Season Finale

Left. Right. Left. Up. Down. Lower.

The butt in front of Rajat's face was hugged by a fine, black specimen of sartorial excellence. What had started as a round of dignified stares and curt gestures into platoons of brass and wood had now reached a fever pitch that apparently required ball-of-the-sole jumping and butt-flailing. A slower melody was emerging, thankfully.

Rajat's eyes flitted to the blonde on the left. She looked doleful with her eyes closed. Engrossed. Asleep? No. She was fiddling. The violin looked so precious in her hands, just the right size. Under her chin, near her nape...

Focus.

He immediately regretted the decision as the plump bums accelerated into a slow rise along an expanding crescendo. An instinctive jerk of his eyes to the heavens above and he was occupied. The chamber was huge. It must have sat over two thousand people (all busy admiring the well-dressed buttock of who was supposedly a champion conductor). The ceiling faced him with what looked like acrylic sheets larger than cars, thicker than engineering textbooks, tilted into reflecting the right sounds the right way. They hung on nothing but floor-high ropes.

Sheer awe.

Rajat's reluctance to attend the orchestra was understandable. He had been raised on a steady diet of Sonu Nigam, Backstreet Boys and Shakira. Classy music to him meant Nordic bands whose names had declensions not found in the English language. He strongly believed that Western classical music was supposed to stay inside elevators, car-reversing systems and the party scenes in a Hollywood movie before a heist. However, his brother had successfully bullied him into attending the "Season Finale" with a lecture on 'expanding your musical sensitivies'. It all stunk of a Pyramid Scheme to Rajat, who was convinced that his frugality was the last defense against the genius of marketing (unsurprisingly, his brother refused to divulge how much his front row seat had costed). His brother's tastes were curious because he had been raised on the exact same staple of mainstream music (unless he had snuck out and 'cultured' himself in secret, which, frankly, sounded appropriately sneaky as far as younger brothers go).

What is a Season Finale any way? Didn't we evolve out of celebrating the end of Autumn a few hundred years ago?

The conductor had settled for what could only be described as needling an imaginary balloon right in front of his nose with that stick-thingy. And then the piece ended suddenly. There were three seconds of silence. Nobody seemed sure whether to clap or not. And then it broke like a river. A thoroughly underwhelming river. However, Rajat clapped enthusiastically, always more generous with appreciation than the more costly resource of attention.

---

He moved out into the lobby with the shuffling crowd where, for the first time he realized, people donned attires two notches above whatever he had put on. Thick rimmed glasses, full-sleeved cottons, etched belt leathers -- the whole shebang. A few coat-racks were even sporting humans, presumably practicing for Oscar ceremonies. Rajat's neck threatened to grow stiff with the effort to not look down at himself. He had missed the discrepancy on his way in, having been distracted by the innocuously labelled "Program Notes" in the foyer. A surreptitiously placed placard had revealed a cost of two hundred rupees. Betrayals everywhere.

The tea-counter seemed empty, just then. With a heaviness that comes from anticipating a lighter wallet, he spoke, in his best attempt to sound 'cultured'.

"Excuse me, a cup of tea, please?"

"Sure, sir. Twenty rupees."

Not bad.

Rajat accepted the ceramic cup and saucer with mild exasperation at the vain attempt at civilization and placed a relaxed elbow on the counter, sipping slowly and deliberately.

The décor was very well done. Plush carpets, stone-bricked walls and an unfrayed candlelight glow over an impossibly large area. The tea was excellent. Rajat decided it was a little underpriced, if anything. There was something endearing about the peace that hung over him in that moment. Tea made everything better. It stirred his soul into awakening. Tea was divine, he declared with great authority, to nobody in particular. He resolved to use his new-found constitution in better focusing upon the orchestra and doing his brother (and the costly ticket) justice.

As he retreated back to the auditorium, a volunteer found him.

"Sir, a moment, please?"

"What's up?"

"Would you take a moment to answer a few questions?"

Rajat had spent the four seconds since having found this twenty-something college student in studying the piece of paper in his hand. Sure enough, there it was: 'Phone Number' and 'Email ID'.

