The Prophetic Curse

1

Death & The Birth of Rebellion

Ladies and gentleman … yeah … I am referring to you lot out there, sitting in your comfy chairs waiting to hear my story. Well, let’s not underrate it by calling it a story. That is exactly what it is not; this is my life’s story and I believe that you will bear it out with me. Let’s all be frank – we Indians have a penchant for melodrama, don’t we?

So, here goes nothing.

To be honest with you, my beginnings were like the ugly duckling story that we all have heard about. You know the small duckling who was bereft of company, of love from its peers? That was me right there. I still remember those days like it was yesterday – the only company I had, except for my family which consisted of my mom, dad, grandpa and grandma, were two dogs that we had in our house. The reason that I was an only child was that my ever-possessive family thought that if they were to have one more sibling, the love and affection would have to be shared, hence they decided to obey the government’s policy of population control, which advised the people of India to have a maximum of two children. I suppose my dad was an ardent follower of rules and moreover he was a devoted central government employee and I am guessing that this got to his head. The government had also advised the people to enjoy coitus in the discomfort yet safety of rubber latex. I really don’t know how easy it was to get hold of those in the year of 1995 in the rural district of Trichur, Kerala, but somehow my father managed to, and hence I was doomed to be a loner for life. Everybody who has a brother or sister thinks it is lucky to be a single child – enjoying all the love and affection – well, I tell you, even though in the family photographs I looked happy and contented, it was far away from the reality. Allow me to explain further. It got to such a desperate scenario that I started to lie to my friends that I had a brother and sister. Even though I am aged 22 now, I still don’t know why I said that. I guess some parts of me craved the love, and I guess I really needed some brotherly and sisterly love. Still everything was hunky dory till the age of my upper kindergarten. It was during my UKG year that my grandma, who looked after me like ghosts guard their treasure, fell sick. Till this day I remember the pain on my dad’s face as he had to face the reality that his mother was falling into the hands of death. It was not a pleasant sight to see. You know how we get the summer rains right? One fine day all of sudden, out of nowhere, when you least expect it a sudden spell of rain comes, which drenches the dry arid land and your soul into momentary relief. Well, the exact opposite happened in the Vysakh household. One fine day when we were sitting in the hall as usual watching television and the food was served by my mom, my grandma refused to have anything. At first we thought it was one of the occasional disagreements that my grandpa and grandma used to have between them. But it was not so. We all were having our food when my grandma had a coughing fit, and she was seen running to the wash basin to spit and what came out instead of phlegm was blood. My father, who followed her to find out what happened, broke into tears. My dad was like that – he just couldn’t bear to see his near and dear ones falling sick. Till that day I used to see that man as an emotional brute, but then I changed my perception about him. I realised that my father was, after all, human and a sensitive one at that. It was a mystery for me, as my grandfather, who is a master of emotional control, nurtured his second son like this. Yet even during that emotional breakdown that I witnessed that day, it was grandpa who took the flight control and calmed down my dad and made my dad functional so as to take grandma to hospital. Funnily enough when you were supposed to play and make new friends, my time was spent between visiting my grandma in hospital and becoming depressed thinking about her in my own way while I was in my KG School. Even though during those days I didn’t know what made my grandma spit blood I knew that something was seriously wrong with her. The bad news crept into my life after I finished writing the final Alphabet Test that marked the end of the kindergarten days for me. My mom had picked me up from school, and as soon as we reached our house, the call of fate literally rang in the Vysakh household, which ensured that I would never see my grandma ever again. It was grandpa who had called and his voice failed to express the emotion that was burning inside him. You really had to appreciate that man as not a single drop of tear fell from his eyes as the apple of his eyes drifted away from him. All he did as the body was laid out on banana leaf for the customary Hindu funeral was sit in a rocking chair in the front porch with a smile full of pain as he spoke to his friends and family that she was no more. It was also the day that curiosity started to kindle a spark in my heart. This curiosity, which was aroused on the fateful day, nurtured a monster in me that would destroy the tranquillity in me inch by inch. I still remember that moment in my childhood – I could see my grandma on her deathbed – the thing that piqued my interest was that I could see her eyes were half closed, and the sceptic in me slowly started to build a conspiracy theory around it. I still don’t know if it was out of desperation that wanted to see my grandma living again, but I started to console myself that grandma was pulling a prank as her eyes were half closed. But to tell the truth, I was afraid as to what the others would say if I were to express my opinion aloud. So I kept it within me, but soon enough it got the better of me when my father told me to get some water for him. I ran with purpose to the kitchen, glad that I could make myself useful. Our neighbour’s wife was preparing the drinks at that time as the emotions got the better of my mom and she was crying her heart out.

Aunty, dad wants some water, I said to her.

One second Appu, she said and I waited.

