Growing up in a Suburb (Story)

"All Dads suck"
They both shouted in unison. And we all chuckled for a while.

I prepared a stick - a cigarette stuffed with mixture of tobacco and hashish. We called it stick. Finding hashish was not that difficult. You just need to know where. The shopkeeper won't give you if he/she doesn't know you. You have to be accompanied by the one who has been there before. Once he/she knows you, it won't be a problem ever. Sometimes you can also make on your own using hands. The bushes are everywhere. You should just make sure that the cops don't see you while you are busy rubbing your hands.

It was long since we three met in one place. Sulav and Sam (actually Shyam) have been my friends before we knew what friendship actually is. For us friendship was to fight whenever we met on some pointless stuff. Sometime we used to make pact with two of us and bug the third one. Mostly me and Sulav would gang up together and bug Sam. Me and Sulav shared more stuffs than us and Sam. Sam was different.

Sulav and I share a wild history together. We did so many stuffs: bunked our classes, smoked together, did the eve-teasing together, stole fruits from street vendor, and the list goes on. We started torching up together in a small canteen in front of our school when were in 6th. I coughed till I die. His face too was red and tears were coming out of his eyes. We drank our first booze during our winter school. He stole it from his dad. We just could gulp once or twice. We felt like grown up once we did it. The taste was not that good. Actually it was shitty. But we felt like we did something no one else in our class could do. We threw the remaining with the bottle. Once we reached school, we chewed lots of lemon leaves from a tree on the other side of school wall. The neighbour had so many fruits planted in their kitchen garden. We sometime used to jump over to steal it. We used lemon leaves to kill the smell from our mouth. No one noticed and those who did, had no guts to complain to anyone. They were scared of us. We were bad boys. No one dared to step on our toe.

Once, Sulav got punished for putting compass, the one we used to make circles with,  on the bench right before his bench mate was sitting. It went right into his left thigh. The guy couldn't keep quite. He screamed and started punching Sulav. He had done it with pens cap before too. This time it was different. We were always kept apart to avoid noise. I saw Sulav putting compass back in geometry box and the other guy rubbing his thigh. As soon as I realized what had happened, I couldn't stop laughing. Teacher made Sulav to put his hand on the blackboard and hit him badly on his booties. Sulav cried badly that day. Later he said, "I thought he would quit hitting me if he sees me crying. Instead, that son of a bitch started hitting harder."  

Sam never came with us. He was too busy studying for his dream to be a big man someday. It helped us in some way as we could ask for his help to do our homeworks sometimes. There were few teachers we obeyed: those who knew our parents and those who punished damn hard. With the others, we could always work out with some excuse. 

This continued whole our school life. We learned new trick to get boozed and stoned. Like I said getting hashish is not so difficult, you just need to have right company.  We found out better hide outs. We became better in making excuses. The only thing we couldn't do was getting good grades.

My dad had enough money. After all that was what he cared about. So, after school, I was offered to go to the Kathmandu- a bigger city for further study: bigger city, bigger fun, and bigger mischief.  I agreed in no time. Later I realized, I would miss Sam and Sulav.

My dad never minded spending money on me. He never even shouted at me. But he never attended my birthdays; I think he doesn't even remember when I was born. I was not lucky enough to be with my mother. She died before I could figure out what mother is to a kid. My father didn't marry twice. However, there were rumours about him. Rumours I hated so much.

I was with my aunt. She was nice sometimes. Other times she had problem with everything I did: my hairstyle, my dress-ups, my friends, my marks and so on. Her comments never made any sense to me. I used to hear them as if I was totally serious on what she says. As I grew up, I started to hear the blurred sound only. She spoke fine but it used to get blurred till it reached my ears because of the trip I used to be in. She never knew this or maybe she didn't know that she shouldn't expect someone in trip would understand her.

Sulav was much messed up than I was. His parents were separated long back. He was with his step mother and his step brother. He never talked with his step brother. His step mother saw him only when he used to come for dinner and lunch. He seldom missed it. Later he missed them when he used to be in trip; especially the hard one that would last for at least 24 hours. His mother never told anything to him. Maybe she thought people would start backbiting about her. They would blame her for being a bitch to her step son. This served well for Sulav.

Sam, he was a real dick-head. His father was a kind of news reader in some local FM station. He had late nights but he always cared if Sam was in before 8 in the evening. If someday he came late, he would have to listen to the non-stop news broadcast from his father. He would talk of his future that was not yet sure to come and would bug him in his present. He would talk of us being useless for him. I don't know why every father or parents think that his/their child is the only naive child in the world and he/she is going in wrong track because of his/her friends. We never forced Sam to do anything with us. He seldom torched and never touched booze. Sometime he would say, 'why drink and drive when you can smoke and fly!' He was better in studies than us.

Well...I was telling about my life after school. I missed two of them for few years. I rarely visited them during vacations. But when we met, we would have our old days back. We would play some songs in our mobile and would start to prepare our stick. I don't know what used to haunt this Sam, because some day he would act like some real bonehead and start lecturing us like our parents. I guess he got his lines from his dad's lectures. And whenever his dad over-lectured him, he would recite those lines in front of us. We would simply ignore him.  After few puff, we could smile over anything he would speak. I think he sometime was jealous of us: jealous that he couldn't spoil himself like us.

