“Tu repeater hai kya?” he asked me.

“Ehh…repeater nahi…” I replied and told him that this was the first time I was doing the sixth semester. So technically, I’m not a repeater, but non-technically, I am?

No ‘friends’ in class. There are two girls who talk a little more Hindi than the others, precisely why I solve the MidDay Bollywood Crossword with them. That is one part of this class that I certainly enjoy. Some lectures are fun, the others morose. No group to ‘hang out’ with. Hari is a loner. The fun lectures are where Hari opens up sometimes, thinks openly about things he heard at work, learnt in the process…shares with the class. Other times, a general quiet descends. Nothing much to talk. Anyways, there’s no one to talk to. Almost all of whom I knew flew away last April.

Lone canteen visits…the four-seaters are over-flowing with bums, while I manage to find a place to grab my grubs in peace. Dark clouds poke me with the silver wiring in them. The silver wiring of all that I did in the one year that I lost, of things I learnt and the money I earned. Sooner than later, the mildly pleasnt hallucination caused by the wiring sublimes into vapour as the dark cloud fogs the planet again.

Why did this have to happen? Why couldn’t I have passed out with the others? Damned.

I think I know why I feel so down in the Deonar dumps.

K. Complete the following sentence with any fucking ten words of your choice:

Hari is going through this because………………………

One hand up. It’s Hari! Ok, Hari, tell us the answer. You are so smart, only you know the answer.

Ahem…yaya…all that is fine. I am going through all this because I always looked down upon repeaters. Did the ‘always good to everybody’ Hari really look down at people who had lost an academic year and scoff and haughtily think to himself that he’s way smarter than any of them?

*sheepish grin* uh…I guess…yes. There’s my neighbour who is really smart but would always fail when he was in school and I would always think to myself what a dimwit he was. It’s only in the near past that I got over that mean pre-conceived notion. Then there were many of these new faces that could be seen on the first day of every year at school.

“Hey, is that one of the repeaters? May be. Because, if it were a new student…the uniform would look newer than what he’s wearing now,” my mind would talk to itself.

It would take days to get talking to this new addition. Not because I thought academic failure was contagious or anything, but because such students were usually known for their nefarious activities and I really didn’t want to be known as one of them.

I never thought of myself as conceited as I now seem to be. My memories are shattering me.

I was getting my new college I-card made…when the guy in-charge asked me, “Tu repeater hai kya?”

The question hit me on my face like stray stones hit footboard travelers on local trains. It reminded me of how demeaning…almost derogatory that word was to me, till a few years ago.

All these while, I thought I did no one any harm. It brings tears to me. I thought I was all goody-goody in school. My hands shook if I tried to copy during exams. I never pushed anyone while climbing the stairways to the classroom, never clicked my shoes on the hard stone, never talked in class other than when of utmost necessity.

Isn’t there something on the same lines as sow a mango seed and you get a mango, not an apple?

My current class is good, accommodative and intellectually sparring and they wouldn’t look down at anyone, let alone me. But it is not my class. Yet.

Enough of things that thus weigh me down, compelling me to squander precious time and energy over such senile thoughts. Hope things do change for the better. May the dark cloud be vacuumed out of my head. Hope the industrial visit help me make friends, to help me get out of this semester in peace. Hope the projects and studies and work goes fine. And then there would be nothing to be as sorry about.