My Friend Muchu

Muchu joined the school in class two. He was a chubby chhota sardar who wore the slightly tilted green patka over his tied hair on his head. Thanks to Bunny, a tall lanky sardar in the class who happened to be my good friend, Muchu became my friend. Both their fathers worked for Customs and Central Excise and had known each other for long. My connect with Muchu became stronger as we travelled to school each day in the same Z1 school bus. He would get off at Moti Bagh 1 while I went further down to Moti Bagh 2 which was also known as Nanak Pura because of the big Gurudwara right at the entrance of the government colony. He invited some of us for his birthday party at home and that is when I got to meet his lovely parents and his elder brother who was then studying in college. Somehow the warmth of the parents and simplicity of the boy was something that made me feel comfortable at his home. That was the beginning of a great friendship of two people who had nothing much in common and yet stuck together. Don’t ask why.

While Moti Bagh 1 and Moti Bagh 2 were both government flats, but apart from the name, the two places had little in common. He lived in a palatial house with gardens in front and at the back. It had three large bedrooms, huge living room and kitchen plus an outhouse for the couple of persons working in the house. His father was a very senior government official and they had a nice Fiat car apart from his father being driven in the office vehicle every day. My house was much smaller with no house help for my mother who actually did everything from cooking to mopping to clothes to knitting. And she also worked in a government office, in the lower cadre of course, and all of us in the family travelled only by public transport called DTC. But possibly, those were good old days when position, wealth and material things were secondary to basic human needs of friendship.

One day Muchu said that his mother had to go somewhere in the afternoon and he would be alone in the house. It would be nice if I were to join him and we could have fun together. It sounded good for at home with both my parents at work and sisters who never really bothered where I was, this was a perfect afternoon getaway. I got off the school bus at his bus stop and we walked to his home where he asked me to call my father at work to tell him about my whereabouts. I had never made a phone call ever before and he showed me a beautiful green phone in his living room. I was nervous. I picked up the receiver and put it to my right ear and flipped open my school diary where my father’s office phone number was written. But before I could put my finger in the holes made on the dial with numbers written from 0 to 9, I felt my heart go dhak dhak in the fear of unknown, I quickly dropped the receiver down and requested Muchu to make the call. He was confident as he spoke to my father and also asked him to pick me up from his house in the evening on way home. From the next visit onwards, I got over my demons and called father who would happily come to Horjib’s house (that’s how my father pronounced Harjiv) in the evening and take me home. I can say, thanks to Muchu, I felt at ease in using the phone at an early age.

Soon the post school visits became frequent and the good thing about going to his home was that on those days I would do my homework with him before we got down to playing. One of our pastimes was trying to outrun the scooters that passed his house. We were like strays that run after every new bike or scooter which makes an entry into their territory. Needless to say, I beat him in these races but he was sporting and never complained. He participated eagerly and gave his best in every race. Another of our sport was to enact the comic book heroes. In those days Indian Express used to be the usual newspaper in most homes and it contained a Tarzan comic strip every day. With no one in the house, we would strip down to our undies and play Tarzan and mimic his war cry…. Kreegaah Tarzaan Bundolo! Muchu had a good collection of DC comics and we played Batman and Robin as well. We used to cut the black sleep eye masks his parents would get in the international flights to make masks and then tie towels around our necks to look authentic.

The day-spending now gave way to night spending. My parents were reluctant but due to my tantrums agreed to let me do a sleepover at Harjiv’s house. I had till then never stayed away from home and on the first such night, while a party was going on in his house with a lot of guests, I suddenly felt home sick. Muchu saw that I was not feeling well and told his mother about it. She understood the problem and quickly drove me home even though there were guests at her house. In the next planned stay, I finally, slept well at his house in a cot that was placed next to Muchu’s. Next morning we headed to the dining table for breakfast where nice porcelain plates were laid out on pretty mats with shining knives and forks. Auntie made a nice omelette and placed two fried sausages with bread that was crisply toasted. Muchu started eating the food immediately. When auntie came to the table to ask if I needed more food, she saw that I had not touched the food. Even without my saying she scolded Muchu, You should help your friend to use the knife and fork like this… and she placed the knife in my right hand and fork in my left and showed me how to eat with these things, something I learnt from her and has stayed with me forever.

