the men in moustaches

when i was five, mallu came along. i don't remember how we met, but i can picture our mothers waiting outside class, scanning rows of unruly five-year-old faces, trying to pick out mine and his from the screaming swarm around us both.

when i was ten, chris arrived. this i remember better. he arrived from another school, from another set of schoolboys, dressed in neatly pressed, carefully creased blue shorts. mine were a mess -- as they remained throughout my tenure in school -- and my crooked tie stuck its tongue out at his neat, well-adjusted one. but, we got along.

mallu and i spoke till school was over and done with. he had the cutest cheeks in the building, after all, and not speaking to him would mean forfeiting the chance to pull them daily. chris and i, on the other hand, decided to form a secret club. i could talk about it in detail, but then i'd have to hunt you down and kill you (sorry, club rules).

chris could draw. i couldn't. i could move though, so we started discussing breakdance like it would change our lives forever. he was the first guy in school to go to a rock concert (so what if it was bloody europe, huh? so what, huh?) and we had secret handshakes, secret codes, secret signs and a couple of other secrets. yes, boys and girls, a frightfully secretive business it was.

mallu, in the meanwhile, decided he liked shonn better. they were both small, both talkative, both prone to giggling in class, and both capable of slipping under the thighs of big, scary, class-ten guys. i was still allowed to pull his cheeks though, and he sat next to me at the class photo shoot of 1989.

with time, chris changed. he decided (i assume) that he wanted to be even more saint-and-goodytwoshoes-like than he already was. he decided he couldn't stand boys who misbehaved, boys who yelled, or boys who abused. i happened to possess all three characteristics in abundance. and so, one evening, chris decided he wouldn't, couldn't, shouldn’t, speak to me anymore. conversations with a boy who abused would, he imagined, ruin his delicate, sensitive soul.

even worse, he broke the boy code and -- shudder -- complained to my mother.

school passed into our past. as did college. as did the beginnings of our individual careers. chris and mallu and i went to other institutions, other places, other groups of people, other life-changing choices.

then, seven years later, chris called. he wanted to find out if lindsay, the editor of a particular magazine, was the same lindsay he went to school with. 'abey chutiya, aur kaun rahega?', i asked. and, this time, he didn't call my mother.

we met a week later, chris and i, and ordered the same drinks, and withstood the same staggering amount of alcohol. that was a surprise. two weeks later, mallu came along as well. the last time i had been in the same room with the two of them was over a decade ago. strangely, it didn't seem like long ago. i examined mallu's cheeks, watched chris swallow a tandoori chicken whole, and stared at their moustaches and little french beards.

we have managed, over the past year, to slip back into our adolescence, slipping on old gloves when we meet, ignoring the present to live in a state of boyish noise from a time long gone. chris yells at me. i yell at mallu. mallu yells at chris. chris abuses me. i abuse mallu. mallu abuses chris. it's a noisy circle. an abusive circle. often, a madly-drunk circle. the two of them sit on either side of me, moustached and french bearded, like sentinels from my childhood.

and, for those periods every week, it feels a little like the eighties all over again.

mallu doesn't like the idea of me pulling his cheeks anymore. and chris (thank you, god) can now yell "lindsay, you stupid fucking bastard, i'm going to whip your ass," without bursting into tears or feeling the need to confess to a priest.

if this is what it’s like to grow from boys to men, i’m not quite sure i see the difference…