AN:/ Extremely sensitive content ahead. Please read at your own caution.
He was seventeen years old when it happened.
He was seventeen years old and it was a Tuesday and the computer lab was empty because the school's extracurricular computer class had been cancelled that afternoon and nobody had bothered to lock the door.
He had been working on the scholarship application.
The scholarship was the one his mother had found — the one for the national science and technology programme, the one that could change the trajectory of the next several years of his life if the application was good enough and he was good enough and the selection committee found him, out of all the available candidates, the one worth choosing.
He had been working on it since the fourth bell of the afternoon.
He had been alone since the fifth — the teacher who had been in the adjacent room had left, and the janitor who had passed through had not noticed him tucked into the corner terminal, and the school had emptied around him in the specific, gradual way of schools at the end of the day.
He had not noticed.
He was used to not noticing when rooms emptied around him.
He had become, over the course of the past two years, very good at making himself unnoticeable — at occupying the minimum possible space in a school that had decided, through the specific mechanism of collective adolescent cruelty, that his presence was something it found objectionable.
He had learned to be small.
He had learned to be quiet.
He had learned to find the corner of every room and stay in it, to arrive early and leave late, to make himself into the kind of student who existed in the record but not in the room.
He had been good at it.
He heard the door.
— — —
He should have left.
He thought about this afterward — in the days and the weeks and the months after, in the specific, recursive quality of a mind that returned to a thing repeatedly looking for the place where it could have gone differently.
He should have left before the sixth bell.
He should have noticed the school emptying.
He should have saved the application and gone home while the corridors were still populated, while the specific safety of a building full of other people was still available.
He had not.
He had been thinking about the scholarship.
He heard the door and turned and saw Birsha Sehwal along with some of his cronies behind his back in the computer lab doorway with the expression he wore when he had found what he was looking for.
Deepak knew the expression.
He had been seeing it for two years — ever since the thing in Class Nine that had been the beginning of it, the specific, inciting moment of a prolonged campaign that he had spent two years trying to survive.
He knew the expression.
He knew it the way prey knew certain things — not intellectually, not as a reasoned assessment, but in the specific, immediate way of a body that has learned to recognize danger in its earliest form.
His body knew.
His body was already cold before his mind had finished processing who was at the door.
— — —
Birsha Sehwal was eighteen years old. And he was Deepak Sehwal's cousin-the complete opposite. What Deepak wasn't, everything was Birsha, ncluding the fact of Deepak being gay but Birsha being straight....or so he thought. But Deepak had a secret-a secret crush that he never ever dared to confess, never planned to in fact, but Birsha came to know about it and he never wastes a chance to take revenge on the person with whom his mother had continued to compare him from almost the time ever both he and Deepak had started to go to school.
Even though Birsha was tall — taller than most of their year, taller than Deepak by a significant margin, with the specific, easy quality of someone whose body had always cooperated with him, who had never had to negotiate with his own physical presence.
He was handsome.
This was a fact that Deepak had filed years ago and held at the specific distance of something that was true and irrelevant — Birsha was handsome in the way that certain people were handsome, which was the way that made other people want to be liked by them, which was the mechanism that had protected him for two years.
Nobody wanted to believe that someone who looked like Birsha did the things that Birsha did.
Nobody did believe it.
That was the point.
— — —
He said: "Working late, Deepak?"
His voice was the pleasant voice.
He had two voices — the pleasant one, which was the public version, the one that teachers and parents and other students heard, the one that communicated warmth and ease and the specific quality of a person who was simply good to be around.
And the other one.
Deepak had heard the other one many times.
Today was the pleasant one.
Today the pleasant one was worse.
"I was just leaving," Deepak said.
He saved the application.
He did it because his hands were moving before his brain had issued the instruction, because the application was important and the brain that was not yet dealing with what was happening had the presence of mind to save the work.
He stood.
Birsha was still at the door.
He was at the door in the specific way of someone who was not blocking it — not physically, not obviously, not in a way that could be pointed to — but whose position communicated something that Deepak's body was receiving very clearly.
