My Mornings and Evenings in Kamathipura

Though frequent night-visitors ('Ahem) will feign ignorance about the place called Kamathipura, mostly everyone has seen the place in Movies or Documentary films or at least heard about the biggest Red Light district of Mumbai. And though one seems to want any association with the place, for obvious reasons I must admit that for five years me and my friends have spent almost all our mornings and evenings in Kamathipura.
It all started when I was in the fifth standard (ya that early too) when my School Bus Guy; called DALAL (no pun intended); for some inexplicable reason decided to change the route of our School Bus No5. and take it though Kamathipura. God knows what made him do that, its not like it was a short-cut or anything, in fact navigating the bus though the narrow meandering lane took twice the time the normal route would have. So here were we kids all in assorted sizes and ages making trips though Kamathipura to and from school, twice a day.
And suddenly with the change in the bus no.5's route came many changes in the Bus no. 5's occupants. The older kids lost all interest in their chief bus-ride sport of tormenting us young ones, pulling at our ties and making us fight, and began staring out of the windows for extended periods of time. Which was foolish cause the sights that presented themselves were impossibly ugly, owing to the early hour we caught them without any makeup and usually with a tin can in their hands and a toothbrush in their mouths.
For a few weeks while the novelty lasted we were class heroes, come on we were the only ones to have seen Kamathipura first hand and that to twice a day. The moral and ethical issues apart we kids couldn't t for the life of us understand how anyone could bear to even look that the unsettlingly ugly local produce of the place, much less use it, and that to after spending money, that led us to spend a lot of our lunch breaks debating and questioning male horniness to no avail.
But kids need their fun so first we started squeezing our water bottles and spraying water out of the windows into the lane and later we made up a small jingle that we used to sing/scream while passing through Kamathipura, it went like...........No wont mention it here, don't want my blog blacklisted so soon. It soon became a rage and almost a ritual, no one cared if there were anyones parents riding in the bus as they often did, that jingle had to be sung while passing thought the Kamathipura Lane. It took a lot of complaining and vice principle riding the bus for it to stop i.e. we would now sing it under our breath and then giggle uncontrollably like little gals, it seems so retarded now but hell it was fun in that age.
The highpoint of the bus ride though Kamathipura came before just the Infamous lane ended and merged with the Reputable people's main road, here was Alexandra Cinema famous for showing A rated films. Now we couldn't enter the place being minors, all we could do was leer at the hoardings and posters of the raunchy English films dubbed in Hindi, with titles like Gurram Pani, or Shadi aur Barbadi, Vaishi Darinde and Kaamini, gosh I can remember enough titles to fill up this page. With the internet still in its infancy and not having reached sexual maturity like it has now, the only provocative material available to us was that stuck up on walls of Alexandra cinema.LOL

This trip down memory lane almost makes me miss the trip down the actual lane, wish I could dress up again in those white chaddis and shirt and wear a blue tie around my head (not neck) like Rambo and shout out our song though Bus no 5 spraying water out of the window just one more time.