"Do you plan to spam me?", he chirped with what was meant to be a disarming smile but looked like you had asked Rumpelstiltskin for the first born.

The boy, who had until then been the literal embodiment of everything a nervous wreck should be, squared his shoulders and suddenly piped, "Not at all! We send you just one email and then if you like, we can send you more."

Sweet kid. "Here, give me that. I think I might fill it faster myself."

"You're really warm, do you know that? Some people here are really rude. It is my first day...that is why I am nervous..."

Yes, you're right, I am quite warm. "Not at all! People just get skittish around surveys, you know. Here you go, let me know if you need anything else. You're doing just fine. The break seems to have ended though, catch you later?"

"Yes, thank you very much, enjoy the night!"

Rajat left the volunteer in remarkably higher spirits. Walking away with a slower gait, he contemplated upon the vivacity of human emotion. There had been something fundamental about this interaction. Every one of us is at the end of the day, he thought, moved by the same family of emotions. Perhaps true achievement of the human potential comes from identifying what drives us to be and how we can best effect change in our brothers and sisters with this awesome power...

---

The butt wasn't moving yet. Rajat was idly wondering how strong the man's gluteus maximus muscles must be when the music started with a distant hum. It grew into a gurgle of notes only to scatter into islands of instruments building on subsequent variations, all staggered relative to each other, creating all-in-all an overwhelming tension that begged for a resolution slow in coming.

Rajat was completely focused on the performance.

For example, he noted that the extreme right of the stage housed what looked like violins that had forgotten to stop growing. They were being hugged and touched in ways that would have made Rajat blush if not for the thorough education afforded by the 21st century Internet...

Focus.

Far behind, on the highest tier of the stage, a pale man in a two-piece suit held a single silver triangle with a seriousness that seemed woefully out of place to Rajat's tea-fuelled examination. Every few minutes he would strike an equally silver rod against the sides of the equilateral triangle, to his credit, with practiced haste. And that was that.

People get paid to do this?

They were now playing something that seemed to grow as if from behind a rock. He felt it progress around him with the sincerity of a rattlesnake.

Hey! Did I just do musical appreciation?

"No.", said a disembodied voice.

I thought that was pretty poetic.

"No, you did not."

Okay, but I found the whole effect quite wholesome.

"Please. Stop embarrassing yourself."

He had the distinct feeling that the speaker, had he a corporeal form, would wear a monocle and an unkind moustache which would be trimmed at fixed intervals with designer gold clippers. For an entity inside my head, Rajat thought, you are quite extravagant.

They hadn't played the Beethoven that succeeds 'Please hold the line. Your call is valuable to us.' Rajat had a feeling the performance really wasn't complete without those few notes. He instinctively looked around as if the sheer force of his thoughts could solicit fellow patrons and call this out for the hoax it was! To make it worse, the musicians kept sneaking peeks at the conductor's wand every few minutes. They really should have come prepared. What was the conductor's job anyway? Weren't these pieces tightly wound with timescales, bars and staves? The small pumpkins were in a frenzy again. This guy loved his job, Rajat noted with a happy smile.

Just as his attention floated to the eye of a video camera recording the stage from behind the flutists, the piece ended with a finality. Claps resounded and a few shouts of 'Bravo!' rose from behind. Rajat fought the urge to raise an eyebrow into a geosynchronous orbit. Slowly, figures rose around him. There was a stubbornness to the remaining mass but the gesture gained momentum and within ten seconds, only the most elderly were seated, ostensibly due to their arthritis and other exculpating handicaps. It fascinated Rajat how the motive of a hive could emerge from its individuals and grip every constituent member into action; Rajat fought hard to resist it in himself! Truly there was something religious in the way the sum could be greater than its parts, in the power of non-verbal communication to rouse fellow men to the pursuit of goals arising from the deep oceans where the self slept and stared at itself in pools of memory long since forgotten.

It almost made Rajat want to stand up and clap.

Arriving in Bhachau

(Editing Credits: My good friend, lawyer and writer, Sai Vadhan. He would probably sue me if I didn't put this up.)

White ribbons swam into the air and the hungry winter ate them up. Firoz sliced a finger through them, hoping to know something of the temperature of the cup they arose from. The water on his finger felt lukewarm.

