I recently landed a stroke of luck when I reconnected with an old childhood friend after forty years. We were just kids when we had lost touch with each other. Now having reconnected after an eternity almost, we felt an awkwardness arising from not knowing anything about what kind of people we had grown up to be. We were virtually strangers to our present selves. The vast gulf of time between when we had lost touch as 11-year olds, and the present day retired seniors that we were now, meant that we had little idea of what our formative and professionally active years had made of the other. Did our closeness as childhood friends ensue? Did it even have any relevance?
She is now a retired teacher, settled abroad, and our efforts to make something good out of this pleasant reconnection led to us to try to involve the other in each other’s current activities. So, she being a fitness freak and an outdoor enthusiast, takes this weekly one hour digital class of body stretches and light exercises with a small group of above-60 ladies and gents.
She invited me to join them. Initially hesitant (because I’m camera shy), I finally mustered the courage to accept. The group consists of her relatives and close friends, and though I was initially very reserved, it gradually began to feel good to share in their friendly banter and fun-poking every Tuesday.
I had soon opened up enough to frequently proffer my own two-bits of supposed witty quips. Till suddenly last week, amidst a bout of gusty laughter in response to one of my wisecracks, my friend commented, “Looks like he’s the class comic.” This was followed by more all-round laughter as I beamed smugly on my side of the planet.
Well, I had often before been described as the guy in class who has a penchant for being funny. So it didn’t strike me then that this ‘compliment’ could be a two edged sword. Buts uncertainty crept in soon enough. I began to have doubts about it being a compliment at all. If it was a barb instead, it certainly couldn’t have been a slip of tongue by my friend, for she is a former teacher with decades of experience in speaking in accurate terms, and has, among her several attributes, a mind that is quite quick-witted, and a tongue which keeps up. Why was I worrying?
The uneasiness niggling at me was about whether the term “class comic” is another way of saying ‘smart Alec’. Smart Alec, I knew for sure, is not a compliment. It is used for a person who is a smarty-pants, who thinks he knows everything, and believes he is being perennially funny. He fails to notice that the things he says and does might be irritating to others. That disturbing thought kept me awake for most of the rest of the night (our virtual Zoom class by Indian time would be around midnight).
In the hurriedly dawned morning, I ‘woke up’ groggily to the incessant ringing of my phone. It was a former school friend. He seemed very elated about something. How does someone become so elated so early in the day? But it aroused my curiosity, nevertheless. When his intro of elated jabbering eventually made way for coherent words, I finally heard him say, “I just spoke to Chandni after decades, man. Remember her? She was in school with us?”
Nobody ever forgot Chandni. I grunted my affirmation. Jumping up and down (I imagined), the dude went on, “You know what? When I asked her if she remembered me after all these years she immediately replied, ‘Of course I do. You were the smart Alec of the class.’ And then she began asking about Vinay, Uday and . . . .”.
That woke me up like falling into a pool of ice cold water would. I banged the ‘cut call’ button on my phone and began frantically searching Google to know the difference between class comic and smart Alec.