Ambi's Tryst with the Tyrantess

 Terms and Conditions

Ambi was, at the ripe age of four, already a shrewd negotiator. When school was first mooted in 1970, he did not throw a tantrum — he made a demand, delivered with the gravity of a treaty clause: he would go, but only if Aditi, the Tamil girl in the neighbourhood, went too. Without her, the township could keep its school. Aditi, an inconvenient eight months younger, had not yet earned her admission papers. Ambi, wholly unmoved by the academic calendar of the then school Board, simply refused. Negotiations stalled. The matter was tabled for a year, and nobody — least of all Ambi — seemed in the least bit sorry about it. His elder brother Kumaran, meanwhile, had made his own peace with school two full years earlier, and went off each morning entirely unbothered by his younger brother's diplomatic standoff.

That year, in fact, was pure gold. Mornings began with breakfast, then straight across the street to Aditi's for a morning of uninterrupted play, until the factory siren blew at noon to announce lunch — at which sound Chella would come scampering across like a woman late for a fire drill, to haul her son home in time. The three of them would sit down for lunch without Kumaran, already at his desk. The afternoons were worse for her — Ambi flatly refused his nap, so Chella would trot back across a second time, cap in hand, and beg Narayani, Aditi's endlessly fond mother, to absorb the boy for a few hours. Narayani almost always said yes, with a smile that suggested she did not mind the regular intrusions. On the rare day she had somewhere to be, she'd warn Chella in advance, and Chella would then descend on her son with the no-nonsense fury of a woman who had been made to walk across that street once too often. At five, punctual as a temple bell, Ambi returned for coffee — poured into a great "Eversilver Davara", a wedding gift from his Nana, with Chella's initials engraved on its belly, as though even the vessel needed to prove whose house this was. School, meanwhile, could wait. And wait it did.

 Admission, and Betrayal

It waited until 1971, when Aditi finally turned admissible and Ambi, a man of his word even at five, agreed to attend.

The family lived near the west end of the township, barely five hundred metres from a spot the township simply called Nursery, and when the time eventually came, it was the “Hospital” stop — serving every child in the zone — where Ambi would board each morning. A bus made its rounds each morning, scooping children out of the township's various zones and depositing them at the only English-medium school within its boundaries — a school that sat, rather ominously in hindsight, in the shadow of a hill called Bhalu Pahad, the Bear's Hill, a good two kilometres off towards the east end of the township. Ambi and Aditi boarded together each morning at the “hospital” stop, opposite the turnstile, thick as thieves, and the routine held without incident for several months.

Then the school did the unthinkable. It split them into different sections.

Ambi took this the way a shareholder takes a hostile takeover. He marched to his father Raman and reminded him, word for word, of the terms under which he had originally agreed to this whole "school" enterprise. Raman, employing the great fatherly art of the vague promise, assured him it would be sorted "in course of time" — four words that have bought grown men decades of peace from their five-year-olds, and bought Raman about a week.

The Tyrantess of Section B

The universe, having separated the two children, then decided to rub it in. Both KG sections, mercifully, were run by Tamil-speaking teachers — Ambi arrived at school fluent in exactly zero of the languages actually in use there — but the mercy stopped at language. Aditi got Ms Julie, a woman built entirely of patience and warmth. Ambi got Ms Uma, who was not. Ms Uma ran her classroom like a small, furious kingdom, brooking no deviation from her pupils, let alone outright mischief, and had discovered in herself a most particular gift: an unerring instinct for the inner thigh, and the exact quantum of pinch required to make a small boy see stars. Ambi, desperate, appealed to Ms Julie directly: “Miss, enna please unga classla admit pannunga” — could she not simply take him in? Ms Julie laughed, patted him off, and told him it would all work out. It did not.

A Hunger Strike, and Its Consequences

Diplomacy having failed at the teacher level, Ambi escalated straight to the top — his parents — and when even that produced no instant results, he did what any self-respecting five-year-old with a grievance does: he declared a one-day "bhook hartaal". No food, no school, and no negotiating with terrorists — except that Raman negotiated anyway, promising not only to speak to Ms Uma but to have a word with her husband too, her "Veetukkarar," for good measure. Suitably flattered by his own father's willingness to go to the man's house over this, Ambi called off the fast and turned up at the bus stop the next morning full of swagger. Aditi, noticing his absence the day before, asked where he'd got to. "That wicked woman is about to be taught a lesson by my father," Ambi informed her grandly. "If she tries anything again, my dad will ensure she stops coming to school."

Whatever memo Raman had sent, Ms Uma appeared not to have received it — or had received it, read it, and consigned it to the bin. The next day after lunch, she greeted Ambi with a warning, delivered in crisp Tamil: "Nalla thinnuttu panni madthiri alaya thaan nee layakku, pallikku varama ne uruppudave mattey" — roughly, that you are fit only to eat to your fill and wander around like a pig, playing truant, you will come to no good. Ambi, done with diplomacy altogether, shot back that his father knew all about her wickedness and would deal with her personally.

This did not land well. Ms Uma slapped him, then went to work on his thighs with her signature technique until he broke down completely, wet through with fright, and bolted for the gate, howling. The chowkidar, Bahadur, caught him in the corridor before he'd got ten feet away and marched him straight back into the lioness's den. By now thoroughly wrecked, Ambi cried himself hoarse, then cried himself to sleep at his bench — and was, for reasons the family has never been able to satisfactorily explain, simply forgotten there.

Alone at the Gate

He woke on his own, hours later, to a silence that should have alarmed him sooner than it did. The classroom was empty. The corridor was empty. He staggered out to the gate, bag in hand, to discover that the entire school had quietly packed up and gone home without him — bus, teachers, chowkidar, the lot. Only the Maali remained, watering the plants, oblivious to the boy standing at the gate. The sun was dipping toward evening, sometime around half-past-five, and Ambi stood alone at the gate of a deserted school, two kilometres from home, doing the maths a five-year-old does in exactly no time at all: nobody is coming.

