Ormayundo?

Somebody asked me to write a story.. So here it is..

To avoid the reader imagining a personality or a character as I define it, I'll not be going into a detailed description of the protagonist, his friends and his adversaries. This has not been done to protect the identities of those actually involved.

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Free hours were not that hard to come by in the four years he spent at college. The assigned professor might not turn up; the students might have decided to bunk class en masse; the lab might have been suspended; the class might been cancelled to let the students prepare for some festival happening at the college; someone(anyone) might have called a strike; etc etc. If not for any of those, you could quite easily have decided not to attend the class, and instead spend your time loitering around the campus.

But in the first year of college, it was never advisable for a fresher to wander around the campus. The officially-free-of-ragging-campus had indeed had some ragging left in it. So in their first academic year at the college, he and his classmates would spend the free hours inside the classroom, passing the time by holding games like anthakshari or dumb charades.

The story I've to tell you happens on one such free hour, when the whole class was playing dumb charades, and he was miming the name of a movie across to his team. The movie was a Malayalam one, "Pedakozhi koovuna Nootandu" - which would mean something like "The century where the hen crows at dawn".

After successfully communicating to his team that the phrase is a movie, a Malayalam movie, a Malayalam movie with three words, he proceeded to split the first word into two, and tried to mimic the second part of it. If you have played the game, you would understand that this is pretty much a standard procedure.

So the word he was trying to get across now was "kozhi", which means Chicken/Rooster. Now, I don't know about you, but in our time, the pet name of "kozhi" (rooster) in a batch was reserved for the guy who tried the most to flirt with the opposite sex. And, up till that moment, this batch of no-gooders hadn't decided whom to call that. Yet.

If you thought that our friend got the name "kozhi" just because he enacted one, then you are wrong. His rather weak acting skills made it tough for most of his teammates to deduce what was being depicted. She was the first one to recognize the fowl he was being. And she cried, "Kozhi!! Kozhi!!", and then in a few seconds rolled off the whole movie name.

As he was celebrating with his teammates, the captain of the opposite team made the remark that "She called you a 'kozhi'."

In a few seconds, this one-liner spread throughout the class (and later throughout the campus), and the name has stuck with him ever since. He never flirted any more than any other guy you would meet in that campus. But being the wrongful owner of one of the worst tags in college, his life was never the same.

But that is not the worst part either. One of his classmates at that time, another girl, got a higher option in Medicine and left their group. She came back after a year or two to attend some fest, and the class was saying their hello to her. In between, he propped up and asked her, "Ormayundo?" ("Do you remember me?").

You have to sympathize with her. She was only in our company for a month or two, and she couldn't recollect all our names. So, when she said, "Oh pinnae.. Kozhi allae." (Of course. You are "kozhi".), he could do no more than feel sorry for her.

But that was not the case with his classmates. The one-liner came out again.

"She called you a 'kozhi'."