What The Eyes Don't See

27 | Top of the Class

Every bone in Anay's body shook. Impaled upon the frame, not much unlike Christ at the Crucifixion, he could feel his bones creaking within his ribs and his limbs, and his teeth chattering against each other in his mouth. He shook so violently that he felt he might break the frame and plummet thirty feet to the ground and that would be it. That would be the real moment of passing away of the great Anay Ghosh who had died like a worm impaled on a skewer like a kebab.

And the source of his fear was a singular peril—

—the thing bobbing up and down in that air in front of him was an undead, a being that had died fifteen years ago; and in those lifeless vestments now was the soul of an old nemesis who bore the most unpardonable grudge against him.

"What do you want to do to me?" Anay wept.

The wind grew around him till it exploded in a storm. In that storm were the angriest eyes seen upon any creature, dead or alive.

"What do I want to do to you?" he spewed, the many black shreds of his attire sweeping the air around him. "It is all about you, right? It has always been about you."

"Please... let me go... What have I done that is so bad?"

The being glided forth with the speed of a gale. He came to rest inches away from Anay's face till Anay could feel the cold aura permeating his very being, lodging itself within the joints of his cracking bones. There was no measure of the excruciation of that pain.

"This is my story then," the being hissed, "which your selfish eyes did not see. You have forgotten it but your only hope lies in remembering the story."

Anay cried but there was no one to hear him.

"In this very school, fifteen years ago, sat a boy named Deep Mishra," the being started his narration. "No one looked at him, for there was nothing spectacular about him. He might as well have been a wallflower. He came from a family of affluence, but that was not his boon. Nay! It was a curse. For he was a lonely child in that palace of his ancestors, and a lonely child in this school of great repute. And so, the years kept on passing, and the boy learned to live with himself.

"Friends? What were friends? He did not need friends. On the rare occasion he was in the company of other boys, they spoke of things he did not understand—like sports and cars and girls. Oh, girls. He neither understood nor cared for them. What was in them that made the boys—all perfectly healthy sane boys—go so weak in the knees? He never felt a passion for them. Not even for those ugly big-breasted models in magazines that the boys kept ogling for hours with those weird hangdog expressions on their faces. Not even for that supposedly sexy music teacher whose stolen cleavage pictures were on every boy's cellphone. But he wanted to understand what made the boys so weak upon looking at the pictures of the girls. He would probably have made more friends then, for he'd have something to talk with them.

"And then he entered tenth grade. The final year of school. The year that was impressed upon every student by their teachers as the most important year of their academic lives. Lessons started in full swing right from day one. Homework piled up like it was a long-due punishment. Long answers needed to be learned by rote. Math problems had to be solved perfectly and within minutes. Diagrams had to be drawn with the precision of a da Vinci. There was no time to breathe. And the year was doubly difficult for the boy. For, it was also the year when poor Deep blossomed.

"Along with the sprouting of hair in various places, even down there, which disgusted him, and the deepening of his voice and a little knot growing around his throat, he felt something else too. A tingling within him that he hadn't felt before. He had heard of it. It was the same tingling that the other boys would talk about when ogling those naked female models. He did not like it because he worried it was wrong. For, he had that tingling in his pants not when he looked at girls, but when he looked at the other boys.