Aaryan Khanna

“It was our first fight, wasn’t it?” Sooraj smiled.

Sooraj and I sat beneath the crescent moon, my back tilted to the front and my weight on the elbows on my thighs. I donned a black sweatshirt and a denim blue pair of capris. Sooraj was on my left, his back straight and his head tilted down in guilt, just like me. Both of us were feeling shit.

I smiled at Sooraj’s comment too. “Yeah, I was shit scared, pal!”

“Yeah. But… we were so…”

“… so desperate.”

“So desperate…”

“… desperate…”

Those words echoed in my ears. That shit made me realize, “Yeah, just how desperate we were to find our lost charms, were we not?”

“Just how fucked we were because of all that that was happening,” Sooraj added, his smile gone.

“We were just growing up.”

Sooraj smiled after hearing those words. “Sure we were.”

I smiled too.

“Yeah… both of us had lost some shit or the other… something that used to define us as humans, as individuals, and something that made us distinct from others. Our lives took it from us. It was studies for me, and it was cricket for him.”

***

A guy my age in a green frame of spectacles was smiling as both of us stood in front of each other, talking to each other and laughing. I was laughing hard as he added, “And your mom banged that milkman that night! Ya know why?! That was me, fucker!”

“Shut the fuck up, fucker!” I shouted back, still laughing. “Ya can’t even milk a gal and ya call yourself a milkman?!”

“Bitch, I milked yer mom! Ask yer sister when she comes out! I banged her so much my dick must have touched her inside yer mom’s womb too!”

“Shut the fuck up, man!” I shouted, both of us still laughing.

“Aye, bitches!” Another guy walked from behind. He had relatively darker skin-tone. “What the fuck shit hell bitches?”

“Huh?” The guy in front of me asked. “You sucked your mom’s dick so much that your tongue is fucking malfunctioning, bitch?”

“Shit the shit fuck hell up, bitch!” He stood beside me. “By the way, let’s bunk the math period today, man.”

“Huh? Why?” The guy asked as he corrected his spectacles.

“Not in the mood, man!”

“Pal, don’t skip math class.” I smiled and joked.

He turned to his left at me and asked, “Ain’t gonna fail like ya, bitch.”

“Ahahahaha!”

“AHAHAHSHHSAHA!”

“Clap!” The one on my right said as he moved his palm up, and the other one gave him a high-five.

“Ya know, pal, it doesn’t really hurt when your friends are joking about your mom and sister being a dick or some other shit like that, but… it hurts a shit lot when… when they joke about ya… Especially about something ya are going through, pal. That’s fucking… painful.”

I turned my head a little down—still smiling but a little depressed hearing that—as that guy pulled the glasses one by his arm just beside me.

“And it was not just one or two instances. And, he was just a friend. There were even toppers who… who were quite cheerful, ya see, and… sometimes… spilled their tongues a lot when they talked to me.”

***

“What? You hate math?” I was roaming with a friend of mine on the corridor with classes on our left and a glass window on our right, from where ya could see the surrounding buildings.

“Yeah, pal,” I replied with a smile. “That shit scares me now. So, can ya teach me math?”

He smiled and commented, “Obviously you failed, and that’s why you hate math.” He turned to his left at me. “Just practice daily. That’s all I can advise you to do.”

I continued to glare at him for a second, and then nodded. I then turned my head to the front.

“And it hurt me. And… perhaps… that was what made me do what I did that day…”

***

It was nighttime. The two groups—the one in reds and the other one in whites—stood facing each other about a dozen steps away from us. The three of us stood on the edge, just by the entrance, facing them.

The moon was shining brightly that night beside the clouds.

I turned to my left at Sooraj. He turned at me. Both of us looked into each other’s eyes. “Shall we?” I asked him.

Sooraj glared at me for a second, and then turned to the two gangs for a couple of seconds, perhaps accessing the shit we were in, gathering up the courage, and thinking of the reply. He then looked at me in my eyes again.

Both of us nodded at the same second.

Then, both of us turned to the fighting arena again.

Rohit smiled. “Best of luck to both of ya, motherfuckers.”