The Long Long Days

All inhibitions evaporated.  Pushing, kicking and punching, the Forrester students sought to prevent their erstwhile opponents from entering the bus.  Their efforts were led by Seenu, the Forrester College light heavyweight who in his militant enthusiasm half got into the vehicle himself.  The students heaved.  The bus shook.  There was a desperate last-minute flurry round the two doors.  Despite the Forresters’ clutching hands, the single impulse of escape of the Vikramites could not be denied.  Within three minutes they were all safely ensconced within the decrepit walls of their bus.


“Driver!” came the urgent shout.  But answer there came none.  Then Mr. Thomas showed his mettle.  With one spring he was in the driver’s seat.


“Hold tight, boys!” he shouted, his moustache blowing up and away from his lips like a wind-sock.  He then stepped on the starter.  There was a long gargling from the vitals of the engine, ending in a bang as the ancient Ford back-fired.  And at that tactical moment the Vikramites leapt out of the festivities, leaving behind a white vapour of noxious hydrocarbons.  The gate was closed.  But it was no time for quibbling over petty impedimenta.  There came a rending crash.  The bus emerged into the road.  Its windscreen was starred into an elaborate cobweb, one head lamp was wrenched off and the radiator grille had caved in.  But on its bonnet stood a new imposing structure of green, gleaming woodwork:  it was half of the Forrester College gate…


P.M. Nityanandan’s first novel caputres nostalgic, exuberant and fiercely comic vignettes of campus life in the fifties in a southern Indian college.