Woke up with thoughts of my school....wish I could go back there

I was in the seventh grade then, Christy, my best-friend was in the same class, same bench. The next year we were shifted to the new school building. Uptil then, from a long time back, our school was the barracks inside the military compound. We were surrounded by a large expanse of military land, abundant with trees and grass. There were long rows of class rooms, some of them with wooden partition which enabled the naughtier ones to peek through and maintain long-distance conversations.

Once the recess bell rang, the atmosphere would burst with the noises of hundreds of us. Christy and me, we would gobble down each others tiffin. Then we would run to the end of the quiet road and begin our tour of France and Italy and any other place we chose to. I was the imaginative one and she the humorous. We would spend the rest of our time visiting monuments and market places, conversing in french and italian, a word of which neither of us knew. Holding our hands and laughing our guts out at our own foolery till the bell rang and we had to dash back to our class.

Being amongst the tallest in the class we were seated in the second last bench with the bigger hooligans sitting behind us. Our desks were not large enough to take our bags, so we tucked it behind us on the bench. These hooligans would quietly give their desk a tug and there, our bags would be on the floor. After having picked up our bags for the umpteenth time that day, Christy stared at the boys and shouted ' All you chuha chaaps'..meaning all you rat moulds...and they immediately retorted back, You two bandar chaaps! That was the beginning of the Chuha-bandar war. The entire year was spent fighting them. Luckily the next few years they didnt pop up in my class. Sadly neither did Christy. Our tours came to an end, but never our friendship.

About almost a decade later I was walking through the busy lanes of Colaba when I halted to check the books at the roadside open library. As I ruffled through the pages of a book I heard a hello, there was this tall man looking at me expectantly, a smile on his face. He looked familiar and before I could control it I heard myself say ' chuha chaap' and he roared in laughter shrugging away my apologies. His eyes twinkled with mischief as he lowered his voice and murmured and you are still the same bandar...