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Showing posts from October, 2016

677 Runs

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Skinny Shakeel & Stout Tom, that’s what they called us in school. It’s all our Sanskrit professors’ fault. Mr. Upadhyay, the tall, lanky, perpetually unkempt language expert whose mannerisms very closely resembled the zombies from the walking dead. Most of us were hearing the word stout for the first time when he pointed at Shakeel and then me saying “You are so skinny, and he is so stout”. He wasn’t wrong, I was pretty rotund back then, but there was no need for him to give a bunch of primary school kids another word to make fun of a nice round fellow. I usually sat next to Shakeel because he was the only one in class who could fit in the same bench as me. Avinash thought it was the funniest word ever to have come out of a person’s mouth.  That little rascal didn’t even know what ‘Stout’ meant, but for the next 3 years he wouldn’t stop calling me ‘Stout Tom’. It would have gone on for years,  but then one day the very same Mr. Upadhyay caught him withou