Pritam's Blog
I Am Not A Goldfish Circling Around In A Fish Bowl… And I Refuse To Live Like One…
When I was three, I saw my dad rushing towards my mom in a murderous rage while I was playing with my toys beside her. They had been fighting for a long time and my grandpa was keeping an eye on them. He came in between them, pushed my dad away. Then he grabbed me by my hand and took me out of the room. It took me a few moments to forget what I had just seen as my grandpa took me for a walk and told me ghost stories.
At the age of five,I first noticed that Sanju, who was my only friend and belonged to a so called lower caste, was not allowed to have his lunch with me, for I was a upper caste Hindu.
When I was seven, on my way to school with my mom in a rickshaw, when the rickshaw was stuck in traffic, someone from the crowd threw a ball of paper on my mother’s lap. I don’t know what was written on it but my mother was fuming after she read it.
At the age of ten, I was molested by a woman. For the next few years, I kept on wondering if it was my fault in any way.
I was 14 then. The girl I had a crush on came in a short skirt to the tuition. The guy sitting opposite to her would drop his pen every now and then and and go under the table in ‘search of his pen’… After sometime, I got really irritated and the next time he went under the table, I gave a nice kick on his face.
I chose atheism at the age of sixteen, and my mom and other members of my family kind of felt betrayed. They have been trying to get me some astrological gemstones since then.
After my high school, I decided that I wanted to become a writer. I told my parents that I would take up Arts. They scared the shit out of me saying that Arts has no future, even though both of them are from arts background and were doing pretty good. They wanted me to become a doctor. I intentionally filled up the Medical Entrance Exam form with all the wrong details and the hall ticket never arrived. Then they put me into engineering. I passed, got a job. Didn’t like it and so quit. But it ruined seven years of my life.
During my second year, I was thrown out of a bus in Bangalore at 11 at night along with a couple from the north east, for speaking against a few ‘mainlanders’ who were taunting them, calling ‘Chinki’. I didn’t get another bus, nor did I have the money to pay ‘two and half’ of the meter value to an auto, and had to walk 8 kilometres to my hostel.
I started going out with Pallabi during my third year. My parents didn’t like it, firstly because it wasn’t the right time, and second,because she’s from a different caste.
All these times, people with whom I shared these experiences said,“Happens. This is life. You will get used to it…”
It was the same year I brought a goldfish in a fish bowl and kept it on the bedside table. I would keep on staring at it for hours as it circled round and round inside the fish bowl. A few weeks later, it died. I didn’t get another goldfish. But every night I would think of how it circled round and round, and I realized how most of us are like a goldfish inside a fish bowl.
It was in 2013, I decided to give up my engineering career. Nobody supported me. I quit my job in February, 2014. Life at home became unbearable, and I left home. I started writing more seriously, now in English.
I was an active netizen now, and this was where I saw the ugliest side of human nature, especially after the Great Leader became the Prime Minister. I lost it.
I was already tired of patriarchy, misogyny and its consequences, religion, racism, and the likes, but deep inside I thought probably there is some place for someone as uncompromising as me in this big world. But the world is not a fair place.
So forgive me if you think I rant all day for apparently unimportant things…
It’s just that I am not that three year old kid anymore, the one you could tell a ghost story to, and make him forget everything that had happened before. And I don’t want to live like that goldfish I had in that fish bowl which circled round and round, and then died one day.