He couldn’t do it.

He looked over to the other side of the table where a glass cup lay half-finished next to his father’s newspaper. With a jealous nonchalance, he looked at his own cup with deep concentration. He extended fingers testily towards the rim and let two fingertips sit. It stung! Instinctively, he jerked four fingers into his mouth, only dimly aware that it made no sense to do so.

Father looked up from his study of the paper and knew what had occurred in that tradition of fathers who always know when you want to simultaneously confess and not confess. He requested the owner of the ramshackle establishment for an extra glass cup in a raw dialect of Gujarati Firoz never grew tired of hearing. He did not use it at home. Hearing it was a special experience and Firoz would absorb it like water on sand.

They had arrived in the morning train on a platform seven inches too low for Firoz’s liking. It didn't take them too much time to locate the eatery out of the gate since it was, quite literally, the only building dominating an empty landscape of tar roads and thorny shrubs. Their luggage was sprawled lazily on the elevated floor as if it too had become exhausted by a night of rickety-rackety travel from Mumbai. A single, large plate of fafdas arrived, the oil on its surface disappearing into its yellow flesh even as Firoz looked upon it. Father made it a point to impress upon Firoz that fafdas are extremely tasty with tea. Firoz looked down at his plate and back at him, slightly confused. He told himself that fafdas are extremely tasty with tea.

Father was wearing a cream-coloured pinstriped shirt with a pocket that meant business. On any given day, it would carry a ballpoint pen (whose nib was concealed by a clever rotating mechanism), a Nokia handset (that would outlive the establishment) and a mini-folder of papers (that seemed extremely important to Firoz for no reason except that it was in his pocket). He always dressed business, even on vacations. (The first time he wore a t-shirt in public, Firoz was positively scandalized. Since then, he had made his peace but still preferred this version of his father better.) The lack of walls around them framed him against a clean powder-blue sky. It was one of those moments when Firoz felt particularly impressed with Father without fully understanding why.

The second glass cup had arrived and Father was already juggling the contents of the first cup into the second from an impressive height. Steam escaped the long red-brown current in great waves. It reminded Firoz of Angel Falls in Venezuela, the tallest waterfall in the world; he considered this an essential bit of information and would look down upon those who did not know it. Father did not know this fact but he was an exception. Firoz did not feel a need to explain the grounds for this exception.

This wasn't the first time they had visited their native village but this was the first time that Firoz was old enough to register the personality of the place Father grew up in. Bhachau was a place of austere beauty: not a single high-rise or vehicle was in sight; men were few and far in between on roads that seemed to stretch to nowhere in particular and the thermometer played between several degrees in a single day. Even as the day grew into noon around them, life was confined to the thousands of ants scurrying over the thin plastic bags and a lone cow grazing at the obstinate grass on the roadside. Firoz found her horns annoyingly asymmetrical and fought back an unnatural urge to twist them straight.

Father was reading the newspaper again. Firoz put a twisted strip of the hot farsan in his mouth, munched twice to break it into manageable pieces and lowered his lips to his cup with all the trust one could give to something that had violated it a minute ago. The tea was delicious. The fafda was underwhelming. He decided he wasn't old enough to appreciate the Delectable Mysteries of the Fafda. 

Lost in his precocious rumination on the philosophy of taste, he did not notice Father get up until his gruff voice broke the silence from behind. "The poor things. Can you imagine going hungry for days on end and that too in this cold a season?"

Firoz stared at him and then at his hand. Father was cupping the head of a golden-brown mutt, his fingers busy rubbing its neck. The dog let out of a low purr with closed eyes, its entire body steady while the tail radiated the excess energy like a windshield-viper on overdrive. Father cocked his head to his left, looking behind at the shopkeeper and shouted, "Give me two packets of Parle-G biscuits!" He motioned Firoz to fetch them from the counter, who dutifully tore open one of them along the extruding strip. This had become a family tradition a few years ago; it upsetted Firoz, mostly, to imagine himself on the roads without food for ‘days on end’ but if Father could do it, so could he. Besides, he loved how happy Father looked after having fed an animal so much that it could do little except lick his hand. Firoz threw some biscuits at the floor like gunpowder and bolted behind the granite counter as an extremely slimy tongue leapt at the now-broken biscuits. Father was kneeling and busy picking up some of the pieces from a corner and positioning them in the center, sometimes feeding whole rectangles to an eager mouth with his fingers.