Following Rupa and Subhra Home

Salvation, when it arrived, came in the Godsent shape of two senior schoolgirls walking down the road away from the gate toward Bhanja Mandap, the township cinema. Ambi took off after them like his life depended on it — which, as far as he was concerned, it did — falling twice on his knees before he'd closed the gap enough to tuck in behind them, uninvited. Rupa and Subhra, as he'd later learnt their names to be, clocked the small apparition trailing them and exchanged a few lines of Bengali, amused, at his expense — they seemed rather familiar to Ambi, as it happened, since the two families lived only a few blocks apart. They were, it must be said, at exactly the wrong age to be an assurance to Ambi — too young to feel any tenderness for a strange five-year-old, and quite old enough to be out walking home alone themselves on a warm evening. So they did the only sensible thing two pre-teenage girls saddled with an uninvited toddler, ambling behind, can do: they ignored him, and kept walking, hoping he'd peel off somewhere.

He did not peel off. He followed them past the outer road moving away from the cinema, skirted the frog pond, and struck out across the open sports maidan — unfenced, ungoverned, and entirely too large for a boy already sneezing and heating up his way through a cloud of his own making — toward the circular junction off the central market road, where the hospital road met the way to D Zone. The girls walked further down the “Hospital Road”, running parallel to the H Zone Blocks, meekly followed by an anxious Ambi. At the bunker shop opposite the Chaudharys', the girls dropped down a kaccha path toward lower ground. Ambi, eyeing the gradient with the suspicion of a man asked to sign something without reading it, chose the only dignified option available: he sat down and slid the rest of the way on his backside, arriving at the bottom intact but comprehensively redecorated — blue shorts, white shirt, and every inch of skin between, now the same uniform shade of township dust.

By Sector VII the roads had turned friendly again. Rupa and Subhra, spotting their small shadow finally peeling off toward his own lane, allowed themselves a visible sigh of relief and pressed on towards Nursery without so much as a backward glance. Ambi, filthy, spent, and running purely on instinct, staggered the last stretch to the third lane, too weak to walk any further, faltered and collapsed on the road close to the junction of the lane. Watching this from his veranda, Chinnappan, a bachelor who lived below Ambi’s home, frantically ran down the road, picked him up and promptly deposited him upstairs at Raman’s.

The Reckoning

The next day brought delirium and a fever fit to alarm the whole street; Dr Mishra prescribed three days of bed rest, and Raman, uncharacteristically indulgent, actually granted them. Ambi's only complaint through the entire ordeal — slap, pinch, abandonment, forced march across a maidan, and a raging fever included — was that Aditi would not be around to keep him company while he recovered.

He went on to endure Ms Uma, thigh and all, right up to the second standard, by which point he had made a private peace with his fate — the way children of that era generally did, back when even the parents were hesitant to haul up or complain against a schoolteacher.

The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram, where the siren has long fallen silent, but old habits of waiting linger on...

The Two-Rupee Tiger

 

The Sound of a Particular Door

Nambi began his college days in 1984, the year he learned to read a house by its noises. He was almost nineteen, commuting fifteen kilometres each way, and living under a roof shared by two people — his mother Chella and his father Raman — who could not agree on how to run it, what to save, what to spend, or, most evenings, whether dinner would survive the night.

He came to know the sequence the way you know a piece of music you have heard too many times. The gate latch. Raman's footsteps, heavier and less certain than they should have been for the hour. The particular silence that fell over the house the moment he called out for food. Chella would already be moving toward the kitchen before he finished asking — she served him without a word, plate after plate, night after night, as though obedience alone might one day be enough to end it.

It never was. Raman, deep enough in drink to have lost his appetite but not his grievances, would sit before a full plate and find that his hands would not cooperate. Rather than say so, he found something else to say. That he had never been given the respect due to a man who had sacrificed as much as he had. That Chella's family had never once treated him with the dignity he deserved. The accusation changed its clothes nightly but never its shape, and it built, course by course, toward the same ending: a plate, airborne, striking the wall with a crack that Nambi could have located blindfolded, rice and sambar sliding down the plaster in a long yellow smear, and his mother on her knees afterward with a rag, weeping quietly, cleaning a floor she had cooked for an hour to fill.

Nambi sat through most of these evenings. He watched his mother go to bed hungry more nights than he could count, and on the evenings he came home late from college, it was worse in its own way — walking in through the front door to find the wreckage already cold, his father already snoring, and his mother alone with the mess, looking up at him from the floor with an expression he never found a word for.

Winter, 1985

He turned it over for a long time before he found the courage to act. Then, one evening in the winter of 1985-86, after the last plate had stopped ringing against the wall and Chella had slipped out of the room, Nambi stood in front of his father and asked him, plainly, what any of it was for.

"Appa," he said, "what is this achieving? Every night, the same drama. You can't even eat what she cooks for you, and by the time it's over there's nothing left but what's on the floor. What do you actually want from her?"

Raman's answer was not an answer. It was old wounded pride finding a new listener. "It is easy for you," he said, "to talk of pain as though it is something you leave behind. You would need to live through what I have lived through to understand what it has cost me." And then, sharper: "You are a boy who has seen nothing of the world. Don't teach your father right from wrong."

For a couple of days, oddly, it worked. Raman came home, skipped dinner outright, and went straight to bed without a word — sparing Nambi only a resentful glance on the way past, as if being denied his evening theatre was itself a fresh injury. The house went quiet. Nambi allowed himself, cautiously, to believe something had shifted.

The Culvert

It hadn't — it had simply changed direction. A few evenings later Nambi came home to find his mother beaten badly enough that the sight of her stopped him in the doorway. When he confronted his father, Raman's defence was that she had answered him back once too often during one of his tantrums, and that this had left him no choice. Nambi gave him a final warning — the kind a boy gives when he has already stopped expecting it to be heard. Raman, furious at being warned by his own son, struck him across the face. And something in Nambi that had been absorbing blows of one kind or another for months finally gave way. He struck back.

What came after was worse than the fight itself. Raman raged and cursed at length, dressed, and walked out of the house without saying where. He returned the next morning around nine, bathed, and left for work within the hour, as if the previous night belonged to someone else's house entirely.

Three days passed in a watchful, uneasy quiet. On the fourth, Nambi came home late from college to find his mother sitting outside on the culvert by the road, waiting for him in the dark, crying. He brought her in and turned on his father one more time — what now, this time? Raman told him to shut up and mind his own business. Nambi pressed. Raman told him to get out of the house and manage his own life from now on.

Nambi did not need to be told twice. He asked his mother to come with him. Chella would not leave. But as he walked out the door, she pressed a fifty-rupee note into his hand — everything she had to give a son she would not follow.

