The Story of VJ Waghray
Many years ago, the sun dawned on a peaceful day on earth. The postmen of the idyllic small town, which would later be infamous, set out on their daily journey. The milkman woke up to bother the cows. A cool breeze left the trees elated. People were released from the arms of sleep; they hurried to reach their respective workplaces.
The postmen, milkman, breeze, trees, people, and even the sun for that matter, were blissfully unaware of the calamity that was to befall the world that day.
In a small clinic, not far away from the milkman's hut, a large, toad-faced man paced outside the labour room (if you could call the part of the shack separated by the flimsy curtain that). His face was dewy with perspiration; it was his first child, after all. A similarly agonized face behind the curtain screamed; and a minute later the doctor held the new soul that had entered the world. He was delighted that he had a part to play in the birth of this new child (no, it's not in the way you're thinking, you pervert!) but the emotion vanished a second later when, with a cry, the new born bit off a chunk of the doctor's arm.
The doctor's yell rivalled that of the mother's in labour; he dropped the little devil on the floor. The impact that followed displaced the partially developed, hormonally imbalanced, pea-sized brain and altered its position in the cranium. A few neurons shorted out and -- long story short? -- the kid would definitely turn out to be mentally disturbed and abnormal to an infinite degree.
The nurse, brushing aside the chunk of flesh, drew the doctor's attention to something more noteworthy-- ' Er, doctor? He's uh...he pulled the mother's intestines out, too.' (Excuse the morbidity of the situation; the kid was just BORN violence-crazed).
The infant sat up and looked around. He found a scalpel and stared at it for a good two minutes before he began twisting it out of shape. Another minute later, it was in his stomach, gurgling away in the acid.
You're probably wondering why the newborn was so well developed already. It was because he was born late-- 4 months past the due date. His narrow-minded, pious, and superstitious parents had proclaimed this as a message from the Almighty, heralding the birth of a prophet.
Oh, sure-- it was a message from God-- only wrongly interpreted. What He meant to say was-- 'Holy shit! I made a mistake! Don't let that kid out!'
The hospital was evacuated within the next 24 hours, because they did not have enough gas masks to hand around. The kid had started eating all the metal instruments he could lay his eyes on. Basic chemistry tell us that a metal and acid (in the stomach, duh)gives us hydrogen gas. And the kid was evolving quite a lot of gas and letting it out-- both ways. The doctor and nurse died immediately of asphyxiation.
Things turned ugly when he took a liking to plaster and cloth. Four days later, two exhausted parents, along with two groups of police escorts and an army battalion, took their little bundle of, er, joy, home.
By the time the kid, named VJ, was one, he could eat every single thing synthesized by man without any side effects (well, if you ignore the steam billowing out of his ears and the need for gas masks). By the time he turned two, he could manually demolish steel beams like regular two-year-olds did to crackers by accident. When his third birthday rolled around, he had learnt to speak, and boy, he had a lot to say. No one could swear and cuss like he did, and no one could blow the top of his head off like him. You could actually see his red face and steam flowing out of his ears if you chanced upon him when he was three and a half; a winter and a spring later it was how he always looked. He was instantly rusticated from school after he broke 12 bones-- the other kids', not his own-- and all he did was roam around the city looking for kids to pick on. He hated kids, because they had shunned him at school; he became a local threat to people's safety, for he could incapacitate any adult as well.
When he was five, VJ asked his mother for a car, who, being a sane person despite the hardships she was being put through by the father-son duo, refused to allow him to drive.
'GAAAAAHHHH I want to drive, you
'VJ dear, you're not supposed to drive till you're 18 years old.. and don't use such harsh words... They hurt my ears..
'Hutt your
The rant that followed destroyed their seventh house since he had born; and the mother had second-degree steam burns at the end of it.
When he was six, he was booted out of town along with the family for infecting 17 people with rabies. When he was seven, he amputated a brave behavioural counselling expert's arm when the city he was living in appointed a panel of child experts to see him. Needless to say, he was banished from that city too.
You might be wondering how his parents managed to pay for all the damages incurred. They didn't. The good old taxpayer's money, in fact a good chunk of it, was allotted to it in the National Budget every year.
When VJ was eight, he ate his neighbours' new car because he didn't get a birthday present that tasted good (though his definition of 'tasting good' may be leagues away from ours). He ran away from home when he was nine, and overnight, pushed the newly-constructed bridge in Mumbai into the water. It was later covered up by the government by pressing a few contracts and a cash deal onto the contractor, urging him to take the blame.
VJ was ten when he made his first friend in the slums of Mumbai. He was an ugly brute who had been living on dung for his entire life; VJ felt that he had 'founded' his soul mate.
They first met at a traffic light when VJ was twisting the pole; he watched as some animal crawled on the road. A responsible citizen, on seeing the animal, stopped, but the cars behind went on ahead in all eagerness and hit the said citizen's car; which fishtailed around the traffic light and whammed into a pole. The very pole VJ was twisting.
His face turned as red as the red light on the pole in his fist; he searched for the cause of this calamity as his ears started whistling. The animal was still ridiculously crawling on the ground, having narrowly escaped by an inch. And that's when VJ realised that it was a horrendously ugly boy.
