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Lights Out! Lights Out! This is a true story. On my word. The scene: Class IX Dorm, Fern Hill – Diwali night, 1969. The school Fireworks is over. The boys are all back in the Fern Hill dormitory. Everything should have been winding down and boys should have been contentedly getting ready for bed after an enjoyable eveningon the main field. But all is not well in Fern Hill. The Cast: Birendra Lama - Chief Instigator, Mastermind & Rabble-Rouser. Mr. Jim Darr - Best Physics teacher in the known Universe & Fern Hill Senior Warden. Fifteen Class IX Boys - Willing participants. Six Class IX Boys - Unwilling participants. Kong King Liu - Big, tough, muscle-bound, scary guy from class X. Prasobchok Niamkongkit - Big, tough, muscle-bound, scary guy from class X. Kesang Thondup [‘Yak’] - Big, tough, muscle-bound, happy guy from class X. I blame Birendra Lama for the incident. Usually, we kept all left-over fireworks and used them up over the days after Diwali out between Fern Hill & the swimming pool [where the Round Building now stands]. This one year, however, having not had enough of the fireworks on the Main Field earlier in the evening, Birendra Lama instigated a bunch of us to have our own little fireworks display – inside the dorm. We started by taking a couple of sets of 6-foot-high upright lockers and propping them up, back-to-back [at about a 50-degree angle] against the Dorm door so that no one would be able to get in. Next, we drew all the curtains so that no one would be able to look in. Then we all got out all the fireworks we had left over and took inventory of what there was: Floor-Spinning ‘Charkis’ - 20 Small, red Chinese Crackers - 7 packets Large, red Chinese Crackers - 4 packets Sparklers – ‘Phooljaris’ - 5 packets Chocolate Bombs - 3 Double-Bombs - 5 . . . And, the piece de resistance . . . a firework I have never seen before or since – something that was a kind of rocket – but was meant to be hung on a clothes-line. When you lit it, it took off in one direction on the clothes line. Then, when the gunpowder had reached a certain point, it started twisting around and then propelled the firework in the opposite direction on the clothes line. At the end of this it was supposed to explode. After we had fooled around with a couple of ‘Phooljaris’, someone suggested we try a chocolate bomb. This was promptly vetoed and negotiated down to small Chinese cracker. When that first Chinese cracker went off sounded like thunder inside the dorm. We waited a whole fifteen seconds for teachers and senior boys to descend on the class IX dorm door. When no one did, we were greatly encouraged and forged ahead with the festivities. Not wanting the ammunition to get used up unwisely, we saw a need to formulate a plan in order to orchestrate . . . choreograph . . . synchronize . . . the event. Enter the pyromanic talents of the young Mr. Birendra Lama – stage left. Under his expert eye we strung all the explosive crackers we had in one long string along the length of the dormitory floor so that one would trigger the next and so on. Somewhere in this chain reaction was a fuse that went up to the clothes line rocket and lit it. The plan was that by the time the fire-crackers had all exploded, the rocket would take off across the dorm, reach the other end and then come flying back and explode in a fitting crescendo with the last of the double-bombs and chocolate bombs. The lights were turned off. We each got a sparkler lit and started waving it around. It was a pretty sight and one that I have never experienced again in my life. The thought of the fire-hazard never even crossed our minds. The dorm quickly filled up with smoke and soon all we could see was the disembodied, bright trails the hand-held sparklers left in the air as we swung our arms around. Over the sound of our shouting and through the billowing gunpowder smoke we followed shouted instructions to light the ‘Chakris’on the ground and started jumping around between them as they spun furiously around . At around this time we began to hear a knocking on the door. Some of the first boys to hear the banging sounded the alarm and got into bed. The lockers propped up against the door were looking good and appeared to be doing their job well and so the rest of us were not very concerned yet. Before we were quite ready, one of the Chakris on the ground got too close to the long string of Chinese crackers and chocolate bombs on the ground and set the chain-reaction off. At this point, events went irrevocably beyond our control [if indeed they ever were within our control]. It was bedlam in there with the smoke and the sound of the explosions reverberating within the glass-windowed dorm. Against that background, the pounding on our dorm door and the lockers rocking back and forth and on the verge of falling away from them seemed a distant threat. Still, reason had not totally deserted everyone in there and a few more of the boys felt that it might be a good time to get quietly into bed and pretend they knew nothing about what was going on in there. So . . . there they lay, under their blankets . . . propped up on elbows so as not to miss a thing . . . looking in a way almost detached through the smoke – like floating heads. Others, however, were beyond all reason. Time seemed to stand still. The noise and smoke and excitement had taken them past the point of no return and they just kept dancing around and yelling – intent on making the most of the special display. It would take more than just banging on the doors to restore reason in there. When the lockers finally tipped over and fell away from the doors with a crash to the floor, the first of the chocolate bombs went off and half of the boys were already in bed – peeping between the covers at the events. I had my back to the door and so was taken a little by surprise when I saw Darru rush into the dorm – followed by Kong King Liu, Yak, Prasobchok and some other senior boys. I made a beeline for bed and dived in and then spun around to look. Some of the boys were STILL dancing around! “They’re crazy”, I remember thinking to myself – still charged up with adrenaline – [like I was sane or something!!]