Today, we have met once again. Dashain, our biggest festival is near. It used to be the time when we got our new dresses. Schools would close for a month as there was Tihar-festival of light, right after Dashain. No school and enough time to fool around with friends.

Dashain had other significances too. It meant no more muddy streets. The puddles where we would catch our gold fish (they used to look like gold) would dry out. Gold fishes were later kept in empty bottles of alcohol. They would die the other day. Few survived for couple of days. Flying kites would be more frequent. As a child we sometime used to make our own kites. We used to take spikes from broom and use a simple polythene bag to make our home made kite. The sharp end of the thread would be made by grinding glass and mixing it with rice. We would sometime cut our hands while doing it. This was done to cut other's kite. One the kite is cut we would run along the damns in fields to get them before others. This would start right after rice plantation finished. Some would even do it earlier.

Sulav is married to his beloved.  He runs his own Farm for his living.

"You should not waste your life in running hither and thither. Find the one you can live with and marry her. Of course, it won't be so smooth like they show in the movie but the good moments you live together make you strong enough to fight the bad ones." he explained.

Sam, we thought he was a real dick-head but he came out to be the wisest of us all. He has pursued his dad's career but instead of working in FM, he runs his one newspaper.
"You don't make much money but you know life is not always about money." he justified his choice. "Journalism has become an addiction to me. I think I can make changes I want through it. People read what I write. If I write something good people would certainly benefit from it. Thus, I can fulfill the dream of changing the world." he added.  
Both of us praised him for his good decisions for not being with us for more.

When one is married to his love and the other has started to change the world, I am still waiting for the one with whom I could do my 'life-long romance'. I had this idea since long: to find a girl who would be wise and open and with whom I could fall over and over again. Time spent on whose presence would make even eternity feel shorter. Unfortunately, that search has not yet ended. I found some to give me the illusion if they were the one, but it didn't take much to realize that they weren't.

I grind the hashish and mixed with the tobacco. Sulav as usual pulled it into the cigarette. He used his delicate fingers to bring back the cigarette into cylindrical shape. He knocked his thigh with the filter of the cigarette to settle down the mixture at the bottom. He continued till he could fit all in. Then the tip was rolled.  

We were silent for quite long. It's so awkward when you don't find what to speak. Sulaved pushed me and offered the stick.

He exhaled the smoke and began, "My dad always bugged me for being a smoker. He never knew that he was provoking me to do so by creating bondages in my outings and friendship. He was setting the challenges for me. And I was proving him inferior in every puff I took."

"Same here...." I said with a long puff. "...Once my dad came to know that I was taking drinking and smoking. He came to meet me just to say that I have disgraced him. He who didn't come to congratulate me in my victories in school level competition didn't forget to bug me when I was down. I thought that was the way to get him close to me." I wished it had not happened that way.

"I thought it made me numb. It gave me freedom from knowing that I have a faggot father who is married to some lady much younger than him, the lady whom I have to call mom. Shit...I don't know what I am saying?" Sulav snatched stick from my hand and started taking quick puffs.

We were in the same place we used to meet when we were teenager. It was a patch of trees in the middle of rice field. This field used to look so big when we were small. You would only see fields till you could see. Now, there are houses everywhere. The irrigation canals used to be like rivers for us. I used to stand on hands and flap my feet and say, 'Look, I can swim.' We were afraid of going to the river. Every year someone died there. Our parents convinced us that the river takes sacrifice every year. So it's better not to go there.

The 'Beshram' bushes along the canal were our dense forest. Sometimes dead animals were dumped here. The were not covered with mud and hence vultures came to eat them. We used to scare kids following us by showing the skulls of buffaloes from distant. Sometime we would make the stories about some child picked up by the vultures. There were stories about the aborted babies being thrown there, mostly the daughters. We once saw a white cloth half buried under the bush. Even we were scared that day.

People claimed that the hut made for keeping rice sapling was where the devil danced at night. We too invented the story of some people trying to sleep there once and running away after seeing the blood all over the floor. It was real scary. Even for us. Hence, it was our best hideout.

We got our fishing rods from the same bush. The irrigation canal next to the patch was where we fished. I still recall the days when we all three used to go to fish directly after our classes. The summer classes were in the morning and we would skip going home and start fishing there. Then, Sam would come and tell us that our parents are searching for us.
"Hey, what happened to the rice mill we used to go?" I asked both of them.
There was a rice mill in our town. It was very big. The pile of chaff of rice was so big that we would go there to climb and pretend that we are mountaineer. Sometimes we were chased by the guards. During winter, we used to steal the chaff and burn it for warmth. Sometime we brought corns and put it in the fire and wait for the pop-corn to pop out. The quicker one got more to eat than the slower one.
"It's closed. People complained about the chaff coming to their house." Sam said.
Before we started smoking real cigarettes, we smoked the jute sticks. We called them 'Santhi' in our local tongue. After the jute was peeled out, what was left was a white stalk with a whole in the middle. We would burn one end of it and inhale from the other. We would act like the stars in the movie with it in hand.
Then came the teenage. We could buy cigarette from the shop. No one would ask a question. Even if someone asked, 'It's for my father' would be enough. Same was for alcohol. 
"I think we should leave." said Sam. Sulav looked at my face. I looked at the finished stick in my hand and nodded.
"I too think we should leave. No one will come searching us now like in the past." I said


The sun was already in the horizon.
 

(Characters in the story are fully fictional. Any resemblance to dead or alive is just a coincident)