Unless you were living under a rock, marooned on a deserted island, or trapped inside a psycho’s basement, there was no way you wouldn’t have heard of Rocky Balboa. Although growing up in the ’80s in Pakistan felt like a version of all three of the above at different points, I wasn’t immune from the ‘Italian Stallion’ bug. If there was a vaccine to ward off the allure of those adrenaline-pumping muscles and fight scenes, it hadn’t yet breached through the martial law government’s iron curtain.

Bullying was an Epidemic

The point is, the day I skipped school with a fake fever  — a word to the wise, don’t believe the hype; the onion under the armpit trick doesn’t work. But there are other, more surefire ways we’ll discuss when the grownups aren’t watching over your shoulder. Naah, in all seriousness, don’t miss school kids. — I stumbled upon the solution to a problem that had haunted me ever since I’d started school in a new city.

I was being bullied. Now these were different times. Bullying was frowned upon but there wasn’t enough awareness about it amongst the victims, such as yours truly. It was a grin-and-bear-it era where getting wedgies and punched was a rite of passage. Sort of like family heirlooms, passed on from one generation to the next. I wonder if the hazing culture in many colleges and schools is an offshoot of that.

Anyway.

Unable to focus on my textbooks or sleep, I ventured to my parent’s bedroom, where I saw a video cassette dangling enticingly from the VCR. No mere mortal has ever been able to repel the crazy high of watching the cassette slide in as you gently push it with your fingertips.

Rocky Balboa Stepped into My Life Like a Knight in Shining Armour

I was only seven. I had no chance. The first time I saw Rocky Balboa knock out Apollo Creed on a bootlegged copy, I was hooked. I couldn’t get enough of the fight. Over the next couple of days, I got ‘sick’ so many times that my parents wondered if I had contracted a rare strain of the bubonic plague. But I had bigger things to worry about as I rubbed ice cubes over the boiling VCR. I had ruined the cassette beyond repair, and no amount of ‘tracking’ — our era’s version of the autocorrect — or praying on my part could fix the tape. Then I found out that there were other parts to the Rocky franchise. In the next week, I went on a strict diet, which was more severe than any paleo diet known to man. I was on a mission to abstain from all vices and luxuries known to man. These included ice lollies, anda shami burgers, Jubilee chocolates, and anything that threatened to shrink my pocket money. I had to save up every week to rent out the next version of Rocky. Half of the pocket money went into the orderlies’ pocket for posing as my guardian at the store since I couldn’t rent the movie alone.

By the time Rocky IV rolled around, I was a disciple of the Italian Stallion, doing push-ups whenever possible and measuring the pea-sized biceps I had developed underneath my Tom & Jerry T-shirt. And then I heard the songs.

I know what you’ll say: Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger was a generational song that became an anthem for people who wouldn’t back down.

All true.

But when I saw Rocky IV, it spoke to me in a way that felt like it had been made specifically for me.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

You see, growing up as an Army brat, constantly posted to a different place every two years, I never got to settle in. In our recent posting, I was thrown into a rough school that felt like a new shoe. It pinched in a different place every day. One major pinch, whom I’ve also spoken about in my debut novel I Dream of Rain was Sabahat, a Pakistani version of Ivan Drago. He was a relic from the Stone Age in size and temperament. He believed in simpler times when clubbing someone over the head was a perfectly acceptable ice breaker, bone breaker, and lots of other body part breakers as well.

By a cruel combination of a capitalistic educational system that refused to expel a failing student, bureaucratic ineptitude and the mental capacity of my tormentor who refused to assimilate anything written on the blackboard, Sabahat had been sliding down the educational ladder just as I climbed up until, like a match made in hell, he landed on the chair behind skinny old me.

From then on, I became Sabahat’s sock bunny. Failure to comply with Sabahat’s whims meant being suspended head-first over the toilet or being sat on until you felt your eyes would pop out from their sockets like marbles.

Give Peace a Chance

There’s a theory in conflict resolution that says we need to make war to ensure peace. Clearly, the people for that theory had not had their head stuffed down a toilet by Sabahat. That was my situation when Rocky Balboa stepped into my life. It was safe to say that I was clearly opposed to that theory if I wanted to avoid the same fate as meted out to Apollo Creed by Sabahat’s ideological cousin Drago.

I had run out of ideas to escape from the clutches of Sabahat, who had made me his secretary, doing his homework and helping him cheat during exams. When I saw Rocky IV and heard Robert Tepper’s  There’s No Easy Way Out it was as if a door had opened in the sky, shining a bright light on me.

For the first time, I felt seen and heard. I played that song on our VCR until I had worn out the reel. But by then, I had burned every word in my memory. Of course, we didn’t have YouTube or Google to know the lyrics in those days, so the words were only as good as your ears and vocabulary. So that when he sings:

To me, it sounded like:

There’s no easy way out,

There’s no shotgun home,

There’s no easy way out,

Gimme that candy gum

I know. I know.

Why would Rocky eat candy gum? Yeah, that factual anomaly bothered me, too. But I had to align the song with my situation. To me, the song was telling me to win over my tormentor with kindness. And that’s what I did. I had realized that no amount of consuming raw eggs and running up and down stairs would make me overwhelm Sabahat in a fistfight.

The only way that led to my release went through his stomach. So, little by little, as Robert Tepper’s words played in a loop in my mind, I won over my tormentor by sharing my lunch money with him and giving him enough candy treats to rot his teeth out. One day, I looked behind and saw an unfamiliar and friendlier face sitting in what had been Sabahat’s chair. When I heard that his father had been posted elsewhere, I did my best Rocky Balboa- twisted-lip- version of “Yo Adrian! We did it!”