Teenage is kind of a screwy time. A time of hope and confusion. Things were changing and changing fast. 1988 was a year of speed and magnitude. Carl Lewis won 5 Gold at the Seoul Olympics. The Last Emperor won 9 Oscars. Zia-Ul-Haq was killed in an air crash. Soviet left Afghanistan. But the biggest news was that cable TV was about to enter Golf Green. 1988-89 was an alarmingly decisive phase in the history of my formative years in Golf green. There was a race on. A race to excel at the WBCSE examination. A race to be inducted in the hallowed list of the B Block achievers. It's a race to find out who you really are. Well at least the way your folks wanted you to know you. Sports was now been replaced officially by watching television and attending tuitions. Thereby the foot prints at the cricket field were getting sparser by the day. To a stage where we were forced to enter into a pact with the girls to initiate a sporting event.
One of the games that was getting infectiously popular was “piitu”. Here 7 stone chips were piled on top of the other at the center. Teams were divided into 2 and one team was supposed to break the pile with a ball and run. The same team was supposed to then put the pile back in place without the opponent team hitting you by the ball. By the spring of 1989 the women's liberation movement was in full force. Across India a revolution was in progress shedding old stereotypes... building new roles. It was a time of raised conscientiousness and high expectations a fight for equality and freedom. Women everywhere were facing difficult and complex choices. It was social Darwinism at its cruelest. Now this game wasn’t an exception. The girls were severely organized whereas us guys naturally being bred in the staple diet of “they are the weaker sex” took the games lightly and nearly always lost. However there was a sense of cheer in that defeat which we couldn’t understand why.
Then one day an amazing thing happened at the B Block park or trot lot as we called it. There sitting on its railing we all witnessed the sweetest thing we ever knew existed in skirts. She seemed right out of a 1960s Dennis Hopper film. She had hair wild and open would have looked apt with flowers in them as she played with rainbows and butterflies in a field full of bright yellow flowers. I could almos hear Scott Mc Enzie singing “San Fransisco” in my ears. She was not like anyone of the girls we had around us at Golf Green Phase 1. She was not like anybody we ever knew. Suddenly the women around us seemed like right out of “Frankenstein’s Bride” or “Pride and Prejudice”. She was following our game and laughing. Well I remember that afternoon all of us gave her lots of chances to laugh her lungs out as we made a complete fool of ourselves.
1989 was a complicated time. Full of passion. Excitement. The crazy joy of being young. At Golf Green, all that craziness came together in one word - “Silk”. For us, it was more than just a name. It was a spirit. An experience. A mind expansion without LSD. It was a romance and all of us were caught head over cricketing heels in that. I remember years later somebody had confessed that, on that afternoon if he had a camera, he would have captured her frame after frame after frame. When you're happening you're happening. And when you're not, you're...everybody that was not Silk. This girl was definitely out of our league. Out of B Block. Out of this world.
She was different than all the rest of the girls at Golf green Phase 1. She was a tomboy. She came up to talk to all of us. I knew with all these inroads being made by women. It was time to accept the realities of the 20th century. It was time to act like a liberated man. And crawl like a dog. That’s exactly what we all did. She opened us to the notion that “Guys doing guy-things. Chicks talking chick-things” sort of society has formally come to an end. I realized it was time to accept just the way the big guy upstairs intended it. I mean no sense being pigheaded. The way I saw it, the world was big enough for all of us. And besides, so what if women could influence government, take over big business, alter domestic policy, dominate education, make the world and play time a better place…why not! So Silk became a Hit.
But already it felt like I had known her for...years. I think she felt that way, too. She had this ephemeral approach towards guys that was a hit with the men instantly. Well those days you were forbidden especially if you were a respectable girl to stand and talk to an unknown guy, well a bunch of unknown guys. You were allowed to speak to each other post gaming activities if you were from the same block, went to the same school, tuition or if your mothers were friends. And here she was completely unknown talking to all of us as if she was there all along and for hours. Because out there...in the world of the young... things were hopping. And we were all caught up in it. Silk was no ordinary romance. It was not the kind where you are expected to hold hands, talk clandestinely over the phone or with her friends waiting disgustingly at the side or sending her cartons of cheap Archie’s cards. Silk was beyond all that. She mesmerized the generations around us. Me included. It was evident that we became astonishingly close friends. Guys older than us were oogling at her. Desperate to get a glance from her. Arup, Aveek, Rathanath, Krishanu and even Al Tapone sat scheming perched poignantly on the 11th Street for a way into her orbit. I was her pal. Not that our relationship was all one-sided. I mean, she respected my opinion and I respected hers. OK, so we weren't exactly Butch and Sundance. So what? I was on first-name basis with a superstar. A guy who had the world at his fingertips. A guy who was by her bedside everyday when she was down with fever, with an out of tune guitar playing out of tune songs – in the wrongest possible chords. But what egged me on was that she would find ways to explain how good I sounded.
I was especially touchy about her for no given reason. I couldn’t tolerate her being mentioned derogatorily, not that anyone did so. I couldn’t explain this feeling with my 14- 15 year old intelligence. There were times when I had questioned “Is it Love?” “Do I want to go on a date-date with her?” the answer had always been a stoic “No”. So what was it. Bollywood was screaming at my face that “A boy and a girl can never be friends”. I don’t know if she ever went through the same things, but I was making mistakes. I was making blunders. When you're fourteen... your sense of logic isn't particularly well-developed, no matter how much you wish it would. The fourteen year old logic was the logic of the silver screen. Bollywood was not the right coach for me. Destiny can turn on a dime... and cut like a knife. It did. Through a series of misgivings we moved apart. The worst was getting into a fight with Bison Busy over her completely drunk during a Puja eve with the social function going on in full throttle.
She was disgusted with me. She cried and told me that she never wanted to speak to me again. Which she didn’t for a very very long time. . It was a night filled with eggrolls and despair. The brightly lit streets of Phase 1 could not obliterate the darkness that was inside me. I began to feel shortchanged. I sat alone on the 11th Street that night for a long time. I just wasn't ready to leave. I was not drunk enough. Somehow I just couldn't quite believe it was over. Things were pretty quite heading home. There wasn't much to say. Some people pass through your life and disappear in a flash. You get over it. But the good ones, the real ones, the ones who count - stay with you for the long haul. The thing is, after all these years, I couldn't tell for sure what started the fight. What I remember is...sitting in that dark flagstone missing a friend that I had known.
I was prepared to die now. I knew at that moment, that life was not fair. Sure... I'd never felt pain like this before in my entire life. It felt...wonderful. A lot happened on streets and around GG Phase 1 that autumn night in 1989-90. And of course, none of it was permanent. When you're fourteen, it's a long way to heartache. As I have grown older I realized nothing is of any real importance, anyway. But somewhere down I do crave for that one single night like that amidst a thousand other nights, just like that one. Stupid, ridiculous...and glorious.
I still pass her house on my way to the only supermarket in GG. Somebody mentioned to me that she was suffering from a long and painful ailment. In 1989 I was broke, but today a different kind of poverty upsets me. The poverty of not having the spirit to walk up to her room again with my out of tune guitar and sing out of tune songs to her.
But a prayer does reach out to her everytime.
But a prayer does reach out to her everytime.
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