JeeJee

The first time anyone became aware of his presence, he was a snotty-nosed, bug-eyed, skinny little kid, the kind you can call 'Sunshine' and would give you a wide, gleeful smile, in return. All of a sudden one day, we learned that this classmate of ours was shanghaied aboard an unknown vessel by a crew of savage buccaneers, who would then proceed to rape him, kill him, make a wind-chime out of his genitals and sell his organs on e-bay. There was much celebration. E-bay was finally in operation!

The next time anyone became aware of his presence, it became obvious that he had survived the vicious ordeal. It was also obvious how. He had resorted to cannibalism and eaten his way through the crew and then commandeered the vessel all by himself, toward the rising skyscrapers and neon lights of Hong Kong, in search of something to wash it down with. It has been hypothesized that it was there that he met his first love. The momo. For the next time we saw Gaurav Guha, he didn't look anything like his former self. Rather he looked like something that had consumed Gaurav Guha and had somehow assimilated his essential features, but appended a thousand pounds in the process. Yes, the image of Gaurav after his exile has been perpetuated through the years and immortalized as some of television's most loved characters.



An image of Gaurav after his return from Hong Kong


Through the years, we became accustomed to the presence of this strange creature in our midst, always with a plate of momos in his hand and sauce stains on his uniform. It must not have been a small feat developing opposable thumbs and losing the extraneous appendages and tail, for this gigantic caterpillar, fully conscious of his incumbent metamorphosis, had started playing the keyboard. And play he did, with the zeal of a butterfly that has just discovered its wings and spends its time fluttering about the Begonia bush, avoiding the little girl with the net, and I dare say, he got good at it.

16 and almost fully human,( apart from the slime of his reptilian predecessors and the shower of spittle that charges out of his mouth when he speaks, that he refuses to part with even to this day), Guarav develops an even higher skill. Speech. Glib as a crack-peddler on the street corner, he gets himself out of many a sticky situation by simply talking his way out of them. He might well have encountered a few crack-peddlers during the time too. Examples of his conviction as a salesman can be seen in later years too, when joined by his sinister accomplice, whose identity we shall keep secret and call 'Gupto', he began amassing a small army of students, supposedly for the purpose of tutoring for the IIT's but in truth, training them for a life of vandalism, general lawlessness and reefer madness. These were the bleaker years of his teens, when disheartened by the loss of his third mobile phone that he unwittingly left behind in a cab( the first one being lost in an auto and the second being short-circuited after he was picked up and hurled into the lake by his arch nemesis, Ranada), he chose to befriend a budding coolio called Arijit, drown himself in weed-coffee every morning and succumb to premature ejaculation, thus incurring the wrath of his warped father, who retaliated by grounding him every weekend, discussing the hopelessness of their sons' futures with my dad and refusing to supply Gaurav any more porn. So much so, that Gaurav found himself hurtling through a vortex of befuddlement and juvenile delinquency, falling asleep every night in a bar and waking up with all kinds of people. Former one night stands include Snoopy and Kemrit the crab.




On a more serious note, Gaurav Guha is by far the most colourful person I've ever known. The only person liable to run up a bill of 5000 bucks at Grub Club and never show up again, peer over the partition of a urinal to compare and walk away disheartened, weigh 300 pounds but get knocked out by Arijit, break a tense moment with an apt and clever comment, or simply lose the greater part of those 300 pounds in just a month. When Gaurav Guha was born, the world may well have lamented, but in the course of his life and with his antics, he's etched a smile on it's wooden face, so now it laughs with him, and when he's gone, shall shed at least a tear for the loss of a something so unique!