Ponneri

He had no destination that night, only a bus to Central station and then a suburban train heading north, chosen for no better reason than that it was leaving. He sat by the window with his thoughts running well ahead of the train — quit college, find work anywhere, become nobody in a town where nobody knew his name. An hour in, the train pulled into a station called Ponneri — the golden lake — a name that snagged on an old family memory, a stop the family used on trips from the Andhra–Odisha border. It was familiar enough, in the smallest way, to make him get off.

It was close to midnight. He bought a bun and a cup of tea for a rupee and ate slowly, standing on the platform, and it was only then that a name surfaced from somewhere further back than the last few days — a distant grand-aunt, his father's paternal aunt, an old lady living alone on Hariharan Bazaar Street. She was family, however thin the thread, and thin threads were what he had left. He walked out of the station and into the bazaar, losing his way more than once in the dark, asking directions from whoever was still about, until he finally stood before what he believed was her door and knocked.

A middle-aged man opened it — a stranger, in a house Nambi had walked to expecting a grand-aunt's welcome. He asked, reasonably enough, who Nambi was and what had brought him there at that hour. Nambi introduced himself and asked for her by name. The man's answer landed harder than anything else that night had managed: she had passed away six months earlier, and the house had since been let out by whichever relative stood closest in line to inherit it. There was nothing more to say to that. Nambi thanked him, turned back the way he'd come, and walked to the station crestfallen, the one thread he'd reached for having given way in his hand.

Back on the platform, he sat on a cement bench, and sleep started pulling at him. He didn't get far into it. Two constables on their rounds blew a whistle, inches from his ear and moved him off the platform, and Nambi — in nothing but a veshti and a shirt — found himself walking the dark road to the highway bus stop instead.

An old man sitting there asked where a boy his age could possibly be going at that hour. Nambi had a lie ready before the question had finished landing — missed the train after stepping out for water, needed a bus to the city. The old man shook his head; no buses from here, better to find an auto to the main terminus, where the Andhra buses came through toward Madras. Nambi thanked him and walked, asking directions from whoever was still awake, counting his coins the whole way — he was not going to be caught penniless in the morning.

Broadway

Two hours later a bus from Nayudupeta finally arrived, close to three in the morning, and set him down at Broadway just as the next morning was breaking over the city. He had tea and a snack at a stall — and then, spotting a bus pulling out toward Tirunelveli, made the sort of decision only a boy with nowhere fixed to be can make. He ran, jumped for the moving rear footboard, nearly lost his grip and his footing both, and was hauled bodily back inside by a conductor who was considerably more annoyed than impressed.

This time he bought a proper ticket — thirty rupees — and settled in for the day with the discipline of someone protecting the little he had left: water at the stops, nothing else, however the food smelled. Somewhere along the way the plan finally took shape in his head. Trivandrum. His uncle Krishnan, Chella's youngest brother, an Engineer at TERLS, and a man Nambi had always been close to.

The Tenner Dilemma

The bus reached Tirunelveli junction around eight that evening. Nambi was weak by then — a single tea and vada at Broadway was not much for a nineteen-year-old to run a whole day on — and as he walked from the junction toward the station, the smell of fresh dosas from a roadside stall stopped him cold. He had ten rupees left and a choice to make: eat, or save it for the fare ahead. Hunger won. He sat down to uttappam and coconut chutney and ate until he was full, and somewhere in the middle of it, without quite meaning to, found himself brooding — thinking of his mother pressing him to eat more at her own table, a hundred evenings that had nothing to do with any of this. He left the stall, with some residual coins left in his pocket,.

The Two-Rupee Note

There was no train to Trivandrum until seven the next morning, so he walked to the bus stand to see if anything moved south by night. Nothing did, and the fare — twelve rupees — was more than he had. He hesitated a long while before approaching a well-dressed stranger for help. The man questioned him with the thoroughness of a policeman, and then, under cover of that same concern, let his hands wander somewhere they had no business going. Nambi excused himself, said he'd be back after answering nature's call, and did not go back — he walked straight to the station instead and did not look over his shoulder until he was inside it. For once, luck sided with him: no constables that night to chase a frightened teenager off the platform. Running short of the fare for Trivandrum, he even tried his hand at serving customers in a petty restaurant near the station, but had to leave with just a two-rupee bill with a tiger on its face, doled out to him by the hotelier for serving one customer.

Valliyoor

He spent what was left of the dark on a bench and boarded the seven o'clock passenger train the next morning without a ticket, doing the arithmetic in his head as the small stations went by — caught, perhaps a fortnight in custody, food included, survivable as long as nobody's hands strayed. He thought, with the particular gallows humour of a boy who has stopped expecting things to go his way, of the old crude wisdom about giving in to what cannot be helped, and decided he was ready for whatever came. At Valliyoor two constables stepped into his compartment, and Nambi slipped quietly through to the next carriage before they reached him, breathing out only once he'd found an empty window seat and handed the rest of the day over to luck.

Eraniel & The Rice Women

After Valliyoor, the day eased. A samosa vendor at Nagercoil got what remained of his attention and none of the money he didn't have. At Eraniel he thought, briefly, of getting off and walking all the way to Kollenvilai to see his grandfather — he would very likely have found him some menial contract work through Murugan at the telephone exchange — but decided against troubling an octogenarian living alone for the sake of his own convenience. Besides, Nambi was overcome with guilt for an act of impudence committed a few years back that earned his ire. By Neyyattinkara the compartment had filled with women carrying baskets of red rice on their heads, riding, a fellow passenger observed dryly, as if their own fathers owned the railways. Nobody troubled them either. Nambi, for the first time since Ponneri, let himself relax.

Karamana

At Trivandrum Central he stepped off with no idea how to find Karamana, and asked his way there one stranger at a time until, an hour on, the road turned suddenly familiar — past the Bhagavathi temple on the riverbank, to his uncle's door at TC/50. It was a Sunday, luckily, and Krishnan was home — startled to see his nephew standing there in that state, glad of him all the same, and entirely at a loss for how he'd arrived.

Nambi told him everything, start to end. He bathed, ate a proper meal, and slept the way he hadn't in days. Krishnan promised whatever help he needed, but talked him out of the one thing Nambi had actually come to ask for – a job for subsistence. "Don't worry, boy," he said. "Your father will be looking for you by now. Go back, finish your college, and then find work — but go back and look after your mother. I will help you with whatever you need, always." A week later he sent Nambi home with three thousand rupees and an eighty-rupee ticket to Madras. Nambi owes this sum to his uncle, even today, with interest compounded for about four decades, not less than at least two hundred grand.

