The Fight Clubs From The Past

It was sometime in the year 1969, when my consciousness of worldliness and its various hues and moods and shapes had just begun to take form. It was of a pleasant afternoon that my mother, yet to get over the bewilderment and novelty of her new surroundings, where marriage transported her just a few years ago from small town Golaghat and the flatlands of Assam, was dandling my baby brother in her arms while walking coolly down the steep slope from Laban Shiv Mandir to Red Cross. Deuta, my father, was leading me alongside, myself a toddler then, clasping his big forefinger with my little hand, when he noticed an Ambassador car behind us, backing up with good speed with mother right in its path. A great deal of shouting from father finally caught the attention of the driver, and the car came to a halt a few inches before it could topple my mother, along with my baby brother, flat on the street. Father was rightly offended, and confronted the driver with some choice Anglo-Saxon expletives. The driver wasn't one to shrink away in penitence, rather, he seemed to take greater affront, possibly aggravated due to the English language being applied in the reproof, and considered father's tirade to be an absolute assault upon his dignity and innocence. He jumped with great sprightliness out of the car and gave father and aggressive push on the chest, with an equally pugnacious "kya?" Well, that was perhaps the last straw on the back of my father's forbearance. He handed a receptacle he was carrying to mother, and asked her with her children to wait inside a small homeopathy pharmacy next to the book shop "Student's Corner ", where we all deposed obediently. What ensued subsequently I could only faintly comprehend with the dim understanding of infancy then, but the occasional glimpses of flailing arms and fists through the huge crowd of eager watchers that had collected on the pavement and on the front porch of the shop; the other person landing a couple of times on the ground and getting up with amazing swiftness; Ma in a great state of agitation imploring the pharmacist to go and stop the fight; and Deuta finally emerging out of the crowd after a while, breathless and muttering "who is he to ask ME to apologize"; are some of the visions still vivid in my memory. From what I saw and knew, Deuta won the fight, and became a hero in my eyes, infallible, as his reputation had become in the neighborhood and in office.

That was my induction into the rough side of Shillong, a side I was quite inured to by the time I passed out of high school. Yet, I could never muster courage enough to emulate Deuta's bravado, to get into a real fight, and always found plausible reasons to back out of every one that confronted me. One that comes to mind is the story of that detestable big bully, Raju, who haunted my favorite route to school - that diversion just down from Appayani Restaurant, through the verdurous glades of Crinoline and Pine Mount School to Malki Point. He must have watched me walk to school by that way often, because he appeared of quite deliberate intent when one morning I saw him stand akimbo with his big brawny legs, with a tattered cap sitting aslant on his dishevelled head, in the middle of the road looking me up and down as I approached. As I tried to pass him, he grabbed my arm. "Give me 10 paise" he said with a sneer. When I said I did not have the amount, he forced his hand into my pocket and grabbed the money. I struggled as far as I was able, and I must say I wasn't very able at all, especially to deal with a veritable rapscallion who was twice my size in height and girth. I walked angry and disappointed to school, hurling the choicest comminations in my mind at the rogue, and imagining fighting him with telling blows that felled him bloody on the street.

But as time went by, scenes of uninhibited freestyle combats in the alleys, in the marketplace and at school became commonplace to me. My Khasi friends had their own secret gangs which clashed with the Lushai gangs and Garo gangs. I remember the huge Lushais of our class in St Anthony's, one of which was a giant with a flat face, flat nose and flat eyes, whom we named "paat" or leaf. There was another who was tall, lanky and with a perennial smirk on his face, whom we called "lenlengia". There was a time when the gangs, in their earnestness to overcome each other, weaponized their members with metal knuckled gloves, and the possible employment of one of which was much talked about when we found our one of our Lushai classmates lying on the sidewalk of St Anthony's College, totally unconscious. That event caused quite a stir amongst the Lushai gangs, and I clearly remember Paat and Lenglengia in very uncharitable moods that afternoon. The Khasi gang, the main suspects in the case, declared their total ignorance of any such happening, as one of its prominent members, L____ K____ asked with an expression of remarkable astonishment when informed about it, "whattt???? where????" Our dear friend had this inimitable way of feigning innocence or ignorance which was sometimes quite amusing. There was this teacher in St Anthony's who could never turn his face towards the blackboard and his back towards the class without being made a subject of target practice by intractables throwing paper pellets from the back benches. When he did catch our dear friend in the act once, and reprimanded and warned him with all the severity he could muster, L K looked genuinely hard done by as his tone would have suggested in asking with great timidity "meeee saaaarrr?" with his hand on his heart.

Of course, the Assamese and Bengalis had no gangs to boast of, and most of them only developed strategies on how to avoid getting into the crosshairs of any gang member. When they did, of course, the result wasn't too much in their favor, like the case of our dear friend ____it Chak____, who was accosted by one such gang in golf link and was declared guilty on the spot of stealing their golf ball. His protestations were thrown to the wind, as it were, and he arrived next day at school to tell the dreary tale, not without some mention of heroics on his part, but with eyes so black and swollen as to belie anything he said in his favor.

In the classrooms, the belligerence and bellicosity was always at a subdued level, but the signs and gestures following any altercation were portentous of an explosive release post the class. Sometimes, both parties would mutually consent to maintaining the decorum of the classroom and "make out" at tiffin time in an open area where a large crowd can be accommodated, and the safest place to do this out of sight and earshot of the formidable Brothers and Father George was the Anthony's College field. Yet, scuffles did take place across benches, and quite a few lost front teeth and black eyes were ascribed later to the teachers to "natural accidents".

Although I wouldn't have liked to be in one, I definitely enjoyed watching a wholesome fight, with the leaders of each pack sparring against each other, starting with aggressive "whats" or "what meh" or "what leh" responded to by rejoinders of similar meaning and ferocity; and the acolytes standing by with clenched fists, ready to jump in if their counterparts developed any eagerness to join the affray. I specially revelled in the vicarious pleasure of seeing some bully get a few solid socks under the chin which I would have liked to administer myself.

After sailing this far downstream on the river of Time, when I have seen rapids, whirlpools and gales by the hundreds as I move inevitably towards the final precipice, all those childhood wrangles seem so docile and puerile in contrast to the many evils of today, that I have developed a kind of nostalgia, rather than any feeling of sadness in their remembrance