extraordinary street

In the beginning, Theatre Road was just like any other street: a two-kilometre stretch connecting the Park Circus Roundabout to the Planetarium. Like all streets, it bore punctuation marks: the shop with a shit-pot as window display; the aquarium they had built on the pavement, at ground level, right next to the digital temperature and humidity display which displayed whatever it felt like displaying; the leather-goods shop with the notice on its door saying "Blow Horn To Know For Parking"; the strange room on the pavement which had turned into a public urinal where the smell of fresh and not-so-fresh piss hit you like a high. Theatre Road juggled traffic as part of its daily routine: from around eight-thirty in the morning till two in the afternoon traffic flowed one-way down (towards Park Circus), then did a totally chaotic about-face at two in the afternoon and flowed one way up till nine at night. After that, anything went, any which way.

And everything would have remained that way.

Then one day, completely by accident, nine boys and another...let's just say he was another boy...so that makes it ten boys...converged upon a tea stall on theatre road. They had time to kill; they asked for tea. They stood on the pavement and drank tea out of khullars. They discovered that the tea stall sold samosas as well, and so they drank tea and ate samosas. They discovered that the mishti shop next to the tea stall sold chhena toast and puri sabzi and hot rasgulla. So they extended their repertoire. Then, round the corner, the shop with the telephone booth, it turned out, stocked vanilla coke. And so started the ritual of Vakao followed by tea followed by Vakao followed by strange-tasting burps. For those who drank neither tea nor Vakao, there was Frooti. And through all of this, ten boys talked and talked, because everything was changing so fast, and there was always so much to talk about. When they got bored of talking, they wanted something to do...something substantial: they practised marksmanship with empty khullars. They took photographs. Every once in a while they got shit on by crows, but they didn’t really mind...it was all part of the organic experience.

What did they talk about? O, lots of things. “Damn weird thing happened today, check this out...” was the way most of the talking started. One of the boys had started obsessing about prime numbers. That there are infinitely many prime numbers. The proof was simple, elegant, therefore beautiful. They talked about the weather: “It’s so damn sexed out today, man, let’s just do something totally freaky, let’s just freak out (who wants more tea?) let’s go to maidan (no let’s go to cafe no fuck off let’s go maidan ok fine but after that let’s go cafe ok fine whatever let’s just go) and take a buggy ride fuck, man, check out the sky!” They talked about movies. That some movies are so bad they’re good, while some movies are just plain bad while some movies are good, in that you can watch them once but never twice. They were tricked into talking about cinema. That cinema is something which goes over your head if you’re not used to it. A Short Film on Love; A Short Film on Killing. They talked about death. It was suggested once that everything is all gas. They stood on the pavement and learned to pay attention. They talked shit. They talked about love, about what they were scared of, about weird dreams they’d had. They were sad and angry sometimes because love had soured in their hands. Then love bloomed beneath their feet and they stood amazed, nervous. They made fun of each other. Maybe they even fought once or twice (but naturally, over unbelievably idiotic things). Sometimes they wrote little poems and groped for rhyming-pairs. They worked on their college essays. Everyone had written something on collaboration, and the project was to integrate several individual contributions into a single piece of writing. They stood on the pavement and fine-tuned their writing. They guzzled tea and agonised about paragraph four: “It’s not working, but it’s such a great paragraph, so, what, do I just chuck it? Fuck, man, I don’t want to chuck it.” They stood on the pavement, making choices.

They called the tea stall Vien. So they would say, let’s go to Vien; or, we’re meeting up at Vien get your ass there; or, in exactly twelve minutes I’ll be at Vien ok then bye. (Purists pointed out that the mishti shop...and not the tea stall...was Vien...which was true. But there was pleasure in misnaming, in purposely confounding identity. It is how secret languages are born.) Meeting at Vien meant walking to Vien. So ten boys did a lot of walking.

When you walk, you come into physical contact with the street: it becomes real, tangible, and not the blur it is forced to become when you drive with the windows rolled up. When you walk, you get wet if it’s raining, your hair gets tousled if it’s windy, you sweat if it’s hot. When you walk, you let the rhythm take over; it’s really a kind of dance. You stop caring about what people will think and what people will say and you start singing, even if you can’t sing. Or, if you’re feeling happy for no reason at all, which is totally the best reason for feeling happy, you stop walking and start bounding along the footpath because you know you’ll stay forever young. When you walk for the sheer mad fun of it, you collide headlong with the beauty and power of your youth. And then, suddenly, you begin to feel things about yourself you had never imagined: you’re wonderful; you’re funny; you think the strangest thoughts; you have unbelievable energy; you talk shit with compelling fervour; you’re with others who’re so totally different, so exactly alike.

Walking up and down Theatre Road, ten boys became friends.