When was the last we were so easily happy?

My life has been so uneventful; even I would fall asleep if someone else was narrating it to me.

I was not a troublesome kid.
That title would go to my brother, he was The one who squirted Farex back to my mother’s face every time she tried to feed him, The one who made my parents suspect he had some hitherto unknown strain of unmanifestable rabies because of acute hydrophobia displayed during baby baths, The one who fell back to the road when my father tried to make him sit on the back seat of his scooter instead of planting him on the foot stand, hell even The one who looked so cute as a kid random old ladies on the street would come unbidden and tell person carrying him that he closely matched their mental image of Lord Krishna.
But me, you ask?
I was the will keep Farex in mouth before ingesting, baby bath liking, clutching father while on scooter and never matching old woman fantasies kind of kid.
Yeah, the uneventfulness cycle started very early on.

School was not much better.
I was a good student, my teachers liked me.
I was too scared of the reputation aspersions missing homework would cast, so homework was never missed.
Our Kannada (which was my first language in school) teacher used to make us write the much hated copy book which had to be submitted to him every Monday. The idea was to write 1 page each day in a two lined book which was supposed to make your handwriting round and symmetrical and also make you learn your lessons better because we would mostly write the textbook chapters in the copy book.
But I at least had to bend the rules, if not break them, right?
So in Gandhigiri-type protest, I would write all 6 pages on Sunday afternoons (not one every day as stipulated. Delinquency starts off in such small ways only!) And further, I would even venture so far as to pick something else every week to be the content and never write from the text book. Stories from Dinakkondu Kathe (‘A story for each day’, popular Kannada comic book), Sudha (a Kannada magazine), Byrappa’s novels my mother liked to read or if I was in a hurry to complete, my own story about something.
So you can imagine how much on the wild side I walked.

English copy writing was decided in a pretty progressive manner. You had to write only if your handwriting was deemed untidy and needing improvement. Those having decent handwritings were exempt. And I, you guessed it, fell into the latter category. (Our teachers never made us learn cursive. We were supposedly in an exclusive, experimental school – 1 of only 4 of its kind in India. I can mentally already see fellow school mates clutching belly and laughing at this!)

I think I have set the background enough to make you appreciate what constituted our idea of fun. We were a co-ed school. But boys barely existed - in lunch time gossip, inside jokes - till class 6. They were taken note of only when they got really good marks or did something outrageously naughty, to you of course. Say squirt ink all over your cream shirt or ruin your ‘Surface of moon’ science project by stamping on it or such like. Conversation was pretty non-existent between the sexes till around class 6. Class 7 onwards it was a different story; we were late bloomers even there.

The air changed pretty drastically when we came back from the summer holidays for Class 6. We collectively decided it was high time we be 'old' and hence, people were assumed to be in ‘love’ with each other all the time, crushes were discussed in great detail among ourselves, compatibilities were furiously tested using the then very famous ‘Flames’ method (where you write the 2 names in question and start striking off common letters and somehow arrive at a percentage which was the ‘love success’ rate. I am hazy about the details, anyone know what I am talking about? What was the calculation?!)

“Hey, he asked her for rubber (eraser). Yesterday he asked her for her scale also. He’s got to have a crush on her”
“God, that guy keeps staring at me all the time”
(This was a very common grouse and our class teacher then had a really innovative answer to that. She would ask in return, “To know he keeps staring at you always, you need to be looking at him always too. You do that?”)

And pairing up people was the most favorite past time.
There always used to be lesser number of girls than boys in the class, so all girls were assured of a ‘pair’. Not much ever happened in real life to substantiate the pairings, but we never tired of working out the various permutations and combinations.
We used a fairly logical formula to arrive at the guy most suited for you:
1. If there had been more than 2-3 lines of voluntary conversation, it had to be love.
Routine talk like asking for way, fighting for more bench space when you sat next to each other in some periods, minor shoves during morning assembly rush were discounted.

2. If you had no such love interest, the Group collectively picked one for you.
Things considered ranged from:
a. Parity in height, weight, appearance
b. Parity, to an extent, in marks scored (we girls were pretty discriminating even then!)
c. Flames score – crucial, sometimes could override other arguments
d. X-factor, determined by the Group (which was mostly used to pair up the girls for whom we
couldn’t find a pair by the above criteria)

General wisdom, perpetuated by trusty stereotypes, dictates that the class jock should get the head cheer leader. Of course, in sunny south India kids didn’t play American foot ball and spontaneous cheer leading would have given way to either Bollywood style dancing or Bharatanatyam on the field. But we did match the most popular girl with the cricket star in the class. No girl herself voiced a choice most of the times, for that meant ‘feelings’ from her side and eternal ribbing from our side. So, the Group was essentially God and we perfected a form of socialism in the realm of matchmaking.

Now, I being kind of nerdy but nevertheless kind of popular, at least among girls, got a soft spoken, silent guy as my ‘pair’. The Group decided that we were ideally paired and our Flames score was among the highest in class!

So many afternoons spent doing this, ensuing gossip and laughter when following the ‘pair’s activities – such fun.
We were so easily happy then!
And though handpicked by the Group, I always ended up with a guy, which is much better than my current scene.
Oh, did I mention he was cute? :)