After the twelfth exams got over, my friends decided to have a get-together. Due to all the recent pressure and tension, we hadn’t had a proper time together. In fact, we didn’t even have had a chance to see each other at school much. Now that everything had gotten over, we were all too excited for the day. There are five of us – Pooja, Sheena, Swara, Priya and me Monica, an all-girls group, always ready for some fun and enjoyment.

We were to hold the dinner party at Swara’s house. The appointed date arrived and we all reached her house. Sitting comfortably on the sofas with a glass of juice in our hands, gossip began.
“We might not meet again like this, anytime soon. We might all even go to other cities for further studies. So why not just bring up all the past memories and laugh a bit? You know, with all the past tension, we seldom had a good laugh. So why not just relax and lighten the atmosphere? We can all just narrate some funny incidents that we never had any time to share. What say?” said Pooja. And we all saw the point that she was right. Hence the narration began.

Sheena took the lead, “Hey, I just remember an incident that happened some days ago in my coaching class.” She had recently joined a coaching class.”We were having morning sessions for a week, from 6 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. There was a group of three boys there, Nishant, Ravi and Shubham. They always used to come and go together. One day one of them had come to the class with the group, but perhaps he was feeling too sleepy, so, he went home again, before entering inside. But our tutor, Rajiv Sir had seen him. Observing all this, naturally he got very angry and when Ravi and Shubham remained quite evasive to his answers, he immediately fished his cell-phone out of his pocket and called up another boy who lived near Nishant’s house. This guy, Rohit, was just on his way to the coaching class. Sir told him ‘’Aarey sun, Nishant aise hi ‘chal basa’. Uske ghar ek phool mala leke jaa’’. What he meant was that Nishant being very lazy and an impudent fellow, who never completed his homework, has gone home, thinking he had successfully cheated him (Sir). He had meant to say ‘chala gaya’. So go to his house and invite him with a garland to come to the coaching class (this Sir had said angrily and mockingly to teach Nishant a lesson). But as they say, we should never speak anything in anger, hurry, and without a thought. His words really had a comical effect. Rohit thought immediately that Nishant had committed suicide due to the words ‘chal basa’. He was shocked and just as Sir had said, bought a thick garland from a florist’s and with all the speed that he could muster on his bicycle, rode off to Nishant’s house. As if everything had to go wrong that day, Nishant’s family had attended a wedding last night and hadn’t slept much. Nishant had gone home and slept straight. Aunty’s eyes were sore and red. Both she and Uncle were sitting at the table, discussing something in solemn voices. Rohit in a grave mood went over to Aunty’s side. “Why did he do this?” he muttered.

Both she and uncle looked up at once. Surprised, she asked “Who has done what?” Rohit spoke up, “I don’t know what was wrong. Oh, God! What is all this happening?  Why did Nishant suicide?’’
Then you can imagine what happened with him. With a serious scolding, he quietly came back to the coaching class.”

We all laughed a lot. “Now my turn”, volunteered Pooja. “In the summer vacations, our whole family was travelling to Kolkata in a train. Along with the train, the night too was moving on. But due to some reason we were unable to sleep. For children there were only three of us, my two cousin brothers and me. My younger brother and I were just sitting on the same berth, clicking photos and talking. My elder brother had slept till then and was sleeping like a log. Suddenly my hands got hold of a tube of ‘Fair and Lovely’ cream at the corner of the berth we were on. Perhaps someone had left it there. We thought of some fun. We went down to the lower berth where my elder brother was sleeping.

With the cream we both scribbled happily on his face, making a beard, moustache, tribal designs on his cheeks and so on. Then we started clicking selfies with his funny face.

Maybe he felt something, for my sleeping brother woke up. He did not find out what we were doing though. He just said that he too couldn’t sleep anymore. So we sat with him, talking (My brother and I were having a hard time controlling our laughter). After sometime my elder brother sniffed and said,”Hey, what a nice smell is coming from somewhere!”  We giggled but then he couldn’t understand that the smell was from his face. We then simply agreed that indeed a nice smell was in the air. He then suggested clicking some selfies. That was when all our fun ended and he found out about our deeds. But luckily for us, not getting angry, he too laughed it off.”