'YOU!!!! You--my--pole--GAHHHH!' he roared, his toad-like face scrunching up. And then he saw the boy's face and was temporarily speechless.
He was the ugliest thing VJ had ever seen; it made him go weak in the knees. Those large, triangular eyebrows; that twisted mouth; those flared nostrils; and that abnormal hair...
The steam from his ears turned pink; VJ looked like he was growing cotton candy from his filthy ears.
'Come here, I say..' said VJ, suddenly mesmerised with the way the boy swayed his hips and twirled his hands.
And thus began their volatile friendship, with VJ too soft to say anything to this boy, whom he had christened 'MNR'; MNR fed VJ with all the trash he found, while VJ protected MNR from all the slum boys. Indeed, all of Mumbai's slums were frightened by the duo. However, VJ and MNR quarrelled often; one such quarrel a year after they had met destroyed their bond forever.
'It could yable to be my hyappy buthday and you shameless bastud you get the nothing for the ...me?' MNR said, jutting his hip seductively to the side. VJ turned a spectacular red. 'Thuswy I tohl.. you get-taw-toff-da 'ouse!! Simply you tell that one and the 'ydrogen you emitting from the both ends of the tubular structure! It very bad, that one! Thussall! Thussall about the fwendsip! You ask me, no one know the frendsip like me. We friend, we kill eash-othar, that is the true fwenship! You bastaaad! Fussst you get out of the 'ouse, you could able to be ...thusall about the..ah!'
VJ, on protesting, received the biggest surprise of his violent life-- 'I'll kill you bastaaad! I'll show you the 'yderabadi way!!'
SLAP.
VJ left heartbroken, but swore never to forget MNR or the Hyderabadi way of showing someone something. He returned to his parents on the day he turned eleven; but let out his pent-up frustration on public property.
Three years later, he asked his father if he could do drugs. The creator of this brute didn't even finish saying 'No' when he found himself being run over by his neighbour's car.(VJ's fetish for neighbour's cars is yet to be explained; its is currently being debated by a council of eminent psychologists at Copenhagen, along with the issue of whether VJ's emissions contribute to climate change).
So VJ got into drugs and his face bloated up and turned uglier, and he lived in a constant fit of anger. A 'walk around the city' meant damaging traffic lights (another fetish), bullying a few kids, scaring the crap out of a few policemen, and drowning a few people at the beach.
When VJ was 17, he moved to Hyderabad, in fond memory of the 'yderabadi Way. He led his aimless, destructive life the same way he did in Mumbai, until he met the second man who changed his life.
He had been roaming around Lumbini Park, and spotted a bridge he could push over. He went to the beginning of the bridge, but was distracted by a ghastly prison on the road. FIITJEE Junior College, said the yellow board. When he reached the gates, he was again distracted by a traffic light, and began to twist all the poles on the road into triangles (remembering those lovely triangular eyebrows). Suddenly, he realised that a cartoon-faced man standing near the prison had been giving him the old eyeball all this time.
'Ay, you come here once!' said the man.
VJ nearly screamed with delight. HIs steam turned the slightest shade of lavender as he put on the macho-man act while he walked towards the prison.
'I have the job. Disciplinarian. You'll do?'
'Aah?'
'Arre, you beat the students and scare them. Foul language proficiency is a prerequisite, though.'
'
'You're in!' yelled Mr. R (for that was his code name), sagging with relief that he had at last found a man who could put all those students picking on him to their graves.
Mr. R, had, in fact, been conducting interviews for the post of disciplinarian all day. Disappointed with the timid and meek fools he met, he had come outside to take a breath of fresh air when he spotted a very-agreeable-to-the-eye man demolishing electricity poles.
Mr.R took VJ into his new office. Thermocol and plaster?? He LOVED it! The moment he entered he began chewing the wooden desk.
Mr.R yelled, 'VJ!! Where are your manners??'
VJ stopped midway, his jaw hanging over a particularly tasty section of the wall.
'You should ask before eating the plaster!' thundered Mr.R.
VJ hung his head and begged for forgiveness; there was something about the other man that he could not punch through. His knees weakened for the second time in his life. And after all, Mr.R had given him a plaster palace! What more could he ask for?
'Oh, and when you eat a wall, blame the students for it. Blame them for everything. That's all you'll need to do here,' advised Mr.R.
And thus began VJ's new life; he punched holes and ate Fiitjee's walls; he terrorised students, and loved Mr.R passionately. Somewhere down the line, after a few years, he got over him and instead dwelt on MNR. He tried retracing him, and that is how MNR ended up next to VJ's cabin at Fiitjee.
When the world will be rid of this disaster named VJ, we will never know. Till then we live in darkness and despair, with only a shred of hope to pass around.
* * *
Last link in the chain: A special thanks to Kaiser for that old entertaining morning break on the terrace where we cooked up this story I've expanded on. And his entertaining GK stories which finally pushed me to finish this one. =D
Another thanks to Ank for putting up with my idiosyncrasies every day of her life, and inspiring me to laugh a little more and breathe a little more =P
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