Two frogs out of the village well

 

My first independent trip as a traveler came in the first year at college. Me and my uncle—more of a friend because he was of my age, being the youngest of a dozen children fathered by my granduncle—went to Shimla. We have saved enough from our paltry pocket money to give us courage to see the larger world out there beyond the boundaries of our village and the nearby town. As per the fashion of the times, we had long pantaloons, belts with elaborate shining buckles, leather shoes, printed shirts with side-slits to carry them well both in and out of the trousers. All this was topped with dark oversized sunglasses to make it a photogenic presentation.

I had a little red and black rectangular Panasonic camera to capture the moments pumped by the adolescence youth in us. We hit it off with a lot of spirits. Trekking to Tara Devi temple we soon realized that people already knew where we come from. The little shrine is situated ten kilometers down from Shimla on a hill from where Shimla glittered like a tiny heaven. I had been here as a part of the school children tourist group for fifteen days. That was a few years before and the pull of that free fun still beckoned me to the hill. During that trip, we had camped on a hill on the way to the shrine. It was a quaint British-time bungalow where we stayed. It was sheer fun. Well, of that sometime later.

Well, how did the people come to know where did we belong to without even having a word on the issue? Our actions speak louder than our tongues. We had been dislodging dead pine trunks down the slope. ‘You must be from Haryana! No wonder!’ a man exasperatedly sighed.

We captured the best dining moment of our lives at a restaurant at the erstwhile summer capital of the British India. It was a very high-end facility from our rural standards. The table had knives, forks, napkins. We hardly had any clues about this. But we felt bound to use them, so we followed others with a lot of anxiety. Then the beautiful aroma and wonderful taste of the food relaxed us, making us bold enough to click the best moments of life so far. Our bowls and plates had been wiped clean to do justice to the every paisa spent on the order.

There was a gentle hum of the urban people eating with dignity and perfect decorum. We had eaten too fast, we soon realized. The people basically talked and enjoyed the time there and took little bites in between. We had plainly gobbled down the food. The people who were already there when we arrived had barely touched their stuff. Sitting in a restaurant isn’t all about gobbling the food straightaway, first lesson. So we thought of prolonging our stay there. The bowls with warm water and lemon slices arrived. ‘See, they serve lemon juice as well to help digestion!’ we told each other. So this being our last item, we took elegantly stretched time to finish it like the real gentlemen do. We squeezed the lemon slices with a well-meaning look and sipped the digestive juice with a meditative muse. In fact we took many pictures of the cherishing sips. All this while a gentleman—a real one—casually looked and unhurriedly carried on with his lunch. A thorough gentleman not to get judgmental at all. His look didn’t betray even the slightest condemnatory hint towards our manner of treating a finger dip as a stomach wash. So we had a prolonged lemon juice drinking spree.

Then the moment of second learning struck with a nice punch. Very coolly the gentleman squeezed the lemons, expertly dabbed his oily fingers into the acidic concoction and elegantly wiped them on the napkin. The only saving grace was that he didn’t look at us even once while doing all this. A real gentleman, passing the message without making us feel embarrassed. Now it was difficult to stay there anymore due to our shame. We somehow managed to chicken out. Our entire schooling hadn’t taught this much as this visit to the restaurant did in a little time span.

We had shiny clothes, large shining belt buckles and still bigger glasses for our brattish faces. Now here was this beautiful Mall Road boulevard humming with tourists as the evening handed over the baton to a mercury lit arena. A perfect night for a lighted boulevard. But dark goggles are for shading the sun, the night is already shaded. To us a picture was incomplete without sunglasses, especially if you possess them. So we imitated an entire set of filmy postures with our hands on the hips and the legs positioned in varied ways to do justice to the sunglasses. All this while two girls, urban girls a bit senior to us, swankily clad in T-shirts, kept staring, giggling, saying something to each other. Now I realize that it was plain flirting and teasing to get us onto some encouraging frequency. But we weren’t exposed to such fine nuances. We felt offended. We thought they were joking at our expanse, making fun of us, little did we realize that teasing girls are a boon for the boys. It was a belated lesson, which I realized a few years later, as I vividly recalled their behavior, that it wasn’t an insult. It was a beautiful bait of youth. It was a tantalizing teasing. As urban girls and maybe a few years senior to us they knew far more in the domain of boys and girls. So quite foolishly, we felt insulted, scorned at them, threw daggers of hate at them, muttered our dissension in their direction, left the scene to carry on with our photo shoot at some other location.