All the geeky things apart, Anirudh had a secret spot of love in his heart for the girl who sat two desks behind him. He was all afraid of her, but still always tried to get along with her. The attempts of which once got him almost slapped by the same girl, on whom he had a crush on. All he did was to call her by some nickname he devised, thinking it was cute and cool of him. But, still that never worked and always backfired on him.
Apart from getting thrown out of the class and have crush on ‘the girl’, Anirudh had quite a lot interesting hobbies. Rather, interesting ways of spending his time. On his way to school and back from school, he had a petty big gang of friends, who were always upto something or the other. For a few months during his first year at Ambani’s they used to fantasize about ghosts and demons that lived on the peak, seen from the highway on their way to school. And then came the age of ‘WWF’ trump cards, each had his own collection of them. Most of the time was spent playing them and quite a bit time was time was also spent on fighting over them. Slowly, the ‘WWF’ cards faded out, with the arrival of ‘Center Fresh’ cricket cards. But, they too weren’t around in the bus for long.
Well, while ‘gang’ was beaten by boredom, one of them found a way to amuse themselves. Throwing orange peels at passing by cars or people. Slowly all of them started bringing oranges to school. The mothers thought, the children were getting health conscious, these fools were throwing them at the cars and pedestrians. The first incident, Anirudh happened to throw a peel at a truck driver, which hit him hard on his ear. Well, that was not it – while Anirudh stood at the window teasing the driver. The driver who happened to be a Sardar, drew out his dagger. That was something, that doesn’t happen everyday. Every kid on the bus was scared to shit and dunked under their seats. None of them even dared to get up and see where the truck actually was. And as soon as they got down the bus, they just ran to their homes.
That was the last of the peel’ing’ fun they had.
Evenings, was much more fun. Anirudh raced in the evenings, and he was the champion in cycle racing. Not because, he cycled hard, but he had the best cycle in he market – a green Hero Ranger Swing with 18 Gears & shock absorbers. He raced with his friends on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, which wasn’t open yet.
On holidays and weekends, he used to cycle to nearby villages, cycle around rough patches of land and used to return home by noon. It was going happily. He sometimes played cricket, which he wasn’t good at. Most of the time he hung out at the club, playing pool with his seniors or hide and seek with the children.
He did some mean things, he never realize, but he broke the sewing machine of the club caretaker’s wife, when he jumped on it from the terrace. The watchman’s wife was a tailor, who had the machine to earn and supplement the income of the house. Sometime later, he killed a squirrel by hitting it with a stone, instead of hitting a mango on the tree. Some other time, an old man fell down and got bruised badly, only because, Anirudh trying to speed past the old man, pulled an unsuccessful stunt of screeching to halt, beside the old man. Who just got clumsy and tripped down. And all these time, he just ran away, as fast as he could.
These were accidents but, when he realized the mistake, he was too afraid to face the reality and just skipped the truth, escaping from it.
Academics, life, future, career – all these never seemed to bother Anirudh, he had his own life.
But, then things changed. His parents had different plans for him.
