending the entire time in nice, easy and enjoyable conversation with Mallika.
From Garrison Ground, she chose to walk alone the rest of the way to her home in Kench’s Trace and Dassu took a bus back from Civil Hospital to Don Bosco Square.
By the time he reached his hostel, Dassu was utterly and comprehensively smitten.
Part Two. Tripura Castle
Six weeks after the Mera Naam Joker fiasco, Dassu got up the courage again and asked Mallika, through the same mutual friend, out for a date. Once again, to his utter surprise, she agreed.
Five very nervous and anxious looking girls were waiting near Dreamland Cinema with Mallika when Dassu arrived there to meet her for their second date. The other girls all turned out to be her classmates in First Year at St Mary’s College, there to provide moral support to her on this momentous occasion. Introductions over, Dassu hailed a taxi from GS Road and they drove off. Destination Tripura Castle.
They let the taxi go near Dhankheti point and started walking. It was a serpentine road starting from somewhere not far from his college gate – an uphill walk of about one kilometre along an empty and quiet road lined with pine trees, bamboo groves and cherry blossoms that led up to the Tripura Castle which was once a summer retreat of the Maharajas of the Manikya dynasty of Tripura.
During our early days in Shillong we used to go on long walks every afternoon after classes got over, going this way and that, exploring and discovering the various parts of our new town of residence at a leisurely pace.
We had visited this castle with Dassu during one of those walks of discovery. I don’t remember much about the place now because it was an apparently abandoned and completely deserted palace that had gardens gone to seed and running wild. Narrow tunnels leading off to some unknown parts of the palace, and brickwork that looked like a century old, and probably was.
Returning to Dassu, he had no clear idea of what to do when out on a date with a relatively unknown girl. All his notions and ideas about girls were gleaned from the books by James Hadley Chase, Harold Robins, Henry Miller and the like, which were the staple of literary pursuits of the boys of his class. As far as prior experience is concerned, he had to fall back only on the memories of his encounters and groping matches with Rekha Didi back in his hometown in Coimbatore some years ago.**
** ( For more details please read https://jayanta13.wordpress.com/adventures-of-dassu-mohan-a-case-of-raging-hormones/)
At this point, I must hasten to add here that I am merely trying to explain Dassu’s motives, and not explain away his actions. This is very important in the context. Both of us hailed from a part of the country where Western music, books thoughts and ideas were very far away from our immediate environment.
But here in Shillong, the only culture surrounding and immersing us were of the western kind – English language, English story books, English text books, English music, English jokes, Irish teachers… everything was English, except for food which was of the Indian kind. As far as clothing was concerned, the boys here wore bell bottomed pants and shirts with pointed collars,whereas in Chennai they were still in the drain pipe era. Girls here mostly wore pants, lungis, jainsem, salwars and saris. In Tamil Nadu all girls wore saris and only saris. Boys and girls used copious quantities of hair oil and most girls liked to put white flowers in their hair.
Naturally, Dassu had no idea about how to conduct himself with a girl steeped in western culture like everyone else around him. But he was very attracted to her and wanted her as his girlfriend. So he fell upon his past experiences with Rekha Didi and his present literary pursuits with the aforementioned authors like James Hadley Chase and others of his kind.
As they reached the castle, it was very late in the afternoon and the light was fading. There was absolutely no one in sight, save for a sad faced mongrel resting all curled up by the side of the massive gate. They walked in and were somewhat scared to enter the seemingly empty palace. So they loitered aimlessly in what passed for a garden and it was all eternally boring.
So then Dassu held the girl by her hand, escorted her to the entry point of one of the underground tunnels that led to the bomb shelter, and kissed her in the cheek. She just shut her eyes and did not seem to mind. Emboldened, he embraced her tightly and kissed her ardently many more times – on the cheek and lips – which she also seemed to enjoy, though she didn’t actively reciprocate. Probably she didn’t know how. After all, she was only seventeen, fresh out of school and into her very first year in college.
Then, it was time to return because Dassu was getting scared of the absolutely lonely place in the gathering dusk. It seemed like a security risk for both of them.
They walked hand in hand down the winding road to the nearest bus stand at Dhankheti where Dassu found a taxi and dropped Mallika at a point close to her home in Kench’s Trace. Then he took the same taxi back to his hostel.
Neither Dassu nor Mallika could even imagine that the day was just the beginning of a long and wonderful period of romance that would last for several years thereafter.
But that’s another story.
Fifty Shades of Random Ramblings 