text: Thanks for reading. Happy to hear any inputs. Sonti The Sophist Sonti was my friend. We were about the same height, though he had a slightly darker complexion than me and a chubby face. His long dark hair was combed and parted over his left eye. Strands of hair would fall over his right eye which he would flip with a twist of his head to bring them back over his head--a characteristic display of his irreverence. I don’t know when he got the nickname “Sonti”. Maybe when we were in our second grade? I remember he fell from the mango tree at our school, fractured a bone in his right arm, and stayed at home for two months. When he came back to school he started learning to write with this left hand. As was the norm in our class we ridiculed him as “Sonti” (lefty). Whatever it was, the name “Sonti” stuck with us: only teachers at our school knew his real name. He made exaggerated claims about his struggles to learn to write with his left hand. But his other stories and claims captivated us even more. Like that one time in our third grade he told us about how he learned to ride a bicycle by himself: His father had asked him to rent a bicycle at Kumar’s Bicycle shop near his house and bring it back home. “First I chose the Hero bicycle that was about this length,” he lifted his palm to his head, “and I asked Kumar if it was a good vehicle. Kumar assured me it was the best he had and wrote my name in his notebook. He said he knew my father. I tapped on the seat twice with my right palm--just to check if the seat was ok. I looked around the bicycle and the air pressure in the tires seemed fine. Then I simply got on the bicycle and slid my right leg to the other side of the pedal, and slowly lifted my left leg onto the left pedal and balanced myself. I fell twice, for sure. It didn’t hurt me. After two attempts, I easily rode it like a monkey riding the bicycle,” he briefly paused to let us imagine a monkey riding a bicycle, “and I crossed the Seven Bisons bridge where I had to carefully drive on the side to give way to the No.10 bus. When I reached home, I told my father that I parked the bicycle outside.” He narrated it all so casually, as if the whole event was just like another leaf falling from a tree: pre-ordained and inevitable. Ennai, Mottai, Doku, and I listened in awe to hear Sonti’s mini travelogue. For us a third grader riding a bicycle by himself was quite a feat--or so we thought, till Sonti told us that he learnt it the very first time, by himself! One day during our fifth grade we were chatting at school before the morning bell. My friend Mottai was narrating his weekend experience riding the pillion of his uncle’s moped for the first time. It was a TVS-50, a lean 50-CC two-wheeled vehicle--in essence, a bicycle with a motor. “He drove for half an hour. Towards the end he went fast. May be 90-95km per hour, zhuuurrrrrrr.” He sounded like the roar past a supersonic jet engine. “I was frightened when he rode at 100 km per hour to overtake a truck,” my friend claimed. “100km. That is nothing,” Sonti dismissed my friend’s claims nonchalantly and continued, “One of my uncles has a Rajdoot. It is a large motorcycle,” his hands widened, “It looks like a big bull. My uncle and I went for a ride from our village to Madurai. He told me to sit in the pillion and told me to wrap my hands around his waist. But when we were returning, I asked if I could sit in the front, just above the petrol tank. It was dark in the evening. As he rode fast, I feared my dangling slippers might fall off. He even let me drive. I firmly held the motorcycle’s handlebar with both my hands. You know what I did?” he paused to look at me and gauge if I was following him, “I turned the accelerator and rode fast, rocket fast, at 150 or may be 200 km per hour. I overtook four cars and three buses and we came back home in half the time. My uncle was impressed with me. You know what he said? ‘This Rajdoot is yours’.” Sonti looked at us with his eyebrows lifted up. A casual swagger. “Is it that easy,” I asked. “It is, for me,” he shrugged. We nodded our heads in approval and looked at him with a sense of gratitude: at least, he is still our friend. “Super, super,” Ennai was emphatic in his approval. In sixth grade he ratcheted his claims even further: like that one time he told us that he had an uncle who was a District Superintendent of Police (DSP) and how he and his uncle went chasing a robber. “My DSP uncle asked my father if he could take me to Salem for ‘official work’ and my father consented. I was sitting in the passenger seat. An hour later he stopped at a roadside tea stall in a village. He ordered a Limca for me and a tea for himself. He described a person to the tea stall owner and asked if he knew his whereabouts. We walked towards the village and a man, who resembled a thief, started running away from us. My DSP uncle told me to stay behind and started chasing him but I also ran behind my DSP uncle. Fast and faster. When we finally caught him, the rascal couldn’t run anymore,” he finished with a triumphal grin. “Incredible,” we all muttered with our eyes open. “Why didn’t you chase him in the police jeep?” my friend Ennai wondered. “Don’t you know that roads are narrow in villages?” he bluntly rebuked Ennai. During the initial days of our seventh grade, he used to talk a lot about his pet peacock--a gift from his father’s friend. “My father is a government official. He gets a lot of gifts but he mostly rejects them because he is an honest man. When someone offered a peacock as a gift, I asked him if we could keep the peacock. He agreed under the condition that I would be responsible for its upkeep.” Before any of us could challenge his claim, he pulled a small iridescent blue and green colored plumage with a spotted eye in the middle from his back pocket and gave it to me: “This is a good luck charm. But you have to keep it inside a book. Otherwise the peacock will curse you.” My friends were envious, but I felt honored to be the custodian of his gift. There was one time when he claimed his family was related to the famous Tamil actor, Vijayakanth, and that his family always got free tickets to watch Vijayakanth movies. Who knew? Sonti once told us about how his father wrote to the state’s Chief Minister about improvements his father had suggested to a canal digging project and how the Chief Minister responded in a letter with grace and appreciation. “I think he might be promoted as the District Collector,” Sonti mused with a slight irreverence, as if his Dad becoming the most powerful man in the entire district didn’t matter the least to him. We were however excited at the prospect of having a powerful friend in our midst and were immediately curious: “Would you come to school in one of those police jeeps with a blue light atop?” “Would the police accompany you to the bathroom during recess?” etc. As was his habit, he simply shrugged--either he didn’t know or didn’t care or wasn’t interested in responding. One evening after school Dokku brought a picture of a tall building in the United States. The caption read: “The Empire State Building.” He said it was 100 floors stacked one on top of another. We took turns to look at it and gasped at the marvel. “How do you build 100 floors?” Dokku wondered. Sonti took a peek at it and paused. “This is all recently built. Anybody can do it,” he simply rejected the grandiose claims behind the Empire State building. “Did you know my ancestors built the Meenakshi temple in Madurai thousand years ago? Have you seen it?,” he sought our reaction and continued, “Even though people call it a thousand-legged hall, it has only 985 legs and the remaining fifteen are atop two shrines. Every pillar is sculpted with images of Gods. The entire temple was built by my ancestors,” he paused again wondering if his claims registered with us. “One thousand years ago,” he lifted his right hand behind him to emphasize the long past. “Think about it.” With those three words, he relegated Dokku’s wonderment into oblivion. Sonti’s stories were convincing. Whenever we challenged his claim, he countered us with questions for which we had no answers. Whenever we accused him as a cheat and a liar, he simply ignored it. One day, just as our afternoon session was about to begin at school, Sonti came running into the class and impatiently dislodged his school bag. He summoned the four of us into a huddle. His voice was frantic and he sounded tense. He gasped for a few breaths. “Somebody shot and killed Prime Minister Indira Gandhi today.” Our collective shock was shattered when the school bell rang. It was 1:00pm on the 31st of October, 1984.