“How wrong can I be, Ajay, after all, I am your mother; would I really want anything bad for you? Heed my words and go, it will pave the way to a better life for you.”
“I was your age too once son, I was indecisive too, but listen to these words of your old man and be sure that it is going to be a good choice. The road may be hard, but at the end of it all lies treasure, remember that. You just need to believe in us and all will be okay.”
I lay in bed in remembrance of my family’s words every single night, their voices ringing in my ears, my mother’s shrill and dead, my father’s reassuring and husky, my sister’s fogged and sadness.
Most nights I lay in a state of stupor, my eyes half-open, gazing at the patterns of the shadows on the walls and floors of my room made by the starlight coming in through the one small window beside the reading desk. I lay all by myself, all alone in my room, the three other beds sharing my room empty and their sheets cold; no one had slept in them for days. When I had first arrived in this city and started my tutoring for one of the biggest exams in the country alongside scores and scores of students, the only thing which I could relate us, students, with were sheep; sheep, and cattle being whipped by our masters and teachers, to go in one direction, to pass with flying colors, to make their coaching institute famous. Life had spiraled down so fast; I slowly started to lose the colors from my eyes, seeing everything in black-and-white, gloomy and sad all the time. My three friends shared my lodgings spent endless amounts of their precious time to cheer me up, and I wouldn’t laugh, simply because I had nothing to laugh. They were sad too, but it seemed the norm for everyone was once in the city.
One had tried to fly from too high up and had come crashing down to earth. One just simply just roped his way out from the mess we lived in; the ceiling fan had looked too tempting perhaps, one afternoon when no one was around our room. The last one had gone sleeping with the fishes. She had loved fishes her whole life, creating a pond in her family garden all by herself and bringing fish from all over. All I could hope was that she would be able to stay with them at least in the afterlife and that all of them would be happy with what lay beyond life, but maybe that was just wishful thinking.
“We have spent as much money as we had to, son, and more so that you get the best coaching available with the best of facilities. If you don’t manage to get into a good institute, you will have no future, and all our efforts would go to waste. What will your mother think if she heard you saying all of this?”
“Look at your sister, Ajay. Look at the respect she commands in society because she is a doctor from a reputed college. If you don’t become an engineer from a top college, you will hold no place in society because everyone will look down on you. And what will I think? That I, as a mother, made one child big and failed another? And you will never be able to qualify for a good college unless you finish your coaching. No, you are going to stay there and work as hard as you have to for as long as it takes, but you aren’t coming home until you finish your tutorship.”
All three of them would come back at night, as soon as the clock struck midnight. Their faces would be stark-white, their skin ghostly, their bodies smelling of dirt and rot. They would all be half-illuminated by the faint moonlight, their smiles as if they were a part of an old faded photograph. Sometimes one of them would be studying, sometimes two or all three of them would chat between themselves, falling asleep one by one as the night passed on, only for their bodies going out of the light and falling into darkness. All nights would pass in such normalcy; it was as if they had never even gone in the first place. The entire situation of their appearance at night and disappearance in the morning was a sinister sequence of agonizing fright for me every single night.
“When I was in medical college, my roommate one day packed up all her belongings, and simply quit mid-semester, and I was alone in my room for a month until a new roommate arrived next semester. Staying alone hours on end studying does strange things to you, and I occasionally hallucinated about her, seeing her back again in her bed, but it passes, dear brother. Sure, she never killed herself, but I still completely understand what you are going through right now.”
It was as my entire body was frozen, for all effort to close out my eyes to block them out was in vain. I had to keep them open and keep staring at the horrors no matter what happened. On some nights they would all look at me and start talking to me, telling me how wonderful their afterlives were, how happy and contented they were because they were far away from the ‘horrible mess’ they were in before and in which I still lived. They would ask me to join them and be happy, and my mouth would be jammed. Every time my mouth would refuse to open, but I knew I would be courageous enough to reply one day. One day……
