Silly Tales

Confessions of a Teenage Bully!

In school I used to be like one of those big fat bullies who used to threaten other students into giving up their lunch boxes. It is not that I was not happy with my own lunch but I always wanted more and I was really excited to see what the other students brought. I was in my 6th grade when I used to act as such and I was not alone in this. I had friends who enjoyed doing the same thing during breaks. I remember this one day when Rajon, who is a very dear friend of mine now but used to be a dork back then, brought something from Labamba for his lunch. We knew right then that we have to go and grab the lunch. When the bell rang, we cornered the poor guy and made him give it to us. After a while, he was let go and obviously we finished the food up. Later we found out that he played a prank on giving us stale sandwiches for which we had to skip school for a week. All of us got sick and were food poisoned! We learned our lesson by that week and stuck to our lunch boxes ever since.

Tamim Siqdar
United Internation University, Dhaka

Game Gone Wrong

Playing cricket in our school after class was a must. We used to make our parents wait for our games to finish just because we needed to know the result. The supervisors and the Vice Principal of our school would not mind us playing until this one incident. As every other day, we formed two teams and put our cricket gears on and started playing as soon as school ended. The game started out just fine and my team was on the verge of winning when everything just went wrong. Shajib, being a top notch batsman, batted against a very fast ball and it was about to land for a six until and unless somebody would have stopped it. I started running towards the ball and what I did not notice was so did my other friend. When we were both really close to catching the ball, we both collided face first and the ball went for a six anyway. As a result, we both ended up losing our front teeth due to the facial collision and after that, we were not allowed to play in the school premises anymore.

Sayem Talukder
East West University, Dhaka

Love Hurts!

I was a student of the English Department at the Dhaka University a long time ago (I got my MA in 1975) but still remember all the pranks we used to pull and the silly things we used to do very well! One day, my husband's younger brother, who was a student of Economics and also a very good friend of mine, was seen loitering around in our department. After a while he was seen following a young woman around who was dressed in a cotton sari. For days together he was seen moving about from one place to another, clearly in love with the young woman. He consulted with me and our friends regarding this and, even though we thought it was a bad idea, we wanted to have some fun with him and told him to 'brave up' and speak out his love for the young woman. He did, and found out that the young woman was not a student but a young graduate who had come to teach at the university, and to make things worse, she was married! We knew this all along but never told him! Poor chap, he still feels cheated today, even decades later!

Syeda Fauzia Haque
Lalmatia, Dhaka