On a quiet Sunday night, Ramu lay in bed lost in one of his reveries in which he had just won the Maths Olympiad by decimating the competition. He had become the cynosure of all eyes in school. Kids, teachers and even the curmudgeon of a principal were begging him for his autograph. His reverie was shattered by a low, ultra-deep vibration. The water in the glass on his night table quivered ominously. The rain started to pour down instantly like in a Bollywood film, heightening his anxiety. He heard distant rumbling and stomping noises - like a herd of marching elephants - that progressively grew louder and louder. He nearly peed in his pants as a giant silhoutte loomed in the curtains. A monstrous snout lined with rows of white daggers rose up in slow motion, accompanied by a deep breathing noise and a guttural growl, like a motorcycle far away. A yellowish green eye of unimaginable cruelty stared at him from right outside his window frame. He froze, literally petrified. Then without warning, there was a roar so blood-curdling that his ears throbbed in pain, his heart forgot to beat for a while and the walls of his house shook like the earthquake he had never experienced. There was a tyrannosaur, an actual freaking T-Rex, outside his - poor old Ramu’s window! Shut up and get out of here, he muttered under his breath! He pinched himself hard. Ouwwwww, that hurt! Even in the midst of his speechless terror though, he displayed presence of mind, and groped for his phone to take a photo to show off at school. As his hand slithered over the night table like a serpent - catastrophe. He knocked over the glass of water which crashed onto the tile floor and burst into its constituent atoms. The T-Rex jerked his head in the direction of the noise and blasted out another terrifying roar, the fantastic energy of which blasted Ramu off the bed and flat onto the floor.
Then, he woke up. He was sprawled on the floor, drenched in sweat, stinking, and shivering like an Arab in Alaska. He had really fallen off the bed. What a harrowing nightmare. He cursed himself for watching two Jurassic Park movies back to back last night. Also, as he sorely realized, pinching oneself is no guarantee of telling a dream from reality. What a juicy tale I’ll have to tell Somu tomorrow, he thought. He was so keyed up he didn’t sleep all night. Aftershocks of the nightmare kept haunting him. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t get the motorcycle growl out of his head.
Of course, the tale wasn’t retold in the exact same manner it unfolded. The tyrannosaur morphed into an Indominus Rex - the lab-designed killing machine from the Jurassic World movie that made T-Rex look warm and cuddly. Ramu actually stepped out of the house in the pouring rain - there was whip-like thunder and blinding lightning too - and baited the IRex using the flashlight on his phone, just like Dr Malcolm from Jurassic Park. Then, as Lord Yama in the form of the IRex hurtled after him, Ramu outran him in a burst of adrenaline. He ran so fast that the IRex fell away like a bullock cart in the rear view mirror of a Ferrari, its stomping and huffing and panting growing feebler and feebler. He ran into the forbidden forest on the outskirts of town. The IRex was now catching up, and thundered into the forest, snapping branches and uprooting smaller trees like they were saplings. Ramu raced up an ancient banyan tree, and played dead. The IRex passed within touching distance of him as he sat petrified for what seemed like days. He heard the sound of breaking bones and ripping flesh shortly thereafter. Some poor animal had become a meal. He sat in the same position for the entire night, desperately trying to control his chattering teeth. At the crack of dawn, he slid down the tree and ran home as if he were being chased by stray dogs. The IRex was probably still somewhere in the forest. The part about all this being a dream was left out.
To make the tale credible, a tooth was manufactured using clay and paint. Not that Somu wasn’t gullible enough. But Ramu liked to have things up his sleeve just in case. Somu, being a trusting type, bought the story with no questions asked. He had always looked up to Ramu for his superior intellect, but now he placed Ramu on a more exalted pedestal. Somu wondered if he even deserved to be in the company of someone so gloriously valiant and heroic. His adulation of Ramu bore parallels to Dr Watson’s fawning veneration of Sherlock Holmes. There the comparison ended, for Somu couldn’t write even a sentence without making at least a couple of mistakes, and he played a more active role in the executive branch of their joint enterprise. It was said in Shivajinagar that if Somu didn’t know you, you didn’t deserve to be known. He knew almost everyone in the town from the mayor to the municipal sweeper. He kept his ears open at all times for interesting news, and he could be highly persuasive when he wanted to be. However esoteric the request, he could get it done through his prodigious network in real-time. All skills that made him valuable to Ramu, who had a more white collar ethic.
