tommy, baby pal

one morning, many long mornings ago, i ran outside class at school with the unholy intent of locking my classmates in. outside, quiet amidst the chaos around him, stood thomas, alone, alongside the supervisor's office. he stared at me, then swung his eyes back to the floor, shutting me out. two mornings later, he was ushered into class and given a seat in the next row.

we called him 'refugee', simply because he had returned to india to escape the effects of the gulf war in his home country, kuwait. we were cruel, of course, as schoolboys are wont to be. after all, to be cruel in school is, in a way, a rite of passage that, for some, never nears completion. but thomas didn't seem to mind. he sat there, quiet, unsmiling, in his starched blue trousers and impeccably ironed shirt, staring at the blackboard and making copious notes.

i was class monitor, as always. which is why i knew he wasn't as quiet as he pretended to be. within four months, i had proof, watching him help dawson blow tiny seeds through long straws at the women in class. it came as a relief, actually. my propensity to welcome any form of lunacy has always been a strong force.

so, thomas and i spoke more often, and laughed more often, and played mean tricks on quieter classmates more often. when school was over and done with, we took to lounging outside jas' building, legs dangling over the wall, aiming for the ridiculous record of 'consuming a one-litre bottle of pepsi daily for the longest period'.

ans, jas, neil, tommy and i. partners in crime.

there were other tales, of course, involving drugs, the police, a fairly large number of women. tales that belong to us alone. thomas would head for kuwait, come back ten months later, and drag us out for wide-eyed nights fuelled by drugs from manali, alcohol from tiny bars, and all kinds of women from various corners of bombay. when we wanted him to, he'd let us borrow a room. when we didn't want him to, he'd pretend to sleep so he could watch and embarrass us with lurid tales the next morning. he did it to jas, once. but jas has forgiven him.

we'd dance strange dances together, down vague concoctions in dark alleys, share illegal substances, cruise the streets at 3 am. thomas would go back, we would quieten down, settling into relative sobriety for the next ten months. when we think about them now, those years, we find an intimate, intricate, shared past. our collective adolescence.

thomas will be back in march, to seal a pact made ten years ago. his wife will stay in kuwait. and we – the mighty bleahs -- will stand in a quiet circle, drinking rum and coke and vodka and sprite, thinking strange thoughts, discussing, as we have for years, the ups and downs that made up the astonishing years of our youth. and, for one whole night, we’ll all be eighteen again.