Ola. Cult Following ----------------- It was love at first sight. Love at a glimpse, actually- the glimpse of the tight slacks up her skirt as she climbed up the stairs to her classroom. I barely saw her face but i was smitten. When I told my friend, Mr.P, he trained his diagnostic eys at me for a second and concluded gravely, "Yeah, you are a goner." So at the break time all my fellows gathered around me and we brain stormed. We agreed that I had to find out more about her. We would start with finding out where she lived and go from there. Mr.S suggested that I should buy a card and give it to her- nothing fancy, mind you- said he- just a simple declaration of my true emotions. As the Moral Science book says, friends in need are friends indeed. After school Mr.P and I waited outside the school gate. I was not sure if I would recognize her. But he sure did. When she walked out we slunked behind her about fifteen feet away. She walked majestically away from me. She had her arms crossed and seemed to look down on the road as she walked, her black backpack slung carelessly down her left shoulder. But I was engrossed by her legs. She had pulled her socks right up to her knees. I could see a small patch of her skin on the back of her knee just below where the skirt ended. If I could see future I would have seen myself following her down the same road a million more times in the future. Her house was one story and was painted yellow. It looked cosy. After seeing her home, Mr.P and I returned to the Status. Let me tell you about Status. There were these seedy joints around our school where we hung out smoking and having tea. They were named so and so hotel or such and such bhojanalaya but those are too grand the terms to describe them. So when we first frequented these places we were strangers to the Saaunis. After some familiarity we build some goodwill - status - at the place and we got smokes and stuff for credit. That's when the place became our Status. But the agony is that it does not last long. When debt accumulated and the Saauni started to nag, we simply switched to a different one and worked on a brand new Status. So the fellows at the Status were impressed that we now knew where she lived and apart from the glimpse of her slacks, I now had the memory of her lovely legs to see me through. Not only that, Mr.C had come to find out from his sources that her name started with a S. That was certainly a good sign, we decided. Mr.S reiterated about the urgency of the card. "Nothing fancy," he reminded. Mr.B was certain we would find her name by the next day. (............later)