Chapter 3

“Where did you learn to drive? Did papa teach you? Who taught you?”

I could hear a shrill piping in the background. I turned around and saw this scrawny little thing looking at me with really familiar and twinkled eyes. It suddenly hit me that the last time I saw those eyes, I was at Heathrow airport and the owner of the eyes was telling me to forget Guwahati, forget the NGO and just forget the past and settle down there itself. Those twinkled eyes I remembered were duplicated in the faces of my lovely twin nephews whom I was holding when the original owner was advising me not to go back. I wished I had listened to him….

Bro….

Mr. Hell-on-wheels, the ladies man, the corporate whiz, father of the greatest brats in the world and my brother, M. Now as a scrawny little kid in the back seat and to be honest, a bit ratty looking. I told myself that he is going to grow up into looking better, especially once he gets his pair of rimless glasses and stops behaving like an insane pomerian with a attention deficit problem. But right now? Ummm, allow me to reserve judgment. And that voice….Ouch!

“Where did you learn to drive? Did papa teach you? Who taught you?” He repeated again, in a higher shrill. The cars windows were beginning to quaver.

Man, was he this irritating always, I wondered. No wonder I used to try to hit him when we were kids.

Hmmmm….

“If you’ll keep quiet, I’ll teach you too” I opened with a weak defence.

“When?” came back the instant query, dripping disbelief in anything but what’s in hand. Yeah, my bro was definitely going to be a corporate lawyer, the damned pessimist.

“As soon as you can look over the wheel and see the road” I tried a stronger ploy for time.

“I can see over the wheel if I sit on two cushions, like that boy in the Indiana Jones movie we saw last summer”

Hmmmmm……..

“Okay, fine, we’re cool, as long as papa has no issues in you banging up his car while learning how to drive.” I went for broke.

“What do you mean we are cool? Its hot, isn’t it?”

“Erm, nothing. Ask papa for permission to use the car.” I threw out the bait as diversion and made good my escape.

“Papa, can I……”

I mentally switched off the voices as bro went to work on the poor old man and started looking around at the roads.

It was just like coming out of a really bad bender or a really wild party and seeing everything with totally zonked out eyes. I mean, it was all the same, jut different and eerie.

The roads were smaller, the cars were less, traffic was brilliant, the flyovers did not exist and there were no brand name stores, coffee houses or restaurants lining the road. We were traveling GS Road, which would later become the main brand-shopping avenue for Guwahatians and boast of nearly as many brand showrooms as Kolkata, no wait, its still Calcutta.

GS Road was a dump, right now…Oh man, for some hard cash, a few decent builders and architects and the body of a grown up and I would be king of the world, this world.

Hmmmm…. there were possibilities, I had not considered. Hmmmmm indeed.

I think I spent the rest of the journey with my mouth shut and eyes really open till we reached school.

Don Bosco High School, as we know it now is a towering edifice with a massive auditorium and very smart interiors as well as exteriors. The place we had reached in my dad’s old ambassador was something out a photographs page in one of school’s yearbooks. The foundations for the auditorium were just starting to be laid down, the old classrooms building was still standing and not yet torn down. The boys of Bosco were still the cocks of the walk in Guwahati, the teachers were allowed to utilize corporal punishment and most did with a rather worrying cheerfulness, the principal himself would have made marine drill sergeants shrink up and wilt and I was still expected to carry a water bottle on a strap that hangs from my neck.

Ye gods, here we go……