Recently, I had a conversation with my other brother, the revered Ricardo, which touched me enough to drive me to my keyboard. Strangely, I have never bothered to mention him before, so this piece aims to change all that. I do believe I have a sister somewhere, too…
But never mind, we’ll let things pop up in their due course. Now back to Ricardo, that effervescent brother of mine. The conversation in question took place after one long heavy-as-iron-balls lunch, when he was lying down there, musing over his long and glorious history - and believe me, he did have an exceptionally long and glorious history to muse over. He was also quite aware of the fact that I had a cheesy yet nifty little website, where one could usually find me publishing shocking expos?s on subjects as varied as prostitute-obsessed priests and astoundingly blunt ‘friends’. So he wanted to provide me with a little fodder for this ’site’. After deliberating on the best way to grab my attention, he jabbed me in the shoulder with his toe.
“Hey Rolly,” he said, as that’s what the near and dear call me. “Here’s something funny you can put on your site.”
“Oh really? That’s great! I’m all rears, go on.”
“Ah yes. This happened sometime when I was in the 6 th standard, I think. Lucu was in the 10 th, and we both used to go cycling all the way to school. Now at that time it was raining buffaloes, and you know how these disgusting roads are at times like that. Everything was flooded, and the drainage system was complete crap, so you had to move on these roads as fast as you could while praying for your life. So on this particular morning, Lucu (Lucu being Lucano) had left a bit earlier than I, and after a few minutes of dodging the craters on the road, I finally reached the main road, where I saw Lucu about 200 yards ahead of me, I think. Because of the road being flooded and all, the people were forced to walk in the middle of the bloody roads right along with the vehicles.
“Then, it really started to rain. Lucu had only his raincoat on, and not his cap, and this fellow didn’t want to stop and then put on his cap, so he tried to do it while cycling. After struggling a lot, he single-handedly managed the extraordinary feat of putting on his cap without stopping, and was very happy about it. Only problem was that after he put his cap on, he had no idea where he was; he lost track of everything. And as his luck would have it, there was this old grumpy man right in front of him, obviously not very pleased with the fact that he had been marinating in muck for the past one hour. Like the time you were soaked in muck when you fell from my cycle, remember? OK, so being so very pissed off and all, when this oldie saw Lucu so close to him, he thought Lucu intended to finish him off, so to save his life, he dived into this huge puddle of water - so huge that it might have even been a pond, who knows? Now this Lucu didn’t know what the hell was happening, but luckily he did see that crazed look in the oldie’s eyes, and like a rat he cycled away as fast as he could with all the little energy he had, not even bothering to look back and see what happened to the old man. Of course, I was there right behind witnessing the whole spectacle. This old fart got up and first started hobbling towards Lucu, but he realized he’d never be able to catch up with that madman. Left with no other choice, he started hurling these filthy abuses at Lucu: ‘Eh sala kuthriya! Vichithra porga!’ (’Eh, dog! You abnormal, ill minded child!’) God, I was laughing and laughing like crazy there!”
By now, after listening to this master storyteller, I was laughing like crazy too. I said through my laughter, “This really happened?? Poor Lucu. Well, at least we got a good laugh out of it, no?”
“Ya, right. You can put it on your site if you want. There are a lot more things like this that you don’t know about, a lot. When I have time, I’ll tell you about them.”