Afterward

Nambi had missed a week of college. He came home to find his mother alone. Raman had left the house the very day after his son did, and never came back to it.

He lived out the rest of his years apart from them both, and died in the summer of 1995, of cancer in the oesophagus — unremarked, the way most such endings are, in a house that was, by then, no longer anyone's.

 

Author’s note

I wrote this piece as a small record of the kind of boyhood that rarely makes it into our public stories – a life measured in gate latches, bus stands, and the sound of plates hitting a wall. Nambi’s journey in the winter of 1985–86 is not extraordinary in the way headlines use that word, yet it contains what many families quietly live through: a son negotiating love for his mother, fear of his father, and the need to leave without quite abandoning either. The amounts of money in this story – a fifty-rupee note, a two-rupee bill with a tiger, an eighty-rupee ticket, three thousand rupees in an envelope – are not just details but markers of how precarious movement was for a boy in his teens, and how much calculation sits behind every “simple” decision to run away.

I am also trying to preserve a texture of time: late-night platforms without CCTV, constables who move you on with a whistle, long-distance buses leaving from Broadway, women riding passenger trains with baskets of red rice as if their families owned the rails. These are fragments of a rural and small-town world in the early 1980s that is already fading from memory, even though its quiet violence and quiet generosities still shape the adults we later meet only as colleagues, uncles, or neighbours. If you recognise something of your own family’s history in Nambi’s, I hope this story gives it a language you can carry.

The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram where the evenings are long and the distant memories are longer.

Chronicles of Kancha Bhatta 4 — The Troubled Tiger

If the Dubai Experiment taught us anything about Kancha Bhatta, it is this: the man is constitutionally incapable of a quiet life. He does not seek drama — drama simply recognises him from across a crowded room and makes straight for him, the way stray dogs make for the one person in the street who is not particularly fond of them.

He arrived at my door in early February 2024, boria-bistar in hand, with the air of a man who has thought the matter through and reached a considered conclusion.

“Sir, humko Dubai set nahin hua,” he announced. “Mujhe yahin gheeske kuch na kuch kamaana padega.”

Dubai had not suited him. He needed to earn something here, scraping along as best he could. Fair enough. A reasonable position. The kind of thing a man says when he has run out of alternatives and needs to make the remaining one sound like a preference.

He paused, and then added, with the studied casualness of a footnote: “Meri bibi mujhe ghar se bhaga di.”

His wife had thrown him out of the house in Dhangadi as well.

So the arithmetic was now complete. Dubai had not worked out. Dhangadi had not worked out. Chennai — specifically my door — was therefore not so much a destination as the last option standing: the chair that remains when the music stops. I let him in, because what else does one do with a man who has been evicted from two continents and is standing at your gate with his worldly possessions in a bag?

The Tea Doctor Takes His Rounds

What followed, for several months, was Kancha Bhatta at his absolute finest — and I say this without irony, because the boy, when he is in his element, is a genuinely remarkable creature.

He threw himself into work with the focused energy of a man who has decided that industry is the best available answer to his circumstances. At Dharmarajapuram, the garden was watered with religious punctuality, the house maintained in a state of spotlessness that it has not achieved before or since. At the city home, similar order prevailed. And at the office — where he had installed himself as a kind of unofficial domestic department — he found his true calling.

He began, modestly enough, by taking the 10 o’clock tea orders.

This sounds simple. It was not simple. Kancha approached the 10 o’clock round with the methodical seriousness of a ward doctor doing patient consultations. He went from person to person — Prasanna, Deepa, Mohan, Hari, and the rest of the office — taking individual orders with a small nod of acknowledgment at each preference, as though mentally filing the information for a medical record. Then he disappeared into the pantry and brewed each cup separately, to individual specification.

His repertoire was, by any measure, impressive. Ginger tea, cardamom tea, green tea, lemon tea, amla tea — the full spectrum of what a health-conscious Chennai office might reasonably demand. But Kancha, being Kancha, could not leave well enough alone. He began to experiment. Combinations emerged from the pantry with increasing ambition: ginger-lemon, cardamom-amla, ginger-hibiscus. Some fell flat. Some became quietly famous. The ginger-lemon tea, in particular, developed a devoted following among the health-conscious members of the office, who began referring to Kancha in tones of mild reverence as the Tea Doctor — a man who had, in their estimation, post-graduated in tea studies from Dubai.

It must be recorded, for the sake of historical accuracy, that not every experiment survived contact with its audience. There was the Girnar-cardamom combination, which Kancha presented to me one morning with the confidence of a man unveiling a masterpiece.

“Sir, try this super combo,” he said. “You will become addicted.”

I sipped. I sipped again. I considered the liquid in my cup with the careful attention it deserved.

“Main bilkul bhi mood mein nahin hoon,” I told him, “tere nautanki brews ka aadi banne ke liye. Ja, ek simple adrak chai bana. Phooto.”

I was in no mood to get addicted to his nautanki brews. Go and make a simple ginger chai. And get out.

The Girnar-cardamom combination was quietly retired and never spoken of again.

In between the tea rounds, he entertained the office with his Dubai dispatches. He was a natural storyteller, Kancha — the kind who improves with each retelling, adding details that may or may not have been present in the original event but which make the story considerably more satisfying. The tales of Mridula Rani and the flying plates were received with great appreciation by an audience that had never met her but felt, by the third retelling, that they knew her personally. The story of Aditya’s exotic dogs and their home tutor produced particular delight — especially the subplot in which Aditya’s two boys, watching the trainer put the dogs through their paces, decided to try the same methods themselves, with the result that the dogs promptly turned the exercise around and trained the boys instead. By Kancha’s account, the boys emerged from this experiment considerably less civilised than when they entered it, while the dogs remained entirely unaffected. The office found this deeply satisfying.

For a while, everything was in order. The Tea Doctor was dispensing his prescriptions, the garden was green, the house was spotless, and the Dubai chronicles were keeping the staff entertained through the slower parts of the working day.

Then the evenings began to go wrong.

The Evening Pareshaaniyaan

The trouble with evenings, when you are Kancha Bhatta, is that they are long, and the Dhangadi house loan is real, and your friend lives nearby and has a bottle.

It began unremarkably. On a busy day at the office, I sent Kancha home on his bicycle an hour before I was ready to leave, as was the usual arrangement. He pedalled off. I finished my work and reached home around nine in the evening.