"Don't rush," Birsha said.
Deepak looked at the door.
He looked at Birsha.
He thought: walk toward the door.
He walked toward the door.
Birsha closed it.
— — —
He did not remember all of it.
Behind Birsha, his crush appeared like a shadow, hatred blazing in his eyes. A mocking glint in Birsha's eyes, something raw, animalistic. He indiacted something with his eyes to one of the cronies that have kept Deepak surrounded. After that, there was pulling and pushing, something tearing-his clothes perhaps. Then it was pain, probably blood, cruelty, mockery, flashing of cameras. Hoots, animal sounds.
Then....then what happened Deepak doesn't remember....or rather his brain does not allow him to remember.
This was the specific, merciful quality of what the brain did in certain situations — not fully merciful, not the clean amnesia of complete forgetting, but the partial mercy of a mind that dissociated from the unbearable portions and kept only the ones it could not prevent itself from keeping.
He remembered the computer lab's overhead light.
The fluorescent quality of it — the specific, flat, institutional quality of a school building's after-hours light, which did not flicker but which had the particular constancy of something that had been on for a long time and would continue to be on regardless of what happened beneath it.
He remembered the smell of the room.
Computer labs had a specific smell — the accumulated smell of electronics and the specific, slightly chemical quality of machines that generated heat and circulated air and which existed in a room that was used by many people and cleaned only to the institutional standard.
He remembered the sound of the chair scraping.
He remembered Birsha's voice saying something.
He remembered thinking: there is no one in the building.
He remembered thinking: I should not have saved the application. I should have just left. I should have left an hour ago. I should have—
He remembered the overhead light.
He remembered it because looking at it was the thing he did when the looking at anything else was not available to him — when his face was being held at the angle that made the light the only available thing, and the light was there, and the light was consistent, and the light did not care what was happening below it.
He had looked at the light.
He had not been in the room.
He had been — somewhere else.
Not physically.
Physically he had been entirely, comprehensively in the room, in the computer lab, in the school that had been emptied around him while he was working on a scholarship application.
But the part of him that was Deepak — the part that had a mother who laughed loud enough to be heard two floors down and a father who stood at doors because crossing thresholds was too much and a Sunday phone call ritual that had been running for three years — that part had found, in the specific, survival-shaped way of minds that could not manage what was happening, a place that was not the room.
He had gone there.
He had stayed there.
The light had been consistent.
— — —
Birsha and his cronies left at some point.
Deepak did not know when.
He knew because the room changed — the specific, qualitative change of a room that had contained something and no longer did.
He did not move for a long time.
The overhead light was still on.
He looked at it.
He looked at the ceiling around it.
He looked at the computer terminal, which was still showing the scholarship application, which was saved.
He thought: the application is saved.
He thought this several times.
It was the thought available to him.
He got up eventually.
He did not think about getting up — the body moved and he observed the movement from the specific, slightly detached quality of someone watching themselves from a small distance.
He looked at himself.
He was — he was not going to think about what he looked at when he looked at himself.
He was going to think about the application being saved.
He thought about the application being saved.
He left the computer lab.
He left it the way he had learned to leave all the places where things had happened — quietly, quickly, without looking at anyone who might be in the corridor, without being visible in the specific way that being visible produced consequences.
The corridor was empty.
The school was empty.
He walked through it.
He walked home.
— — —
He did not tell his mother.
In fact, he had entered the house through the back door like a thief and discarded his torn uniform into a black garbage bag as he jumped into the shower, a long one. With warm water scalding his skin, he scrubbed until his skin wrinkled and seemed raw, he cleaned until all the filth gets cleaned out. But the ghost of touches remained all over his body-the unwanted touches, the grabs, the smacks, the pinches.
He had thought about this on the walk home — had turned it over with the specific, exhausted quality of a mind that was doing the work it had to do because the not-doing-it was not available.
He had thought: I could tell her, she would believe me.
