Dilip Muralidaran

Foreword: All incidents, names, places mentioned are for real. Nothing remains changed to the best of my knowledge.

To put it in simple terminology, i was a bit of a loner most of the times. I tried my best to fit in. I tried my best to like Tamil music but nothing moved me as much as Michael Jackson did and Ilayaraja for most parts sucked. Yes, i was ridiculed and occasionally awed at for being the weirdo who listens to English music all of the time.

My MC tapes were often in my absence erased and re-recorded with Tamil music that i used to hate and silently sneaked back into my suitcase. I tried to fit into the class cricket team but i simply did not fit in at all. All i was let to do was wicket keeping, the job everyone hated to do. Of course the ball boy who would fetch the ball if it went into the roads or the neighbors house. The water boy who would fetch water from the house when everyone was famished.

By the time i was in 9th grade i had a tricycle and i was a bit more famous now, i guess cuz 2 folks can tag along on that cycle and i could give them a ride easily. One can sit with me on the chair like seat and the other stand on the bar that connected the two wheels and framing at the back and yes, this routinely happened on the way back from school. But then that lasted only while going and coming back from school. I looked for elsewhere to have fun, to find company apart from the annual holidays where i would spend time with cousins, the best of the times ever in life, i would swear.

One could only wish for 2 months of school and 10 months of summer vacation and your wish came true but that was possibly the best pipe dream one could have. At this time when i was trying to find exactly where id fit in i also realized that i had to pass mathematics if i had any chance of clearing 10th grade and going to high school. Thankfully, that is when the legend of RJ master from Jayam Tutorials came to the rescue. He taught my dad, my aunt, my cousins (same aunt’s daughters) and now me, math & yes all of us cleared math. I’m not sure if this indicates a genetic weakness for arithmetic in the family blood-line but it sure indicates RJ master could teach any idiot math.

Anyways at this point in time when i wanted to go in for math tuition classes with RJ i met Usha and Swapna. Usha and Swapna were from the girls school branch of my School. My school was the main branch in perambur. The girls school branch, the most exotic of all branches with private zoo (which was later confiscated and barred) and stuff was called “Maryland” and was in madhavaram. To put it in short, usha was highly attractive, smart, witty, intelligent a woman and i sometimes used to wonder they the heck on earth does she even needed tuition classes at a tutorial since she was first rank holder type anyways.

Technically, Usha stands to be the first personal friend i ever had. Not some cousins classmate, not someone i tried to fit in with. Someone who liked who i was with no alterations and liked to hang out with me. I don’t know why but randomly this thought hit me a few days back and i was wondering who was the very first genuine friend i ever hand who liked to spend time with me without having any expectations. After much thought i would conclude its usha. Well there was this Didymus d’monte that i hanged out with during school all of the time but it never really occurred to me that he was plainly being rude to me behind my back and i was the star character of his dirty jokes which impressed other kids in class. Then there was this Kiran whom i used to have lunch with in 4th grade but he left school in 5th grade and i never saw him again.

I remember numerous friends whom i used to play cricket with, fly the kite but they were all my cousin rakesh’s class mates and i did not fit in with younger kids either. I would say this because i remember not once they were keen on hanging out with me or doing the things i wanted to do. It was always me trying to tag along with whatever they did and look cool and not be left out. Of course it did not work. I do however remember this incident, so vivid and crystal clear as water in a fish bowl.

I was cycling to tutorial class when it was announced the 5 pm class for biology was postponed to the next day but the math class was preponed to 6 pm instead of 7 pm. I had to kill 1 hour so i pointlessly drove around meenakshi street and school road when i came back to the class 15 minutes later, i bumped into usha. Together we decided to pointlessly cycled around perambur and she suddenly said “Hey, wanna drink something? I feel thirsty” and i lied “not really, its not so hot today..” and yes it was extremely, unbelievably dumb of me to say that. I do have my own reasons for it. First off my only source of pocket money was thaatha and he was out of town, which meant i was penniless. The very thought of a girl buying me something to drink humiliated my ego to the core, i wanted to bury myself alive. Secondly, the hard reality of the fact was that no one had outside of my family (read as cousins) had actually asked me out to do something fun! I was so hit like a moving train at 90 mph i just could not figure out how i should even react. I guess the default reaction was to escape from the situation.

Usha retorted “what?! just come i say, i can’t stand the heat and im dying of thirst!!!” and we went to this fruit juice shop at the end of raghavan st., opposite to Anand Book store. Grape Juice it was and 1 by 2. It felt extremely good. Someone really wants to hang out with me. The very feeling was like having 3 large vodkas. Usha used to routinely hang out with me, almost everyday. We were both fond of amman and used to visit the lakshmi amman temple in melpatti ponnappan st., everyday. We spoke on a variety of things, what we wanted to be, our perspectives of life, school, report cards everything under the sun. Of course that perverted bastard Solomon, biology teacher hated us St.Mary’s students to the guts. Our common enemy was a strong foundation for our friendship.

Some few weeks down the line i cancelled tuition classes for all the 12 subjects that i enrolled for and just took the math class. I guess usha must have realized she was wasting her time at the tutorials class and quit. It was the late 90’s and telephone was a luxury and i did not have one at home. My class mates Javed Ahmed and Sai Prasad used to ridicule me everyday for hanging out with these two women. Especially usha, being the pretty one of the two. The everyday routine before assembly was a healthy dose of comedy which comprised of sex jokes. One only needs to make an average guess who were the two characters in those stories. Ironically, they did have usha’s number but would not give it to me. Apparently they even visited usha at her house and she enquired how i was doing and she had been promptly lied to that i had her number and i was too busy with other things in school. A silly fight between them two would dig out such dirty facts, i found out later.

I met usha about 2 years later on the road and was glad to find a lost friend. I promptly got her number but then who would know that writing down important things on a small scrap of paper was a bad idea? Before i landed home i had a nasty accident in that tricycle and my fingers were caught in the hand pedaled gear wheel and my blood soaked my shirt red and gloriously washed away the fountain pen ink in the paper that lie in my pocket. My white shirt was not the only precious thing i lost that day, sigh!

So why the hell am i blabbering all of this now? Well as i look back and figure out who were the real friends and the loved ones who made my life worth fighting for, usha shines like a star on top of a Christmas tree. I believe its a shame to let go of friends when you can consciously try harder and see possibilities all around you. If there is anything i would love to do, i have this list of friends i’ve lost and believed i would never be able to find out for eternity. I’ve been proved so darn wrong by facebook thrice and i think i have higher hopes now. I have this list and usha is on top, i guess i will post more of these gem of people i’ve lost in time.

People talk about the power of social networking and social media and the internet. Well then, here is the deal.

The name is Usha. I hope you are alive, i hope you compute frequently and you use the internet and you are into social networking. I’m assuming you must be married right now and probably have kids, or the other obvious possibility that you’re slogging out a Ph.D somewhere. If you still remember Maryland school, If you still remember Montford School or Jayam Tutorials, If you still remember the silly fellow called dilip you used to hang out with almost every day before tutorial class at Lakshmi Amman Kovil, ping me will you? Email me here. The year i think is 1996-97.

I can’t do much but if i can throw in a big treat for the very first personal friend i ever had in life, i guess nothing would make one happier. Yes, if any of you could identify such a person and get her contact info i promise you, name the place and your lunch/dinner treat with/without saraku is on me, no questions asked