Aaryan Khanna

“I had expected more from you.”

“You could have done better.”

“Make sure to score better next time.”

“I had more expectations from you.”

“You can do better than this.”

First it was a bald man in a light blue shirt, then it was an old woman with white hair and a yellow kurta, then it was a young female with dark eyeliner and dark green saree, then it was porcelain colored young woman in blue kurta, then another man with black dense hair and white shirt. All of them were my teachers—all trying to act like they gave a fuck.

I had my head tilted down, my face on the bunch of papers in my hand. On the first page were the marks, forty-eight out of eighty, along with my name, class, and other information on the top half of the page and mathematical calculations on the latter half of the page.

“You score sixty-three percent on average, Aaryan!” A man later scolded my younger figure. He was screaming at me, with some drops of saliva coming out of his mouth. He looked at me, frowning at my guilty figure. He was so fucking angry on me. He was my dad—a man with a dense black mustache and thick hair, half of them white. He wore a shirt-trouser combo.

The room was dark. Only the kitchen had a bright bulb on, which was not really sufficient to light the whole house. We stood in front of the kitchen on the left of the dining table.

“He’s really gone out of our hands,” My mom, who was working in the kitchen, added. She then turned around at me, pointing her rolling pin at me. “If we had been strict, he’d have never turned out this way!”

I had my head tilted down, silently listening to both of them screaming at me.

“Yeah! Don’t make me stop all of your games and stuff! We can live without an internet connection and a TV in this house!”

“All of it has made our lives harder anyway!” My mom said and turned back to rolling breads in the kitchen. A pot was being heated on the gas.

“Change the password of your phone and don’t tell him. That’s the only way he’ll start focusing back on his studies!”

“And if you go out to play for more than an hour, then you’ll see!”

Irritated, I turned to my left at my mom. “Mom, health is also important, and kids need to play to remain healthy.”

“All of that health can go to hell! We eat well, and we don’t need to play to remain healthy! Look at us!”

“Mom, kids are differen—”

“Stop answering back to us!” My father screamed.

I turned quiet.

He continued to glare at me with his angry eyes, like he’d eat me. “Shameless!”

“We didn’t even dare talk back to our parents, and look at this generation.”

“Times have changed, mom.”

“Then don’t make us go back to being the parents of that time to make you study,” My mom replied back.