Firoz stared at him and then at his hand.

“Disgusting!”

Father smiled and said nothing.
A full minute later, feeling a little left out of the activity, Firoz shuffled lightly to the front and extended a palm over the hungry form whose chest heaved visible. The hand froze in the air as if in benediction.

"It's OK. You can pet her. She won't bite."

"How do you know it's a she?"

He pointed at her elongated teats.

"She is a mother. Those are how her puppies get their milk. She needs to eat to produce milk or they will all die hungry."

The statement had an effect on Firoz. He vaguely imagined small, emaciated golden-brown bodies, lying in a gutter close to their home back in Mumbai. He mentally corrected the picture so that the dead puppies were now heaped against the steps where the dog was lapping up the crumbs. Geographical accuracy gave the scene a fierce morbidity. Firoz wasn’t one to shy away from duty and stomaching the truth was an important part of growing up. Everyone knows that.

"Go ask uncle for two more packets. Look at how she gobbles up several pieces at a time. Poor thing has been starving for a while now."

He did as he was told, this time kneeling next to her and carefully releasing the biscuits from the pack, careful to not let them break. Firoz was determined to give her whole biscuits because, he reasoned, whole biscuits are better than broken biscuits. She licked the back of his hand. He stood up and ran behind the counter. Father chuckled without turning back, shook his head and said nothing.

Between Cities and Countries

"Sir, you may take photographs of yourself; however, you may not take photographs of the crew."

The petite figure moved down the aisle without the air of someone who had been digitally molested in public and, with a smile, deleted evidence of the man's indecency. She handed him his smartphone with fleeting eye-contact. That smile, I noted amusedly, hadn't relented. He looked back at her as if she had offered a set of dentures and smiled back with faux kindness and tight lips. I vaguely remembered psychology experiments.

My eyes were slow to swivel away from her. She had the kind of nose that reminds you of strawberry sweetcakes. I had never liked strawberry sweetcakes.

As she walked back, I spoke to her in a voice that I hoped would not carry, "That was awfully polite of you."

"You have to be."

"Does this happen often, then?"

"All the time."

"Does it get any easier?"

"Never."

She smiled. This smile seemed remarkably less cold than its predecessor. Had she beamed at me? Had it lasted too short to matter? Perhaps she had offered me the best she could given the context? I stopped myself abruptly, having gone down this rabbit-hole before.

Ten minutes into a book on India's foreign policy, I realized I had registered almost nothing. For some reason, my brain now thought of General Musharaff in a slightly romantic light.

Stupid Pavlov.

Resigned, I lifted my head to see a lady dressed in immaculate navy-blue reciting the particulars of our flight. The white ribbon-rose on her neck made her look silly. She wore an expertly suppressed smirk that told me that had we met in a different setting, she would have agreed vociferously.

I looked down into my book. The author repeated his stance on terrorism for the fourth time. I groaned quietly.

I looked up.

The girl was back. She was miming the safety procedure that precedes every take-off. I wondered whether law forced her to repeat these with the hope that enough exposure to choreographed instructions would make them stick. I wondered if legislators understood the obstinacy of the average citizen in ignoring death and its affiliated protocols.

I gazed over at her more consciously. I focused on the way her lips shifted to the left every time the speakers blurted something inanely obvious; the way her hands soared above her shoulders, spending energy she could not deposit elsewhere; the way her hair was cropped in a bun that did little to take away her youth.

I was seated in the third row and my height offered a gorgeous view of her half-spirited movements over the head of a gentleman in front. I wondered how much of her soul died every time she tied the belt-buckle and displayed it to a crowd that was clearly not impressed with her effort. Something of my reflection must have been borrowed from her mind because for the first time in my life I was witnessing an air-hostess that was visibly bored.

