AUTOGRAPH, PLEASE!

Have you ever given an autograph?

I have. Three days a week, for nearly two years.

Who's that lunatic, obsessed fan...are you thinking?

Please do not go by my current state of middle-aged aunty-hood. At that time, I was a svelte seventeen.

I was a boarder at Lady Brabourne College Hostel in Calcutta, and I used to autograph an egg with an indelible ball-point pen three days a week (give or take a day here and there).

Was I a mad, narcissistic egg-head?

Not really.

It was a nutritional survival strategy, actually.

The food at the hostel was, to put it mildly, meagre.

I still remember the first dinner we had at the hostel. Dressed up ridiculously with hair in five pigtails and face painted half-man-half-woman, bowing each time we saw a senior boarder (ragging was a rite of passage then, not a criminal offence), we shuffled awkwardly to our table - some excited, many homesick, all nervous. Only to be met with dubious, watery khichdi (rice-lentil gruel), equally dodgy tomato chutney and a shriveled piece of fried fish that the tiniest kitten would gulp down in one bite. Sitting down to this sorry repast, our hearts pined for home.


Actually, for home-cooked food.

No wonder we were all so thin during those days. (Now, how I pine for that long-forgotten slim frame)

So, to supplement the slim (and slimming) diet, we had to adopt other strategies.

The signed egg being one of them.

The hostel kitchens boiled copious quantities of water during the day - for tea, for hot water baths, for...now-don't-make-me-think-of-weird-things. And if we gave them raw eggs, they would return the eggs to us after boiling.

Pretty straightforward, don't you think.

Not so.

Eggs have an irritating tendency of coming in different sizes. (Not shapes. I remember reading an Agatha Christie where the cubist-perfectionist Hercule Poirot wishes that eggs were perfectly symmetrical cubes).

So, to be sure of WYGIWYG (What You Give Is What You Get), we signed on the eggs. In indelible blue ball-point pen ink. And also made smiley faces, flowers, hearts, stars and whatnot.

Like fame, these autographs were short-lived. 

They disappeared when we cracked the (boiled) eggs and ate them.

And, sadly, my chances of giving autographs have also disappeared.

Of course, discounting chequebooks, exam papers and the thousands of forms we fill up to survive.

WHERE DID YOU SIGN YOUR FIRST AUTOGRAPH?

MY MOST EMBARRASSING FAN-TASY

(Almost) Everybody goes through a FAN-tastic phase in life. One, at least. Or several, as in my case. Over those awkward, gangly-gawky growing-up years, I have been a fan of several different people from several different professions. Actors, singers, authors, sportstars…you name them, and I have had them up on my walls or deep in my heart.

Sometimes the adulation-relation has been a lifelong one – I just can’t get enough of Mr Amitabh Bachchan, for example. Or Agatha Christie.

But sometimes, the passion has been short-lived. And the intensity has been completely inexplicable once the phase passed. (OH MY GOD, HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SO-O-O CRAZY ABOUT SO AND SO?) I have done this from oooh-to-eeks deflating journey quite a few times, actually.

Take the eminently-nonentity Rahul Roy. When he first appeared in the movie AASHIQUI, strumming a guitar and lip-syncing to the nasal-but-memorable songs by Kumar Sanu, floppy hair hiding half his face (and covering up for his complete lack of expressions), it was fan-dom at first sight for me.

I was all of seventeen, living in a hostel with a gang of girls (all in their swoony-moony adolescence), and completely swept off my feet by this screen-hero who waited for his girl with a bunch of flowers outside her typing school, who came from a broken home and hated his dad, who cried like a child in his mum’s lap when love seemed to turn sour.

Teenage romantic filmy classics like BOBBY and JULIE were before my time. For me, and some of friends in Lady Brabourne College Hostel (Lopa, this is for you), it was this ordinary, sensitive and vulnerable hero of AASHIQUI, who believed in love, not violence, who ruled our hearts and raced our pulses. We bunked college several times to watch and re-watch the movie. In fact, I think we saw it seven times in all. Six times at the theatres. And one time in a riskily madcap adventure.

Around eight of us had slipped off from the hostel with no intention of attending classes, intent on catching the matinee show of AASHIQUI once again. But the show (at the now-defunct LOTUS cinema, I think) was, as the board proclaimed, HOUSEFULL. Then one of us said that we could go and ask the nearby video-cassette rental shop if we could hire the AASHIQUI cassette and watch it at their shop premises, since it was not possible to watch it at our hostel. But the shop-owner did not grant us our request.

Very dejected, we dragged our feet outside the college, unwilling to go in. We loitered outside the strangely-named stationery shop, DOLPHIN (located close to our hostel and much frequented by us) and poured out our woes to the sympathetic young (and nice-looking) owner.

The chivalrous fellow immediately offered to help us damsels in distress. He invited us to his house (a three storey mansion right behind his shop), sent someone to rent the cassette and showed us the movie on his drawing room television. He even treated us to colas, a luxury for us perpetually cash-strapped hostelites.

