4-C

-'Fuck!' I said, bubbling with gleeful effusiveness.
Rudra put a hand up to his mouth. I don't know why he did that. He hardly ever talked.
-'Fuck Fuck Fuck!' I retorted. Putting your hand up to your mouth was not a polite gesture among grown-ups at that time.
-'You shouldn't say that,' he said, displaying more gums than were practically necessary and a set of teeth that were pleasantly ingressive.
-'I can too, I am a grown-up now! Check this,' I commanded, pulling the tip of my nose up with my fingers and flaring my nostrils.'Nose Hair!'
-'But Missis Arora will hear you.'
-'Fuck Missis Arora!'

I didn't mean it of course. Mrs. Arora was beautiful. She was our 4th grade teacher. 4th grade was a lot better than 3rd grade. I had grown a couple of inches and could almost reach the pile of notebooks on top of the dusty cupboard in the corner of the class. She was Mrs. Arora. She was left handed. She called us 'darling' when she wanted us to do something for her. 'Darling wipe the board' or 'Darling could you get some chalk?' or 'Darling don't lick your snot', she said. 'Yes ma'am', we would say, overwhelmed by her charm. But I was pretty sure she was not around. In fact, I even thought of taking a lick at the snot running down my philtrum from my flared nostrils. She had had to go mind a different class cos Mrs. Gabriel had the flu.

'Gabriel Gabriel, she has a fat ass,
She says it's the flu, but really it's gas'

The boys around my seat had suddenly gone silent. Several gasps escaped their mouths, but they knew better than to cover them. Some might have even shivered in their navy half pants. Some might have wiped a runny nose with their navy ties. But they all knew now that I was a God.

-'Anurag...What does Fuck mean?' asked Pushkar tentatively, not wanting to incur the wrath of this newly transformed God.
-'It means when your goldfish have little goldfish,' I replied proudly. I heard my brother say it myself.
-'Is it a bad word?' asked curious Kanishka, sitting behind Rudra. Kanishka lived in a blue and white building on a road somewhere in our locality that had a funny name I couldn't remember. When he left after grade 4, he took his building with him, for what was left was not a robust building in blue and white, but one that was grey but looked deceptively his own. Kanishka could dribble. He was also the first person in class to start using 'Whatever' to convey disinterest. I liked Rudra. He brought chicken sausages and Don Giovanni's for tiffin.

-'Yep. You get whacked for using that word. It means other stuff too.'
-'Like what?'
-'Like when your coffee is cold, it's called Fuck'
-'Who told you that?'
-'My dad.'
-'He really told you that?'

That was Kaushal. He always had too many questions. What's worse is he he stuttered which made his sentences unusually long. He had a side parting. He brought bhujia for lunch which we threw at Kaustav Bakshi.

-'No. But he said it. My daddy never lies.'
-'Ooh.'
-'And when you take your car out onto the street, and it starts raining real hard and gets all flooded-'
-'It's called Fuck?'
-'No, then you're fucked!'
-'Just like the Goldfish?'

This was Saurajay Nanda. He had lately developed the disgusting habit of sucking his thumb and had tried to perpetuate it as a trend. He had failed. Mrs. Arora called his mommy. He bawled like a baby.

-'Just like the Goldfish'
-'Oh so the Goldfish are Fucked cos they're flooded in water all day long!' said Pushkar. He was good at these conundrums. He also blamed other people for stealing his football studs when he lost them.
-'Yes,' agreed Rudra solemnly.
-'My dad fills my fishbowl everyday....My dad Fucked my goldfish! My dad Fucked my goldfish!' shouted Kaushal gleefully jumping up and down on his wooden seat.
-'Fuck you!' said Hozefa Malik, and kicked his seat from under him.
Kaushal fell flat on his bum. But he didn't cry. He rarely cried. That's why I liked him. He didn't cry when in 2nd grade, I used my pair of scissors in art class to cut V's into his pants. For some reason, this angered his mother, who drove down in her van and complained to our teacher Mrs. Varghese. Fortunately, I'd cut a pair of V's into my pants as well and pointing to them, had said 'He cut mine first!'They looked accusingly at Kaushal. He didn't cry. Kaushal didn't cry. Unless you threw his bhujia away.

A fight was now beginning to brew in our class. It was a time before we had come to realise that punches hurt and wimps cry. Surf Excel had not started campaigning its 'Daag acche hain' so vehemently, still fights broke out in great profusion all over Junior school, and clothes were stained with mud, sweat and tears. Sometimes blood. After all we were the oldest. We had to set an example.

