It was when my mother bought a pair of Nato green binoculars on Dhanteras (a holy occasion when women buy jewelry) to spy on the shady neighbour that I realized I was genetically predisposed to snooping. Thus, in my case, to know was to be, or to be was to know, however you like to put that.
Whenever my Naniji or Mausiji graced our humble abode with their presence, my mother spent hours spilling to them secrets of everyone, as if she was a RAW agent communicating field notes to the seniors. They listened with the attention of cranes, and were always eager to prod further, and tell the secrets they had gathered all this while. It was a club of matrilineally related women, and if you have observed well enough, you’d know that’s a crazy club. They practically talked everything till every shred had been analysed and examined like an extraterrestrial carcass.
As it was only natural, I acquired a taste for secrets. I began with my own house, and after spying on my mother for some time, I hunted down the pack of Horlicks she’d buried behind the Tupperwares on the topmost shelf. After I bravely climbed the shelf, I also located my piggy bank which had surprisingly gone missing after ingesting a grand fortune. My mother had told me that the piggy bank had run away with our money, and that she’d lodged an FIR.
Soon, I too began to look around for news. And in the school, I’d overhear conversations, mostly about Ben 10 and DBZ, and make a note of it. It went somewhat like this:
Manu likes Diamond Head. But his pencil box has a Forearms sticker.
Rustom is a Vegeta lover. But he pretends he likes Goku.
Then, as I tumbled into std 5, people started playing FLAMES, a game that was as dangerous as it sounds. It decided once and for all who the lover was, and who the enemy was. And everybody played the game. I followed it keenly, and soon, my notes began to look like a CAT puzzle question:
Rustom likes Manisha. But their FLAMES score is Enemy.
Munjal hates Manisha. Their FLAMES score is Enemy.
Viren and Kritika are the same height. They share Affection.
As per FLAMES, Kritika Loves Manisha. They are actually sisters.
As per FLAMES, Munjal Shall marry Kritika.
Rustom loves Kritika as well. Actually, Rustom loves every girl. And Vegeta too. But FLAMES says Rustom is Kritika’s enemy.
Now Rustom and Munjal don’t like each other.
I had a crush on a girl, and when I secretly tried the game, it got me friend-zoned. I finally switched to playing Atlas when they started putting my name on FLAMES, along with the female teachers of my class.
Soon, we stepped up the ladder of adolescence, and there were more secrets than non-secrets. It was the age of exploration, of discovering the new world and experimenting with ourselves. And those secrets were quite gross and macabre even by my standards. To summarize, all my classmates fancied this woman called the TRex, who lived at the corner and bewitched young boys. As the myth went, she had stopped ageing 150 years ago. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to meet the TRex, but there were always stories floating around, about who met who. It was also the time we were learning cuss words, and getting really creative. And there was an unwritten textbook of cuss words circulating around. I also hoarded rumors, like which teacher had what cancer, and which senior belonged to which gang. I never bitched about it to anyone, because I didn’t trust people much. More on that later.
After these small adventures, I began to crave higher orders of pleasure. So I learned two things: the art of deception, and the art of manipulation. This effectively meant that people now began to confide in me. I had to make zero effort to get things out of their heads. They’d seek me, cajole me, and pay me. Sometimes, even random strangers would harangue me with their love story. I was good at making people feel comfortable and wanted. I gave them the polished English words gathered from Zee Cafe and Fox Life shows. So there was a long queue of people who just wanted to let it out, and confess their crimes, and I was the guy, the father confessor of the convent.
Girls would confess to me that they were lesbians, and boys that they liked lesbians. I told them I understood, while I searched ‘lesbian’ in the dictionary. Then came the era of 3G internet and Facebook Messenger, that brief era, and everybody sent requests to everybody, and the CBSE board allowed you enough leisure to swim to the Atlantic, observe seagull evolution, and come back to score 90%. Cyber criminals were still in their buds, and people weren’t vile. In that rare moment in history, my whole lodge was engaged in unprotected careless chatting with multiple partners.
It was the time when my secret treasure was close to bursting. So many secrets flooded my inbox that it was impossible to manage those without a battery of assistants. To add to that, secrets also flew in via other apps, through text messages, through Whatsapp and Hike, and through good old phone calls. Sometimes I’d be chatting with 4 people at once, and all their secrets blended and became a weird Monty Python story. It was bewildering to keep through the narratives. Despite the notes and flow charts, I’d always blunder. Sometimes, I’d say “I understand” to someone who had a crush on a cousin, and “I am with you” to someone who wanted to murder physics teacher, while what I really wanted to state was the former response to the latter statement, and the latter response to the former statement.
I came to feel like the parking lot where everybody parked their truck of secrets. I had created a multiverse. And it was spiraling out of hand.
Plus, mostly, people just hated everyone else. And for the silliest reasons. One of the blokes told me they hated another bloke because he had a banana-like jaw. Another one didn’t like this girl’s handwriting. This girl didn’t like this boy’s specs.
They also revealed their crush and all, but mostly it was the most popular girl or boy. And it took insane amount of math while talking to 4 women with same crush at the same time, pretending in 3 cases that I had no idea about the 4th one.
It was the time everyone was going to Kota, and that fuelled the first era of mass breakups. So people needed a shoulder to cry. And so I was all ears to their grief and rants. Â
To be continued…
roastedmoongfalis 