(Move over Hindustani, for the title of the Longest Thing I Ever Wrote now belongs to this. Thinking about the length now, I wonder how many people actually will have the time to read this. If you decide to read however, you’ll see the return of the two certain fat schlobbs and one blunt friend that I claim to have. Not only that, it will also give you a vague idea of how much free time I have on my hands. Seriously.)
It was on an extraordinarily chilly day that a strange-looking freako entered into the mostly vacant school, clad in nothing more than his bare essential school clothes, so as not to look too uncool. He of course had a reputation to look after. On this day, though, he was even more strange-looking than he usually was - a commendable feat, to be sure. He managed to do this as he was bleeding profusely from his left knee, and slightly less profusely from the other knee and both elbows. Knees and elbows, the two hotbeds for bruises and wounds among small fries such as this. In his hand he held a flat cube-like machine know to them at that point simply as that walkman that plays CD’s, which was broken beyond belief and, more importantly, beyond warranty because since it was broken in two, the sticker that said “Warranty Void if Broken” was also in two. This caused great distress to him, even more distress than his loss of blood from four different places caused him. Dazed and utterly confused, he made his way into the school and looked around.
Just as confused though somewhat slightly less dazed stood a puny insignificant speck inside the school. Barely a few minutes back, as he, the speck, was just about to leave the school premises, he was distracted by a sight so totally freaky that it bothered him for several months to come. What he saw was this: A strange looking freako studying in the same class as he was maniacally speeding on his bicycle, with wires that came out of the earphones lodged into his ears trailing in the wind. At a reasonable distance from him were two fat female schlobbs apparently walking home after a trying day at school during which they were mercilessly prodded and poked insultingly by their seniors. Then, just as the freako was about to make a turn, the front wheel of his bicycle suddenly halted seemingly in order to rid itself of the freako. So the freako went, as they said in those days, for a toss. When the freako opened his eyes, all groaning and moaning, he saw that the fat on the two schlobbs was jiggling all over he place, leading him to think that they were giggling uncontrollably at him, and so in tearful disgust he attempted to heave himself off the ground.
It was this groan-inducing incident of which this puny speck was one of the few privileged witnesses that made him make the first clear straightforward resolution of his life, and also the first resolution that he would subsequently break in a few moments: he decided there and then that he wouldn’t want to be friends with that freako, let alone be acquainted with him in any way. So, when he saw that the freako was about to enter the school, the speck turned around quickly and ran into the school’s shadowy corridors, and when he reached the end, he stood quietly in the corner and spied on the freako, wondering what he would do next.
The reason the freako entered the school in the bloody mess that he was in was because he desperately needed help. While he struggled to get off the ground, he saw a puny insignificant speck standing at the gate of the school and staring at him with detached bemusement and so decided to approach him. Turning to enter the school, he saw the speck run off frantically into the school, and this confused him. Nevertheless, he went in and followed the puny speck who, on reaching the end on the corridor, pressed himself into a corner and frowned in the freako’s direction. The distance between them shortened more and more, and finally the freako, still oblivious of the speck’s futile attempts to get away from him, said, “I swear this is the worst day of my life. Hey, do you have a handkerchief?”
Little did the speck know at that point that just this one question from this one freaky looking person would be the factor that would throw their paths, distinct and separate on their own until then, recklessly together, only if he, the speck, answered the freako’s question in the affirmative. If the answer had been negative, that would have been it. The freako would have gone away, looking for someone else’s handkerchief to prey on, and the speck would have been free to go on his insignificant way. The answer that the speck did end up giving, though, was not entirely his doing, to be sure. Ever since he had been going to school, a rather healthy habit had been instilled into his very core by his mother who would shout out from the doorstep to ask if he had his handkerchief exactly 30 seconds after he had left his home for school. If he didn’t have it with him, which was usually the case, his mother would then rush into the house, search high and low for one and then rush out again and give it to him, this whole process usually taking around 3-4 minutes. Now the Speck, in order to gain some excitement in his insignificant life, came up with the idea of arranging his departure from home in such a way that he would reach school neither a minute too soon nor too late, but at the exact moment that the gates had begun to close. This was the reason that those 3-4 minutes ended up in his reaching the school late and getting a late remark. There soon came a point when the space in the Speck’s school diary that said ‘Late Remarks’ was filled to capacity, and this created a great dilemma for the school authorities, who had no idea what to do next. Well, they did have one idea, and that was to make the ferocious looking vice principal threaten to slap the speck if ever he was late again. And so the speck became afraid, and in desperation he promised that he would always be on time from then on. The way he accomplished not by leaving home earlier, but rather by hollering ‘YES!’ whenever his mother asked him if he had his handkerchief without wasting time to stop his bicycle, dig a hand into his pocket and actually check, as even a minute was too precious. After a couple of years of doing this, the reaction to shout out ‘YES!’ whenever he was asked that question had been embedded in the nerve pathways in his brain, so that it became second nature to him - he would scream ‘YES!’ without actually being aware of his doing that.
