School Trip to Islamabad - Part 1

Many had spoken at great lengths about this fabled trip to Islamabad. Many had doubted it and still, many more had advocated it. The date was finally set as Sunday the 19th. Many must have lived that week in anticipation for the Big Day, but life (read: Beaconhouse) has a tendency to drop bombshells when you least expect them. At 10:00 at night on saturday, the ALC called me up and told me to tell everybody that the trip was cancelled. Such rumours had filtered throughout the past hour but he confirmed them. 10:00 was far too late to go around calling people's houses. About a bajillion calls to the principal by our esteemed head girl made sure that the trip was on. God alone knows what venom she spewed in the principal's ears. The catch was this: Only A2 was going. A1 would get it's trip the next sunday. Good enough we decided, but not before calling up Khizer, who is in A1, but part of the gang and assuring him that we'd take him along, come hell or high water, or the ALC, as it turned out to be.

Getting there at 5:30, I thought to myself, 'Man, after like 16 years spent in Beaconhouse, you still trust the bullshit they put on their permission slips??'. The school gate was still closed you see. After a good 10 minutes, somebody came along on a bicycle, scaled the wall and opened the gate from the inside. A slight drizzle heralded our arrival. As usual, I was the first one on the scene. They slowly started to arrive, but the high point of that morning was when one of the girls from A1 came along with her dad, who was looking mighty irritated at being woken up at 5:00 in the morning (hey, who wouldnt be irritated at being woken up at 5:00 in the morning). I, personally, undertook the honour of telling her that A1 wasn't going after she had asked, 'A1 waaaali koooooii naheeee aaayeeeen??'. The girl has a tendency to pull her words and I felt sorry for her when she asked me, 'Aaaaree yooouuu guuuyss plaaaayiiiinggg, liiiikeee, a praaank on uuuss?'. I told her she could go with us if she wanted to, but she said no. Oh well, that's life (read: Beaconhouse) for you. With a good 20-25 people present and counted for, we were waiting to board the bus when from far away we heard the faint echoes of a drum or something of the sort. Slowly, the roar of an engine was discerned; a toyota came into view spraying water all over the place; sound system playing at full blast at 7:00 in the morning. It was Abdur Rehman, ofcourse, another one of them A1's. To put the icing on the cake, he backed the car into the fence around the garden. When I saw that, I knew this trip was going to be good. The moment of reckonging finally arrived as Sir Tauseef (our beloved ALC) laid his eyes on Khizer and announced that he wouldn't be joining us on the trip. All the guys refused from boarding the bus and finally, I volunteered to call the principal again. Woke the poor woman up and told her the sad, woeful tale of how Khizer had left a wedding in Mardan to come back especially for this trip and now his house was locked up and he had nowhere to stay. It was decided that he could go on this trip but would miss the trip for A1. This suited him just fine as he used to be our class mate back in 10th grade, and he hasn't quite fit in with A1. Off we went at around 7:15-ish.