Ghost Notes

For me, remembering childhood means constantly accusing myself of turning my past into an explanation. One of these accusations takes me to a classroom.

School. Sixth grade. It was a hot summer, so much that shirts drenched in sweat, students fainting in morning assembly was a common sight. The summer uniform especially bothered me. The half sleeve T-Shirts exposed my skeletal arms and overall skinny stature. The constant quips on it from the classmates didn’t help either. I was the skinniest boy by a distance, weighing the same as an average child four or five years younger, and people reminded me of this achievement constantly.

That year, I was made to share a desk with a bulky boy. Two extreme bodies on a single bench. Bullying was a normal event. So in that sense, he was probably nicer than others. The niceties ended there.

One day, he opened his zipper and pulled out his penis. He had the look of someone presenting work he was proud of. Then he began rubbing it. After a while, he smelled his own hand, made a face of disgust, and grabbed my face and forced me to smell it too. I still remember what it smelled like.

This became a ritual. Daily, sometimes multiple times. Some days he forgot. Some days there was an audience. I waited each morning with mounting dread.

I told no one. I was socially anxious, never spoke to teachers unless directly asked. And I felt shame. It felt shameful to admit. I was small and weak and I could not stop him, and that meant it was somehow my fault too.

The school brain did not come home. Home was cricket, television, running mindlessly in fields. Just like the heat, it was just more indignity in the classroom, and so I accepted it as such.

It was lot later when I realised what had happened, and finally reflected back on this event in horror.

As I’m writing this, I still cannot believe how I let this happen to me. I can understand my younger self for not being courageous enough to speak up or stop him. But some part of me wants to go back in time and correct this. Correct myself. Maybe I still have some growth left to do around this.

Have the ghosts of that summer haunted me in ways that I do not even know? Maybe. I do not know and may not know ever.

Some memories do not provoke an immediate rush of emotions but they linger. They do not hit hard like a downbeat of a drum, but surface like ghost notes that are felt more than they are heard.

I have two brains and they keep fighting. The first is horrified. It wonders whether this was the first crack, that pushed me to go inside. That eventually shut down the emotional part of me. I have been told that I don’t think from the heart. That I am cold. That I don’t care for people the way I should. Once, a friend told me a tale of his heartbreak and I felt nothing except the stupidity of the actors involved. The horrified brain wants to point down to the hot summer that cracked me from the inside.

The second brain is a cynic. It watches the first construct this narrative and calls it: a performance of suffering. “Woe is me, give me sympathy, I have suffered too. Even though I feel zero effect of this so-called trauma.”

I cannot trust either, but the second brain wins most times.

Am I hiding behind these cracks for my lack of accountability when it comes to relationships? There is a vast gap between knowing who I should be and actually being that person. Bridging it requires exhaustive mental work. I have tried over the years but each time I keep finding myself at the bottom.

I mentioned this to a friend once, anticipating a soft placating response. He said,

“We make ourselves believe that something bad happened to us so that we can feel pity for our past selves. When in fact, it did not impact us that much.”

Even if I believe that to be the case, I wonder if unconsciously the event, or the belief of this event, has shaped me in ways I can never know.

The heat of the classroom has faded with time. But I keep returning there, looking for something I know I will never find.