We laughed it off too. At the time Swara went and got some snacks. Good, now we could enjoy our gossip even more. I had just remembered an incident which I decided to share with my friends.  “On Diwali, I was at my cousin’s place. We were having a great time bursting crackers on the roof with his family in the evening. After an hour or so, all the adults present went down for a Diwali meal. My brother and I were not at all hungry so we insisted on staying for some more time. Still many crackers were left which had not been burst, and the thought excited us that now we were alone to take care of all of them. At once we started bursting them one by one, very happy. Then my brother got hold of a packet of ‘peculiar’ looking crackers. We had never seen anything like those and wondered what kind of crackers they could be. My brother being the adventurous type suggested that we should burst them to find out. I reluctantly agreed. So taking one cracker to the flame of a diya, he tried to ignite it. For some reason it didn’t catch the flames. We tried for sometime but nothing happened. That ended my patience. Regarding those crackers as defectives, I made my brother drop it. Hurriedly, he dropped it inside the diya. We then got busy with other crackers and soon we forgot about it. We were almost finished with the crackers when some phuljharis were left. So both of us holding one in our hand, started roaming on the roof. ‘Bbbooooooooommm!!!!’  We heard suddenly. Very much surprised, the phuljhari fell down from my hand and in the confusion, my brother, who was beside me at the time, stepped on it. “Aaahhh!”, he screamed. I couldn’t help laughing and he was irritated.
Anyway, we went to see where the noise had come from. It was the diya inside which we had dropped the strange cracker. It had split into two and all the oil in had spilled out. There was no sign of the cracker. Meanwhile all the others had come up, hearing the loud noise. We showed them what had happened. And then Dad, who had bought the crackers, told us that it was a kind of bomb. “

Again everyone laughed. Now Priya took the initiative. “You know my family insisted on having a private tutor for me. He was a good teacher, except that he had a strange habit. I used to sit on the bed, while he used to be on a chair in front of me. He would give me a task and while I would bend over my notebook, trying to solve it, he would just swing on the chair pushing it back and waiting for it to get swayed towards the front. The first day I saw him do this, I told him that the floor had recently been polished and he might fall down, as the chair was likely to slip off. Perhaps that offended him, for he got irritated and told me to concentrate on my studies. The next day he did that three times and the three times I warned him. And every time he moodily told me to do my task and not divert my attention to unimportant things. So further on, I kept quiet, though I did not stop looking at his actions. After that he swung two times. But the sixth time, perhaps he swung back a little too forcibly, for this time he fell with a thud. He was totally flat on the floor, the chair on him. I laughed and laughed, embarrassing him a lot. Mom was in the kitchen and came to the room to see what had happened. The sight made her smile too. Looking at her, I laughed all the more.  After Sir had got up quietly, he straightened the chair, sat down and told me to complete the problem he had given me to solve. Then it was a hard time controlling my laughter.”

Laughing and giggling so much had got us aching on our sides. Only our host Swara was left out now. She complained that there was no funny incident that she could call to her mind. But at that time her mother came and called us for dinner. Amazingly, we had talked ourselves well into dinner time. Still giggling, we went to the table. Aunty had made a lot of delicious dishes. Just as we were about to sit, we found that there was one chair less. Swara insisted that we four should take the main chairs and for herself she bought a plastic one from inside the adjoining bedroom. After the arrangements, we sat down. But before Swara could sit, just as she was going to, the plastic chair slid back due to a slight jerk from her leg and she fell down. Though we laughed, we could not make it loud, in case she should feel embarrassed. Then before we could try to help her up, taking help of the dining table she started to get up. But unfortunately, when she put her hand on the table, her hand fell into the bowl of custard that had been kept at the edge. The bowl got upset and the custard spilled down on her. This time we couldn’t control laughing. And she was laughing with us too.

So, what if she couldn’t think of a funny story to gossip on, she gave us a funny incident to remember forever, with her small accident. I don’t think we had ever laughed so much before. That day indeed we enjoyed a lot and it was a successfully wonderful get-together. I am sure all of us would remember this day for the rest of our lives.