It was thus that the freako got the answer to his question barely a moment after the question had left his mouth. After being momentarily thrown aback, he said to the Speck, “OK, OK, no need to holler like that, jeez. Well, can you give it to me?”
The Speck checked in his pocket and realized that he did in fact have his handkerchief with him. He took it out and almost handed it over to the freako who had been getting paler and paler, but pulled it back suddenly and asked suspiciously, “Er…what for?”
“Oh nothing, I just want to tie it round my knee here,” replied the freako and raised his bleeding left knee upwards so that it was so close that the Speck could smell the dried blood. “Um…er…well,” said the Speck unintelligibly, his eyes still firmly on the reeking knee. Then, he tried to change the topic. “What happened to you, anyway?”
“What, you’re trying to change the topic now? Weren’t you standing there and watching the whole thing?”
“Well yeah, I was, but what happened to your cycle?”
“Hell, I wanted to ask you the same thing. The damn thing just stopped. Must have been that bloody Tribal Chief, putting some of her tribal voodoo spells on me, who knows?”
So that was Tribal Chief, the Speck thought to himself, pleased that he, after hearing so many things about the famed Chief from so many sources, had finally seen her. “Who was the other chubby girl that she was with?”
“Oh, her silly sister Baby Face of course. Who else could she have been?”
“Wait a minute…Baby Face and Tribal Chief are sisters?”
“Of course they’re sisters! Which world have you been living in?”
The Speck was overjoyed that finally, after all those months of merely thriving on the immense reputations of Baby Face and Tribal Chief, he had had the good fortune of actually seeing them both in one shot. He then felt the familiar pangs of an anti-climax. The only common factor in all the many stories that circulated about Baby Face and Tribal Chief had been a statement of their stunning beauty, but what he saw in his brief glimpse of them both was neither remotely stunning nor beautiful. How could that be, he wondered. Maybe the combined beauties of both Baby Face and Tribal Chief seen at the same time somehow cancelled each other out. Maybe….
He continued wondering for a while, and would have continued for a while longer if it hadn’t been for the sudden thud that shook him from his reverie. He looked around, and then down and saw the freako lying flat on the floor. While the Speck was immersed in his wondering, the freako had continued to stand with one leg raised like a flamingo, but being no flamingo himself, he soon lost balance and fell, adding more injury to injury. Even more pained than before, the freako said, “How about that handkerchief?”
As the Speck helped him off the floor, he said, “I don’t know…you’re all bloody and all and-”
“Well I was going to wash it and give it back to you tomorrow, you know.”
“Yes, of course, but still…by the way, where’s your handkerchief?”
“You think if I had mine I’d be here bleeding to death asking you for your handkerchief?”
“But why don’t you have one?”
“I don’t like carrying those things around. They don’t look cool, and I of course have a reputation to look after.”
This explanation made very little sense to the Speck, and he stared at the Freako blankly for a moment, wondering what was wrong with him. The Speck knew that to not carry a handkerchief was sheer foolishness (his mother had told him so), and so he thought the only right thing to do was to clear this freak of it. “Well,” he said to the Freako, “you should have thought of that before you went and got all bloody, shouldn’t you?”
One exasperated and angry moment later the Freako saw that he had no choice but to try his luck elsewhere. So off he went, leaving the Speck behind who, in spite of being quite disgusted with this freak, still could not help being curious as to what the Freako’s next idea would be, and looked on for his corner in the corridor.