Like the time we were playing football in the dusty field before Summer. We were always confined to a particular part of the field during break. What's worse is that 3rd and 2nd graders played with us between the very same goalposts. But they were idiots. They spent more time laughing and chasing the ball than kicking it and when they found possession, didn't know what to do with it. They would run one way, and then quickly turn and run the other way when the ball was kicked, giggling all the while. So their game looked more like a bunch of blind midgets playing 'Tag' in a dark forest than football. Except the giggling. A blind midget wouldn't giggle. The day Jeetu Dansinghani was absent, no one volunteered to play goalie. We shouted at each other to go in goal. Everybody knew being goalie was for losers.

-'Hey, Dibya, you're fat, you go in goal!'
-'I won't. I went last time.'
-'Then Kanishka, you go.'
-'No, let Anurag go.'
-'Hey, I just got my glasses. Goalies don't wear glasses!'
-'I'll do it!'

There was silence. The voice was not one of ours. It was a 3rd grader. He had dared to speak when we were in the midst of a serious discussion too complicated for his dim wit to comprehend. He was half our size. He was scared now. His nose was running and his lips were trembling.

-'What?'I asked, walking slowly toward him with clenched fists.
-'N-n-nothing sir'
-'You want...to be goalie?'
-'N-n-no sir'
-'Then why did you speak?'
I charged at him and stopped a step away. He sprang aside and stood, rooted to that spot.

I was only faking it. I was no good at striking fear in kids. Supratik was good with kids. Big for his age, he had once grabbed a kid by the arms and twisted them behind his back and shoved his face in the dirt and said,

-'Baap ke gaandu bolbi'
-'Gn-gn-gn-gnnn'
-'Ki bolbi?'
-'G-g-gandu'
-'Haan'
The last carried the note of affirmation that he didn't let out until he was well satisfied. He let him go then.

I couldn't hurt someone willingly. I'd always faked it though. Now, I felt the eyes watching me, peering through my skull into the soft, throbbing innards of my brain. I remembered what Supratik had done. I kicked the kid. It felt good.

Kaushal kicked Hozefa and missed. They grappled.

-'Fuck you!'
-'Fuck you too!'

A grapple was a stalemate in fighting jargon. At least among us it was. One could not conceive a fruitful result from a grapple unless he was appreciably stronger than his adversary.

-'Fight!'
-'Fight!'
-'Fight Fight Fight!'

Small fights broke out in various parts of the class. They started small and rolled like an avalanche, amassing more people as it went along. Tiny fists were flung, milk teeth were broken. Some sat, scared at their tables. Others willingly joined the whirlpool of swinging fists and legs, governed solely by testosterone from their as yet,developing masculinities.

-'I'll Fuck your pencil box.'
-'I'll Fuck you na, you'll get AIDS!'
-'What's AIDS?'
-'It's what my darwan got from eating stale guavas.'
-'Ya well, I'll...Fuck your darwan!'
-'Yeah, come na!'

Sometimes...I felt trash talk was a cause wasted on us.

If you've ever heard the sound of 44 kids shouting simultaneously at the top of their voices, you'll know it's enough to drown the sound of fire alarms at a nuclear power plant. Footsteps then, were not a challenge for our harrowing, shrieking voices tearing the class apart. Paper balls flew threw the air and one struck Mrs. Arora standing at the door with a couple of other teachers. They gaped, aghast, eyes bulging out at the sight. We had stopped shouting, of course, and stood with our heads down in our respective positions. Repentance, of course, was something we did not know the taste of, and the act of hanging our heads was merely a response that we had learned through experience that least invited any kind of retribution on the part of the elderly and easily agitated.

Some voices still echoed at the far end of class. 'Fug, fug, fugyou' and then drowned away as hope before the brewing storm. There was punishment. There were cries of disbelief, of anguish, of fear. There were meetings where parents were summoned. There were disciplinary meetings. There were meetings with fat, bald men, meetings with fair, slender women. Kaushal's parents were called. He was riled and coaxed and disciplined. But he did not cry. Kaushal never cried. Just like Samara never slept.

And through it all we hung our heads. Till the storm passed over. Till the world stopped spinning. Penitence, like trash talk, was a cause wasted on us. We were 4-C. We were formidable.