He had thought about what believing him would produce — the specific, devastating cascade of a family that loves you encountering information that they cannot undo and cannot protect you from retroactively and which they will carry for the rest of their lives. Then Birsha's warning of what would be the consequence if this gets out. The video gets leaked.
He had thought about his mother.
He had thought about her face.
He had thought: I will not put this on her face. I will not put this anywhere that makes it more real than it already is.
He did not tell her.
He went home.
He sat at the dinner table.
He ate the food she had made.
She asked about the scholarship application.
He said it was going well.
She said she knew it would be — she had said this since the beginning, she had always known — and the specific, warm certainty of her voice was the most painful thing in the room.
He ate.
He said goodnight.
He went to his room.
He sat on his bed.
He looked at the wall.
— — —
The thing about carrying something was that it did not stay where you put it.
He had thought — in the specific, naive way of a seventeen-year-old who had not yet understood the specific properties of certain kinds of damage — that he could put it somewhere and it would stay.
That he could file it.
That the filing would be the end of the having-to-deal-with-it.
It did not stay filed.
It came back in the fluorescent quality of institutional lighting — not all fluorescent lights, not always, but sometimes, in specific rooms, in specific qualities of light, it was there.
It came back in the smell of electronics.
It came back in the sound of chairs scraping across floors.
It came back in the specific, pleasant voice that Birsha used in public — in the particular quality of warmth that had no heat behind it, that was produced rather than felt, that other people heard and found appealing and which Deepak heard and felt in a very specific, very cold location.
He carried it.
He carried it through the rest of Class Ten and the beginning of Class Eleven and the scholarship application that was eventually successful and the news that he would be going to Hyderabad and his mother's laughter that could be heard two floors down.
He carried it through the Sunday phone calls.
He carried it to Hyderabad.
— — —
He never told anyone.
This was the thing he thought about sometimes — in the specific, late-night quality of the hours when thoughts that were usually manageable became less so.
He thought about the not-telling.
He thought about what the telling would have required — the specific, enormous requirement of making someone else carry a piece of it, of putting words to the thing that he had spent considerable effort not putting words to.
He did not know.
He would never know.
The dawn of the jump — the Hyderabad street, the third bell of the evening, the specific, immediate quality of something that was over before it produced a reaction — came before the perhaps could be resolved.
— — —
What he carried into the next life:
The overhead light.
The smell of the room.
The application that was saved.
And the specific knowledge — not intellectual, not theoretical, the knowledge of a body that had learned something about survival that it had not wanted to learn — that the mind found places to go when the available place was unbearable.
It found them.
It stayed in them until it could come back.
It came back.
This was the thing.
It always came back.
— — —
In the Wadee estate's cedar bedroom, on a night when the rain was on the window and the lamp was low, Gerffron Wadee — who was Deepak Sehwal, who had been Deepak Sehwal, who would always be Deepak Sehwal in the foundational way that the first version of a person remained the foundation of everything built on top of it — woke from the specific quality of a dream that was not entirely a dream.
He lay in the dark.
The room was the cedar bedroom — the familiar ceiling, the lamp, the window with the rain.
Not a computer lab.
Not a school building.
Not Hyderabad.
He looked at the ceiling.
He breathed.
He thought: I am twenty-six years old and I am in a room that is mine and there is no one in it except me.
He thought: I survived it and I crossed a border and I sent a boy to safety and I read two and a half years of books and I stood on a dock in formal attire and I danced at a king's birthday and I sat in a garden and someone said I would believe anything you told me.
He looked at the ceiling.
He thought: I survived it.
He thought this for as long as it needed to be thought.
Then he closed his eyes.
The rain was consistent on the window.
He let the sound of it be the thing he listened to.
It helped.
It had always helped — the sound of rain, the specific, consistent quality of something that fell without purpose and continued without intention and was simply there, simply itself, asking nothing.
He listened to it.
Eventually he slept.
The overhead light was somewhere else.
The application had been saved.
He was still here.