This crucial minutes of boredom got the better of me as my thoughts once again drifted to the half-closed eye theory that I created. I could no longer hold it in me.

You know, I have my doubt about Achamma’s death. I think she is feigning death, I blurted out.

I don’t know what the problem with some people is, but they tend to laugh whenever I express an opinion of my own – some original thought – and she did exactly that.

Why do you think she is playing ‘dead’? She asked me finally, controlling her devil’s laughter.

Um … Um … because … she keeps her eyes half-closed. I think she is pulling a drama for the day. I didn’t wait for her reply and ran outside with the glass of water in my hands. And I was laughing inwardly when I saw my father crying. As he heard me coming he made a desperate attempt to wipe away the tears. I quickly handed him the glass and really wanted to console him. Somewhere deep inside me, I wanted him to be the happy dad he had always been.

Dad … I don’t think you should be crying … , but before I could complete the sentence he gave me a bear hug and I hugged him back, words slipping away from me as it often happens in moments of intense emotion.

Yet, before the hope within me could blossom they took grandma away to the crematorium. The innocent child in me believed that I was right all along and that my grandma pulled a prank, which in the end backfired on her because as the flames consumed her body, her legs suddenly began to rise automatically. Even though my father tried his best to convince me that it was not a prank and hammered me away with scientific logic, I refused to believe it. I started to blame them unconsciously for her death. Even though this happened to me at the tender age of five, I couldn’t accept the logic behind all this until the age of thirteen. Hence it bred in me a lot of hatred towards my dad and constantly swearing behind his back whenever he scolded me. It made me hate my family though I daren’t voice it out in front of them.