Feeling very faint, the freako made his way around the school when, to his unusual luck, he bumped into a soft cushion-like beer belly, which happened to belong to the very garrulous and just as religious teacher of a curious little subject called Religion, Mr. Fatterbelly. Mr. Fatterbelly looked at the disgruntled bloody little mess that was the Freako and remembered him as being that little turd who kept interrupting last week’s class. Still, he put aside his distaste for turds like the Freako when a line from the Bible flashed in his mind like lightening which read, “Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.” This line, rather that giving him any spiritual meaning, filled him with fear because it reminded him of the many stones that were cast on him over the years by numerous students of his who later claimed that it was a mistake, but Fatterbelly knew it was hatred, pure and simple. Rationalising quickly that if he helped this little turd now it might prevent a stone-bruise in the future, he listened to the Freako’s tale of woe.
Witnessing all this made the Speck very uncomfortable and a even tad frightened. If the Freako actually went and told Mr. Fatterbelly of all people of the incident of the Speck being unwilling to help him, it would without doubt end up being blown completely out of proportion in Fatterbelly’s small mind, while at the same time solve Fatterbelly’s problem regarding which subject to tackle in his next class. And seeing how the freako, while speaking to Fatterbelly, pointed in his direction and then the subsequent shaking of Fatterbelly’s head in dismay, it became clear that he, the Speck, would be singled out during religion class next week and be made to bear the brunt of all of Fatterbelly’s incoherent religious ranting.
Oh well, what the hell, thought the Speck. At least he had his handkerchief with him. You win some, you lose some, he said to himself as Fatterbelly willingly gave his handkerchief to the freako.
***
The next day as the Speck was on his way to school on his cycle, an old friend, Blunty McBlunt tried to catch up with him, and huffing and puffing, he gave the Speck what he thought was a friendly pat on the back but what in reality was a smarting slap that nearly threw the Speck off his cycle. Recovering his balance just in time, he said to Blunty, “What’d you do that for, yer freaking blunt maniac?”
Blunty laghed bluntly at this. “Ha ha. Nothing, man. Listen, I have some good news. Very good news.”
It seemed that Blunty was one of those cross-eyed fools who drooled helplessly at the very mention of Baby Face’s name. Over the past several days, he had been boring his friends to death with stories of how he met a girl who was the most beautiful thing that he had the pleasure of being acquainted with. While he was most definitely head over heels in love with Baby Face, there was no sure way of telling what exactly she thought of him. But now, after a rather interesting turn of events, he got word from his sister that one of her classmates, who stayed near the daughter of the god-mother of the second cousin of Baby Face’s best friend, said that Baby Face had once while describing Blunty to her best friend said, “Awwa, he so nice and sweet, yes-no?” And just like that, a time and place was arranged where the two lovebugs could meet and grin shyly and each other for an hour or so. This was Blunty’s good news.
The Speck said with mild irritation, “That’s good news only to you. It means nothing to me, so why did you have to tell me that whole damn boring story?” Then, just for kicks, he asked Blunty, “So, when’s the happy day?”
“Today, of course! That’s why I’m so happy. After school I need to go near Tribal Chief’s friend’s place, where she’ll be waiting for me. Oh, and one more thing I need, a favour. I’d really appreciate it if you came with me. Please, I’ll need the moral support to go through with this. You see, I don’t want anything to screw up my meeting with her, and well, you tend to make a good impression on people. Even Baby Face said that she actually thinks highly of you, of how you don’t try to those cheap tricks to be friends with girls like her, the way people like the freako do, and how you have respect for girls like her. If she sees that you’re a friend of mine, she’ll think the same way of me.”
This little speech of Blunty’s hit the Speck like a massive pile of bricks. It struck him as extremely funny that his sheer disgust of girls like Baby Face, who themselves kept pulling off cheap tricks so that they could be friends with boys like Blunty, was actually and moronically misconstrued as respect for girls like her. With this thought in his mind, he promised to accompany Blunty.
Then, Blunty saw another good friend of his slightly ahead of the Speck, and repeated the whole procedure, starting with a fierce slap on the back, all over again.