She brandished a menu-card for expensive sandwiches and cookies, torturously unable to gesticulate the sentence: "...help yourself to our exotic selection in the finest cuisine...".  She settled for holding it like she was auditioning for The Lion King and rolled her eyes in her head. I couldn't stop myself from grinning in her direction. She found me and her face gave way to a mini-chuckle. A small explosion on an alabaster face. I felt myself grow very interested in military coups.

Stupid Pavlov.

I was pushed into my seat as the plane accelerated and, almost as if the universe conspired to make me believe in a benevolent (or bored) God, she sat herself in a seat that was amply visible from mine. I would spend the next thirty minutes alternating my attentions between Benazir Bhutto and a face in perpetual blush. I did not mind her make-up at all.

I like to think I was covert. I probably was not.

At this point, the gentleman in front of me either grew smart to my efforts or thought I was flirting with his hair (or I was the protagonist of a cheap tragicomic production) because he maliciously moved to obscure my view of the girl whose navy-blue suit did little to hold the summer within her...

With a mental kick to myself, I realized I was in the dastardly rabbit-hole. I settled for enjoying my stay there in what can only be described as an act of desperate pragmatism.

The overhead button that summons flight attendants is genius, I realized. It is the closest we have to a magical lamp. Unfortunately, every time I was 'thirsty', the wrong genie would pop into my field of vision. My stance towards the white ribbon-rose graduated to belligerence. After my fifth glass of water, I wasn't even trying to hide my eyes from searching her whereabouts.

Ah! There she was! Row N. My aqueous needs were now rendered obsolete and disappeared as awkwardly as they had come into existence. I decided to work up the courage to ask her out for a cup of coffee when I unboard. Surely, she will stay back in Mumbai some time soon?

I sighed.

Something sarcastic in me asked me, "Does this happen often, then?"

"All the time."

"Does it get any easier?"

"Never."

---

It was a little awkward to sit on the third row from the exit and not alight. I was suddenly reading the book with more interest than I have ever paid to anything without a strawberry sweetcake nose. When the mob thinned enough so that I could ask her away from pleasantries for a minute, I stood up (less ceremoniously than I had imagined) and ambled slowly to the front.

And then I walked left, out to the stairs and breathed in the night.

She hadn't been there. In that small area where the crew stands and fares you well. She hadn't been there. I deflated like a pool of stars would if they weren't abstractions of titanic conflagrations floating in the indifferent vacuum of space. Both fit, the poet in me remarked. I politely asked him to shut the fuck up.

About fourty-three milliseconds later, her face appeared from the darkness, travelling up the stairway and I had the fleeting sense of being buffeted backwards by sheer intent. She threw a chirpy "Good night" at me. I caught it between the space of my ribs and nodded my head in acknowledgment. Something appropriately enthusiastic passed my lips while I descended and before I knew it I was looking at the passenger bus. It had never looked sadder.

I stood for a full minute in a night that wasn't appropriately cold. I looked behind and up into the looped canopy of the portable stairs. I was hoping to find light at the end of the passage. She wasn't there.

I moved forward.

I moved backward.

I climbed the stairs. I learnt that day that nothing is more irritating than being interrupted mid-climb to the girl of your (recently conceived) dreams. The security-bloke wouldn't let me pass beyond the third step and confiscated my ticket until I answered a few questions.

"Have you forgotten something, Sir?"

"Look, I will be down in a minute. Let me just..."

"Sir, we cannot let you do that. There are laws against this. If you just tell me what you have forgotten, I will get it for you."

"I haven't exactly forgotten anything."

He looked at me with anticipation. I gave him the kind of look I last gave my Chemistry teacher, bargaining for an extra 1/2 mark over a diagram I had guessed into creation.

"Look, I just need to speak to someone in the crew..."

"I am sorry but we cannot allow that."

And just like that, my shoulders fell by an inch accompanied by other changes I had read of in a psychology book more interesting than the one I was now holding. Suddenly, I did not like foreign policy too much.

Stupid Pavlov.

Opening Ceremony

Screeeech.

Nikita fought back the need to break apart the arm-rest of her chair and fling it towards the lectern. Restraint was easy because she was sure the act would constitute as desecration of Heritage Site property. An air-conditioner crooned. Something grated in the walls.

“…it is my great pleasure to start the Fifth Ganshyamdas Debate Competition of…”

ScreeEEEEEeech.