Kancha was not there.

I called him. “Aatha hoon,” he said — I’m coming — and knocked on the door a few minutes later.

He came in and looked at me with the particular expression of a man who has a grievance and intends to air it before any other business is conducted.

“Sir, kab tak main aapka intezaar karun?” he demanded. He had arrived home two hours before me. I had not come. So he had gone to meet a friend. The logic was presented as self-evident, which in Kancha’s framework of reality, it entirely was.

I told him it was fine, work had held me up, go and make something to eat.

He informed me his stomach was full.

I looked at him more carefully. He was regarding me with the expression of a man contemplating a mildly interesting but ultimately puzzling object. There was a certain looseness to his bearing, a certain careful deliberateness to his words, that I had come to recognise from his late-night Dubai dispatches about Aditya’s household.

“Daru peeke aaye ho?” I asked.

“Haan, sir,” he said, without particular guilt. What was he to do? There had been no timepass. His friend had called. The house loan in Dhangadi had been pressing on his mind. He was pareshaan.

He then listed, in sequence, with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who has had two hours to organise his thoughts and a couple of drinks to loosen them, all of the things currently causing him pareshaaniyaan. The list was not short.

By the time he finished, he was horizontal on his custom bed, still muttering to himself, and I was standing in the kitchen making my own dinner.

This, I regret to report, became the routine.

The Portico Parliament

On a Sunday that had already distinguished itself as one of the worst of the season, I drove back to Dharmarajapuram from Viswanathapuram — all of two hundred and sixty miles — having left in some haste following what I will describe only as an Abirami storm that had erupted that morning, the details of which are not relevant to this Chronicle and which I have no intention of revisiting. I reached home at around six in the evening in the mood that a man is in after eight-plus hours of highway driving on an already spoilt day: the specific mood that requires silence, a hot meal, and the complete absence of additional complications.

In the portico sat Kancha Bhatta, drinking with the relaxed authority of a man who has been at it for some time and has reached a comfortable equilibrium.

I confronted him. I may have mentioned that my day had not been ideal.

He regarded me with the injured dignity of a man whose own pareshaaniyaan are being insufficiently acknowledged.

“App sochte hain sirf aapka samasya hain,” he informed me. He too had problems. Many problems. Problems of considerable weight and complexity. Was he to be expected to sit quietly with his problems while I was apparently the only person in the household permitted to have a difficult day?

I asked him, with what I felt was admirable restraint, whether I was personally the cause of his pareshaaniyaan.

He drew himself up. “Main nikal raha hoon yahaan se,” he announced. His problems could not be solved here. He needed to be released. “Mujhe chod do.”

I considered this for approximately one second.

“Phooto yahaan se,” I told him. “Maine thodi roya ki tum Dubai se waapas aaja.”

I had not wept when he left Dubai. I had not asked him to return from Dhangadi. I was therefore not in a position to be accused of obstructing whatever solutions he felt were available elsewhere.

He picked up his boria-bistar — that faithful bag, present at every significant departure of his adult life — and left for a relative’s place in Purusaiwalkam.

The Purusaiwalkam Dispatches

He did not come back the next day. Or the day after. Or the day after that.

On the third day, his phone stopped being reachable. This is, I have since learnt, a reliable indicator that Kancha has entered a phase of activity that he would prefer not to document in real time.

Five days after his departure, a man appeared at my door. This was Nemraj — Kancha’s relative, a decent and entirely blameless individual who had, through no fault of his own, become the custodian of this particular chapter of Kancha’s story. Beside him, in a condition I will describe diplomatically as substantially reduced from his usual self, stood Kancha Bhatta.

Nemraj told me what had happened, with the patient thoroughness of a man who has spent several days living inside an improbable story and wants to make sure it is accurately transmitted.

After leaving my door with his boria-bistar, Kancha had arrived at Purusaiwalkam and proceeded, over the following two days, to drink with a dedication that left no room for other activities. He had then navigated himself — how exactly remains somewhat unclear even to Kancha himself — to a footpath near Ampa Mall in Aminjikarai. Somewhere around dusk, he had been picked up by a person or persons whose identity and motivations remain unrecorded by history, and deposited near the railway line between Chengalpattu and Potheri. While in whatever condition he was in at that point, some public-spirited individual had relieved him of everything in his pockets.

He had come to his senses the following morning on a stretch of railway-adjacent landscape, some considerable distance from anywhere he recognised, with no money, no phone, and no immediate prospects. With the instinct that never entirely deserts him, he had walked until he found a tea stall, presented himself to the proprietor, and offered to work in exchange for enough money to get back to Chennai.

Kancha Bhatta — Tea Doctor, post-graduate of Dubai, specialist in ginger-lemon and cardamom-amla — had arrived at rock bottom and asked a stranger for a job brewing tea.

The tea stall proprietor had presumably seen harder cases. Kancha worked, earned his fare, called his wife from the stall’s phone to relay his pathetic condition to Nemraj, and waited. Nemraj had arrived, collected him, taken him home, bathed him, dressed him in clean clothes, and was now at my door with the complete report.

I looked at Kancha.

“Kancha,” I said, “tum ab yahaan rehne ka laayak nahin ho. Ghar waapas chala ja.”

You are no longer fit to stay here. Go back home.

He did not argue. For perhaps the first time in the entire Chronicle of our association, Kancha Bhatta had no counter-position. He said he knew he was guilty. He would go back to the hills, take a break, clear his head, and return a saner man.

I told him he could return on one condition. Not without his wife.

There was also the small matter of the ATM.

It emerged, in the course of Nemraj’s detailed account, that before the Aminjikarai episode, under drunken stupor, Kancha had attempted to draw money from a machine. Kancha does not operate ATMs. This is not a gap in his skill set that he has ever felt the need to address. On this occasion, faced with the machine and its requirements, he had done what seemed to him most sensible: he asked a helpful stranger standing nearby to assist him. The stranger had been happy to oblige. The stranger had assisted Kancha out of the entire month’s earnings — twenty-seven thousand rupees — with an efficiency and thoroughness that suggested considerable prior experience in this kind of assistance.

Twenty-seven thousand rupees, surrendered to a stranger at an ATM, because Kancha Bhatta has never in his life seen a reason to be suspicious of people who offer to help.

Some men learn from their mistakes. Kancha Bhatta simply generates new ones, each more imaginative than the last.

Wapsi

He left for the hills the next day.

