CHAPTER THREE
LINING UP THE PENT ANGLES
From the whirling top of cascading flyovers at Dhaula Kuan, a highway shoots straight into the heart Delhi Cantt. Plying down the road, canons to the right and canons to the left, in ready artillery positions, we rode to a cluster of institutions locked into a triangle of army land. The pink convent of Loretto, candy striped in their uniforms, sisters of conformity being readied for the rampaging Marians housed behind in a magnificent façade of extruded red brick structure called M S M, generally alluded to as mount the merry. Otherwise, a bastion of a multitude of boys whose pops served in the great Indian armed forces. Hedged in between is a house of faith, a church of insignificant architecture behind which young, hot bloods of different gods congregated to indulge in many catholic shall-nots and, more often than not were found hastening the second coming of Christ.
Andrew Webber Lloyd couldn’t have strung together a better symphony of sweet syncretic longings.
St Mary’s and Loretto owed their origins to devoted Irish folks dedicated to spreading the good old Queen’s lingo and info. Though it was a general notion that all this was a grand plan of systematic and serial catholic seduction.
No way! These cowbelters never give up.
Passing along these establishments was the the not-so-famous Parade Road which landed up at the Parade Ground where the Army Day is still celebrated to this day.
We were tough guys, not easily taken in by surprise or anything out of the ordinary. But to this day I can never forget the terror on Robert Burn’s, mug, charging out of the church, like a Gandhian rank or file being chased by a Subhash Bose recruiter!
Watching this amazing twist of fate was a junior, a regular law-bender strutting his stuff on the legendary MSM grounds and it showed up in the way he hung out with the real cats in school and went by the name of Arjun Sen.
“They’re comin`! “
Out, into the great wide open, ran the Anglo white-faced Robert, stricken with a fear I had not seen before in our legions. Coming is generally a heady thing but here it sounded like anything but that, more like the coming of the 61Cavalry. O Lordy!
Surely this was the crusades. For flying down Parade Road came AFCS.
We abbreviate everything in our part of the winding world, so let me lay it out simply: AFCS was the Air Force Central School in Subroto Park. And by the nature of their descent, you can surely guess that these worthies were the descendants of the guys who manned Gnats and Migs. They were going to sock the crap out of us. Led by Nari Contractor, this here was a very wronged bunch of mean bombers whose hairlines didn’t reach below their foreheads and were generically known as `baati chhaats. Very unlike the pansy ponytails who hunk around these days, all pretty and pesterly prim, good to look at and ordinary down there where it really matters.
A seize was laid outside MSM on the road, where a few days earlier, the US prez, Richard Nixon had alighted to shake some manly Marian hands. It was the year of the summer of love that was happening right then in Hait Ashbury and the NAM war was radicalizing Yanks into countering the straight laced culture that good folks wanted us to be status quo-d in.
And, Hunter Thompson was making us go hitching down the highway, looking for adventure.
And that’s what got our dingo Bob into this rather tight bind, in the first place. Nari and his raging squad were hollering for a bloody fist-up.
Bring Robert out!
Gen X, I present to you, your dads, a Generation Really Bad!
And our own Bob was a much vaulted player of such real times, considering that we’ve even made, making out, a virtual habit. The first of the Pent Angs, Bob was the Irish brothers’ groomed gift to Indian cricket before it became it a whore, a short time quickie.
Bob’s misadventure was a Miss who had ventured out of AFCS with our Bond, on a mission impossible that led to the plonking of one of their blokes in the course of this passionate pursuit. And that meant hell and hell hath no fury, like, when Nari`s pride was scorned.
After a couple of hours of righteous mitigation, Bob was hauled out and made to make amends. So, Bob apologized with his palm raised - Scout’s honour, his fingers wet with the sweet of Jenny, the prep miss who never gave Bob a miss! Such gallants of incredible deeds you would never find in Modern School or DPS, whatever that is supposed to mean.
When Bob batted on the matting, he belted all the balls out of ordinary cricketing imagination and created new idioms of destruction that made Babul Bose of St Columbus, a six foot Bong of the fast bowl, break down and weep when our Bob stepped down the the pitch and whack the frickin ball into Loretto where Shushmita Sen kept Babul’s battered ball as a souvenir of MSM and LC bhen-bhai ritual and keep it on an even keel.
We wonder - whatever happened to Shush?
She had the world at her feet or maybe the balling affair had truly affected her. And, maybe she went on to become a Kill Bill. When it comes to dames, you can never discount anything.
Till today,it`s a heady scent of what life used to be before the WASP deluge, that made all that dough for the all consuming middle classes. And our Bob – he could really score anything. Arjun Sen had a good thing going with Bob, in a mentorish way, for Bob had selected him for the Senior Cricket XI when Sen was still nudging it past Standard VIII.
What’s the score? What’s playing in town?
That’s how the Penta -yakking went.
`Yo, man – check this out:
Delhi Cantt was happening and we were right in the midst of post colonial splash of such pleasures that no amount of corporate dough could come anywhere close to match this awesome, all pervading existence. We were the scions of all variables and screwables.
We resided on the Mall, in 3 acre British Army bungalows – all help attached and housed. Our pops were officers in charge of pumping pounds of shells into Paki plots, whenever the Generals on the other side of the fence had no where else to scratch. That’s how they got their kicks, firing their Pattons up their own untrained arses and singing –
Itchy-itchy-itchy / Ya-Ya-Ya Khan!
Yitchy-Yitchy-itchy-Ya-Ya Khan!
Two bust-ups and they haven’t finished! So much so for history – its just geography over which the thakurs and khans still etch in their unsatiated lusts. We sure have a scrotched past since independence, always in a ready and upended position to be scratched and changed, quicker than a zip less fuck. So fingered were we that we had no angles to turn to, but to conclave on the ides of August.
What could be more apt?
Got to have our kicks before the whole shit house up in flames, said the preacher to the preached.
Fifteenth of August and its judgment day.
Fifteenth of August and its judgment day.
Now that we got the screwables in place, the Pent Angs got down to business, hardcore.