***
The day at school passed without much incident. When the school bell rang, the Speck remembered his promise to Blunty and looked over at him, and saw a look on his face that could only be described as the look of a dog just before it gets neutered. Without wasting a moment, he jumped from his bench and came towards the Speck, grinning like the biggest, bluntest idiot in the whole wide world. “Come,” he said with the all-important air of one on a life-changing mission, “it is Time.” So he and the Speck walked to the cycle stand, and then the Speck said, “So…where exactly is this Tribal Chief’s friend’s place?”
“Oh, very close, very very close. In fact, it is along the route that you take to go home. You know, at the junction after the big downward slope? Right there at the side is her house.”
“Ah, that’s just great. So, what’s the POA?”
“Poa? What is Poa?”
After a very deep sigh, the Speck said, “The Plan Of Action. How’re we going to do this?”
“Very simple. We just go there, then I’ll meet her. Simple, no?”
“Simple yes, but what’s my part in this whole ugly farce?” Then, remembering that these were two people who hadn’t the slightest idea of how to meet their possible prospective spouse and as a result the meeting could take a little time, he said, “And exactly how much time will I have to waste with you?”
“I don’t know, man. I think we’re really meant to be, Baby Face and I. So, I’m warning you it could take a bit long.”
It was then that the Speck realized the Blunty intended to make him wait for the entire time that the said meeting took place. Something wasn’t right here.
He said, “But why do I have to wait while the two of you slobber over each other? I mean, the point of this is to make her see that you’re a friend of mine, isn’t it? Can’t I just crack one of my usual jokes and then leave?”
Blunty went blank for a brief moment, and then said in tone that was not as apologetic as the Speck would have liked, “Well, yes, but…. But I’m going to be on your cycle, and you on mine, so, you know….”
Truth, who had been mercilessly hidden in the deep innards of Blunty’s blunt lies, finally made an appearance. The Speck glared at Bluntly agape, as he realized that the only reason Blunty had decided to drag him into this fiasco was so that his beloved Baby Face could be impressed with the clean and polished cycle that she would see Blunty riding, instead of being grossed out by Blunty’s own rusty mess of a bicycle which hadn’t seen the likes of a cleaning cloth in the past five years. It also became clear that apart from being Madly In Love with someone he hardly knew, Blunty was also simply Mad. And then, he felt something he didn’t think he would even have to expect to happen: he felt sad. Sad over the fact that Blunty’s statement of how Baby Face had spoken highly of him was a barefaced lie, while, in all likeness, the truth was that she didn’t even have the faintest idea who he, the insignificant Speck, was. He had long since suspected that he wasn’t exactly at any point of time the ‘talk of town’, but now, all doubt had been driven away in the bluntest manner possible. Feeling sad, lonely and dejected, he threw his cycle keys at a puzzled Blunty and asked him for the keys to his cycle.
“I don’t have any keys to it. It isn’t locked. I’ve been leaving it unlocked everyday for the past six months in the hope that it would be robbed so that my parents would buy me a new one. Unfortunately, even a common petty thief isn’t interested in that worthless pile of crap.”
So they walked with each other’s cycles out the school, and then mounted them and started cycling up the sloped road in sullen silence. All anger aside though, the Speck was actually silently impressed with the extent of Blunty’s planning. Nothing could go wrong since everything had been taken care of. On reaching the point where the uphill slope changed into a sharply downhill one, Blunty looked ahead with pathetically longing eyes and said, “Hell. She hasn’t come yet. Maybe she got delayed somewhere. We’ll go down and wait for her.”
With that, they rode swiftly downhill.
***
As if to prove the Freako wrong in his statement that the day he fell from his cycle was the worst day of his life, Fate, in another one of its bitter ironies, had made it a point to make the next day even worse for him. First, Fate took the blunt shape of one Blunty McBlunt. In the morning a few minutes before the Freako reached school on his cycle, he felt a very painful and twice as forceful slap across his back, the force of which had been just enough to make the already frail Freako lose balance and fall off his cycle. This time, however, it wasn’t half as bad as the earlier fall was, but that didn’t mollify his anger even by the slightest bit. When he got up and saw that the deliverer of the slap had been a person he barely knew named Blunty, he let lose his mighty cannon of profanities in Blunty’s general direction. Luckily for Blunty, he didn’t understand what most of them meant, so he just laughed it off and then proceeded to bore the Freako to hell and back with the story of how he was going to meet the girl who, in his blunt words, he hoped would be the bearer of his children. The only girl his age that the Freako could think of as ‘a bearer of children’ happened to be Baby Face, on account of her child-bearing structure, and so a joke sprang from his feeble mind and out of his mouth: “Don’t tell me this girl you speak of is that fat slobby buffalo Baby Face!” Instead of getting the full bodied guffaw he expected, he got a kicked aimed at his cycle that sadly resulted in a fall comparable to the previous day’s fall.
