I was five when I started reading on my own. What I read generally stayed with me for a while. At times the torments of the people and animals I read about almost moved me to tears. Ma was pleased. She had much rather me read than go digging about or waging battles in the backyard. But, of course, treasures I still dug for and battles I still waged. Only now I enacted what I read.
My games changed with the seasons and with my moods. On a sunny day I might bury a treasure and find it all on my own. I liked the sun then and still do despite living on the scorched plains now. If it rained for too many days I sulked and felt a twilight in me. I won’t be able to wage battles because on rainy days my armies bivouacked. I will be restless and will bother Ma asking her what do I do. Mostly, she will ask me to re-read my old comics. Sometimes, I found something to do on my own. I will try to forge a wondrous contraption with sticks and pieces of card board. I invented many a things thus, once a periscope that could spot ghosts. The inspiration behind it must have been some story I read. Except Baba no one showed any real interest in what I invented. No doubt, Baba was so visibly proud when I built a rudimentary morse code oscillator at the age of eleven. I managed to make some feeble transmissions from our bedroom to our drawing room. Baba received the signals on our radio on medium wave. For the next few days, whenever his friends dropped in, he showed them the miserable twists of wire I had knitted on a circuit board. With the pride in his voice barely concealed, he will ask them, “My son is rather precocious, isn’t he?” The encomiums inspired me to erect an antenna upon a pole in our backyard and try making a longer distance transmission. But this time the radio received nothing, not even when placed at the foot of the pole. My device was far too feeble and could not cast its voice too far out in space.
I liked to know how things worked and often wrecked them in the process. When I was very little none of my mechanical toys survived more then a week. Often, I took them apart on the second or the third day and put them back imperfectly or not at all. The operation of springs, gears and motors held a strange fascination for me. I think they do for almost all boys. Of course, I annoyed Ma because I collected nails, bolts and bits of wire and piled them in odd corners of the house. In fact, when I was little my life’s ambition was to be a truck driver. To get to tinker with a truck’s engine every now and then and get your hands and clothes smeared with grease seemed such a wonderful idea. I parked my toy trucks in a corner of our veranda which was kept aside for me. I spent many an afternoon there taking them apart and assembling them back. In their case I did manage the assembling, they were simple toys and contained no gears or springs.
For some time after Tope ran away from home I had no real friends. At least not someone who took interest in all I did. It changed when I met Shiv. I remember I was in the sixth standard when he enrolled in our school. He was painfully shy in the early days and hardly ever spoke. Being an early grower he towered over us. I am sure that already at the age of eleven he was at least five and a half feet tall. He seemed so like a giant to us. Naturally, his shyness notwithstanding, he was not to remain indistinct for too long. And it was not his height alone that lent him distinction. Soon, word spread in school that the new boy has a great collection of comics. You just had to name the comic that you wanted, the character and the issue, and he had it. It helped that he was generous too. He never minded lending them away. That is how I came to know him like many in the class and the school, by borrowing his comics.
By the time we were in the seventh standard, we had struck a fast friendship. Shiv, Dibakar and I now sat on the same bench. We talked and laughed endlessly. Shiv was shy and reticent with strangers but when with friends never ran out of stories. We never ceased telling each other stories, not even when a class will be on. Soon, teachers took to the practice of separating and dispatching us to different corners of the classroom before they began teaching. Our Math teacher, her name was Madhumita, always did that. Though I hated what I saw to be her tyranny, I also secretly knew that I ought to be grateful to her. She lived on the same street as us and could have reported my doings to my parents. But she was kind and never did.
Our stories were of all kinds, mostly made up impromptu. We loved to cast our teachers in them, have them abducted by villains and aliens, and imagine what they will do. As they never failed to act like fools, we always had enough to laugh at. The best of such tales were always told by Shiv and Dibakar, I was not very good at the task. Especially Shiv with his limpid simplicity could imagine situations which I never could.
Shiv and I often discussed the comics we read. We tried to imagine how a certain story could have been concluded better. Both of us shared affection for the Phantom. I remember he gifted me an issue of the Phantom on my twelfth birthday. Besides comics, Shiv collected stamps. The notebook in which he stuck them was a wondrous world for me. Wanting to gather a similar world I too took to collecting them. Shiv was very typically generous in donating me a few from his collection with which to start my own. A beautiful set from Nepal and Bhutan, I have them still. Shiv often came to our house after school or on Sundays. We will perhaps play a game of carom or wage a battle with the GI Joe action figures. I delighted in displaying my ‘inventions’ to him for he admired them keenly. After Baba he took the most interest in my morse code oscillator. One day, when he visited me with his younger brother, I remember showing off my antenna pole to him. And I remember how genuinely disappointed Shiv was when I told him that it failed to make a transmission. His house was a couple of kilometers away from mine. Had the thing worked we had pondered the possibility of us exchanging messages on the radio.