The Sharda was waiting, and the cold winds off the mountains, and the house in Dhangadi with its uncleared loan, and his wife — who had, let us remember, already evicted him once and was presumably in no mood for a hero’s welcome.

Some weeks passed in silence. And then the WhatsApp call came — from somewhere up in the hills above Tanakpur, the hills that Kancha has been returning to and departing from his entire adult life, as though the Sharda itself is the fixed point around which everything else in his story revolves.

He called to announce that he had arrived safely.

He announced this in the tone of a man who had departed with my full knowledge, blessing, and approval — a man who had been sent on an errand and was now checking in as requested, mission accomplished.

“Tum gaanv pahuncha ya nahin,” I told him, “mujhe koi fark nahin padta hai. Ab kisne roya ki tum udhar se mujhe phone nahin kiya.”

Whether you have reached your village or not is a matter of complete indifference to me. Who exactly has been sitting here weeping that you hadn’t called from up there?

He laughed, the way Kancha always laughs when he has been caught editing his own history — briefly, without embarrassment, and with the immediate pivot of a man who has the next item of business ready.

He wanted to come back to Chennai. He put this not as a request but as an announcement dressed lightly as a request, in the manner he has perfected over the years.

I reminded him of the condition.

Some more weeks passed.

And then, one fine day, Kancha Bhatta arrived at my door.

He had his boria-bistar. He had his wife. He had his youngest child.

He knocked, and before I could say a word, he drew himself up to his full height and announced, in the voice of a man returning in triumph from a long campaign:

“Tiger Zinda Hai.”

The tiger had been to Dubai and bolted. He had been to Dhangadi and been evicted. He had drunk his way from Purusaiwalkam to a railway line near Chengalpattu. He had begged for work at a tea stall. He had donated a month’s salary to a helpful stranger at an ATM. He had crossed the Sharda and returned.

And here he stood, boria-bistar in one hand, wife and child behind him like the terms of a negotiated settlement, announcing that he was, against all available evidence, still very much alive.

I looked at his wife.

She looked at me with the expression of a woman who has heard the Tiger Zinda Hai announcement before, has her own views on the matter, and is too sensible to share them at the door.

I let them all in.

What else does one do?

Hugh Allen once wrote of a tiger that prowled alone through a shrinking world, fighting battles that nobody else quite understood and surviving them by sheer, stubborn instinct. I thought of that tiger as I closed the door behind Kancha Bhatta, his wife, and his youngest child.

The lonely tiger had come home!

यारों का कारवाँ — A Blog Chronicle

 

There is a particular kind of madness that afflicts those of us who went to school together in a small town, grew up sharing the same ‘Singadas’ and Chai, the same overbearing teachers, and the same adolescent dreams — and then scattered to the four winds, only to be reunited decades later on a WhatsApp group. The madness is this: we actually believe that nothing has changed. That the boy who sat three benches behind us is still that boy. That the girl who topped every examination is still nervously checking her answer sheet. That time, that great leveller and wrinkler of faces, has somehow made a polite exception in our case.

It hasn't, of course. But the beauty of our little caravan — our Yaaron Ka Kaarvan — is that it doesn't matter. Because what we share is not youth. What we share is something older, deeper and considerably more indestructible than youth. We share a story. And every member of this group is a chapter in it.

Allow me, then, to introduce the cast. No names — where would be the fun in that? Besides, they will know who they are. And so, I suspect, will those who know them.

---

The Caravan Sets Off ....

With the Generals who Defended our Frontiers

We begin, naturally, with the man who holds the caravan together. A soldier by profession and a gladiator by temperament, he is the kind of man whose opinion arrives before he does. Fiercely opinionated, aggressively articulate, and possessed of a pen that cuts like a ceremonial sword — he is the group's conscience, its provocateur, and its unlikely glue. He will disagree with this description. Loudly. Which rather proves the point. He has done us proud, after a distinguished career in uniform. He is the group's genuine chronicler, who never misses a date to reckon with, for any of the schemers. Reunions, when they happen, don't really conclude before we get to indulge in the passionate narratives chronicled by the mastermind. 

Then there is his fellow man in uniform — though this one, it must be said, wandered into the army somewhat by accident. He is really an artist, a dreamer, a man more at home with a paintbrush than a parade ground. He disappears for months at a time — one suspects he is somewhere sketching a mountain or composing a haiku — and then reappears with perfect quiz scores and a detailed itinerary for a group trip planned precisely thirteen months in advance. The army made him disciplined. Nature made him poetic. The combination is entirely charming. That said, it was amazing to see his commitment and passion when he got to work with JD/SD students, deep down south, with an enthusiasm that knew no bounds. His epic speech, rendered during the early winter of 2018 at our alma mater. is still afresh in memory

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The Admiral, The Adman, and The Ancient Reptile

No chronicle of this group would be complete without its most beloved figure — a man who spent his finest years navigating the seas as a naval officer, rose to the rank of Commodore, and then, as if that were not enough, went on to command a large and prestigious public sector organisation. What makes him extraordinary is not his career, impressive as it is. It is his heart. He has attended every wedding, every funeral, every moment of crisis that any member of this group has ever faced. He arrives before he is called. He stays longer than he is needed. He is, in the truest sense, the kind of friend that legends are made of.

Our adman, on the other hand, makes legends of the present. If this group has a pulse, he is it. A career in media and advertising has given him an inexhaustible supply of content, positivity, and the curious ability to reply to every message approximately four seconds after it is posted. On days when the group falls silent, one only needs to wait. He will arrive, bearing links, jokes, inspiring thoughts, and general exuberance, like a one-man festival that never quite ends.

And then — ah, then — there is the Crocodile. He earned this affectionate title not through any menace but through a magnificent, unhurried stillness that has descended upon him in his later years. In his prime, he was the class comedian, the most enthusiastic organizer of reunions, a well-travelled businessman who had seen more of the world than most of us had seen of our own cities. The Dundee hunted down all, even the global brigade across the seven seas and consolidated the Caravan. Now he basks. He is content. He moves when he feels like it, which is rarely — unless the right person calls. There is one member of our group who has the mysterious ability to fetch him, rather like a faithful retriever summoning an ancient, dignified crocodile from the riverbank. When he does appear, the group is always the better for it.

