The Secret Treehouse in Christ

"They're on in 20 minutes!"
I put down the phone and burned rubber to Koramangala. When I pulled into the parking lot in Christ I could already hear music pounding out from somewhere.
Maya came running out of the milling crowd of students yelling in my ear, "Come on! They haven't started yet." She grabbed my hand and we ran into a quadrangle with 3-storey classroom blocks all around and a makeshift stage up front from where the sound was emanating. There was a seat for me in the front row with Maya's friends, where we insensitively made fun of the PUC boys who were playing.
Rahul's band was playing that afternoon in the Western Electric competition of the Christ College fest. They took the stage. Our brother Rahul played lead guitar. In his "lucky" camouflage pants. They started tuning up, relaxed and laughing unlike the earlier bands. It was just before Christmas and Rahul broke out a Santa hat before they burst into a rendition of Deep Purple's Highway Star, the song that "made them famous" in all the city college competitions. Rahul grinned at us and we went wild with pride during his guitar solo.
Satisfied in the knowledge that they'd bagged first prize, we joined the slow, light-hearted exodus of kids drifting out into the other quad. This one was a big lawn--the pride of Christ--under a huge, white, billowing canopy. As you watched it soared impossibly upward and came plummeting down at you in the breeze. Kids were sitting on the grass, sprawling, lying down. Chilling.
Thermal and a Quarter, Christ's flagship alumni band, were tuning up on the (much more respectable) stage. Their sound check was taking forever but strains of a funky, bluesy sound were escaping from it.

When it was over, Maya and I, hidden in the crowd, made our way out. The secret treehouse was apparently so secret that even her best friends didn't know about it. We passed by some classroom blocks and down a long, tarred drive. We stopped and looked up at the sky because it was fading slowly to pink and a long double line of brilliant white jet exhaust was slowly streaking across it to the west.
Soon we were walking by a fence and down on our left was a small, presumably man-made, lake. It looked green and cool and it was surrounded by rocks and foliage and it had stork statues and tiny islands in the middle. Maya said nothing.

We burst through the fence off the road and there was a low, spreading fig tree with a stone embankment around it and a ladder against it.
We climbed up to the secret treehouse. It was incredibly neat, well-made, unpainted wood, big enough for at least three people to sit in. There was even a stool for one. Someone had rigged a Christmas star around the bare bulb that hung from the pointed wooden roof. The western sun shone through the gaps in the slats making sun stripes on the opposite wall and on us as we sat looking down at the lake.
We ducked out of view, just in case, whenever one of the "lay brothers" from the Dharmaram College friary came wandering out. They clearly knew about the treehouse. (What's a treehouse when you're in on the secrets of the Universe?) In fact, it belonged to them and was unpublicized because they didn't want students coming out here to get stoned. We sat a while on the low stone wall by the lake where the tall reeds grew out of it.
Later, we were sitting in the stands bordering the not-so-secret football ground, eating pop corn in front of the canteen with the last of the students in the dying light before the guards started blowing whistles and throwing everyone out.
"Wow, I never thought I'd say it but I wish I was back in college. And a real college, not the tight-ass joint I went to."
"But you had good times in college..." Maya suggested.
"Sure, but no thanks to the college. All the good times I had were in violation of the college."
"Yeah, I'm actually sorry it's over this year."
It was dark now and they had lit a huge fire behind us with all the garbage from the canteen.

The Gravity Sand Filter

We weren't allowed on the roof of our hostel in Manipal. I was lying there, spreadeagled on the rough concrete floor in the shade of the water tank in the afternoon. Just the closeness of that water tank made it all cooler. All you could see were the tops of the gently swaying palm trees and the blue, blue South Canara sky. I was lying perfectly still, willing the hawks and kites that wheeled overhead to come close to me, listening to their occasional soporific cries.
There was some sort of workman going in and out on the periphery of my vision. He kept coming out onto the roof and climbing up to the water tank. That was the reason the terrace door was open in the first place. He climbed down the aluminium ladder from the tank. He was tiny, with a round head and grey crew cut hair that made his ears stick out. He had the typical labourer's clothes, shorts and shirt with a cloth slung over his shoulder. He disappeared into the building and went downstairs for, like, the fortieth time.
Curious, I went to the wall on the hostel side and looked down. He emerged at the bottom and went around the building to the back, where it was all muddy. He squatted and started collecting stones in a shallow metal dish. The block security guard wandered out into the open then and looked directly up at me. I ducked out of view a second too late with a curse on my lips, still picturing the old man's skinny frame hunched under the weight on his head, trudging up four flights of stairs. And he'd been doing this all afternoon.
He came out onto the roof and addressed me in Kannada, "Little sister, the watchman says you have to get off the roof."
"Okay, Pop, I'll just hide here a while longer."
"Okay, then." He asked me as he went back to work, "You study here? How much does it cost to study here?"
But I was embarrassed to tell him. Blowing up hundreds of thousands learning how to arrange cutlery while he hauled stones up four floors to fix our drinking water system. "Too much," I sighed. It was past 4:00 now, and something occurred to me. "Would you drink some tea?"
I ran down the stairs to the mess, where there were steel cups and tea on tap. Of course we weren't allowed to take a cup out of the mess. I took two, and made my barefoot way back upstairs. I handed the tea up to him and and he looked at me like he hadn't expected me to come back at all. His eyes crinkled up and he laughed an indulgent, throaty, old man's laugh just like my grandfather's. A mist of good feeling settled over me. We sat down to drink our tea, he on top of the tank. He fired up a beedi, savouring the unexpected break. He told me I was just like his daughter and that she'd been married a while ago. He told me about what he knew best, the agriculture in his home district, Shimoga. They grew peanuts and rice and coconuts.
I saw him again briefly the next day. He came back to the hostel to finish up. I smiled at him. He didn't smile back but his eyes crinkled up in recognition and he left. The terrace door was open again. Mr. Stanley, our Engineering/Maintenance teacher and butt of all jokes, was out there overseeing. "Come look at our new gravity sand filter." We were studying those that year. He smiled graciously, inviting me to climb the aluminium ladder.
I climbed and stood barefoot on the improbably cool tank in the glare of the overhead morning sun. I peered into the dark square of water rippling over the stones below. The tank outlets were opened for their routine cleaning, and one by one the cascades started to gush out of them, slowly covering the floor with light-catching water.