Your Little Secret, Cricket, French Bakery, Tradition

So the new blogword is: SECRET

I’d like to take a moment and say, even this early on in my Wandering, how much I prefer blogwords to blogthoughts. True, a blogthought is only a thought… merely a couple of words more than a blogword, but the word has so much flexibility and the thought seems kind of limiting… maybe that’s why, in the Bible, the Word became the Flesh, and the Thought didn’t. Think about it.

Speaking of a waste of your time, here’s the rest of my posting this fine week, catalyzed once more by everyone's favorite Association (Pavlov's, in case you'd forgotten):

Secret. Little secret. Your little secret. Melissa Etheridge. 1998. O Level examination preparation. Nade. Lodhi. Lollipops. French Bakery. Cricket. Tradition.

Tradition is not what it used to be. My train of thought is still the same. A runaway. But seriously, allow me to explain.

Nade (Ali Shah) and (Imran Khan) Lodhi are two of my buddies from the olden days at Beaconhouse Public School (now known as Beaconhouse School System – seriously, who studies in a system anyway?). We would hang out a fair amount, not enough to get sick of each other, but enough to be identified as friends, if you know what I mean. Anyway, come O Levels (Class 11 mainly, the Os in Class 10 didn’t sink in well enough for me to take them seriously, hence the B and the C), we would get together at Nade’s house for “study sessions.” These “study sessions” generally involved the following:

Cricket
Like, the game, you know. Only we didn’t play with a bat… oh no, regular cricket was too simple for us. We had to play cricket with what must have been a broken chair leg as our bat. “Phatta cricket” we called it – phatta (remember the aspiration on the p) being the Urdu word for plank of wood – and we saw that it was good. Honestly, Nade’s driveway, large as it was, would have been tiny had we played with a real bat, so the phatta worked quite well. Many a fine inning was played using that broken chair leg. Many a game won. Many a career launched. Well, not really. But still.

French Bakery (French by name, not by nature)
Our study sessions invariably involved an hour long (minimum) trip to Khadda Market – Khadda (aspiration on the k now, haha) meaning ditch in Urdu, so literally Ditch Market, because it was built in a large bowl that had a hockey stadium in the middle, but the hockey stadium has nothing to do with the name – for provisions. As far as Lodhi and I were concerned, this trip meant bullying Nade into spending his allowance on us and our need for carbonated beverages, potato chips and lollipops. We always ended up at French Bakery, (which I believe is still there, across the road and to the left of Jimmy’s Studio for the reading Karachiites) run by a group of people who at various stages of my ignorance I believed to be Chinese, Afghan, Kashmiri and Vietnamese (but never French, although they could have been, though it’s quite unlikely). I hate to admit I’m still boggled by their potential ethnicity. Maybe one day I’ll ask them…
And if you’re wondering why a trio of 16 year old young men was at a bakery buying lollipops, I’m afraid I can’t help you. It’s just the way we rolled dawg.

The Melissa Etheridge Connection
So during one Khadda Market swing, we went into the music and movie store (I forget the name) next door to the bakery to browse. Forty five minutes later, the store owner kicked us out saying, and these were his exact words, “This is a music store, not a playground.” Haha. We were a little abashed… well, I was, so, to partially validate our visit, I hurriedly purchased an album Lodhi had recommended during our browse: Your Little Secret by Melissa Etheridge. Little did I know that thirteen years later, that moment would be the inspiration for a blog post. The blogword moves in mysterious ways. You’ll be happy to know though, that the music store of shame shut down not much later and as never reopened in the same location. Oh, the wheel of sweet sweet karma spins so sweetly sometimes. Sweet.

Your Little Secret turned out to be quite a decent album. There was this one song, I Could Have Been You, which I really liked. Part of the lyrics went like this:

I, I could have been you
You could have been me
One small change that shapes your destiny

Naturally, given my penchant for bastardizing songs, even my favorites weren’t safe… a friend of mine and I were singing this song in school a few days later and we ended up like so:

I, I could have been you *point at duet partner*
You could have been me *point at self*
We could have been them *point at random group of people*
Ewww *pretend retch*

Yes. Really high class, I know. Anyway, this is neither here nor there. Cricket and French Bakery were our traditions… notice that studying was not. But they were good times. Good memories. Good traditions.

On a side, Nade used to switch houses often (I think he was secretly a drug overlord or something… but he couldn’t have been because his cook made the best chicken corn soup ever… I miss Ishaq…). During our time at school, he lived in at least four different houses that I knew of. And, since I drove by them this summer, I know that three of those four have either been knocked down or knocked down and completely rebuilt. The fourth one I’m not sure about because I didn’t get a chance to go down that street. A little strange, don’t you think? Now, I’m not saying Nade is the reason for any of this destruction. Just saying, you know. Maybe he has a secret.

(And by now you’ve figured out that the last paragraph, although true, was just a long drawn out way for me to end my post with the blogword. Forgive me.)