The 'Shorts' Story

The place where I stay is called ‘Kalikund’. I can say it’s the ‘Malgudi’ of Gujarat. It’s a beautiful little place with few ancient architectural structures adorning the village. A beautifully sculpted Jain temple ornaments the main square of the town. As the town is in Gujarat, people go about their ‘business’ (literally) with all the ‘busy’ness they can summon. The prosperity of Gujarat lies in the fact that even if the son doesn’t bring home good mark sheets, he learns enough to understand that his education is an investment made by his father. And it’s a less profitable investment than the share market.

Despite their ‘busy-ness’, people have lots of time at their hands to poke their noses in others’ business. Just like any other village in India. And I stay in this village quietly minding my own business. I rent a house here with three other boys who are also from Maharashtra and we have nothing much to do after we come back from the office. So, when one of us gets busy watching TV, the other one gets tired of watching it. If someone wants to go out, the other one wants to wash the clothes. When one of us urges me to play the guitar, the other one would turn on the TV volume as much as he can. In short, we never reach consensus except on two things- Blaming the company for everything that goes wrong and talking on the phone! Every one of us is addicted to mobile phones. Although, you must agree that it’s a better way to deal with loneliness than other known forms of addictions. No one blames anyone if he is on the phone. I can also defend myself by saying that we are all desperate to speak in our mother tongues and always ready to talk to our near and dear ones. Apart from being away from our homes, we also stay away from the glittering city-life which we were used to.

There are some peculiar habits of phone-addicts. They want to go as much away from the other phone-addict as possible. They would talk on phone in such low voice, that the satellite would have to strain its ears to pass on the message on the other end. They hate to be bothered when they are on phone. No one should approach them for any damn crisis in the world when they are glued to the phone. Most of the tsunami victims were talking on phone when the tides came disturbing them. They continued their talk even in the heaven. The ‘mobile-mania’ has gripped the world so much, that even the God is calling network service providers to put up some towers in heaven. And the place where there is no network would be automatically called as the hell!

But people of Gujarat are exceptions. It’s obviously a bad investment. They don’t understand why we should make Sunil Mittal richer than he already is. So, while the four of us get out of our home to talk on phones, they just observe us. As far as I am concerned, I observe them back because anyway I am hardly interested in stuff like ‘you know what Anjali did today?’ I just have to keep talking on phone for philanthropic purposes!

But we were committing a grave mistake unknowingly while talking on phone. We used to wander around in our ‘shorts’ in the neighborhood. On one such instance, one of my friends went a bit too far from the house and sat on a bench wearing a Bermuda. The poor guy mostly talks with his mom and he is an inspiration to all of us! While he was deeply immersed in the conversation, a man confronted him. He was a bully and he was on a bullet. He told my friend to cut the phone. “Cut the phone? What the hell? How can anyone just tell me to do that?” My friend was furious. He told the man to go to hell (probably because there is no network there) and continued his talk. We only came to know what followed when we reached the hospital to see our friend!

That man didn’t have problem because my friend was talking on phone, but he was wandering around in ‘chaddi’. Locals here call shorts by the same name as we would call our underwears. And the man was a policeman. We were also informed that we have to meet him at the local police station and we could exclude the injured person. So, there we were, standing in front of him in our full pants, washed or not! Initially, he was very angry and accused us of violating the culture. I could very well understand his emotions. And I was cursing myself for violating the culture by showing off my ‘not pedicured’ knees. I apologized profusely and then he calmed down somewhat. I echoed his emotions and I myself gave a speech of how not to violate the culture to my friends. Ultimately, he looked pleased with himself for teaching us a proper lesson and we came back home without any further visit to the hospital for ourselves.

The next day, when we told our ‘shorts’ tale to our house-owner, he was in fits! He couldn’t hold off his laughter till he fell on the floor. We were clueless as to what has happened to him. He called almost half the neighborhood and they were looking like members of a ‘laughter club’ gathered there to cure their blood pressures. After, the last member had cured his blood-pressure, some one came to our rescue and enlightened us. He told us that the policeman was the most corrupt goon of that area. He was also a dreaded ‘Saitaan’ in his own household. His daughters were scared to death to have such a father. And one of his daughters finally ran away with a boy. The boy was a reputed businessman. He used to make- ‘chaddis’!