To think of my life now … ahh … honestly, I had an extremely bright future in front of me. Yet – ah … there’s always a yet or a but in everyone’s life, isn’t there? Cut to the chase, I stood 19th in the national level PCM exam conducted nationwide in every school across the sub-continent. Just think about it! India’s 1 billion people, out of them a few million would be and out of that me getting into the top 20! This is the story of a genius who squandered away his potential and all for what? For nothing but the thrill of losing it all. I guess I was always a strange kid and I got even stranger after grandma’s death. I began to feel a growing affinity to fire since my grandma’s cremation. I guess I really wanted to find out what my grandma really felt when she was consigned to flames. Hence an intense affinity to flames. I don’t know whether it was the fascination for its power to consume anything in its path or my desire to conquer it. But the fact is that a lasting relationship developed between me and this natural element. I guess some people would call it pyromania but I started to take her out on dates in company of my mom at first in kindergarten days. But gradually I was losing control over her while in primary classes. I set fire to a coconut tree near our house, lighting a haystack near it. This act got me grounded for almost a year and I missed a lot of Tom and Jerry and Dragonball Z due to this. Yet, somewhere down the line, due to the transition of a child to a teenager, I grew tired of her and found a substitute in paper roll smoking. This happened to me at the age of fourteen. A few of us boys, the naughty bunch, would roll paper up and pretend we are smoking until a best friend of mine, Nilan one day decided to actually light it and smoke it. Although I didn’t actually try it in front of my friends, I really did want to try it and did try it at home. Like all the things that my father had caught me doing, I was also got caught red-handed after a failed attempt to inhale the smoke which triggered a coughing fit inside the toilet. The irritating and incessant coughing drew the attention of my father who was watching television, and it was the first time that my father lay hands on me. I got lashed up pretty badly and also missed a lot of Beyblade episodes due to this tomfoolery. Ah … I guess it is the childhood bereft of my favourite cartoons that added fuel to the fire I guess ha ha ha. But still, to say the least, my life was that of a normal boy except for the occasional naughty things I did. But still, when I recall those times I can’t help laughing. When in the ninth standard, I suddenly had what could be best described as a minor setback in studies. Normally, I used to score full A+ but once, in the ninth standard, the hormones surge took over and thus I started to fall back in grades. From A+ to B+. This minor setback was not so minor for my parents, and hence my highly educated Indian parents decided to take me to a psychologist. One fine morning instead of doing my normal routine of dressing up for the school, I dressed up for the Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, Calicut. I was taken to the child and adolescent specialist in Psychiatry. From the first impression of that place itself, I had this notion that something was seriously wrong with me. I was sitting with kids who were talking with apparently nobody, kids of my age who drooled sitting in a chair gazing at nothing in particular. At that precise moment, I had a sudden mounting fear in me. Am I really like one of them? What is wrong with me? I never talked or behaved like they did. Or did I? Man, I am doomed! After what seemed like an eternity filled with the same confusing thoughts which spiked my heart beat and made me sweat, I came face-to-face with a really gorgeous lady, who asked me and my parents all sorts of questions. Later on, after the boring question–answer session, I was instructed to wait outside. Now, I was almost certain there was something wrong with me because if it wasn’t so, the psychiatrist wouldn’t ask me to wait outside when she talked to my parents. After that, I was redirected to a strange guy who just sat in a chair and observed me for what seemed like decades, after which he asked me my name and other details, all the while maintaining the steady stare of an owl. That guy really drove the living daylights out of me. I knew this guy had to be the main guy, because after asking me all sorts of questions, he began to prescribe medicines. The prescription included a red tablet, which had to be taken twice a day. I started taking that tablet every single day and I would simply doze off in the very first period at school. As the days passed, life became colourless – more of black and white nature. I couldn’t handle being a zombie, and hence after a week or so, I started to flush down the tablets in the closet but still I didn’t know what that medicine was prescribed for. Hence, one fine day, I decided to take the generic name of the drug and search on the web to find out what this medicine was meant for. The generic name of the drug was atomoxetine. Now I am sure that some of you have assumed what this medicine is for. For those of you who don’t know it yet, it was for ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and also for ADD or Attention Deficit Disorder. Strangely enough, I had heard of this disorder at that age because my dad had forced me to watch the film Taare Zameen Par, the Amir Khan film, which portrayed a child affected with ADHD. I knew that was what the film was about, as my dad told me so and from that day I started to think that I was like the kid in that film. You might find this funny, but I started to actually act like that or somehow resemble that kid as I started to really just plainly ignore my studies – but still I managed to average B+ in every exam. Yet my behaviour changed for the worse. I started to hang out with the back benchers in the class, and that’s how I started smoking notebook papers at my home. I decided that I had to hang out with the cool kids and be like one of them, or the girls in my class won’t notice. So it was a sort of monkey-see-monkey-do phenomenon that was happening to me at that time. As the days passed by, my parents started to get frustrated with me, as now not only were my marks plummeting but they were also getting complaints from the principal of the school. I started to bunk classes, bring motorcycle to school, pooled by my cool friends. As I reached 10th standard, things started getting really crazy. It was the year of gang warfare and also the year GTA San Andreas was released. Ha ha ha hence called ourselves gangstas. We would beat up the nerd kids, try our hands at bike stunts and literally go nomadic to pick up fights with college kids. It was a year of violence that ensured that my schooling was officially over in Sarvodhaya Vidhyashram, Calicut. The principal informed my mom that if they were not taking me away, I would soon end up in some juvenile court. All the cool stuff we were fond of, like driving vehicles without licence, rioting, etc., were illegal in the eyes of the law. Even though my dad didn’t tell me directly that he was going to shift me to a new school, what he did was to send me to every Kerala born teenager’s nightmare D.P. Joseph! If you are not a Keralite and have never heard of this man before, allow me to provide a brief introduction about him. Frankly speaking, you could compare this man to Adolf Hitler, except that the man being discussed didn’t kill you. What he did in the name of entrance coaching was mentally torture us teenagers. His institution was established in Thrissur, which was a good three-hour journey from Calicut, which ensured that I would have to stay in his hostel, which can literally be termed HELL! What he expected from his wards was very simple. Wake up at five in the morning, chew or swallow the entrance-oriented books that he supplied till 8 am. The breakfast that followed was measured and served in grams and supplied. The boring and tedious lectures till 4pm followed. The students had to basically sit in the classroom and take in everything that the lecturers delivered, and if you chanced to doze off in any of the classes, consider yourself dead. This man had installed CCTV cameras in the classrooms to monitor the students, and he had a staff monitor appointed to check whether there was anyone sleeping in the class. The punishment was to censure and embarrass the offenders in public, in front of our peers. These were the minor punishments that he would give. He once gave a lecture on how abstaining from adolescent weaknesses can considerably improve your chances of cracking the Entrance. I hope you have some idea of the point I am driving at. That is simply the craziness of the man. My dad had initially enrolled me for the crash course of two months, but soon enough I don’t know if it was the natural corollary of all the bad deeds that I had done in my past life. I secured the stipulated average of 75% in the exams and that ensured for me a seat in the school that he started. The school was aptly named Vidhyasagar which literally meant the ocean of knowledge. If he had built a prison in the entrance coaching classes he conducted throughout Kerala what he did over at the school was to set up a maximum security prison at the school yet it was ironically transformed in such a way that anyone who saw the school would think that it was a heaven as the school had its own tennis court, cricket practice net, athletics tracks, well-equipped library et al. Whatever you needed you had it there. But there was a catch – these facilities were not available for the 11th- and 12th-standard students. All they were expected to do was chew books day in and day out. My blood still boils when I think of it. If the entrance coaching class had a CCTV camera to constantly watch the students, the school also had cameras installed in all the classrooms. There was video-conferencing facility too exclusively for the Head of the Institution to communicate with all classes. Talking to girls was an offense and was treated on par with having sexual relations. I never fully understood why he thought so. The culprits were produced in front of the assembly and humiliated in the presence of all 11th- and 12th-standard students. The one redeeming feature of his character was that he loved the students put under his care, but his way of showing love seemed strange and funny. Thus, at first when I joined, I was full of zeal and positivity, but all that evaporated in the first few days as the school turned into hell. A bunch of nerds were my friends. My choice was such and I suppose that was God’s wish and predestined karma for me. I shared my room with two nerds namely Vinay Ram and Nimay. We were supposed to share one room with three others and the man showed no exception to anybody. My only relief during those days was that a classmate of mine, Ritik, who had studied with me at Sarvodhaya Vidhyashram in Calicut, had also joined the same course. That hope, however, was short-lived, because I found out that Ritik had changed and had become quite studious in the new place. The old creative and friendly spark in his eyes was gone. The atmosphere at the new place changed him. His sole interest was in studies. The most irritating thing about that school was that you could go to bed only at 11 pm and had to wake up at exactly 5 am or you would invite the wrath of the hostel warden and ultimately the wrath of the Boss. For this very reason, I stayed there for just a couple of months and the food served there was measured out in coffee spoons. He would weigh each single morsel of food. You have to note here that the hostel wardens were actually farm workers and they considered us as their farm animals. Anyhow, that provided the necessary spark for the beginning of me manifesting wheezing coughs. The warden, as I had rightly guessed, had seen only farm animals sick. He would call my dad for advice on what to do with me as the warden had no idea as to what to do with me. When animals get sick I suppose you discuss with the farm owner and then take them to the veterinary doctor. I still suspect that they might have pledged their brains to the dictator boss. Hence my doomed-for-good father and grand dad would take their car from Calicut and drive 180 kilometers to the hostel that was situated in Thrissur district in the coastal state of Kerala, and then drive another 20 or 30 kilometers to a hospital. When I would be finally taken to the doctor, they would find no problem with me whatsoever. This routine continued till Onam, and I used to come to Calicut on the pretext that I was sick and needed treatment real bad. The doctors even had made me do nasal endoscopy to check if something was really wrong with me, and finally, after many episodes of my wheezing fiasco, they finally found out that I was actually psychosomatic in nature. You see, my life was like a castle of cards, once the psychosomatic card got down, every other card of my life cascaded down real fast. Thus, I bid adieu to that school during the Onam hols. I created a scene in front of my parents and used my psychosomatic excuse to the full extent – they didn’t know what hit them, the poor souls!