. I think there was a lot of hysterical laughter amidst the shouting. The tide was turning, though. Darru was fast making center-stage his own domain. He danced around among the chain of crackers better than any of the boys had been doing earlier. In his defense, his dancing was aimed at extinguishing the chain-reaction. For a fleeting second a pang of concern stabbed at me, “What if he stops it before it reaches the rocket?”. I needn’t have worried. The next thing we knew, the rocket was blasting off. It was gushing sparks against the east wall of the dorm that faces Lebong. Seeing this new, more extreme, danger, Darru’s dance went from jumping around on Chinese crackers to an all-out sprint towards the rocket. Just before he got there, however, it took off – proving Newton’s Third Law: . . . equal and opposite reaction . . . fire gush out one way – rocket go opposite way. See? There was an educational angle to the whole thing. Darru almost reached it before it sped off, a little erratically at first, because of the knots in the improvised ‘clothes-line’. All the way across the dorm, from East to West, it sped along the string – with Darru in hot pursuit. We thought it was all over when it came to rest against the west wall and was still gushing out sparks eastwards. Even as Darru closed on it, however, the direction of the sparks suddenly changed and as he reached out to grab it, it sped off in the direction it had come from. It was more exciting than we could have imagined! It couldn’t have been timed better, either. I still marvel at how well it worked. I’m sure there have been more exciting Diwali nights at MH. NOT! All this time Lama was dancing around – ‘freaking out’, as it were. The rest of us were laughing till our stomachs hurt. The return journey of the rocket was much smoother for some reason. When it reached the east end it spluttered briefly before going off in a huge explosion which coincided with the triggering of the chocolate bombs and double-bombs! After that tremendously loud finale everything was deafeningly quiet – if you didn’t count the deafening ringing in our ears, that is!!! Every last one of those fireworks had burned out or exploded – what are the odds of that working out so well? And Fern Hill wasn’t an inferno or anything . . . just very smoke-filled in the class IX dorm. Amidst the dazed aftermath I remember Darru still running around and Pradip Verma getting a crack with a ruler that Darru was carrying. The rest of us had by this time dived into bed seeking the fragile protection of our blankets. Meanwhile, Darru somehow realized that Lama was the ring-leader [possibly because Lama was still dancing around and freaking out as though he hadn’t realized that the show was over] and started after him. That’s when Lama sensed the impending doom descending on him and decided to flee the scene of the crime. Agile as a monkey [Lama was the first Hermonite to do the Fosbury Flop at the school high-jump pit and up at NP for the Inter-School sports two years later], he leapt out of one of the south windows and sprinted across the courtyard where the round building now stands, past the pool and up towards the main field. If any of us had ever thought of Darru as nothing but the absent-minded professor [which we all had] our perceptions were about to change. With a couple of long strides across the dorm he hurdled right through the window in a style that would have made Edwin Moses proud. "Oooof !! Where did he learn that?” "No way he’s going to catch Lama.”, we thought. Imagine our surprise when, about four or five minutes later, through the same window they had exited from, Lama entered, looking very sheepish for once in his life. He was followed by Darru’s long, bony fist clenched around his shirt collar. Darru’s long, bony arm and a huffing and puffing, red-faced Darru himself, entered next. In his own inscrutable and surprisingly good-natured way [considering the magnitude of the breach of protocol with the fireworks], Darru stood in the middle of the dorm with Lama dangling helplessly off his outstretched arm – treading air. What a sight! I still remember it. Slowly, he did a full 360-degree turn – almost like a gladiator holding out the victor’s wreath to a crowded amphitheatre. We looked on in awe – speechless at the spectacle. Then, in a voice full of his usual good cheer and humour; his eyes sparkling as he puffed and panted, he looked at all of us as we lay in bed looking back at him and said what he always said to us last thing at night in that singsong way we all came to love and remember so well . . . “Lights out.” By : Robin Sengupta Graduated : 1971. Date : 4/12/2002 16:20 |
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