Read The Eighteenth Parallel for Free Online

shirts falling over my shorts. My tuck-up at the waist also had the incidental advantage of reducing the unwanted length of the shorts. It was on this scene that there now descended two boys whose sole mission in life, for all intents and purposes, was to effect a change in the sartorial habits of the boys of Secunderabad, Raj Kumar and Ranga Ramanujan. Belonging as they did to the new influx into Secunderabad after the end of the war, both these boys had innumerable relatives in the army—a father, a few assorted uncles and brothers.
    Raj Kumar wore a new kind of shirt to school which was neither shirt nor coat. The shirt-coat had huge pockets and a stitched-on belt. This garment, Raj Kumar told us, was called a bush coat. Ranga's shirt was open in front and had buttons running up the whole length. While the rest of us had to push our heads through the necks of our shirts, he could put his shirt on like a coat, from the back. This meant that when the process was over, not a hair on his head would be out of place, while we could never get into our shirts without mussing up our hair. Ranga came from a school with a different system of education. Our school authorities must have found themselves in a quandary choosing a class to put him in. After he had sat in a higher class for a few days, he was assigned to our class for a week. He sat bemused throughout the Tamil lesson which went completely over his head. He didn't ever sit a Tamil exam.
    One day during Ranga's stint in our class, our English teacher decided to test our grammar. He wrote a long sentence on the blackboard for analysis. Pointing to a part of the sentence he asked, 'What clause is that?' The boys stood up one after the other without answering. Then someone said, 'Noun clause.'
    'No, next.'
    'Adjectival clause,' ventured another.
    'No, next.'
    'Adverbial clause,' said the next boy.
    These were the only three clauses we'd been taught. The whole class, not just I, was never quite sure which was which. To answer questions on grammar we always depended on our gambling instincts. Now that all these options had been exhausted, we wondered what clause it could be.
    The teacher continued to call out 'Next', 'Next', till he came to me.
    The teacher now looked like a veritable Shakuni of the Mahabharata, and the class took on the features of the Kaurava assembly. Then I cast the dice.
    'Parenthetical clause,' I said.
    There was a moment's silence in the class, a deadly silence.
    'Next,' called out the teacher. The next boy happened to be Ranga who sat first on the bench behind me. He stood up and said, 'Parenthetical clause.'
    At the end of the class the two of us exchanged smiles as befitted two geniuses at English. He wanted to know my name. And I felt the texture of his shirt.
    Two days later, Ranga was shifted to the next higher class, to Krishnaswami's section. We didn't speak to each other again until after he finished school and I had also got through my tenth without a hitch, and both of us entered the same college, Nizam College, which was five miles away. Ranga used to come to our barracks to play cricket with Krishnaswami's group, but for all they cared, they may as well have been playing in another country.
    The bush coat and the full-open shirt. Soon Secunderabad was also full of them. Tailors charged only a little more for these styles. However when worn with pyjamas these garments posed a problem. If you sat down in a chair, the front ends of the shirts parted to reveal the drawstrings of the pyjamas. A solution was soon found in the shape of pyjamas without drawstrings, a kind of trouserish pyjamas. I too had a pair of these made out of MS 55 cloth which was scarce in Secunderabad at the time. I pestered quite a few people to get this fabric for me. When at last I was able to go about wearing these trouserish pyjamas and a full open shirt, I felt like Janab Jinnah. Jinnah, you see, had the reputation of being the first among the world's best-dressed