No account of this section would be complete without the First Lady — and I use that title with complete sincerity. The wife of a distinguished public sector executive, she presided over our group's gatherings in our shared hometown with the effortless authority of someone born to host. When our caravan descended upon that small town for a reunion, it was she who ensured that no one went unfed, unattended, or un-smiled at. She shepherds a flock — our flock — with warmth, ebullience, and a quiet efficiency that makes it all look entirely natural. Reunions happen because of people like her. The rest of us merely attend.

---

The Global Brigade

A considerable portion of our caravan has, over the decades, relocated beyond Indian shores — some to the Near East, some to the Far West, and at least one who appears to be running out of planet.

This gentleman — a high-net-worth software professional turned businessman — has conquered so much of the earth that one genuinely wonders what comes next. He manages hectares farmlands that stretch as far as the eye can see, and yet he is simultaneously to be found on another continent entirely, biking across countries or catching flights. Mars, one imagines, is merely the next item on his itinerary. He may even be dreaming about landing on the Titan on far flung Saturn!

Then there is our man in a Nation, which was once a known for its Imperial certainty, now almost transformed by migration — a software professional who, after years of shuttling between homeland and what was once considered an entirely diurnal empire, applied that most ancient of Bania instincts — impeccable judgment about where to plant one's roots — and settled firmly in the land of his country's former rulers. The historical irony is delicious. He drops in at reunions like a visiting dignitary, sings happily, charming everyone, and then disappears back across the seven seas.

Our Maple leaf chapter is represented by a man of many talents — a gifted mastermind and designer who built beautiful things in India before deciding that the ‘True North’ suited him rather better. He is a cheerful presence at reunions when he makes them, and is distinguished by a hobby so magnificently unusual that one must pause to admire it: he collects matchbox labels. Not stamps. Not coins. Not medals. Matchbox labels. He is, apparently, the only phillumenist most of us will ever know. In a world of collectors, he has found the road less travelled, lit a match, and followed it.

Then there is the other Bania — and here one must tread carefully, because to call him a Bania in the conventional sense would be a grave injustice to the man. Where the community is celebrated for its legendary prudence with money, this gentleman is its most glorious exception. He is generous to a fault, gentlemanly to the core, and possessed of a romantic sensibility that would make poets envious. He built businesses, bought businesses, sold businesses — with the quiet, lethal efficiency of a grandmaster who makes it all look effortless. And then, having thoroughly conquered the commercial world, he retired to a life of magnificent leisure — yachting, kayaking, trekking up mountains, dividing his time between continents with the nonchalance of someone for whom geography is merely a minor inconvenience. He is, by some distance, the most romantic member of our group. 

Our Detroit pioneer deserves special mention — she was among the very first of our group to make the leap to America, doing so in the late nineteen-eighties when such a move required considerably more courage than it does today. She settled in the Motor City and built a distinguished career in the automotive industry. The girl who always sat in the front row of class went straight to the front row of the American dream.

And then there is the man in the Middle East — quiet, modest, and by all accounts one of the physically fittest people in our entire group, which considering the competition is no small achievement. He was a front bencher in class whose brilliance kept the room thoroughly illuminated, did a stint with a public sector undertaking, and then found his calling in instrumentation - a precise, demanding field that suits his precise, observant temperament perfectly. He is a silent watcher, a man who absorbs everything and reveals little. I have had a particular fondness for him since our school days, and I suspect that those who know him well consider themselves quietly fortunate.

---

The Ladies of Quiet Grace

Any honest account of this group must pause, slow its pace, and speak with particular tenderness of certain women whose stories deserve more than they have been given by the world.

There is the one who was academically brilliant beyond measure — the kind of student of whom teachers say, in hushed and admiring tones, that she could have been anything. She chose, instead, to be everything to those who needed her. An entire generation of ageing relatives — parents, aunts, elders — found in her a tireless, selfless anchor. The group has grown quieter for her in recent years. But those who know her understand that her silence contains more wisdom than most people's words.

There is the central banker who carries within her the ghost of an extraordinary career that circumstance gently redirected. Quiet in a crowd, razor-sharp in private conversation, she was once spoken of as a future titan of Indian industry. Life, with its habitual indifference to such predictions, had other plans. She bears this with a grace that is, frankly, humbling.

And then there is the one who refused — magnificently, stubbornly, inspiringly refused — to be confined by the smallness of her surroundings. She nudged her husband out of their semi-rural comfort zone, flew to the Far East, earned advanced degrees and a doctorate in new age studies, and built a thriving healthcare practice from scratch. She did not break through the glass ceiling. She simply walked through the wall.

---

The Professionals, The Free Spirits, One Magnificent Baroness and a Vanished Mystery

Our professional brigade is formidable. A missile man — quite literally, a man who helped manufacture BrahMos, one of the world's most feared supersonic cruise missiles — has retired to tend to his elderly mother in his village and to sing Kishore Kumar songs with a voice of surprising beauty. A man of absolute precision in his professional life, he brings that same precision to his friendships and never misses a reunion. And now, in a development that has taken even his oldest friends by surprise, the precision has found a new instrument: he has quietly taken to the guitar. Word from the village is that a Kishore Kumar classic is already being rehearsed with the same no-nonsense discipline he once brought to missile assembly lines — and the group can safely expect a rousing rendition of 'Kya Hua Tera Wada' at the next reunion, guitar in hand, taking our memories back to Bhanja Mandap.

A distinguished IIM alumnus who spent decades at the summit of Indian corporate life has hung up his official shoes and now divides his time between consulting and music — driven always by logic over emotion, and blessed with a tolerance for the group's various eccentricities that borders on the saintly. We haven't seen a more serious but exuberant participant in our Reunions.

And then there is our Textile Baroness — and if the previous portraits were studies in quiet grace, this one is a study in magnificent presence. She began as a business executive, married into an entrepreneurial family of considerable standing in the textile city of the South, and then — with the calm deliberateness of someone who always knew exactly what she was doing — became a formidable entrepreneur in her own right. She today commands a large group of companies that are, among other things, in textiles. The 'among other things' is doing considerable work in that sentence. Three words describe her with complete accuracy: Affluence. Eloquence. Grace. She carries all three simultaneously, effortlessly, and without the slightest suggestion of effort.

---

There is one member of this caravan whose presence I very nearly overlooked — an omission that the Adman, true to form, was swift to correct. Some people are simply too significant to miss, and this gentleman is very much one of them.

