Trapped Inside The Paleocortex

There isn’t much to see, and whatever you see isn’t enough. The world wasn’t a horrible place when I was a child, it isn’t now. Although most of my life I believed it was. I always told myself that all my misery was someone else's fault, some big conspiracy cooked up by the people around me, which included parents, their friends, my peers, my sister, her friends and older kids, even ghosts and spirits and gods. I was convinced that everyone was wicked. There was a time when I didn’t see it as a cycle. Happiness and sadness they follow each other, but I thought misery tailed sadness and sorrow tailed misery and gloom tailed sorrow. There was no room for happiness simply because I didn’t know what it was. It's not that I wasn’t happy, I just didn’t know. Times when I was happy, I thought the world was going easy on me. I constantly lived in fear.. I used to think that happiness was something that I would never have and for a good 10 years of my life, I really didn’t. Everything started sucking as soon as I turned 6+. That was the beginning. What I really hate is the fact that I can’t remember the first five years of my life, but I know that I was happy. I was in the 3rd grade when I was 6+ soon to be 7. Then finally turned 7.
I started school at 4. Before that I was home schooled and I loved it, mom taught me everything which later helped me and saved me 3 years and I was sent straight to kindergarten. My life was the best when I was three years old, though. Nothing tops that. I mean, I don’t remember anything but I sure as hell looked happy in the pictures.
Children go to prep school, then nursery then Lkg then Ukg then Kg and then the 1st grade. I just went to KG and then the first grade, so I missed out on early friendships and bonding, and people told me that before KG, kids had nap time before lunch or something like that, I would’ve really liked that. Although some schools don’t have lower and upper kindergarten (LKG and UKG), just one single kindergarten and then elementary school, my school did. Mostly convents and unrecognized schools have this system of refining the young scholars at an age when they don’t question and simply conform. My first day in my first school was the happiest day of my life. I was asked three questions, they basically wanted to know whether I could speak and understand English. They asked me my name, my sister’s name, my parents’ name and my age. And I was in, I couldn’t believe it. I was in, just like that. I was a real student of a real school. Even though it was the most ridiculous school I had ever seen.
I entered a class full of little kids who were older than me but shorter and haughty for some reason. And my friends were a weird bunch. I made friends with three girls who seemed to be popular enough to be known by everyone in school. Imagine that.
My class teacher seemed more like a cruel dog trainer than a teacher; she had three hairs, thick dark black long hairs jutting out of her chin, and a million jutting out of her nose. Her voice was like a crow's and I swear to god, I never saw her smile. She creeped the life out of me and so I never dared to look around or move in my chair in her class. As far as my weird bunch of friends and classmates are concerned, I'll never forget them, even though I've forgotten their names and faces. I just can’t forget THEM. The three girls are the ones I remember most clearly. My first friend was Asmita Singh, a chubby little Sardarni who was insanely white and with whom I shared my surname with, She used to keep telling me how much money she had but I liked her and she wasn’t mean to me and sat right behind me and constantly forced me to accept the fact that I was Punjabi, when I wasn’t. I didn’t know where I was from but I sure as hell knew I wasn’t a Punjabi. Not that it's a bad thing but Caste made no sense back then. I couldn’t explain or ever understand me being a Rajput to her, or anyone else. But she proved to be a very good friend, even though she treated janitors and servants like dirt. Then came Farah Khan, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, my age. But what made her weird was, she was thin as hell, and all her teeth were rotten. Every single one of them. But that somehow looked fine on her. I used to notice the shades of black, grey and moss green in her teeth, which looked fine because she was who she was, she just didn’t have any white teeth. I think that is why I liked the idea of having braces, I always wanted to be her, I always wanted to have her brown, lazy eyes. What I had, were protruding teeth and I was lanky, so the three of us were the weirdest children in the whole school; Anyway, Farah and Asmita were best friends. Their families were friends, they were friends and they were in the same school with me. I used to want to be part of them. So did Sonam. Sonam; I never got to know her surname. Maybe it was Chaudhary. She was the fourth girl. And it completed us. We were weird and there was nothing, anyone could do about it. Sonam had an older sister and a younger brother in school, Farah had an older sister and an older brother in school, and Asmita, was a lonely child; The only child. But Sonam looked nothing like her siblings apart from being really dark. She looked like a full grown man in the face and her body was stout and athletic, she also had facial hair. It wasn’t till the third grade that we got to know that she was a Eunuch. Her parents pulled her out of the school before long. Before people would realize, that she was free from the bounds of gender. We still referred to her as a she, and SHE used to wear a skirt to school.I really liked her.I cried when her parents were pulling her out of the class, forcefully. physically. She gave me an invalid phone number right then and there, slammed it on my table and I was stupid enough to believe her. Her parents didnt want her to have any friends from school after she left our school in the fourth grade. I spent my entire summer vacations trying to have my call connected on the dialed number "44448888".I used to stare at the number, and look at how every digit was joined, like in cursive. She had lied to me, although I'm willing to understand why. Her father never liked the idea of friends. Asmita and Farah had left the school a few months before her and I felt cheated. The voice of the woman on the phone said that the number didn’t exist. The voice of the girl inside me told me the same. She had left the school and I was never going to see her or these girls again. I was stranded in a school where corporal punishment started from the first grade. I used to take all the beating and all the pain, and all the humiliation just because I knew I had my friends who'd comfort me and help me pick out tadpoles to put into the teacher's purses. The loss of three friends strained me, and ruined two or three years of my life, ahead. Farah's family was a family of hardheaded Muslims who had certain views about the role of women in society, so Farah was put into an Islamic school. Asmita had gone to a rich kid school, and Sonam was sent to a village, to rot. School was over for me. One day, when the teacher made me stand in the rain with my notebook as punishment, I saw all my work, melt away. I was standing there, drenched and sad, when I saw three storks flying past, I was reminded of my three friends. That day I went home, a little older than I was. And, after being beaten and harassed by the classteacher ceremoniously, everyday in the 3rd and 4th grade I decided that school wasn’t the same anymore.
I left my school the next day.

You

For the sorry life I'll have to lead, I know I'll have a friend
And for all the love I'll have to give;
I'll give it to my friend.
:)

Fifteen

In all the years that I have lived, there came only three birds:
One bird taught me how to live while the other swayed me with its flutter.
The third bird got caught in a grid but dragged me along to the gutter.
Three birds of love, three birds of pain;
A life spent in misery,
My love spent in vain.

Sunday

In my head full of shit, and my heart full of gloom
I feel nothing today, nothing but this pretty afternoon.
:)