Seven Years in Limbo

They say something about being bullied and character building. That high school is supposed to be the best and worst times of your life, and that for anyone who’s just the least bit different, it can be the seventh level of hell. It’s not as effective as I’m sure it was meant to be.

For me, it was the darkest chapter of my life story. If being bullied wasn’t bad enough, I also had to survive the kind of friends who only talk to you in the confines of the ominously yellow school bus. The kind of people who see you in the corridor and, in the company of their friends, ignore you because oh my god wouldn’t that be social suicide. If there was one thing I learned in my nine years of pure-Delhi schooling, it was this: even in the midst of infamy and the meanest of company, when there is always an extra pair of hands to pull you down, you gotta keep your head above the water. The drowning, that’s what they want.

What’s their reason, you ask? Well, in retrospect – once you’re all in college and beyond – no one is gonna remember. But at the time, it’ll be the most important thing they do. You can’t pass by without a sneer, an acidic jibe, a stifled giggle.

Of all the places to find refuge, I found mine in the art room. There have been days when I used to spend my entire day in there – not always painting, but mostly because it was that haven. Where no one could judge me, because it was the one place where I was actually good at/for something. In there, I wasn’t the school faggot or the freak who couldn’t defend himself. I was the one with the kind of raw talent my teacher was proud of. I’m not bragging – I now look at them as worthless, having never pursued art beyond school – it’s just something I used to be told. I’m not writing this to give a personal opinion on what happened to me, I don’t wanna talk about how good I really was or how bad. The purpose of writing this is just to let words flow, to tell stories as they happened.

And, quite frankly, I was as bad with speaking words then as I am today. Give me pen and paper and I can quote Shakespeare for you – get me drunk and I might just orate – but ask me to talk about what’s going on in my life, or something that happened in the past, anything, I got nothing. On a side note maybe that’s why I drink as much as I do, because otherwise, I’d just have nothing to say. And most people I know don’t really have the patience to read everything I write, much less the shy notes I’d rather scribble and hand them; and there’s only so fast and grammatically correct I can type on my phone!

But I digress.

So, as I quietly suffered through school, I only had the creative route to let out my frustrations and sadness. But you know what I realised, it really is the best character building exercise – of course I’m not saying my seven years of the total nine is something I wish upon someone – that anybody can ever go through. Because once you’ve made it through, once all the bad is behind you and you’re done with school, there’s no looking back. Because if you’ve survived school in a city like New Delhi, the rest is but a breeze. You’re going to find people who can accept you not despite your flaws, but because of them. It’s easy to give up, it’s even easier to give in and be cynical – I’ve tried both – but you have to keep your head up and keep swimming. Someone’s out to get you, face them. Tell them to give you their best shot – even though it’s not that easy. I remember telling people to bitch about me behind my back, have the decency to not say it to my face. I’ll admit it, I wasn’t strong enough. Of course I then went on to being a shade of cynical that’d frighten everybody I know today – remember the part where I don’t share feelings? – and life was all about confrontations and say-it-to-my-face’s. But you have to move past that, because being that guy is worse than being the guy everyone made fun of. You wake up one day and find that you’ve turned into what once was your worst nightmare, and the people who loved how totally awesome you were in your blunt, cynical behaviour are now gone. Because while you judged the world together, they judged you just as severely. And you realise that you no longer recognise the person in the mirror. You’re the perfect Delhi Dickhead and you deserve to wear that crown of shame.

In that moment of being totally alone, you find yourself – a part of you that’s waiting with cross-armed foot-tapping impatience to be discovered.

And so, I’ve entered the next phase of life. It doesn’t matter what class of society you come from – and don’t tell yourself that we’re not in an 1800’s classist society – what you’ve been through or what curveballs you’ve thrown yourself, what makes the difference is how you choose to leave from it. I’m a better person for having gone through hell in high school. I’m a better writer because I couldn’t find a confidant. I was always on the outside of the camaraderie between friends and acquaintances, and once I turned my back on that, I realised that there was another sun to look at. And that sun, well there’s no need to fear the heat.