“You can say hi. I am not going to grab your cream bun and run away,” my classmate from French class uttered these words as she was walking past our group on Chamiers Road.

No sooner than she finished this sentence, all my friends started laughing boisterously. As if taking their cue, the guy who was manning the bakery counter also started laughing out loudly.

I did not know how to react. There was no place for me to hide. The only thought that came to my mind was, “Three of her Computer Science classmates are also here. Why on earth did she target me?”

Every group of friends would have a place where they would assemble after school, college, gym session, etc. to chit chat, make fun of each other and simply while away time.

For my group at Boston Matriculation School, it was a bakery on Chamiers Road just beside the bus stand, at a couple of minutes walking distance from our school. There was also a pharmacy adjacent to the bakery.

My friends Pramod, Vishnu & Nambi from Computer Science group as well as Venkat, Palani and myself from Biology group would assemble at the bakery after school with amazing regularity. There were days in which a couple of other batchmates would also join us. Since we went there so often the person manning the counter at bakery, who was in his mid-twenties, also became a part of our gang.

We would turn any conversation into an opportunity to laugh at each other. We would tease each other, pass comments about the incidents from the day and so on.

Those were the days of limited means. We would pool the money that we had and buy one or two cream buns depending upon the group size on that particular day. The guy in the bakery would usually cut a cream bun into three pieces. But, for us he would accommodate as many pieces necessary so that all of us would get a piece each.

On most of the days each of us would get a piece of cream bun hardly the size of a thumb. But that did not stop us from having a good time. Going to the bakery after school became a ritual for us. The day would be incomplete without going to that bakery and teasing each other.

Apart from cutting the cream bun into ever smaller pieces, the other skill the bakery guy had was to add fuel to the fire for whatever conversation that we were having. Mostly he would hang around us with an innocent look on his face; it would look like he was attending to other customers and was hardly paying any attention to our conversations.

But he had an amazing knack for eavesdropping and even more amazing knack for timing. He would join our conversations at any crucial juncture and pass a comment, hardly a sentence or two, or a question. And that would make the bad situation worse for whoever was the butt of the joke at that moment. With his mission accomplished he would laugh out louder than any of us and then go back to attending the bakery.

Even though all of us used to talk with girls in our batch, those conversations would begin and end inside our school campus. That being the 90s, people would roll their eyes or even offer a look of contempt if they spot a boy and girl having conversation. People had a very severe hangover of Tamil cinemas and had erected an invisible social wall between boys and girls.

On that particular day, we were at the bakery. We were facing the road while eating and chatting. We spotted our classmate walking towards us. Wanting to avoid any awkward question or comment from our baker friend we decided to avoid any conversation with her and turned towards the bakery counter in unison. But I guess I was a little slow in turning and that probably would have made it very obvious to her that I was trying to avoid looking at her. So, she shot back with her critical observation/ comment. Thankfully that episode ended with just laughter and no follow-up questions from our baker friend.       

During our entire 11^th & 12^th standards we regularly assembled at the bakery after school. Strangely today, I neither remember the name of the bakery or the name of the person who used to be an extended part of our gang. We hardly saw him after completing our school. The bakery closed down a few months after we left school and the pharmacy closed down a couple of years later.

Today the bus stand still exists almost at the same spot where it used to be. The place where the bakery stood and where we used to stand and chat still remains dilapidated nearly 25 years later. It’s so strange to think that the place which used to be our chit-chat spot for more than two years has vanished without a trace. All I am left with are the memories of the good times that we, a bunch of carefree teens had there.

This is the second post in the series, ‘From Chennai to Madras Down the Memory Lane’

1st post in the in the series: A Friend’s House