Chapter
1: An Evening With A Cynic:
What’s normal?
How do we define normal living? Is having a
good salaried job normal, even if you don’t like it? Is being cheerful normal,
even if you are on the edge of frustration inside? Is pretending to be happy called
normal, even if you are not?
If so, then I am normal, just like any
other guy who is reading this, or who is throwing it away to go for a better
book.
But I have something that cannot be hidden
behind a smile or cannot be scared away by tax statements and EMI-s, I have
something that can never be called normal.
I am allergic to phones.
No, not physically, of course. I can safely
touch the phone or hold it long enough to listen to all the blabbering or the
other side. It’s just dialing the numbers that scares me away.
Just imagining speaking with people on
phone makes me shiver, my tongue hesitates, all discussable topics start to
disappear out of my brain. I am bloody scared of connecting, reaching out to
people.
Yeah, I was in a serious stage and a treatment
was evident. But as weird as the disease was, the treatment had to be weirder.
And it was.
It all started on a Saturday night.
Like any other normal Saturday night, I was
lying on my sofa, with the TV turned on as a background sound, as the fan noise
wasn’t enough to distract me from the outside world. The light was turned off
and a beer can stood on my table, almost empty. The remote was tired of
changing channels one after another and prayed, maybe more than me, for
something watchable to come on.
I was helpless, thousands of sari clad
perfectly dressed women crowded in my new 36 inch LCD TV and followed me whichever
channel I visited. For a moment I felt men becoming extinct slowly, at least in
the daily soap multiverses.
Then there were the reality shows. Millions
of people fought for their 15 minutes of fame by claiming to acquire talents
and unmatchable passions, some succeeded, few proved their mettle – everybody vanished
after a week.
Next in the list were the News channels;
most of them showed the same interview at the same time from different camera
angles. The ones who desired to stand out of the crowd, showed repeat telecasts
of TV shows, which had already tortured me and my remote a few minutes ago.
Then came the Sports channels. Most of them
aired the limited Cricket triumphs of our country again and again or some lunatics
with bizarre underwear, masks and capes pretending to beat each other’s ass off.
The ones who were sure of never being watched, safely showed sports like
Hockey, badminton, which could never be popular in our gimmicky nation.
Well, I hated them all. Come on, I had a
perfect excuse! I was disillusioned!
The only channels that I liked were the
movie channels. It was a fantasy world and I was heavily drugged by it. But my
poor luck, even the movies that aired were already in my watched movies list.
I scanned and scanned and scanned…
When my finger started to pain, I stopped
at a F.R.I.E.N.D.S. episode, which I had watched a thousand times.
It was raining outside. Drops of water kept
knocking the glass panes of the window next to me. I glanced outside but
couldn’t see through the thick watery fog. It was perfectly depressing, just
like I always loved.
You might wonder if I had any friends.
Well, yes, I have friends. I have some solid good friends from my college who
deliberately chose the same city for job. I used to go out every weekend with
them and did what any normal guy does, bird watching, a little shared smoking,
occasional drinking and very rarely, shopping. But with my present condition, I
hated everything normal. It wasn’t long before I grew a sense of detachment
from that typical guy behavior.
They still went out every weekend, at least
once in 2 days. They even kept inviting me for some time, but when I myself had
given up on me…they too had to, eventually.
It’s not like I don’t speak to them. I do,
but most of the time, it’s when they call me. My call returning ratio was 4:1.
With my mother, it was 2:1. Yeah, I had shut myself off.
Grief? No, not anything in particular.
There has been no sudden death in the family, except the very elderly people,
of course. I wasn’t bankrupt, not yet at least. My girlfriend didn’t leave me,
that scenario wasn’t possible, since I didn’t have any. I had no siblings, so
there was no imminent backstabbing over any ancestral property, not that my
family had any property.
Well, okay, my parents have been divorced.
But it was almost 10 years now…and I had numbed myself out of that long ago. I
guess, that was my problem. I had numbed myself out of everything.
It wasn’t hard to do, all you had to do is
to dislike everything, reply to everybody sarcastically, avoid taking advices
because you do whatever you want to do, suck at all kinds of relationships,
rest pretty much fell into places…and I was left alone with my TV soon.
My mom tried to stay with me for a year.
But as days were passing by I kept turning more and more into a cynic. Even God
couldn’t have stayed with me if He tried! Mom left for her sister’s home in the
thirteenth month.
Me? I swallowed it rather easily, I had a
fridge full of beer!
I lazily dragged my body to the fridge to
bring out another beer can. That’s a good thing about cans. They always sound
very positive and motivating…one more can?
Yes I can!
I poured a quarter of the can in my throat.
There is something very magnetic about this bitter fluid, it slowly keeps
getting sweeter, sweeter than everything else surrounding me at least.
Cliché? Well life’s a cliché! There are 20
billion people in world, God can’t come up with that many different and unique
life-paths, can He?
Anyway, enough of this fourth wall breaking
and back to my depressing room.
My calling bell rang. Who was it disturbing
my perfectly gloomy evening? Not my friends of course, they knew better!
I went to open the door despite of my
desire to just hide inside forever.
