Scribbles by Sudhansh

Tik….Tik….Tik….Tik….
The sound of the second hand tore through the deafening silence of his room like a sword through a neck. Only other resound that had the ability to clash with that sword was the snoring that would often come off as absolutely annoying to his family. Well, there was much more about him that his family could not tolerate and there was much more over which he was often made sarcastic comments upon.
“Look at you! A grown up twenty-two years old man and still making us sweat bullets. Why don’t you go for the civil services? What do you find in these machines that you’ve chosen to postgraduate with? They aren’t going to bring anything I tell you…”

As he lay snoring in a room which was more of a second home to spiders, a wave of images travelled through the air appearing in circles. He couldn’t help but look at them with a freakish frightened face and the first thing he couldn’t do was ignore them because they seemed all around him. The second thing he couldn’t do was run away because his legs had gone numb. The third thing he couldn’t do was shut his eyes because they had now diffused deep in his soul and had become a part of who he had been for all these years. An image of a slit forearm, of rolled up eyes, of a pumping chest. As his legs jerked, he opened his eyes and realised what a horrible nightmare it was.

Kushagra was definitely not the best ranked student of his batch but he unarguably was the most passionate fresher entering in the Central University he was now a part of. He had heard stories of how cruel the campus had been to some students and how kind it turned out to be for those who embraced the cruelty and replaced it with dedication and discipline. Now that the day was there, he had a smile on his face as he freshened up in good spirits pulling up his kadaa. It was gifted to him by his grandfather at age eleven. He’d run into his arms as a kid every time he saw him and the next thing was the big old man’s kisses on his cheeks and a few unexpected tickles. Baba would make him stand on the carrier of his bicycle and take him to the smiling fields of Makandi telling him how his grandfather fought in the first world war and then his father in the second. The scenarios of war that he described were the exact same words passed on to him by the older generations. The one thing he wouldn’t tell was the fact that both of them fought for the Britishers or say the British Indian Expeditionary forces. Kush loved listening to his old man’s stories with extreme delight anyway. He’d smile everytime Baba would describe the Virat Yudh of Mahabharata, get excited everytime Draupadi Swayamwar was described and was all ears when the teachings of Bhagavad Gita were recited. Baba was no longer in the world but the kadaa given by him was a constant reminder of all that was taught.

As he stepped in, he could feel some change in the air which was probably because of the vegetation that surrounded the campus. The department was at a walking distance and the closer he got to it, the wider his shoulders got. A few minutes had passed when he was stopped by a group of students who were lining up the freshers for tasks that were all about self-humiliation. He knew what exactly was going on and chose to walk away silently without bothering anybody but there were no options offered at the moment.

‘Kushagra Joshi is the name eh!’ said one of the seniors as he pulled him by the identity card. ‘Just ride along and you won’t fall into any sort of trouble. Trust me….we aren’t worse than Machine Designing that’s for sure’. The fat senior laughed at his own joke while his friends gathered around their brand new scapegoat.
“We aren’t gonna ask you to perform anything extraordinary. Just hold your balls by your right hand, grab your butt with the left and hop your way to your lecture hall as we watch along. It’s that simple, Joshi”
The young man wasn’t raised that way and no way he was going to obey them. As he calmly cut through the circle and walked ahead, he was grabbed by his shoulder, turned around and one of the taller seniors got hold of his jaw saying, “You don’t cross us young man. Nobody does! Just do as we say”.

As Kushagra hit the hand that grabbed his jaw, he felt a flurry of punches thrown on his head, jaw and the whole of face. His sight blurred as he fell down and the kicks thrown at him hit right on the belly, shoulders and face again. His teeth sank into his lips and some of the other ones seemed to break off his gums. Feeling a sharp pain in his head and a darkened sight, he felt nothing but miserable as more kicks waved through his body. All while the image of a slit forearm, pumping chest and rolled up eyes hung in front of him circling out of nowhere.

The kid who killed himself was barely nine years old. Nobody in the locality had heard of a suicide committed at an age so young and neither did anyone know the reason of it. All they had seen was the boy playing with his neighbours and sometimes fighting like all boys do. One step ahead in every fight was a boy named Kush (as everyone else called him). Although, they had once seen a group of four boys pinching his belly and as he tried to fight back, Kush knocked him out with a blow of his fist. The elders ran forward and separated the kids, scolding them over and sending them off to their homes. Not more than two weeks had passed when that boy was found lying with his forearm slit with a kitchen knife. The chest pumped like an unstoppable engine and his eyes rolled back as if the last hope of saving him had run out. As they carried him to the hospital with a cloth wrapped around his arm, he was declared dead. His parents beat their chest crying like they’d lost every damn thing. The neighbours talked about it to this day and sometimes also mentioned that Kush was in a huge way responsible for driving the boy to death.

Eleven years later when Kushagra Joshi limped his way out of the University gate, his demons walked alongside.