Kritvik Bhatt

The confident eyes were glaring at my horrified eyes. His hands were on his shoulders above the straps of his bag. He wore a white shirt and a gray pair of pants—his school uniform—while I was in complete white. The scorching sun was shining brightly on that hot evening in the sky as I stood frozen, my narrow shadow on my right. Aaryan kept walking from the left road to my right, straight in his path, crossing my path, as he continued glaring into my eyes.

Clomp. Clomp. Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.

As he was about to enter the street on the left, he suddenly stopped. “Kritvik, right?” He asked dominantly.

“Y-Yeah, Aaryan. W-We met yesterday.”

“I remember that,” He smiled a little, though it didn’t really seem like a warm one. “I remember it very well, pal. AGHAHAHSHHAHJAHAJHA!” He laughed like a menace, which didn’t fit in his dialogue. He then stopped laughing, and continued glaring directly into my eyes as he grinned confidently at me. We stood there silently, his figure just some steps in front of mine. I had my hands in my pockets, my shoulders hunched, and my narrowed dark eyes opened wide. He stood dominantly in front of me, his chest facing the street on the left, his eyes confident and dominant, and his hands hanging dominantly around his body. “Since our meeting last night, ya see, I’ve wanted to talk to ya, pal.”

“No doubt, I knew it somewhere in my heart,” I thought. My lips then said in a stuttering soft tone, “Y-Yeah, what’s it?”

Aaryan’s right shoe went slowly from around his left one and stepped toward me. Then, his left shoe got off the road and stepped in the front. Clomp. Clomp. Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.

With each approaching footstep, my fright was rising. Outside, I tried to show that I was not really scared, but I knew that my face—especially my eyes—was really leaking emotions of being scared and that it was being suppressed somewhere.

Clomp. Clomp.

Aaryan’s both shoes stood in front of my shoes. I had my head tilted a little up, with my eyes on the same altitude as his. “Y-Yeah, Aaryan?”

Aaryan’s frustrated and dominating eyes were looking down toward me. “See, pal, I now know that ya don’t smoke or vape or do any other shit like that, ya see. Ya are someone who’s just studied and done that shit your whole life. And, ya might be a threat to the three of us. That’s why I wanna tell ya in advance.” He moved his right finger up and pointed at me. “Don’t ya dare tell anyone about this shit.”

The other guys who were walking in front of me had stopped. All three of them had their eyes tilted to their right back at us as they silently looked at us.

“Lemme tell ya that I’ve got my people all around, and if I ever get the news that ya did something against us, I’m first gonna put all the fucking blame of drugs and shit on ya, and then beat ya up. I can pull that shit off pretty easily, ya see. Ya are gonna be surrounded from everywhere. So, it’s better not to even think of shit like that.”

I had my eyes on those guys from my school who had stopped to see the fun there. When Aaryan was done, I turned my eyes to him, and looked him in the eyes.

“Got it?”

I didn’t say a thing, just continued to glare in his eyes.

“I asked if ya got it?!” He asked again, that time a little angrier than before.

“Y-Yeah.”

“Ya see, it’s for your own good.” Aaryan said that, and then turned back.

Clomp. Clomp. Clomp. This time, each footstep gave me relief.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. My heartbeat was thumping on my chest strongly as I looked at his fleshy back walking away. His figure was naturally well-built, like stuffed with nutrition.

With my eyes wide open in shock and my body numb with fright, I continued to glare at his back walking away for some seconds.

He then turned to his left on the intersection, and I looked at the left side of his face dominantly walking away in the street.

The kids at the right edge were still standing and whispering to each other as they looked to their backs at me. They then turned to the front and started to walk away, still whispering about some stuff.

The summer sun was scorching hot in the sky, turning everything on scene into bright yellow. The street was silent. I stood alone some steps before the four-lane intersection, looking at the left corner. There were high-rise apartments—turned yellow due to the sunlight. My eyes were locked straight at the road in front of me. They were narrowed, uninterested, and dark, but they also seemed depressed.

“That little incident… literally fucked my mind up. I saw my body being surrounded by a dark aura. My eyes wanted to leak out tears, my fingers wanted to scratch the skin of my arms, and my throat wanted to shout out loud, for some reason.”

My right hand moved out of my right pocket. I opened the palm straight and turned my head down, looking at the open palm in front of my waist.

“For some reason, my fingers were itching. Maybe they were angry. They wanted to scratch at his face real hard.”

“It feels like… I’m angry and fucked to my core.”

“So that’s how it feels, huh?”

I suddenly remembered the small cute face of Sana smiling beneath her black mask.

“How would she have reacted to this situation if she were beside me?” I thought. “Maybe she must have fought for me. Maybe she must have pushed my arms and took me away. Maybe she must have done something. Maybe she must have consoled me.”

