I knew a guy about ten years ago. One year senior to me in school, good with a guitar, good in stuff like debates and extempore speeches. And major book-reader. We were pals, him and I – even though he was the guy who kicked me so hard on the seat of my pants one day that I lay down and could not move for about 3 minutes. ( it was my fault he did that, people who’ve heard the Beatzo Laugh will sympathize – and he did take me to the dispensary right after I could get up.) He was also the guy who saved my ass the day I brought a Marilyn Monroe poster to school, and some sneaky whippersnapper went off and tipped off the teachers. Took the poster from me, hid it in his bag, and after school was over, returned it safe and sound.

We never quizzed together, but we did bunk school for the occasional debate at the occasional children’s Book Fair. He led the school chapter of the Junior Red Cross in his last year of school, I took up the cross in mine. ( That last line didn’t really come out too well, did it?) On the day of the farewell, which the ninth class students have to organize for the seniors, we sat down in a deserted classroom and talked for hours. “Make sure you study hard next year”, I remember him telling me, in one of those brief “serious” moments, “And stop reading those comics in class.”

And so he passed out of school, and I did not see him again.

I tried to, really. His mother was a teacher in our school, and she left a couple of months after him, and they moved to Shillong. Over the years, I would hear vague things about him – he’s started a band, gotten into drugs, dropped out of college, he’s sobered up, he’s come back to Guwahati. But yeah, I could never get something important, like an address, or a phone number, or an email ID. Life went on, I went to college, away from Assam and a bunch of old friends who were turning into memories. Passed out, joined a job, changed cities temporarily, and yeah, you get the picture.

So last Monday I am having lunch at this joint near my workplace, a place I like a lot for it’s cheap chicken and non-veg thalis. Conversing with a colleague, when someone comes up to the table and says – “Beatzo Phreniac?” ( Well, not this name, he used my real one)

I look up, and there he is, looking exactly the same as he did eleven years ago, just a wee bit plumper. Fuck, I actually had to slap myself just to make sure this wasn’t some kind of weird hallucination or something. But yeah, there he was, and turns out that he has been in Bangalore the past two years. Understatement of the day – it was good catching up, really. He said he recognised me from quite afar, because I hadn’t changed at all. Which happens to be true, as everyone else keeps telling me.

But yeah, there is a good reason why I remember him to this day, and it does have to do with books. Now while Guwahati wasn’t a good place to get books, apart from the Bishnu-Nirmala Children’s Library, which had (duh) children’s stuff and the District Library, which was terrible – there used to be quite a few private circulating libraries – the ones with the good stuff you don’t get anywhere else, like Michael Crichton and Louis L’Amour and (drool) James Hadley Chase, but they were overpriced, at least for us penniless, school-going folk. So it was a happy time when one of these private libraries announced that it was essentially selling off all its books. We went there the first day of the sale, and spent a happy forty-five minutes browsing through and picking up books. ( I remember that was where I found my first James Bond novel “Goldfinger”, and part of the reason I bought it was the cover which had a still from the movie, and it was not Bond, if you get my drift.)

So we are looking through the titles, and suddenly I notice a book in the children’s section, one with a funny, children’s-booky title that didn’t really make sense, mostly because I had never heard of it before – neither had I heard about the writer, some chap with a lot of initials. I mean, what kind of a name is Tolkien anyway? I point it out, this guy goes “Ah!” – and shambles over slowly and picks it up. I paid it no more heed, there were other things to look at. The evening’s shopping done, we leave, and I ask him what kind of a book “The Hobbit” was. “A very good book.”, he says, “Tolkien is a writer you should look out for, he’s written this massive volume called The Lord of the Rings. I read that sometime ago, and I was looking for this book for quite sometime.” “So how much did you get it for?”, I asked. Very innocently, he says- “Oh, not much. Just ten rupees.”

Later on in life, I was to think much of the nonchalant “Ah!” and the ten-rupees price tag. Ah well, you live and learn.