I could beat Muchu at everything from running to playing cricket to painting. But he beat me hollow where it mattered the most… academics. He would be in the top ten percent of the class in almost every subject while I was in the other end of the scale. He was among the favourites and blue-eyed boys of all the teachers while I had to find a place to hide myself somewhere in the background lest someone picked on me to showcase their fine art of using the scale and the cane. One incident stands out when we were giving our Chemistry practical exams for the class ten boards. We were standing in rows as per surnames in alphabetical order. The first person in the row was Sudhin Sarkar, next to him was Harjiv Sawhney and to his right was me. Both the Bongs were completely dependent on the intelligent sardar to bail us out with external invigilators roaming around. Whatever Harjiv would do, Sudhin and I did exactly the same like picking up a tube and then measuring some liquids, mixing the same to see what colour the combined liquid had turned into. God knows what liquids Sudhin poured into his tube, there was sudden, minor explosion and the liquid from his tube burst out and fell on Harjiv’s answer sheet. The examiner quickly rushed to the place and had the placed cleaned up.  Muchu was annoyed but he steadily completed the experiment and wrote the answer down by covering the sheet from the two idiots to his right and left. Both Sudhin and I begged him to show us the answer which he finally agreed to do and we diligently copied the same without doing our experiment any further. Chemistry for me was the weakest subject and when I took the written exams for the school boards, I had all the symbols written on the reverse of the wooden ruler. Thanks to my prized ruler and friend Muchu, I managed to pass the examination.

During our day-spends, we used to do a lot of sketching and painting with crayons. I was pretty good at it and often Muchu’s mother would come to see our pieces of art. She would admire my drawings more than her son’s who never felt bad. Whenever there was a science exhibition or drawing contest in school, some of my paintings would always find a place there. However, only once did Muchu beat me in drawing. We were in class nine and there was a poster making contest on the subject of excellence. I worked hard and made two paintings that came out beautifully. One was of a sportsman on the podium for excellence in sports and the other was of a decorated army officer for excellence in patriotism. Everyone’s entry was placed on the walls around the class room and the class teacher had to pick the three best which would then compete against the best of other sections. My paintings missed making the cut and Harjiv’s was shortlisted. He had drawn a donkey and wrote… Excellence in Foolishness. The theme caught the eye of the judge and Muchu came out trump.

Muchu had all toys and games in his house. I was amazed at his collection of Dinky cars. He had so many of them ranging from the sports models with Benson and Hedges written to Volkswagon Beetle. He had many relatives living abroad who would bring him toys and gifts. We used to play with them often. My favourite was the 007 James Bond Aston Martin car that he used in the movie Goldfinger. It has a beauty and had three levers. With the first lever, a protective shield would pop up on the dicky that was supposed to protect the spy master from the bullets fired by the gangsters from behind. A push to the second lever led to two automatic guns coming out just beneath the front headlights. Bond could drive the car in speed and yet fire relentlessly at the speeding cars ahead. The third lever was the best. The moment you pushed it, the roof top opened up and a small suited man would be thrown out with the seat springing up. This man was none other than a gangster who had a gun pointed at 007 who was at the wheel. I dreamt of the car on many a night. When we grew up and stopped playing with toy cars and got into playing table tennis and cricket, this car remained stashed in his cupboard. One day, I just could not resist taking it away and played with it at home. No toy was ever so important to me even though it was ill gotten. But somehow, I never felt any qualms about it as Muchu had so many exotic toys and games that he never missed it. For me, it was my prized possession.

After class ten in 1980, we moved apart with him joining the commerce section and me moving into humanities. There were no more days spending and night sleepovers together but I was always an invitee to his house on his next few birthdays. We then grew up and got lost in our own worlds of different colleges, new friends and thereafter to work and settling down with our families. We were then brought together twenty-five years later in 2005 when one of our old classmates settled in Australia decided that we should come together. The spirit of the boys of 10-C, now men, was simply amazing and they descended from all over the country and abroad at Delhi on the scheduled evening at a classmate’s farmhouse. And that is where Muchu and I got together once more. Thereafter, whenever I visited Delhi on work, I tried meeting him. On a couple of occasions met his mother and father, who were always very loving and talked to me for hours together. Every year in November or in December, the class reunion happened and Muchu came for most of those. His health was failing fast. He would often speak to me over phone and also do video calls whenever he felt lonely. Then one day the fateful news came. My dear friend was gone.

Seeing the advertisements and social media posts recently made me sit up and think that in our times we never had a Friendship Day. We just had friends. We never had to send messages and gifts to remind each other of our bonds. We shared what we had. We fought, we played, we laughed, we cried and we lived.

RIP Muchu, my friend. Hasta Manana, till we meet again.

SS