Sushil stood in front of the lockers and considered whether he should do it. The locker in front of him was open – a lot of boys left their lockers unlocked. Who was interested in stealing their dirty underwear anyway? If he left his little polythene bag by the wall, someone was sure to stumble on it. And if someone found out it was his, it was sure to get kicked around. Finally, he made up his mind, kept his bag in the empty locker, and gently closed the door. He looked around. Nobody. No one there to notice that little Sushil’s stuff was in an unlocked locker. Thank God, he thought.
He gingerly stepped out of the locker room and tiptoed to the shower. Mom always said it was a good habit to shower both before and after a swim. Of course, mom was far far away, but somehow obeying her rules made Sushil’s hostel life less lonely. Sushil was relieved that Piyush and his friends weren’t around when he was moving about only in his swimming trunks. Piysuh always made fun of his ‘thin biceps’, and all his friends laughed and teased him endlessly, until he cried. Mom had told him that the only way to deal with bullies is to tease them back. But he was afraid to do it, because then they would beat him and he had no friends to take his side. That boy Piyush, even had a knife, which he hid somewhere in the grounds. Sometimes in fights, he would brandish the knife like they did in movies, as if to threaten his opponent.
Sushil always wished mom would take him away from the boarding school, but she said she couldn’t, and that he just had to make it through another year, before he passed out. About 390 days, Sushil’s countdown reminded him. He didn’t like studying, because he could never understand anything. The teachers scolded him for being lazy and the students found him boring. But the worst thing about school was Piyush and his friends.
He was ready to descend into the water. He first splashed some water on his tummy. The water was always too cold. But he knew that if your tummy gets used to the cold water, it becomes very easy. He shivered a bit, and then put his left foot into the water.
Piyush always teased him and made him cry. He was the leader of that horrible gang. He was tall, strong and loud. He made Sushil’s life miserable, and Darshan’s arrival had turned it from miserable to absolutely unbearable. Darshan was a man who was an ex-student of his school. He had come back to school for a few months, to improve the physical training for the boys. On the first day he came, he took a drill at 5 am, and made the boys march. He told them fitness was very important. And when they were all standing in a line, he walked up to each one of them and told them if they looked fit.
Sushil was now waist deep in the water, at the shallow end of the pool, and wading through it. It was nice and safe here, in the crowd. Once you swam to the deep end, you were visible from everywhere in the pool area.
When Darshan had walked up to him, he poked him in the stomach and Sushil buckled down. Then the devil stepped back and addressed the whole class, “Look, we have girls amongst us today” and the whole class burst out laughing. Tears welled up in Sushil’s eyes but he struggled to hold them back. Since then, Darshan made fun of him at every opportunity. And Sushil’s luck was such that Darshan also took a liking to Piyush. Now, the lot of them, the man with authority, the bully and his gang all turned Sushil’s life into a never-ending nightmare.
Sushil planned to make one quick trip to the deep end, freestyle, so that he would be back in seconds. He was preparing to dive horizontally, when they heard that shriek. It must have come from far away, from the hostel buildings, but it was very sharp and everyone heard it.
Half an hour later, the boys had gathered at the staff quarters, at the last house in the last row, staring at the dead body. It looked like Darshan’s throat was slit when he was asleep in the garden chair outside his house. It was more likely, however, that he was drunk, and lying unconscious there, and not asleep. Soon enough, the teachers arrived and began herding the boys away towards their hostels. The police was to be called and nobody was to touch anything. So far, nobody had noticed that the body had one finger missing.
Sushil didn’t know what to feel. In his mind, he went over the details once again. Locker no. 402. Yes, that was Piyush’s locker. The cocky boy never locked it. None of his own belongings were in the polythene bag. The bag itself wasn’t his own. The knife he had dropped casually inside the bag. The finger, however, wrapped in a dirty cloth, he had placed carefully at the bottom of the bag. The same finger with which Darshan had poked him in the tummy.