The boy in the two-piece suit (that was clearly cut for his father, judging by the folding love-handles of the expensive cloth) had some serious patience. He looked at the microphone with an accusatory non-smile and continued to speak a choppy monologue into it. Maybe he meditates every morning, she suggested kindly to herself. She imagined him with a shaved head, clothed in saffron robes, not without his expensive-looking spectacles (the boy needs to see!) standing in the only unlit square foot of the room, as if in philosophical protest. She focused on him: he was indeed standing in a 3-dimensional polygon not lit by the cheap lighting that otherwise suspended every countenance in the room in a time-locked expression of ennui; maybe this was deliberate positioning? The boy’s flourish belonged to a bent-knee proposal to the woman of his dreams with all the accompanying hesitation, nervousness and awkwardness. He will probably never get married, poor chap.

It was a Saturday morning which meant Nikita had taken the initiative to attend the event on a holiday. She demanded, therefore, that this be worth her time. Something in her head reminded her that she did not have anything better to do anyway. She snuffed the voice with practiced ease and relaxed her grip on the wood of her chair, in the time-tested way men become masters of their destiny. The ochre face of her watch feebly reminded her that only ten minutes had passed. She made a mental note to practice ignoring the watch.

Nitika was fascinated by the way her brain could know what was happening around her while she travelled fantastic tangents of thought. She was the ultimate traveller, yes, she was. Her immediate environs were a sad constraint in space-time that would be dealt with in the coming centuries by scientific innovation. They had to be. Until then, she would have to make do with the silhouettes of the proceedings that her subconscious offered her in regular intervals like the assignments sitting on a conveniently forgotten desk at home. Those fuzzy outlines were usually enough to figure out what is happening. She could comfortably gaze into the poorly designed flex-poster of the Debate Competition while ascertaining how boring the rag-tag assembly of ‘honorary guests and teachers’ on the stage were. Someone had thought to use loud saffron against pastel green as the background. While a little bit of her died inside, she focused her eyes. On the extreme left was the Student Committee Chairperson, a well-built Greco-Romanesque woman that asserted authority that clearly did not belong to her; she seemed to have learnt how to be amused by disorder. To her left was the Vice-Principal of the college, a mousy fellow that seemed the right kind of timid to make you want to lock your doors at night; he wore an expression suited for long elegies. The centre of the ‘august company’ was occupied by the Principal of the ‘reputed college’ whose multi-storeyed eyebrows made him look much more ancient that he was, possibly explaining why he got the job in the first place; he had a blank look supplemented by nods at perfectly random intervals, which also explained a lot. Next to him sat what can only be described as an attempt to make human a Dr. Seuss rhyme about a walrus having an existential crisis; his moustache stared at Nikita and then those around her with a detached Stoicism. Last in line to the right was Ganshyamdas Jr., a middle-aged rotund gentleman who made being bored look polite; he had the courtesy to cast the casual look over his dearly departed father’s photo-frame every once in a while, looking either melancholy or desperate for conversation with anything smarter than his only neighbour.

Nikita looked at her watch. Thirteen minutes. She crossed her legs and uncrossed them. The act made her feel oddly relaxed and uncomfortable at the same time. An air-conditioner burped. Something moaned overhead.

The front row contained the quiet forms of three judges that would be presiding over the day’s panel debates. They had been introduced at some point during one of Nikita’s reveries and she faintly remembered budget bouquets and deceptively heavy gift-bags (the grandmotherly professor emeritus had buckled by the unexpected density of the parcel). Some of the student volunteers had taken to surreptitious glances at the other two judges: a twenty-something youth, with a scrubby excuse for a beard and an ill-fitted pair of navy trousers, was quite opaquely flirting with a reedy woman skirting her thirties with the dependable Ostrich Syndrome (sustained by Parisian cosmetics and sundresses in winter). She had managed to find a joke to chuckle at and touch his elbow with long fingers after every eight-five seconds. Nikita instinctively looked to the right at the Zen host, quite at peace with his station in life, dallying with the embroidered curtains beneath the lightning-cracks of a Heritage Site wall. His detachment made Nikita breathe in and breathe out. Good chap, that. He deserves a happy married life, he does.