Then, fate took the form of a ferocious-looking vice principal. Just like the Speck, the Freako had also had his Late Remarks page filled up completely, and hence had been threatened with the Slaps, which he was now getting in all its violent glory. This one-two punch from fate was enough to drive the Freako into a gory lust for revenge…but revenge aimed at whom? The question answered itself when fate’s third punch came in Fatterbelly’s form, who asked the Freako for the handkerchief he had lent the Freako the day before. Before the Freako could explain that it got so bloodied that he just threw it away, he got yet another slap that sent his head spinning - spinning, with only one clear though in his head - The Speck.
Before anybody was out of class, he went into the cycle stand and located the Speck’s cycle - which wasn’t as difficult as he had imagined, as it shone so much in the sun that anyone could have spotted it. Then, donning a spine-chillingly cruel and hysterical laugh, he tampered with the cycle’s brakes. Both of them.
He had it all planned out so well that he felt it was almost too good to be true. He knew what road the Speck would take on his way home, and saw that it was Perfect, what with the ridiculously steep slope and all. He also decided that he wanted to be there to witness the crash for only then would this cruel day be made good. At the end of the slope, he saw a large tree behind which he could hide. And then, when he heard the fatal sound of a bicycle refusing to stop, he would then do something that in his opinion was Sheer, Viciously Cruel Genius.
***
As the Speck and Blunty were speeding down the road, Blunty, ever the competitive dog, said, “Let’s see who reaches the end of the road sooner!” The Speck saw that this was another one of Blunty’s strange breed of jokes, as anyone could tell that the heap of corroded metal passing off as a cycle would in no way be able to beat his shining metal steed, but still agreed to Blunty’s race. When the Speck had barely passed the half way mark, Blunty was already near the end. At the point when most people would apply the brakes, the Speck saw that the blunt fool was still speeding, and before he could shout out “Brake, you moron!” the cycle rammed into a large tree at the side of the road with such force that it brought down all the leaves from its ancient branches. The last words that went through Blunty’s mind before a bunch of leaves fell into his open mouth were Baby Face, and then, Screw her, I’m gonna die.
At that point, seemingly out of nowhere, the Freako popped out, leaves on his head, saying, “Well, you should have thought of that before you decided to go and ram into a tree, shouldn’t you?” Although it didn’t make much sense, the Freako’s proclamation brought about an entire minute of stunned silence, during which Blunty looked at the Freako with anger brewing inside him, the Freako looked at the Speck wondering why he was just standing there completely unhurt, and the Speck looked at his cycle, or more precisely, at what used to be his cycle. And finally, All Hell Broke Loose.
If it hadn’t been for Baby Face showing up just a few moments after All Hell Broke Loose, things would have gotten very gory indeed. She stood bewildered for a moment and saw Blunty, her spouse-to-be, throwing blind punches at a freaky looking guy, whom she realized was the same poor fellow who had fallen from his cycle the previous day. She also saw someone she had never seen before in her entire life - must be some insignificant speck, she thought to herself - attempting to get at Blunty while shouting, “First you lie to me, and then you ruin my cycle!” over and over again. And finally, she saw the freaky looking guy trying to kick the insignificant speck. The strangest thing of it all, she was quick to notice, was that no one was actually getting to express violence on anyone else, simply because at the same time that one person was trying to hit or kick the second person, that first person was also trying to avoid getting beaten by the third person. Like some bizarre self-stoking cycle that served no purpose whatsoever. After she had finished absorbing the entire situation, she brought an end to it simply by clearing her throat, so that on realizing that there was a female in their presence, they stopped chasing each other.
And to think that I was actually interested in one of these weirdoes, Baby Face thought to herself, and left, swaying her large child-bearing hips this way and that.