2

Damned Digits

Thus I collected my Transfer Certificate and fast forward a bit to see me join Guru Vinayak Bhavan, which was a sister concern of the school where I had studied earlier. So I expected the same sort of standard in that school, but my bad fortunes knew no extent and hence I went to the new place for a period of 6 months. I had taken science and as the majority of the students who took science I too slept in the class and woke up only during the English period, for I had an affinity for the English language from the beginning of my academic career. I had many good friends. We used to call a certain guy called Akhil chembu, a mallu word meaning a big tumbler or vessel for the fact that he had a big ass! Those were my innocent times – I was an overall a good boy and the ladies loooooved me … don’t consider me as a lady magnet sort of material, but I too had my share of love escapades in that school. Thus during my incubation period in Bhavan’s I developed a love for English literature and I had become a sort of poet in the class. I would foolishly scrawl some deep seeming verses when I felt sad or happy. During that time I had mood swings also like being sad for an instant and then becoming just the opposite of that, that is, extremely happy for no apparent reason. The sad thing was that the school was near my mother’s office, that is the University of Calicut, and thus my loving and adoring father gifted us a house taken on rent near that school. I was thus stuck with my mother in a god damn place called Kohinoor without a phone or internet connection to pass time. I absolutely hated the place and would come to my house in Calicut faking a variety of illnesses, but those were the golden moments when I met an awesome chick named Radhika. She was a year junior to me but had an awesome body which most of the boys seemed to go nuts for. She came by the school bus that I too had enrolled for. The relationship was fueled solely by the testosterone levels in her and my own body. She and I used to stand side by side in the bus and occasionally our bodies would touch and it would send a tingle down my spines, the occasional touch was due to the efficient braking mechanism of the bus, without which it would have been impossible for me to touch her. Hence the first thing on boarding the bus was to pray that the god damned driver would apply brakes indiscriminately so that we could enjoy the momentary thrill of the body contact. During those days I had no beard or any of the secondary masculine features, I was in plain words just cute … nothing else, and most of the boys seemed to like me as I was sort of the hippie guy. As the school was located in the suburban part of Calicut and I was a city-boy, I had my own most sought-after features in me. Well, days passed by and we didn’t have to depend on the brakes anymore for the magical moment. The other girls were rudely shocked to see the way I and Radhika behaved. But the funny