Chapter I

There are a few truths in life that stay true forever. One of them is this: hitting rock bottom isn’t particularly pleasant. I hit it hard, and never recovered. You ever smell dead hope? If not, just stick around me.

This story begins from the rubble. I had taken a repeat year after Plus Two, and wasted my time at a coaching centre. The soul-crushing misery of monotonous sums, figures, mathematical formulae, the various strange diagrams and equations of physics, and the confusing mess of elements, compounds, and nomenclature of chemistry—I couldn’t make heads or tails of anything. My “batch-mates” were all dull and dreary guys and gals who didn’t speak to me at all, and who clearly cared little about me. The feeling was mutual.

That year, I just couldn’t focus. In the background, my home life was taking a turn for the worse. The whole year, which just so happened to be the first year since my father returned from South Africa for good, was a shit-show. So much bickering, arguing, bitching and moaning. My house had become an echo chamber for negative comments—obviously not a place for reaping good academic fortunes. And yet, they expected so much from me, even after poisoning the atmosphere of my home. The place I returned to after slogging through six goddamn hours of dull lectures and confusing previous-year-questions. I felt like a hamster in a wheel, spinning on endlessly, with no reprieve in sight.

It did eventually end, like all things, after I wrote my final entrance exam in April. I sighed in relief, but immediately tightened back up. Because until the results of the very last entrance exam I wrote was published, I had to watch my family crumble and finally perish in real time.

Not long after April, my parents filed for divorce. It was almost inevitable. They were venomous to one another—there’s no other way to put it. My father’s massive ego didn’t allow him to ever say he was wrong, and my mother’s nagging attitude got on everyone’s nerves. There was slapping and yelling and door-slamming all over. The divorce was just the foregone conclusion to all that.

As the dust settled, it was clear that I might have not scored a good enough rank to get a good seat immediately after the publishing of the ranks. Unwilling to spend a massive sum for my education at a private engineering college, my parents instead enrolled me into St. Anthony’s College, an “arts-and-science” college near our home, which I knew little about, other than the fact that:

1. It was over a hundred years old, and

2. It was very well-known across Thrissur, my hometown.

The course I got was for a Bachelors in Physics. My parents saw the seat as a temporary resting-ground from which I would hop out once I got a “better” seat from my entrance exam results. Which was starting to sound more and more unlikely. We had no certificates to lean on. No alphabet soup—ST, SC, OBC, EWS… Nothing! So it really was an uphill battle for me.

To tell you the honest truth, I didn’t care where I ended up—here, there, what did it matter? It wouldn’t change the fact that once the ink dried on the papers, I would never see my parents—the ones who brought me to this rotten world—together again. What then, is the point of anything in life if you don’t have the most important people of your life beside you?

**********

The commotion inside St. Anthony’s howled down the hallways, and out through the cold grey gates like an echo from a cave. The security guard scrutinised me, and gave me his approval to enter. I meekly slid onto campus. The whole place was a lot bigger than I imagined. The building was structured in a way that held rooms on all four sides, with a courtyard in the middle. From the courtyard, I looked up and saw a dim light. It was like I was at the bottom of a barrel, which I pretty much was at that moment. Because if things were actually looking up for me, I’d have been in an IIT at this point. But no, I was at an “arts-and-science” college, a term used by by coaching centre tutors which they spewed with so much venom, it made me think “Damn, why y’all so upset about them? What did those institutes do to you?”. And now, I was at the place that they told us to forget about. Whoops. My bad. If only those douchebags had been more enthusiastic about their work, and less focused on preaching the merits of the IITs.

The induction programme began at half past nine. I checked my watch—9.02 am exactly. I didn’t want to be late, so I clambered up the stairs, desperately trying to find the hall where the programme was to be held. Minutes seeped away fast as I continuously went up and down the stairs, eyes darting around, trying to find a sign that there was indeed a hall. Humiliated by the affair, I sulked, and thumped back down to the ground floor.