“… Or maybe she must have shattered all my expectations and illusions about her.”

“I’d never felt so low in my whole life before. I didn’t know what I was feeling. I was angry at Aaryan so bad I wanted to tear his skin out. But, I was depressed. I felt like a loser. I wanted to cry. I wanted to… run away… from this world… to where I’ve come… to some place where I’m truly valued.”

“D-Damn… DAMN IT!”

***

The sunlight started to dim as the hours passed in seconds. My parents’ bedroom—which had a bed on the center of the right wall, a dressing table on the right far corner, and bedside tables on both the corners of the bed that had white and red bed-sheet spread beautifully–was silent and empty, only lit by that soft evening sunlight. The living room, which consisted of a gray sofa with black sheets spread over it, was silent too. The dining table in front of the kitchen—between the kitchen and the two bedrooms—had brown wooden chairs where no one sat. The whole house was empty. For some reason, my parents had gone out somewhere.

I stood on the balcony of my room, with the door open behind me. My arms were on the railing of the apartment, my one foot up on the railing. My head was raised up. In front of my figure, some distance away, were other apartments on the other side of the street. My eyes were lost in some thoughts as I glared at the sky. The sky was dim blue, turning blacker every passing minute. It was filled with white clouds spread irrationally all over.

A soft breeze rose up from my right to my left, touching my right arm and shoulders softly as it went around me. After a couple of seconds, the breeze went away.

I remembered the dominating face of Aaryan as he looked at me with his dominant look, looking down on me.

“Damn, man!” My eyes were suddenly filled with emotions. The lump on my throat was rising. “Damn… Damn it, man!” My head moved down and my eyes sunk inside my right arm. I moved my right fist up and banged it on the railing. Triing! It vibrated for a second.

“Fuck!”

As my head was turned down, my eyes sunk in my arms, another small breeze walked around me from my right to my left. My hair stood and waved a little, and then sat down again after a couple of seconds. More seconds passed as I stood in the same position. For some reason, the moon, that evening, was visible even before the sun had set. On the left top of my figure, the moon was already up in the sky, before the sun had gone away. There were still some shades of blue over black all around the moon.

My figure stood still silently. I then straightened my back, moving my head up away from my arm, and then turned to the moon on my left top. “This place… is so ironic. It’s different, yet… so similar. Why?” I asked, my eyes glaring at the moon.

“It’s a whole new place. It has a different atmosphere, a different locality, a different type of people, a different type of infrastructure. Nothing about Noida resembles Faridabad. Everywhere you see… you find it different from where I’ve come. No doubt at it. It got completely different vibes in it.”

I remembered Jiya’s smiling face filled with pimples as she laughed running toward me. I then remembered another girl, a little fatter and chubbier, smiling at me as she stood beside me. I remembered a guy in loose capris laughing hard, and I remembered a guy in casuals with glasses who was a little fatter in the belly. And then… I remembered my figure… laughing as I stood in between them… on top of the grass in the middle of… a park not so well-built or well-maintained, maybe. It had longer-than-usual grass which touched out ankles, pavement broken and filled with more grass, and unmaintained bushes and shrubs all around.

“Yeah, it’s so different from that. No doubt, where I am now is a better place.”

“But…”

“But it’s still the same. The sky, the scorching sunlight, the soft winter of November… all of it… is still the same. The same breeze in the evenings, the same scorching sun in the afternoon, the same soft coldness, the same winters we spent together, and… the same old moon we used to love. It’s the same. For some reason, it’s all the same. And… it reminds me of what I’ve lost. It makes me remember how I’ve been snatched of my happiness. It makes me feel that… I’m not what I used to be anymore. It reminds me of what I used to be, and of what I’ve become now. And, who knows… for how much more time I will need to struggle against all of it.”

A drop of tear quickly ran down from my right eye. Then, slowly, another tear from my left one started to fall down, making the second irregular line on my face. I closed my eyes slowly.

“Man, I just can’t believe that I cried that day. After all the struggle for two days, I was finally here, doing what I’ve been refraining to do all along. No doubt, I was so down in my life that… that I can’t even explain it, man! I’m just… just low on words. Maybe… I’ve had some hopes inside me that things will get better again. Maybe… I was thinking that I can survive this somehow. But maybe… I knew that this was gonna be my future. That’s how I was gonna live for the rest of my life. That’s how I gotta struggle all my life for every small ounce of happiness. What that feeling was… What that mixed feeling of hope and no hope is called… I don’t know. But for some reason, I knew that… it was something I was gonna live with for the rest of my life, standing on a thin rope of either giving up on everything or fighting a little more, a little more, a little more. Man, I was truly fucked that day.”