By Soumyadipta Banerjee

Once upon a time there was a little boy called Anirban. When Anirban was 10 years old, he used to stammer a lot. Especially when he was angry. That is the reason why he spoke less, but Anirban dreamt a lot.

He dreamt of flying kites, he dreamt of turning into Batman and he dreamt of operating like James Bond.

Often, he would sit with his best friends on the stairs of his school hostel after dinner and narrate how he had solved yet another mysterious case. These mysterious cases would usually be incidents of missing pens from the classroom or some mysterious boy stealing everybody else’s underwear and dumping them into the dustbin.

He would follow every case with passion and energy and in most instances, end up clueless. But in his mind, Anirban used to solve all the cases! Everyday he would sit on his favourite staircase at 10 pm and narrate to his best friend how he solved a case with great risk and how he had put his life in danger for for the sake of the case.

His friend would listen to him, roll his eyes and exclaim, "My God! Then what happened?"

Anirban just loved the expression!

Anirban's investigations became more intricate and more risky as he grew older. He started investigating ‘real’ cases as he discovered that he couldn’t give up on his alter-ego of turning into a jasoos. This romance with being a detective had engulfed him so much that he started investigating anything that appealed to his jasoosi senses.

A few years passed and Anirban was promoted to the seventh standard. He was a fairly good student and loved to study when he was not investigating anything. But the problem was, 'the investigation' had by now, become his obsession.

By this time Anirban's stammering had worsened so much that he would stammer at every vowel. Also, for the dearth of proper 'subjects' and also because he did not want to do jassosi on his friends anymore, he started to snoop on the hostel wardens.

He would insist and tell all his friends that he feels that the hostel warden of class seven was a shady character. That's because the 40-odd-year-old man (he was unmarried and a music class teacher) would always a take an afternoon break from school and would insist on staying in his room. Everybody knew that the music teacher loved his afternoon naps but Anirban insisted that he had heard strange noises coming out of his room during this afternoon breaks.

Anirban decided to investigate this strange case of strange noises.

On a gloomy rainy day, Anirban sneaked out of his classroom and quietly climbed the pipe of the hostel room to reach his first-floor room. He had a lot of ingeniously developed tools for his snooping and one them was a kite. He would put a recording device on the red kite and quietly leave that in one of the windows of his unsuspecting 'subject'. He was also developing a camera which could be operated from a remote location.

That day, he had carefully placed the kite on the hostel warden's window and waited from some sound-bytes to emerge. When that didn’t work out and all he heard was just silence, he grew impatient; there was only an hour left for all the students to return to their hostel.

He tip-toed towards the room of the warden and hid himself behind a pillar. Suddenly the door opened and warden, wearing only a green striped lungi (he had worn it like a loincloth) went to the adjacent students' loo. When he didn't return after five minutes, his impatience was bursting at the seams and de decided to peep into the room of the music teacher.

There, inside the room, he saw a student of fourth standard -- a frail and fair boy called Avinash. Avinash was not wearing his clothes. His school half-pants were lying by one side and all the buttons of his shirt were open. He was wiping his mouth in despair. Anirban rushed to the boy and asked him what happened?

The boy indicated that the hostel warden had asked him to swallow something which he was finding hard to swallow. The boy said that it tasted awful. He couldn't talk properly because his mouth was full of that but he wanted to throw up desperately. The boy also narrated how the music teacher used to play a game with him which can be called If-you-lose-you-put-your-mouth-where-I-say.

It was time for James Bond to act!

Anirban rushed outside and bolted the bathroom door from outside and locked the warden in the loo.

He knew that he had solved the biggest crime story of his life.

One week later, Anirban was rusticated from school and was accused of being gay. His parents were told that he was a paedophile who would target innocent boys of the junior sections and would engage in sexual activities with them. The hostel warden was a primary witness to Anirban’s afternoon sexual escapades after bunking class. 

When I last met him, he couldn't explain properly what he had seen. The stammering had increased so much (in that in one week) that Anirban would barely talk properly.

Last heard, Anirban was enrolled with an NGO called Narcotics Anonymous where he was going through a drug de-addiction programme.

Gattu is Anirban

The film Gattu is all about what Anirban was, when he was a young boy. The only difference is that this film has a happy ending.

in.com rating: 4/5