I would like to begin with a disclaimer. Two, actually. First, I never belonged to anything. And second, I had an unspectacular childhood. I will tell you what I intend the above two statements to accomplish.
I never saw a war. Any war. Least one that was mine. I was once in a school skirmish and another time saw someone being shot at. The school altercation didn’t amount to much, a couple of bruises at the best, and after the first few potshots were traded, both parties quickly forgot who’s turn it was next. The shooting was equally indecisive. The bullet missed Someone by quite a distance and flattened itself out on a wall in the background.
I grew up in a pretty tedious fashion, and fairly unremarkably at that too. I was never too short, or too tall, or even too dull, for my age, and safely stayed within the prescribed boundaries of regular conforming anonymity. My father beat me up in reasonable amounts. I was never molested by an uncle, and never tried to kill myself. I didn’t squash cockroaches for fun and rarely laughed out of turn. Honestly, no one quite saw me grow up, let alone resent me for it. I grew up like the grass.
My family was moderately religious. They knew precious little about the whole affair of faith and thus justifiably believed in it. No one quite remembered how the parable ended, and this surreptitious collective ignorance ensured that of the reprimands and rebukes parents dealt out to their children, a measly share concerned divine issues. They were meek people in that regard, and wisely kept their mathematics textbooks and their scriptures in separate shelves. Not surprisingly, no one in the house could defend the household gods when needed, even though the hagiography came with a lot of convenient ‘holes’ ( The hallmark of an intelligent religion is a generous sprinkling of such ‘gaps’ in the story, crevices in the mountain of mythological expostulations, buffers of sorts, into where gods and their colorful bickering legions can dive in for cover when under attack, and where from devotees can pull out fantastic birds of magic that might be able to aid and abet a clay-footed god on the run in his flight back to divinity. A well thought out religion always has possibilities open for a reverse deux ex machina!) In course of time, the family faith graciously stepped down from its high pedestal and took its place amongst other similar growing up knick knacks, like bedtimestories and fairytales, devices young parents use to discourage growing children from asking too many uncomfortable questions, or going to bed late, or having sex early. The cardboard box marked ‘Used Toys’ was subsequently shut, cellotaped and dispatched to the nearby orphanage.
Adolescence wasn’t especially hard on me. I took passing fancy to a petite little thing in my high school trigonometry class. The intervening period between when I first saw her, and felt something akin to love, and when I first banged her, the expanse of time that can prove to be happy hunting ground for much of boyhood poetry and many of the sleazier dreams, was cut short considerably by our mutual randiness and love of triangles. We got together under the pretext of study sessions, derived some important first theorems and soon parted ways, amicably. The lack of any ill will, again, proved a dampener to any pyrotechnics of creativity fueled by vengeful hormones. I didn’t get into bed with another woman for a long time after that, mostly because I couldn’t find anyone drunk or horny enough, but also in part due to my chancing upon Gandhi and Nietzsche, under the most unusual of circumstances. The former’s philosophy of preserving ‘body fluids’ to strengthen the intellect and the latter’s sheer disdain for womankind kept me happily justified to myself. The thought of having intercourse with a man never occurred to me.
College was a miasmic pastiche and a deja vu mashed together, a collage of messily pasted cuttings from teeny flicks and comic books I had read before. I tried many things, like many others. Philosophy and tattoos and cool, though I admit I met with obscene failure trying to pull the latter off. I would dabble in the uncool, occasionally and accidentally, and my cool veneer would wear thin under reproachful peer glare. I quit cool soon enough, not because I ‘realized’ I was inherently uncool but because I began to see that the brand of cool everyone else used wasn’t natural. Nobody could be that cool naturally, and it took some effort to billboard it up all the time. And then, it tended to get funnily scary when you were alone. I was a sloth by nature, so I decided to get a style of cool all my own, and with some expedient trammeling, I had cut enough flab off ’sloth’ to make it passable as ‘languorous’. I became ’smooth’, ‘easy’ and ‘casual’. I was in no hurry to reach places, I was too polished for that. That was how I saw it back then.
