The Creaky Staircase

BEFORE IT BEGAN

My name is Rohit Saha. I am 18 years old, with no clear idea of my future, or indeed much of anything else. After 2 idle and slightly bookish years in a modern and well developed part of suberbian Bombay, I had developed an aversion to the world of careers and jobs which, I was destined to join. As I left my carefree high school days behind me, a plethora of endless questions stared me in the face .Each one more unsettling than the other.

My high school days were not the greatest. Particularly due to the fact that it overflowed with bespectacled nerds and unlike what the insane number of mediocre, predictable and mind numbing chick flicks would tell you, it’s the ‘Cool’ people who were among the minority. I personally found it to be a strange strange place. The liberty given in the same place a year ago was cruelly snatched away and probably remained chained in some dusty old dungeon for the whole of the two years that we were there. I always hoped that it would do an ‘Edmond Dantes’ but that never happened. The playful chatter of the corridor was replaced forever by an eerie stillness broken only by the dull grumbling drone of overworked students. They told us that it was time to get serious and do something with your life. I never listened. My delusions had me convinced that life always unfolds like a Tarantino movie, chapter by chapter and at the end when everything goes to shit, things miraculously fall into place. I would later realize that life is not as primitive as seen through the eyes of an overindulgent, pop culture obsessed and twisted American filmmaker .Far from it actually.

My personal expectations of high school had been of freedom, merriment and living life on the edge. Clichéd as they may seem, it seemed a natural progression into the forbidden world which I had been long since denied entry by means of an impassive voice in my head telling me that ‘ you are not old enough, wait till you are in high school.’ After you enter high school , the impassive voice continued to haunt me but the words had changed to ‘Time to build a future.’.

Maybe these well meaning voices did not resonate too loudly in my head as it did with most others but not unlike millions of other slightly better than average Indian students, who go out through revolving door of uncertainty each year, I was unknowingly dragged into the mindless rat race of Engineering Entrance Exams . It was one of those things my febrile mind was always unable to comprehend .All around me people were one by one giving up everything that made living worthwhile, for a BTech degree on their future resumes, which would apparently pull their families out of their relatively meaningless lives of middle class obscurity and have their future mother-in-laws and her bitchy gossip mongering mates in bouts of multiple orgasms. The whole dynamic mechanism of thinking made me really curious but I guess all ‘their’ curiousity was duly exercised in seemingly pointless things which had something to do with stuff like Schrödinger’s Equation and Planck’s constant. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that , those days in my class, a Second Order Differential Equation could give more guys a hard-on than Pamela Anderson bouncing along the beach in her customary red swimsuit.

As far as Engineering was concerned, I couldn’t give two shits.

My life as an eighteen year old did not revolve around Study Time Tables, Early morning revision, or making furious mechanical notes in classrooms to the extent that a sneeze from the Teacher would duly be jotted down as ‘Acchoo’ in those well manicured notebooks. Life back then was all about being the quintessential teenager. It was about doing things your own way. It was about being different and standing out from the crowd. It was about being your own master. It was about showing the finger to anyone who disagreed to that. It was about wearing ripped jeans, having outrageous hair and getting at people’s faces. It was about wanting to smoke pot and quoting Bob Dylan’s lyrics in every other sentence. It was about talking like Jules Winnfield and dancing like John Travolta. It was about playing Children of Bodom in full volume and watching the neighbours freak out. It was about thinking that the sun shined out of your arsehole and how every creature in this planet were the functions of a single variable called ‘my whims and fancies’.

Then all of a sudden you grow up and all the little myths that your naïve and deluded teenage mind had created vanish faster than blow in a Kurt Cobain concert. This growing up, is also called ‘point of realization’ in several cultures and this symbolic rock hit me with the force of a fusion bomb knocking me unconscious into the grimy and slippery world of repentance and all I could tell myself was , “Fuck ! I should have started studying a couple of months ago.” It was January, and the immense course of ISC was staring at me like a Spider stares at its entangled prey, though my Biology teacher would love to point out that the above expression is not entirely correct on the account of Spiders having ‘compound’ eyes hence its viewing power is limited only to looking at mosaics and then using its highly evil brain to figure out the rest. But that again is a totally different matter.

So there I was, a month from the Board exams, blissfully clueless of everything. One day later, I was quite literally shitting bricks. I did not think it was humanely possible to finish the course of an academic year in a month. The impossibility of it all reminded me of the plot in Tom Cruise’s highly mediocre and mind numbing popcorn flick which had become a raging success all over the world. All that the fucker had to do aside from looking pretty, was to kill these highly dangerous evil agents and in the process, save the world. I had a harder task at hand. It was called Organic Chemistry.

A man in his life sometimes encounters certain things which seemingly possess a curious power of making his balls shrivel up and die. Obviously this much fabled ‘thing’ depends on a lot of variables ranging from his age to his mental state of mind and this generally changes from person to person. I believe that in Organic Chemistry, I had met my maker. Already a couple of months behind schedule, the various permutation and combinations of bonded carbon and hydrogen had well and truly made me their bitch. Add a bit of nitrogen to all that and you have the human brain going tits up and human heart wanting nothing but sweet release.

I now began to look upto all these people who I had secretly laughed at for so long. I laughed at them for spending the best years of their life amidst books. I had laughed at them for not knowing what it was to get high to Jim Morrison’s voice. I sneered at their bad luck for not having chanced upon the intoxicating combination of Vodka and Pink Floyd. I pitied them for not having the balls to experience the wonderful tricks that Marijuana could play with the nervous system. I grinned to myself as I spotted their school pants pulled up almost to their nipples and wondered if these dudes would one day go on to make it big and then buy out some big fashion house and then proceed to finance a whole new geekosexual ‘low chest’ revolution.

A Great Bengali Philosopher had once spoken of the equal proportions of laughter and tears in life. The Buddhists essentially say the same thing but have renamed it ‘Karma’. Whatever it was, it was behaving like an epic bitch with me. It now became clear to as why the geeks never retaliated. Oppressed for centuries it would seem rather odd that they have not yet given up their pens and taken up pick-axes. I was always of the belief that the Apocalypse that they spoke of, was nothing but the time when the normal population would suander past the elastic limit of the geek community, causing a great power struggle and finally resulting in a epic Mordor-like battle leading to the end of the world as we know it.

Two weeks later as I sat wriggling in my seat, writing the paper in the hot sultry afternoon air, my condition worsened with every passing question and I was no longer able to dodge the volley of never ending bullets shooting out from the Chemistry exam paper. I now started to realize why the geeks would never retaliate. I now began to understand as to why my half baked theory of Apocalypse was nothing but an epic failure. It was in these unsuspecting places like examination halls that they have their revenge. As I stumbled out, physically injured and mentally mortified at the cruel torture that was so remorselessly bestowed upon me, I doubted if I would last the night.

I hit the bed, closed my eyes and the last sounds that resonated in my ears were slow and measured chanting in my head.

“His name was Robert Paulson.”