Have you heard of the unlimited and
un-funny ‘knock, knock’ jokes? My life was just going to turn into one.
Chapter
2: Shadow From The Past:
I looked at the man standing on my doormat
for 10 seconds. He was soaking wet; I got worried for my doormat.
“I knew it, you wouldn’t recognize me.” The
guy smiled while putting his huge camping bag down on the floor of my balcony.
Though raindrops didn’t harass my balcony much, the wet and cold breeze made it
impossible to stand for long.
“I am sorry…I…” I tried to move my focus
out of the doormat and into recognizing the stranger.
He sighed heavily over my incompetent
memory. “Turn the light on, idiot!”
When the CFL glowed over his face, my
memory cells sat up straight. I knew this guy, he has changed a lot…but I could
remember something.
“Okay, I guess you would remember that
night at least.” He riddled me. “If I hadn’t leapt over you that night, we
would’ve got caught…”
He didn’t need to say another word, the
night flashed before me.
FIFA World Cup ’98, Semi-Final,
Brazil-Netherland. It was a must-not-miss match for two groups in our boarding
school, the Brazil supporters for obvious reasons and the Argentina supporters,
who hated Brazil with all their guts and prayed to God for their loss. I was in
the latter.
I was never a sporty person, but it was a
different time. Everybody became football fanatic for those few months, so did
I. It was a very strict school; we weren’t allowed to watch matches in weekdays,
which would interrupt the study time scheduled for all for us. Some extremists
still bunked the study somehow to go and sneak up where the teachers and
wardens enjoyed the live matches.
I still remember the Brazil Netherland
match was a night match. It was 10pm and the match had already started. Our
warden was out of town but he had strictly ordered the night-guards to lock the
hostel gate after 9. Still, the football-crazy guys were planning to get out of
the hostel. Some of us, wannabe-s, joined them as we smelt adventure.
All windows were grilled and so was the
whole ground floor balcony. The gate was impossible to sneak out of. Our only
choice was to use the pipe from 1st floor. We slid down the pipe one
by one and fell straight into a cement dumpster, it was unavoidable as it was
fixed right there. We didn’t mind though. The idea of doing something secret
and risky had taken over us.
Our campus was huge. There were different
hostels for every class, two separate school buildings for junior and senior
classes, a big diner building, a big gymnasium, a large prayer hall and a
number of playgrounds with the size of standard football fields. The major risk was crossing the 3 big
football fields before reaching the gym, without running into the night-guards.
We were a group of approximately 10 guys.
Such a large group would have a hard time hiding as there were very few trees
near the playgrounds. So we broke up in groups. Me, Sushil and Deep were in
one.
We were comparatively lame, considering the
enthusiasm and knowledge in sports. That’s why we were left behind to come in
our own group. Pretty reasonable, I would say!
So, we moved ahead in our own pace. The
other groups were taking the fields, so we decided to be a little safer and
headed for the Junior school building instead.
It was dark like a coal mine inside the
building. We couldn’t risk lighting a single bulb either. We could merely see
the pillars coming from the front and turned left & right accordingly. But
what about the stuff lying in the floor?
Well, what about them!
Of course, like any other temporarily blind
guy, I kicked a wooden dustbin with all my might. It was so slient for last 10
minutes that my feeble kick sounded like a piano being dropped from the roof.
Overwhelmed, Deep tried to run backwards and kicked another! Oh my God, why the
hell are all dustbins kept right here? Another piano dropped.
We saw a few lights in the fields, all
turning this way. If they catch us, it could be an instant TC – Transfer
Certificate, in other words, look for a new school pal!
We ducked and ran backwards with our heads
down through the school corridor. A few whistles blew behind us, it looked like
the guards might catch up with us. We ran out of the building but there were
other guards standing in between the hostel and us. Crap!
The whistles blew very close. No time to
waste, we ran in a new direction this time.
“You guys realize that we are heading for
the teacher’s colony… right?” Sushil asked us while running.
“Shut up and run!” I tried to think, but it
was very hard with all the whistling. The road was heading right to the most
restricted place in the whole campus, the teacher’s colony. Of course, that
hasn’t stopped us from going there earlier, but tonight was different.
Like three moving silhouettes we ran
through the shadowy road, past our school building, past our prayer hall… past
all the places in limit. We couldn’t hear the whistles anymore, so we slowed
down.
Teacher’s colony was like Govt. quarters
with bushes and trees everywhere. We sat down on the grass, tired of running.
“Hey, how about checking out the score with
Pradeep Sir?” Deep asked. We were 2 meters away from Pradeep Sir’s house and to
tell the truth, the thought had already occurred to both Sushil and me. But we
were in a chase right now, and it didn’t look safe to stop here.
“Come on, they don’t have any idea that we
would dare to come here! It’s just for a minute, anyway…. Come on, guys!” Deep
insisted.
I looked around. The place looked dead
without the street-lights, like a whole colony had converted into a graveyard
overnight. Not a single leave rustled, neither did a hood-rat squeak anywhere
nearby.
“What the hell, let’s do it.” I sighed.
Sushil shrugged his shoulders.
