‘Burb Wire

I first met the ‘Bandra boys’ on the Willingdon gymkhana basketball courts. Similar though we may well be today, we were very different between ages 13 and say, 17.

The ‘Bandra boys’, I felt, became teenagers – the time, as Fresh Prince, Fonzie, Bart, right up till Eminem, brought us to understand it – two years before we did. They spent all their teenage years being teenagers, doing teenage things. Even at fifteen, in spite of watching the same shows, I was still much like Jamie Lawson (not even cool-ish like Carlton Banks), with the names of my crushes locked inside my brain and socks pulled way up to my knees, to name two things I hate to recall.

The same age as my friends and I, they knew a lot more about cool than we did. They understood the respect just being late brought along, knew how to ask girls out, how to smoke, how to walk – they even chewed gum like pros. Even on ‘our’ courts, they’d throw their voices farther than I ever did, talk trash, start fights, everything.

We began doing these things only a couple of years later. Eminem, Fresh Prince, Fonzie only sunk in when we were seventeen – eighteen, in many cases.

So, for the first couple of years, I didn’t understand why they’d never make it on time – even to their own courts. Of course I didn’t. I only did when cool hit me, and had to pick up a girlfriend and stop for cigarettes, apart from a whole lot of other essentials before heading for the court. Though, I could never get the entrance right.

– Gym Panzee