Ram

His name is Ram. I'm not kidding, his name actually is Ram. And that's followed by Krishna too. He's from Bihar, the place we all know as where people were afflicted by some form of brain disease after the Mauryan empire fell apart, and have suffered since, most of all from the mental incapacity to name their children something that wouldn't behoove an Auto-driver. Nonetheless, he's an extremely amicable chap, the only person I've known to have successfully pulled off the Christian Bale look in the Machinist without succumbing to malnourishment. He wears those full-sleeved shirts with patterns all over them to hide it, but we all know Ram's biceps have about as much girth as an ordinary wrist.

Little known to most, Ram is a genius. Instead of buying notebooks to take down class notes, he tears out magazine covers and wraps them round those three rupee booklets you get free with a roll of poppins'. Then instead of writing in this origami notebook thus prepared, he sits and reads the comic strips printed all over the magazine page and quietly laughs to himself. As a result, his notes are always clean, tidy and incomplete - like science is wont to be. To be fair, he probably wouldn't have a pen on him to write them with anyway. If he did, he'd give it away to some undeserving bloke who forgot to bring his. The milk of human kindness was skimmed, sweetened and poured down his throat, several measures too many for a normal human being.

Today I was sitting in class, immersed to the nose in a book to while away a free period between classes when Ram comes ambling in from the corridor and drags himself to the seat beside mine. I choose to ignore the hustle and bustle of the complaining waves of students who have begun to pour into the class. He has an irritating habit. Rather, I'm easily irritated. He lifts the front cover of the book while you're reading it in order to check the pagan nonsense you're so interested in, books being anathema in Bihar. Then he'll mutter a knowing 'Oh' and sing the name of the book mellifluously, followed by that of the author. So you'll get to hear a variety of ways you never knew the name of your book could be said out loud.

'Oh. Paydie Clarke ha ha ha! Roddy Doel. Nursery book lag raha hai.' or 'Oh. The Truth. Teri Pratch-Prac-Pra-kya hai yeh?'

Once I didn't let him lift the cover and he just read the name of the chapter and seemed satisfied. 'Oh. Moskyito Day. Amitav Ghosh.' Under ordinary circumstances, I'd generally stick my tongue out at and move on if I so much as laid eyes on a book that had anything in the vein of Mosquito Day written in it. But at that time I had just discovered Amitav Ghosh and wanted more after The Sea of Poppies. So if you ever come across a copy of the Calcutta Chromosome, chuck it out. If on the other hand, you manage to wade through the 200-something pages of demi-gods killing pigeons, machines skipping timelines and implausible sex-in-field/old monument( I forget where), with a general understanding of what-the-hell-just-happened, please tell me. Maybe I'll go 'Oh' and then 'Ah'.

Ram, on the other hand, is an expert at comprehension. He lifts the cover of my book, spends a good 20 seconds figuring out whether Wodehouse is the name of the author or the book, and then smiles conspiratorially and shoves himself onto my seat so he could read too. He spends another 20 seconds scanning the page thoroughly for something, in vain, and then turns to me and asks, crestfallen,

'Yeh kaisa Penthouse hai?'