We all had our own
reasons for being there at that point of time - Kedia
and I to watch live tennis, Baheti had
missed a train (or two) to join friends on another trip, and Kitty could think of no other city that would
give her more joy than the one we were in. We were the first to get back to the
dingy apartment deep inside a suburban locality rife with class divides and
unorganised crime, with Kitty
admonishing us for choosing to drag her along. A national holiday we weren't
aware of meant the only things we could grab from the barely-open supermarket
was a can of beans, and a packet of soup - subsistence food was a la mode that night in Paris, and no, there
wasn't any ice cream.
So, here we were -
four people who may not have wanted to be together a few hours back, in
circumstances depriving them of the comforts they'd expected in a place they
loved truly despite its fickle trouble-giving.
***
As a live example of
the lessons in microeconomics classes, advice was supplied in large quantities
during the first year in Ahmedabad, and thus came dirt cheap. A lot of it was
cliché ("Sleep, grades, social life - choose two out of three"), some
seemingly absurd ("Masturbation - that's the key to getting through first
year"), and then some vaguely life-threatening ("Remember Kramer
following da Vinci and sleeping for 20 minutes every three hours? That
works!"). But the best came from my two favourite 1986-born friends - my
brother ("Have fun.") and Tejo
("Expand your horizons.").
Lunch at the mess
was often horrible - not just the food. I couldn't bear to sit with hordes of
people just looking to get over with first year while we were in the first
month. Ill-gotten advice rented the air as much as the impending hammer of a
quiz announcement at 1:45 p.m. An appreciation of the
moment was just not there. I took the first opportunity to not renew my
mess membership, and ventured, as few observed in shock, into the wild.
The wild wasn't too
far off from where classes ended - BMW was an unassuming little eatery on the
grey side of the 150-feet tunnel. It offered a shockingly wide menu - Mexican
fried rice, manchurian rice and hotch-potch (a
weird name for dal khichdi), all sat smugly next to each other. More
importantly, it was host to other mess deserters looking to be far from the
madding crowd. It was here that I was to join Baheti,
Kedia and Rizwan
for lunch almost every day for the rest of the first term. Ashwin, Pemma,
Sekhar and Kranthi
were regulars on another table - BMW the restaurant was a lot about customers
enjoying themselves instead of just getting their purpose served, much like BMW
the car.
Near the end of the
term, it was tacit we wanted to be in the same study group, too, and
machinations began to leave our current ones. But we needed one more to form a
full group.
We sat at LKP (a
fond abbreviation for Louis Kahn Plaza) and wondered who wouldn't be a terrible
addition. Our chemistry shouldn't be disturbed,
was a common refrain. It was quite fateful that Kitty
called, then, saying she was going to be left out of her group as the others
were forming a super-group and didn't
engage her in that. Rizwan was
characteristically diplomatic, and Baheti convinced
we needed someone who kept us at least slightly focussed on the job. Kedia was worried she'd cramp our style, but we agreed.
A couple of days
later, we met outside the library, right above LKP, for our first group
meeting. It was a disaster. The next few were no better. In some weirdly poetic
way, each of us knew that was how it was going to start, and that we'd be stuck
at the skulls thereafter. And that's how we ended first year - interspersing
discussions on large firms' business problems with light music, irreverent
jokes and knowing smiles.
***
The two Delhi brats
offered help continuously, but with my engineering precision, and Kedia's jugaadu touches, masala boiled beans, toasted
bread and soup were ready at long last. Tired after a day of long uphill walks
and searching for supermarkets, we crashed on whatever cushions were there on
the sofa or the floor. Baheti found the speakers, and we took turns to play
music from our phones. We missed Rajjo,
but thought wisely against calling when it'd be late, late night in Ahmedabad.
A couple of the best hours from my three-and-a-half-months-long exchange term in Europe were on a
rug in a shady apartment in Paris - hours I may not have spent had I not
expanded my horizons and decided to just have fun.