When we returned to the hostel, giddy with another dose of Rahul Roy’s maudlin heroics and the Dolphin-owner’s generosity, we were severely scolded by the rest of our friends for being foolish enough to enter a stranger’s house. “You could have been raped, or kidnapped! The cola could have been spiked, you idiots!" they scolded, and not without reason.

But, being fan-atics, we paid no attention. Head in the clouds, we wore our fan-dom badge proudly and loudly, defending Rahul Roy against charges of non-acting, silly-sissy hairstyle and suchlike.

Once, my friend Lopa and I, the giddiest-headed-ever fans of Rahul Roy, walked straight up to a BATA shoe-showroom glass door, kissed the life-size poster of Rahul Roy smack on the lips (he appeared in ads for North Star shoes and apparel) and walked off again, much to the open-mouthed incredulity of the security guard. But then, fans are supposed to be crazy.

Thankfully, though, the Rahul Roy phase soon wore off, although I valiantly tried to keep the flame alive by faithfully watching his next few quite-unwatchable movies, and I mourned (a little) his passing into obscurity. Imagine my embarrassment when he turned up decades later, chubbier-than-before but as wooden-as-ever, with the trademark floppy hair in place, in that terrible reality show for all kinds of has-beens and never-was-es – BIG BOSS. And he won it, too. Everybody teased me about my old and near-forgotten crush on the now-portly (non)actor. I almost died cringing.

DO YOU HAVE ANY FAN-MEMORIES WHICH NOW MAKE YOU CRINGE?

EGGS - FUNNY SIDE UP - II

Here's another egg memory, served with a slice of hostel-life as I lived it.

For two years (1989-1991) I lived in the Lady Brabourne College Hostel with a group of hip, hot (that's what we thought we were) and hungry (that's what others thought we were) friends. The meagre portions of indifferently-cooked hostel food barely sufficed. But we were allowed to supplement it with, among other things, eggs which we would have to buy ourselves and hand over to the kitchen staff to boil.

Now, eggs came at a fixed price (this was way before organic/free-range eggs made their debut) but in different sizes (depending, I presume, on the size and stamina of the hen concerned). The kitchen staff took all the eggs, boiled them in one huge saucepan, and left them on a large tray for us to collect. If we were lucky enough to get a large egg, we were loath to let other people eat our bounty simply because they had come down before us while we were stuck with a tiny, pebble-sized egg. The early bird would get the worm (or, in this case, the largest egg).

So, we devised a fool-proof system for establishing our ownership of any egg rightfully belonging to us. We would write our names on the shells with a ball-point pen (gel or ink pens would wash away), and then pick up our exclusive, personalised eggs, smoking hot and delicious, from the delivery-tray.

Some of us (including myself) would merely scrawl our names carefully - a utilitarian assertion of abdominal property rights.

Some creative souls would decorate their eggs with elaborate borders and patterns, taking a leaf out of the tradition of Easter eggs. These designer-eggs would be doomed, like sand sculptures which wash away in the tide, to crumble away in a bite.

A few athletic-types would crack the delicate shell while forcing their imprint on it. A similar fate could befall those who autographed their eggs with a careless flourish. (They could use the raw egg for a face/hair pack, I guess).

Whatever their size or sign, these marked-eggs were all destined, like Humpty Dumpty, to 'have a great fall' and end up in the pit (of our stomachs).

DO YOU HAVE AN EGG-CITING RITUAL TO SHARE WITH US?

A GHOST STORY

I am not a ghost-story-fan. The pleasure of reading or listening to ghost stories has a distinctly masochistic edge which gives me no joy.

But as a newbie in the hostel (Lady Brabourne College Hostel, where I spent two rocking-and rollicking years in the new-born nineties) my friends and I were the spellbound and open-mouthed listeners to the traditional resident ghost story, part of the myth-making integral to any institution, which is passed down through generations.

The story was about the next door Medical College Hostel, where the would-be doctors and surgeons had access to corpses and corpse-parts. In a fantastic regulation-flouting (and completely fabricated, I guess) incident, a plan was supposedly hatched to scare the wits out of a rather belligerent, 'over-smart' girl. Her irate seniors put a human arm (detached from the body, or so we were told) under her pillow. The poor girl was literally frightened to death when she fumbled under her pillow in the dark and found the nasty surprise.

In hindsight, the story seems ludicrous. But told in the dimly lit staircase of our hostel, with suitably suspenseful exaggerations and pauses, it scared us to immobility and irrationality . This effect was accentuated by the additional information that the room under the staircase where we were sitting had once witnessed a suicide (which is why it had no ceiling fans - this was the logical grounding to this gothic rumour).

All of us were scared. There is a shivery thrill in getting scared if you are in group which is completely lacking if you are alone. Round-eyed and goose-pimpled, we sheltered each other as we crept up the stairs to our (thankfully) two-seater rooms, but I at least had a nasty night tossing and turning, imagining the decaying slimy-grey coldness of the no-longer-human dismembered arm under the poor girl's pillow (in my nightmare, of course, it was transferred to my pillow and, supernaturally, it creeped out to clammily and gruesomely touch me).

DID YOU EVER GET SCARED BY A GHOST-STORY? OR BY A GHOST?