We tip-toed to Pradeep Sir’s quarter. Deep
knocked the door.
Pradeep Sir came to open the door. His
sleepy eyes sparkled with surprise and shock.
“What are you guys doing here?” He rubbed
his eyes in urgency and checked his watch. “It’s 10.30pm!”
We looked at each other. Clearly, he wasn’t
watching the matches. Deep still uttered with a little hesitation, “Can we know
the score sir?”
“What?” He looked at us as if we were here
to murder him. Since our expressions didn’t change, he opened his mouth again.
“I am not watching any matches, you psychos! I have a relative in my house
today who is quite ill, so I slept early along with him. And do you have any
idea what could happen to you if you were caught?”
“So, no way to find the score, eh?” I
wanted to confirm.
“My god, no, of course not! And it’s a
load-shedding here anyway! Can’t you see the street-lights are not working?”
Oh… we did notice that, but just couldn’t
attach any further intelligence to the fact. Bummer!
“Now, off you go! Scram to your hostel,
otherwise you are going to cause me some trouble too!” Sir closed his door in a
hurry.
We can’t say we weren’t disappointed.
Though sports wasn’t our thing and if we dug much deeper, we didn’t care much
whether Brazil made it or Netherland showed them their mettle, it still felt
bad that our little adventure have met a dead end, after all that running away
like wanted criminals.
I stepped ahead to the small road passing
through the colony. “Now, what?”
“WHO’S THERE?” To our shock, just a few
feet away from me, somebody shouted harshly, in top of his voice. His
flashlight stuck on me in a second. Sushil and Deep ducked rapidly in the
bushes, expecting me to follow them.
But I looked straight at the light.
For a second, my future flashed in my
brain. The guy walked though the bushes shouting at me, but I didn’t move. I
just stared at the light in a trance. It was as if I was having an out-of-body
experience.
I could see my Dad; he stood in front of
all the school board members with my transfer certificate; he kept begging my
principal and school secretary to re-consider it. I stood at a corner like a
convicted person, tears flowing from my eyes. I could see Dad’s tears too; all
his money, all his self-respect, shattered into pieces and each piece turning
into a tear-drop.
“Duck, Akash!” Sushil came out of the bush like
a slashing whip and jumped over me.
It happened within a couple of seconds, but
I felt as if I was standing there for ages. The guard started running as we had
fallen down into the bushes, out of his sight.
“Come on, quick!” He pulled me while
crawling rapidly towards a tree. I was back to the present, so I just followed
him, my heart beating like a time-bomb, ready to go off any moment.
It was a huge banyan tree and it looked at
least 100 years old. The branches and roots spread all over nearby, making it
hard to separate it from the nearby bushes. If it was another time, I might be scared
of the probable snakes that could live in the tree, considering many such
incidences had already happened here. But this was a different moment.
We rapidly climbed up the tree.
The guard came under the tree; he looked
around in the bushes crazily. His flashlight kept making asymmetric polygons in
the dark. We hid ourselves behind its stout stems, hanging from his upper
branches somehow.
Bewildered, the guy looked up and flashed
his light on the tree. Thank God, the tree was really large! The stems completely
covered our lean bodies.
But he was desperate; he turned around and
moved towards Pradeep Sir’s house, where we last saw Deep. We were still
hanging as even a slightest movement could either give away our position or
just let our hands slip. Deep couldn’t be seen anywhere.
The guard rummaged around in Sir’s garden
after taking care of the nearby bushes. Where the hell was Deep?
After what seemed like a millennium, the
guard finally gave in and walked away. We still hung on the tree to make sure he
is really gone.
After 5 minutes, we came down. I sat on the
ground. “What the hell happened to me back there? I was like, hypnotized! My
feet didn’t move, my body froze…!”
“You were done for, pal!” Sushil nodded
with a faint smile.
I looked at him, a thank-you smile running
through my eyes. Speech was never one of my strong points.
“Come on, now, we gotta find Deep.” Sushil
patted me.
We moved towards Pradeep Sir’s quarter,
still a little tensed. There was no sign of Deep.
“Deep… Deep…” We whispered, as loud as we
could. The light was still gone, and the street lights couldn’t help us with
the search, which was a good thing even a minute ago.
“Is he gone?” Somebody whispered back, but
we couldn’t see him. The location was very simple, bushes in both left and
right, quarter in the front, an un-crowded garden at diagonally left. Where was
he?
“Here… here, idiots!” The sound came from
the sky. We looked up. Deep peeked from Pradeep Sir’s roof.
“How the hell did you get there…?” I tried
to calculate. The only stairs to roof was inside the quarter.
“Never mind. Just
come down from there, we need to run.”
To our horror, Deep just jumped straight
from the roof.
“Are you crazy? We can barely see each other,
what if you hit something or fell badly?” Sushil almost shouted, maintaining
his whispering level.
“Well, I didn’t.” Deep smiled as if we were
complimenting him.
Sushil shook his head sideways and sighed.
“Let’s go.”
Chapter 3: Unwanted Flashbacks:
“Let’s go.” Sushil picked his bag. “Let’s
go in, I am soaking wet here.”
