When three KGPians go out for a night



Prologue
The pangs of rebellion. That’s what began it all. Pressure (or the seeming lack of it) has varied effects on people. I like to think that I, myself and my band of brothers deal with it by negating it to the stature of muffled yelps of a mongrel that you hate anyway. It might seem very escapist but then I rarely take anything that seriously. So what the hell if its escapist? Guys, it’s FUN.
On a moderately warm day in March in the year of our lord 2005, the aforesaid band experienced a slight ruffle. A splinter was sleeping, another trying to live a hero’s dream through their optimistically imaginative brains. For another though it was stifling. We needed a new kind of dope. But what new source of gratification might one find in our sleepy little hamlet?
Myself, Mr. Puerile Profundity, my pals the Ponglassian and the Honestly Rapturous moved to the Lounge aka Cheddis (something’s better on the other side). On the way
Back a solemn reality struck us in the face: our sleepy hamlet was huge. Hell, it even had its own airstrip.
We three knights of the empire of Hedoniss had just found our life’s purpose or better still we were ready to reclaim what had once been ours: our life and the fun that came along with it.

Present Day

We are walking along the path that links the air-conditioned torture chambers to the abodes of the propagandists of the world’s newest faith. The phase shift between the old and the new being not that luculent and we being the obfuscated children of a taciturn, conformist generation are allowed the luxury of being logical or illogical as time suits us. We want to be illogical (or probably too fiercely logical) at this time and so are. It strikes Ponglassian that wells go deep down to hell and (ohmigod) Samara (from ‘the ring’) is supposed to haunt the one among the cluster of trees. We want to be gullible, we want to believe, we want to be afraid and so when we see a well next to a deserted temple, we just don’t care about the trees. They are there somewhere in the background, but hey, everything aint perfect.
After we’ve scared our skin to Goosebumps comes the finishing touch. Honestly Rapturous sees a pale hand on the well’s sill illuminated by a flash of lightning. In retrospect, I wonder why she left us alone. I guess she naively presumed smokers don’t make good parents. (For the faint-hearted, the insipid and the unimaginative: there was no lightning.)

Onwards

Faint whistles tell us patrols can see us, so we switch off our torches. Its pitch black, we can see no cattle paths, the treeless wilderness stretches out in front of us like eternity. Guided by the light of an inconspicuous moon we make it to a stonewall twice higher than any of us. It seems freaky as such but our fear reaches its zenith when a spark lets us appreciate the gate.
Rusted but strong it is held by a chain turned over so many times it seems to be a mile long. Like someone’s been making sure the monster inside stays there. Mr. Rapturous though kills the fright (if you could do that) By observing that no matter how many turns a chain turns you still need to break it at just one point to allow the gate to open. HR immediately regrets his words after the reception of a (actually two) sardonic thanks. Made to whimperingly stand aside like the seeker in a hide-and-seek game who counted to hundred alright but counted too fast he entrusts his levels of adrenalin to the two masters of the game.
The patrol though has moved away. They’re probably despondent after watching us on the threshold of knowing their best-kept secret.
Things are about to get better (or worse). Ponglassian switches on his torch. The beam though falls at an angle quite incomprehensible (destiny!). There is no reason why the beam should point to where it does. It isn’t where either of us was looking; it isn’t even where either of us had looked. It is one silly angle. Though what it illuminates is awesomely unsilly. It reveals wall after wall of brickwork with each cell about a human being in height and two in width, which extends along an arc as far as our torch can help us fathom.
I had always suspected as much. If our hamlet had once been instrumental in suppressing a revolt of a phenomenal magnitude surely the six dingy cells near the old building couldn’t suffice as they had us believe
(But then they even had us believe the library was a fun place, remember the long queues for the library card just after registration? But that I’m afraid is another story).
And wasn’t that darkness that hung between every two walls the silhouette of a rotten carcass of a champion of our causes? Assuring them (as ourselves) that we’d come back on a brighter day and in a calmer state of nerves we decided to end our soirée. The journey back home didn’t take quite as much time as the one described above. Not surprising, considering the patrol finally caught up with us. (For the faint-hearted, the timid or the dead, the light of the subsequent day revealed the walls to be supports for a meter wide sewage pipe. How unexciting, right? But then as Mr. Poe would have said excitement is the spice of life, You cant have too much of it.)