Our foursome at college was not at the top of class but was not at the bottom either. It was not a boisterous or noisy group, and so, we were sort of invisible. This had its advantages as we could get away with a lot of things, including playing silly pranks in class. The lecturers would never believe that we would have done it, when the victims complained!  

Between doing quiet mischief, cutting classes to watch noon shows, and sneaking into the room of the lone hosteller of the group to yak away. And we loved eating. Not that we had a lot of choice at the highly subsidized college canteen, but our non-stop chatter, and the hot cutlets and chai were just great. At the prices of those days, Rs 5 would buy us all we wanted to eat. Money went a longer way in those far off days. When we wanted some variety, we gorged on some fantastic chat outside the college gate. It was perhaps the only place where I have eaten bhelpuri with spring onion greens. Try putting some in yours sometime, it is awesome!

It was this love for eating that made us plan an outing – to a proper restaurant. It was a first for us, if you discounted the visit to the Coffee House my elder brother had taken us on Raksha Bandhan. All dressed in saris, we tried to look sophisticated while placing our orders. We might have succeeded too, had we not begun giggling at something silly. Chole bhature, kachori, and huge Punjabi samosas came to our table, and we ate, talked and laughed. It was an excellent repast.

Suddenly the Homemaker looked at the table across the aisle and saw something – tall glasses with layers of some chocolatey concoction and foamy white stuff, with a straw and long spoon sticking out of it. ‘What is that thing?’ she asked sotto voce, nudging me.

‘You are the Homemaker; you should know,’ I said.

‘I am not yet a full-fledged Homemaker,’ she pointed out, a tad miffed.

The other two turned to look and suddenly conscious of staring, we quickly turned back to our bhature.

‘Shall I ask the waiter?’ asked the practical Mother-of-snotty-nosed-kids and we shook our heads. We the elegant young women, remember?

We went off on a guessing spree, the guesses getting wilder by the minute, before giving up and deciding to order dessert. The Career Woman chose coffee (naturally!), the Mother-of-snotty-nosed-kids and I decided on ice cream, and the Homemaker asked for cold coffee.

When we saw the waiter bearing the tray with our orders, our hearts leaped to see that mysterious glass among them! He set them down one by one, and we finally knew what it was – cold coffee topped with ice cream! We burst out laughing and laughed uncontrollably, all our resolve to look mature and restrained flying out of the window. Heads turned to look at us, some with disapproving scowls at the loud ‘modern’ college girls!

As for the waiter, we left a big tip for him in a fit of magnanimity and for serving four giggly girls with patience!

‘Hey, wait! Who were these people – Homemaker, Career Woman et al,’ you ask?

Sorry, I got ahead of myself there, didn’t I? Let me explain.

You know, it is not unknown for teens to have big dreams of their future. But I am not sure whether they have group dreams. I mean, one where everyone is part of a single dream, and fulfilling each other’s in some way. Our aspirations were attainable and were rather mundane by today’s standards, but coming from conservative middle-class families, we knew that these could never come true, as our immediate futures were decided for us — marriage. Still, we dreamed. After all, there is no tax on dreams, is there?

Now, before I proceed, I want you, my dear readers, to promise not to laugh or even snicker. This was half a century ago and we were young, desperately trying to live the lives we wanted to, at least in our dreams, ok?

In our daydream, we would all be living together in a big house with four rooms, one for each of us. Back in those days houses were small and members more, so rooms had to be shared by several of us. Not so in our dream house, which would be really big. And we would all be single.

Our house would be a great place to live in. There would be a movie-like drawing room, a well-stocked library and a modern (for the times!) kitchen, a garden with a lawn….We would have a fridge – a luxury for most middle-class homes back then, and a whole lot of white goods, including a TV, which had already come to Delhi and Bombay. We bickered about where to live: The Career Woman wanted to live in Mumbai or Delhi, The Homemaker preferred a smaller city, while I didn’t care where we lived as long as it had a great University! We played it all out in great detail, right to who would do what in our house. The Mother

One was a lovely girl who was a whiz at everything to do with running a house. She loved everything that went into making a home – cooking, organizing, managing money (which she did at home), home decoration, Ikebana, needlepoint, knitting, handicrafts – the works. Her cooking was so good, we drooled merely thinking about the stuff she would make for us! If she had been born fifty years later, she would have been highly successful in the hospitality industry, she was that accomplished. She offered to run the house for the rest of us, her eyes shining, as if she were already planning the layout of the rooms and the menu for the day. She was The Homemaker – naturally!

The hosteller wanted to be a Career Woman. No ordinary job for her, only a proper high-profile career in Finance would do. She would earn for the rest of us, she said magnanimously. But she made it clear that it would be ALL she would do – no housework or other responsibilities for her. Liberal Feminists of today would have been proud of her. We were too, and grateful to boot!

The third one didn’t have any specific dream but indulged us. She was the practical one amongst us and probably felt it was childish to dream of something that would never transpire. We kept ribbing her about her snotty-nosed kids. It was rather mean on our parts, but we hated the idea of marriage so much that it was unthinkable that one of us accepted it! But the sport that she was, she laughed and protested that she would only have two, and that they would be clean as buttons! We kept the fourth room for her — for the times she might want to take a break from her snotty-nosed brats! And because she was one of foursome and we loved her. We named her the Mother-of-snotty-nosed-kids.

I was beginning to feel guilty. While the other two would be supporting us in some way, all I wanted to do was to study, go as high as I could — Doctorate, research… Though the others couldn’t understand my obsession with learning, they supported my dream. They assured me that they would be proud to have a famous intellectual (??!!) for a friend, bless their generous and loving hearts! For my part, I offered (rashly?) to do ALL the cleaning and washing for everyone. I further assuaged my guilt by telling myself that I could work as a Professor, while doing my research…Oh, by the way, they called me the Scholar.

Three years of college flew by. And then life happened.

Our foursome scattered. We were all married around the same time, but didn’t attend each other’s weddings since we had all moved out of Nagpur by that time. Though I met them a couple of times after that, we eventually lost touch. All I know is that our dreams remained just that – an exercise in fantasy by four aspirational teens.

The Mother-of-the-snotty-nosed-kids did have the last laugh after all!

Images: Homepage-https://www.istockphoto.com/ Bhel- https://depositphotos.com/

Cold coffee – https://www.sugarsalted.com/