He is, in the most literal sense, a self-made man. Beginning in middle management at a large textile firm near Pune, he worked his way up with the quiet, determined consistency of someone who never once doubted where he was going — all the way to the Board of the group, and then onward to their Mumbai headquarters, where he now sits as a figure of considerable authority. From the factory floor to the boardroom — that is not a career. That is a conquest.

But what I remember most about him has nothing to do with textiles or boardrooms. In our school days, when the rest of us were preoccupied with cricket scores and Singadas, this young man was quietly introducing his classmates to a different world entirely — the Divine Life Society, the magazine Wisdom, the luminous universe of the Ramakrishna Mission. He carried spiritual literature the way other boys carried comic books. He spoke of Swami Vivekananda the way others spoke of film heroes. And somewhere, without quite realising it, he planted seeds in young minds that have never entirely stopped growing. I will confess something. Whenever I encounter a photograph of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa or Sarada Devi — those serene, timeless faces — my mind travels, without fail, to this classmate of mine. I am not entirely sure whether that is a tribute to him or to them. Perhaps it is both. 🙏

Then there is the RevOps Romeo — a title he has thoroughly earned. He was, in school and college, a young man of considerable charm and romantic inclination, which meant that academics occasionally played second fiddle to matters of the heart. After a period of finding his direction, he flew abroad — first to the Near East, then onward to the United States — and reinvented himself spectacularly as a Revenue Operations professional who now heads a Client Acquisition Team. The poetry of this is not lost on those of us who remember him: the boy who spent his younger years acquiring hearts is now, professionally and triumphantly, in the business of acquiring clients. Some skills, it turns out, are entirely transferable. He recently celebrated his 60th in a traditional manner, (Congratulations!) when he flew down to BLR.

Our ‘once’ melodious pathologist is a woman of quiet, enduring grace. She was among the most studious of our classmates in school, and possessed of a singing voice that made school events considerably more worth attending. Her school journey was interrupted in the late seventies — life has a way of rearranging one's plans — but she persevered, went on to study medicine, and today runs her pathology laboratory with the same quiet dedication she has brought to everything she has ever done. She participates in the group with perfect calibration — never too much, never too little, always exactly right. Universally liked is an overused phrase. In her case, it happens to be entirely accurate.

And then there is the one I think of as the eternal wanderer — a man whose academic journey was, shall we say, non-linear. He began as our senior, became our junior through the philosophical mechanism of trivializing examinations, visited our class for a year, and somehow in the process became one of us permanently. He went on to serve in the military, acquired considerable technical expertise, and has now retired as an aviation MRO professional — maintaining aircraft engines and keeping airports operational. The boy who dismissed his exams as inconsequential, had until recently, in the most literal sense possible, kept aircraft in the sky. There is a life lesson in there somewhere, and it is an extremely encouraging one. We all learnt from him what to do in an exigency- Simply ‘Parget’

Our singing dynamo — and there is no other word for her — has recorded somewhere in the region of three thousand songs on a social media platform. Three thousand. She is ebullient, dynamic, fiercely independent, devoted to social causes, and constitutionally incapable of a dull moment. She is the group's permanent celebration. She seems to alternate between ‘the overseas Doaba, Trumpland and Modiland. Last heard to have tried a forcible entry into Mr Yedukondalavada’s abode! Wonder if she succeeded in bestowing the coveted 'darshan' upon herself.

And then there is the mystery. A Silicon Valley veteran who blazed through the technology industry's most exciting decades, lived a full and eventful life, and then — vanished. Last reported somewhere in the California hills, possibly on a ranch, definitely unreachable. Her WhatsApp ticks stubbornly remain single. Her LinkedIn has not been updated. She has, it appears, retired not merely from work but from visibility itself. We miss her. We also slightly envy her.

---

Those We Carry With Us

A caravan, to be honest, must also carry its absences.

Two members of our group are no longer with us. One — the class comedian, a mechanical engineer who reinvented himself in the software world and lived with joyful, generous abandon — was taken by the cruelties of the Covid winter of 2021. The other, a senior government officer on the very cusp of a well-earned retirement, a man who danced with his wife at every reunion with the unself-conscious joy of someone who understood that life's pleasures are not to be postponed — was taken on an ordinary Monday morning in January of this year, during a walk. Just a walk. Fate, when it is cruel, is very cruel indeed.

They are not absent from this caravan. They travel with us still — in the laughter that echoes a little of theirs, in the dances we remember, in the spaces at the reunion table that we set and do not speak of.

---

And Finally — The Hillranger

Every caravan needs a few to bring up the rear, keep a quiet count of the stragglers, and write it all down afterwards. That, for better or worse, is me for one.

I am a freelancer in a plethora of trades, revivals being one of them and a writer by compulsion — though I am told I say considerably more on paper than I ever do in person, which my classmates will confirm with some amusement. I am done with serious work and am now on “AMC” mode in the revived entities. I have a village home amidst lush green fields, a trust that tends to a temple and the children of the tehsil, a humble hut up the hills near some prehistoric caves where I collect Jadi-booti, and a blog called Meadows where I deposit my observations.

And we have this group. This magnificent, improbable, irreplaceable group of people who went to school together in a small town, scattered across the globe, and somehow — against all odds, across all distances — kept finding their way back to each other.

---

The Caravan Goes On

यारों का कारवाँ चला, कारवाँ चला.

The years have passed. The hair has silvered. The knees have opinions. But the caravan — this extraordinary caravan of soldiers and admirals, admen and crocodiles, missile men and matchbox collectors, RevOps Romeos and melodious pathologists, singing dynamos and vanishing acts, First Ladies and eternal wanderers, quiet heroines and global wanderers — rolls on.

And it will keep rolling. Because that is what caravans do.

Because that is what friends do.

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The views expressed herein are purely personal, warmly intentioned, and offered in the same spirit in which one might nudge an old friend in the ribs at a reunion — affectionately, perhaps a little too firmly, but always with a smile.

If your sensibilities have been offended, your dignity bruised, or your carefully constructed public image gently dented — the author is sorry. Mostly. He is also fairly certain you will get over it by the time the next round of chai arrives.

All characters depicted are real people living real and remarkable lives. Any resemblance to fictional characters is entirely the reader's imagination.

© The Hillranger, 2026. All rights reserved.
First published on Meadows — hillranger.blogspot.com

Unauthorised reproduction of this content, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of the author, is prohibited — though the author suspects his classmates will screenshot and forward it anyway, which is, frankly, the highest form of flattery he can imagine.