Somu fell for the tale, as expected. No questions asked. Critical reasoning wasn’t his superpower nor was confrontation his style. Ramu had asked Somu to swear total secrecy, but as suspected, the tale spread like a pandemic through the classrooms of VJHS (Veermata Jijabai High School, that parochial snub to long dead Queen Victoria by local politicians - you see, it had formerly been called Victoria Jubilee High School during the heydays of the Brits). As terror gripped little hearts in increasingly fanciful retellings, Ramu and Somu benefited commercially by extracting payment in the form of pencils, fragrant erasers, comic books (Phantom, Mandrake, Chacha Chaudhry, Superman, Tinkle, etc.), candies, samosas, kachoris and jalebis from lunch boxes, stickers, new notebooks, etc. Like every news editor and politician, they well knew that fear sells. Somu even got Badri, the school topper, to share his homework for the whole week in exchange for frightening him out of his wits.
Next day, in science class, the soporific and dull Mr Takle was rambling about evolution and survival of the fittest, drawing an equivalence to his own education and life struggles and how he managed to claw his way to a better life by outcompeting weaker, more pitiable life forms. He described in vivid detail how he barreled and barged his way into the local Virar fast train on his way to school pushing aside weaker commuters and grabbing one of the few vacant seats, how he never gave up his seat on trains and buses even to geriatrics, women and the disabled, how he never gave even 5 paise to beggars, and so on. Survival depends on intelligence and adaptability to the changing environment, not mere size or ferociousness or position at the apex of the food chain, as the example of dinosaurs versus monkeys and Sabre toothed cats versus coyotes demonstrated. Look at me, he said. I’m short and puny yet have triumphed over burly Neanderthals and gorillas in the race of evolution. I’m not a dinosaur whose size became a liability. If there is a famine, how long will that brawny six footer Ghorpade (the Math teacher at VJHS) last? I can last for days with very little food.
Ramu had to accept that this irritating man had a point. Yet, dinosaurs ruled earth for 165 million years. They couldn’t have done that without being adaptable or having no survival skills. It took an extraordinary cataclysm to end their reign. Man, the upstart, had barely been around for a million years. A little humility is in order, thought Ramu. Dinosaurs deserved a lot of respect in Ramu’s book, especially after that terrible dream. It was time for Takle to show them some respect, and appreciate their beauty and ferocity.
Ramu sketched the contours of the main idea and tossed it over to Somu to do the boring needful. Somu, the marvel of coordination and project management, roped in Badri, and Anil and Sunil who had their own coterie of hangers on. The payoff was agreed on - freshly fried samosas and jalebis from the neighborhood Haldirams (not affiliated with the national brand). Badri implemented the high tech parts such as holographic imagery, Dolby 5.1 surround sound, authenticity and scientific accuracy of visuals and sounds, while Anil, Sunil and their coterie handled menial work like creating vibrations by jumping up and down. A certain Dhondu, whose father owned the apartment Takle lived in (besides being a local politician), came in handy as a prior acquaintance of Somu. He had an axe to grind having been humiliated by Takle in front of the entire class in a prior episode for scoring dead last in the class test. Speakers were hung down outside Takle’s windows from the unit above. Only Badri knew how he managed to project the holograms right outside Takle’s window.
As night fell, Takle yawned and retired to bed. The water on his table shook at first. Then the tyrannosaur reared it’s colossal head, a cruel yellow eye pinned Takle to his bed, and let out a blood curdling roar.
Next day science class was eagerly awaited by all and sundry. A haggard, shaken and shaking Takle entered. His eyes were bloodshot. Poor man hadn’t slept much by the looks of it. Snickers were desperately sought to be suppressed, yet managed to escape, and not even noticed. Takle staggered over to the blackboard and wrote two words that drained blood from Ramu and Somu’s bodies. “Surprise test”.