Taking pity on me, the security guard snapped his fingers, and told me to follow him. From the courtyard he pointed out exactly where I needed to go—a spot on the top floor of the building which I had passed by twice, without thinking to go and investigate. Embarrassed, I thanked the security guard, and rushed up the stairs once more.

I made my way to the double-doors of the hall, and hesitated for a moment. The time was 9.19 pm. The programme was already going in full swing. I didn’t want to interrupt it, so I gingerly pushed the door open. It didn’t matter. The damn thing creaked with a sound like that of a wounded buffalo. The whole room of students turned their heads to face me and shoot me puzzled stares. It was well that the AC was working, else I would have broken out into a sweat. I smiled uneasily, and scrambled to find a vacant seat.

A couple of “sorrys”, and “excuse mes”, and awkward shuffling and squeezing past feet later, I managed to find what I was looking for—a seat. I sighed, and plopped down onto the seat like it was a king’s throne. I relaxed, and adjusted my back into the cushioning.

The AC felt good to my deeply troubled mind. Inside, I was bubbling away, and ready to jump, if opportunity were to ever strike. Deep down, I knew it was a pipe dream. I knew I had flunked all my entrance exams. But damn, I had lied and said that I did “alright” to my parents. So now they, especially my mother, were expecting good things later down the line. It broke my mother’s heart that I didn’t even get close to qualifying for the IIT exam, so her new hope was that I, at the very least, got into the nearby Government Engineering College.

Ah, yes, the GEC of Thrissur. A prestigious institution with almost seventy years of history. Many of my old school friends had somehow ended up there, while I was busy with my repeat year. Since my focus was the IITs, I didn’t bother with writing the entrance for getting into GEC in the year that they wrote it—just after we passed out of Plus Two.

After failing the first few entrance exams, I desperately wrote out the Kerala Entrance exam in my repeat year. Since I had little motivation to study due to the problems at home, inevitably, the exam kicked my ass. I had little hope of ever seeing my friends on that campus afterwards. But, to keep my parents from exploding, I told them that everything was alright, and that they could expect me to get the seat at least by Round Two of the counselling session. A big, fat lie…

Seated in that AC hall that day, I grew more glum. When, I thought, when will I get that dub? A small victory, nothing too big. Just enough for me to float my hopes.

“Yo, are you a repeater?”

That question burst me out of my self-pity sesh. “Umm… yeah? Why are you asking, man?”

“Oh, so you’re the guy that went to Sunil and Upendra Coaching Classes?”

“Um, sorry, exactly how did you know that?” I scrutinised the boy who asked the question. His face wasn’t all too familiar to me.

“Bro, I was in the medical batch there. I saw you every day.”

The hell? How did I miss him? Perhaps it was because I was in the engineering batch, and thus, was never in direct contact with him. Even if I was, it would have mattered little, as I have what people call an “introverted behaviour”.

I kept the ball rolling. “So, uh, you didn’t get a seat?”

The guy shook is head. “Nah, and neither did Samson, Rajiv, Ann-Mary and Preethi.”

“Damn, that’s a long list.”

“We’re the dregs of the academic world… Uh…”

“Athul. Athul Vinayan.”

“Ah, Athul. Cool—I’m Subash. So, yeah… what are we? Dregs. We’re the 95% that have nothing to show for a year wasted. The ones the coaching centres brush aside, and pretend don’t exist.”

I nodded along. This guy was making a lot of valid points.

“Bro, trust me, the torture don’t end, no matter where you are. Hell, there’s ragging and mental torture even in IITs and AIIMSes. So, really, no matter where you are…”

He leaned in to whisper something to me.

“You are utterly fucked.”

And then, Subash leaned back, and relaxed. That final statement, man. That was the bombshell. Pure, uncut, nihilism. Instead of being shocked, I was… agreeing with the statement! I took it as Gospel, an unwritten rule of life.

I repeated it once more in my own words: “No matter where you are, you’re fucked.”

I don’t remember much about the induction programme itself—someone said something about academic excellence or whatnot. But that statement, man. It stuck with me for days to come…