Prinking at the Dicnic

We’d convinced the Principal to let us go on an overnight picnic. In the hundred-year-old existence of the junior college and, to our juvenile minds, the equally centurion existence of the principal, that had never happened. Good grief! Boys and girls – 17 to 20 year-olds at that – together overnight! The maternity hospitals would be overflowing nine months down the line!

So there were a lot of compromises on both sides. All three sides, if you considered the girls’ viewpoint, or rather, the viewpoint of their mothers.

No booze, no staying up past midnight and girls and boys to stay strictly separate during the night.

It never occurred to venerable principal that what could be done at night under the influence of liquor could very well be done by day cold sober. Teenagers don’t need artificial stimulants like darkness and alcohol.

Anyway, d-day dawned and we, mostly 17-year-olds and a couple of 21 year-olds (what can I say? Some guys made failure a habit) gathered in front of the school.

As was expected, a bag-and-body search was conducted. One quart of rum and three cigarettes were found and confiscated. Nitin, all of 18 and therefore considered an oldie by us mostly-17-year-olds, was found to be in possession of a 250 ml. bottle of Dettol, which, he claimed, was in case of cuts and bruises when the time came to hike. His Dettol was returned, unmolested, to his bag.

Joss added a new word to the lexicon of Firdosh by saying, “Man, the Universe is really expandin’ tonight.”

Joss was our resident junkie, so it was no wonder he thought it was still night. Firdosh just naturally latched on to any new word he heard and “expandin’” was it.

The journey to the ramshackle condemned building we’d wheedled from a local potentate with property at various places was quite uneventful, if you ignore the episode of the girl who was pulled by her ear from my lap and the clip on Firdosh’s ear when he told the teacher she was expandin’.

So we reached our destination.

The place was a ghoul’s delight. The top floor had completely given way in a couple of places, so Nitin, Joss, Firdosh and I naturally took first dibs on it. The top floor was ours.

The ground floor was divided into two sections, one – the one with the bathroom – for the girls and the other for the boys.

The top-floorers moved on up and, after ascertaining, to our disappointment, that the missing floor tiles did not give a view of the girls’ section, repaired to the only room there and bemoaned our lack of alcohol.

Whereupon Nitin rummaged in his bag and produced his bottle of Dettol.

"C‘mon, guys," he said, “time to party. First class rum in a Dettol bottle.”

I shall not bore you, dear reader, with details of how that 250 ml. of rum then led to midnight attempts to frighten the girls – with Nitin clumping along in his military boots and Firdosh yelling, “Joss, stop expandin’” and self attempting to shush the three – self having had sufficient access to Pater’s hoard of rum to be able to absorb larger quantities of it than the others.

Suffice to say we were caught, hauled out to the courtyard for punishment and set to be made an example of.

“You boys have been prinking at the dicnic,” began the teacher.

She was never to complete the sentence. The roars of laughter just wouldn’t let her.

Deepak
PS: The above story is completely fictional. If you believe that, I have a couple of bridges you might like to buy. :-)
DM