The ‘dignitaries’ had proceeded to crowd the table where the late Mr. Ganshyamdas’ portrait sat with an ornate diya-stand that enjoyed the only attention it would get for the next six months. It was positively glowing after a few minutes of furtive searching for matchsticks. The Vice-Principal had extended a hand into his pocket absent-mindedly as if retrieving something but replaced it slickly as if in reconsideration. Some student had been called to sing a prayer to start the ceremony. Start, Nikita thought with as much doleful stress on the word as can be given without enunciation. A short, meek girl shuffled out into the front of the mass of chairs, almost as if spontaneously erupting into existence right near the marigold-decked table. The casual glance behind her shoulder afforded a quick survey of the faces of the scattered audience, one and all caught in different stages of naïve excitement to insensate resignation. She smiled to herself. That was how you told apart the freshmen from the seniors. 

The prayer ended as smoothly as it had started, not unlike the flagging attention spans of the listeners. Some people looked around, unsure whether a prayer should be followed by applause. Some clapped but the movement never gained critical mass. The Principal must have been asked to speak because he glided to the lectern and looked around at the audience in a long, thoughtful manner. Nikita remembered doing something similar when she blanked out during her Elocution finals. He began like the morning sun, imperceptibly slow and when no one was really paying attention. By the time Nikita had caught his words, he was halfway through his halting improv:

“…there is so much to say about all of it, I really cannot express it. There is a lot that has been done and this is all really so important, I don’t have words for it. I believe this is an important activity for students and our college and we must do it and give it all the attention that an important event like this deserves. I have a lot more to say about this but we have only so much time. That is all, thank you.” 

The ‘speech’ had lasted a minute (although some in the audience might argue otherwise). Nikita was listening intently at this point. (So intently , in fact, that she even ignored how the frisky judge was now holding the fair-skinned wrist of a volunteer who had in all probability bent over just to ask if he wanted a cup of tea. Her face now looked as if she was going to read a coming-of-age novel when she got home. The lady judge stared forward, her face as inscrutable as a Parisian mime). Watching the ‘luminaries’ speak publicly was always fun. The experience reminded her of unprepared students facing viva voce exams. The walrus-man (whose existence made some sense when he was reintroduced as the Chief Guest for the day) trundled to the front with a blissful smile plastered on a face that was anything but blissful at the prospect of having to talk. He began in a measured drawl:

“A very good morning to one and all present here. It makes me really happy that we are taking on such initiatives as a college…”, he stared at approximately fifty post-adolescent faces (not counting the twenty or so volunteers who looked like they could benefit from reading ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ or, really, any book at all) while the Principal consistently nodded out of step, “…as a community, as a nation. We need to encourage this so that we do more of such…things to help our students understand the world. We must debate for overall development of personality, to know the world around us. Cultural activities like dramatics, singing, public speaking…these are good ways to develop personality which is important for the job market. It is very…good that we have our alumni coming back to join us and help us, one of whom is with us today and has started this debate competition!”, he pointed at the mass of loose clothes and arrested beard-hair busy courting a cup of tea, suddenly illuminating why such a young, over-hormonal person would be allowed on the panel at all. Maybe the committee ran out of people who were willing to endure this? 

Nitika became aware of the thin fabric of her skirt against her calves as she waddled between chairs and out into the column of volunteers, all standing in a file of concealed despair as if they had discovered a new meaning for the term ‘wasted youth’. She discreetly grabbed her nylon-netted bag from a ledge under a terminally ill air-conditioner and waited while the volunteers dissolved around her to make space. The Chief Guest had managed to reach a point in his soliloquy where his garage-repairman’s health, a highly sexist parable and an odious political joke were all relevant, wrapped with a self-satisfied “I really didn’t prepare anything today. These are just thoughts that came to my mind right now…” 

You don’t say.

A friend grabbed her by the left arm as she made to move, “Where are you off to?” 

She gave him a weak smile and whispered, “I have assignments I need to finish.”

“Oh, here for a quick refresher. You’re really focused, eh?”

“Very.”

With a silent prayer for the host’s love life, Nitika left on feline feet, relegating the remainder of the ceremony to her imagination.