The Lost One: Story of the One who ends it all (Shiva the Destroyer Book 1)

by Aarohan Atwal

  “Okay, go to the other one” I say, after thinking about the situation, this one appears less dangerous, the slope is definite, you will only roll few meters if you fall down, catching up some bruises, few broken bones at worse, but certainly you will not die, a much better bet by miles.

  Like brave soldiers, who go to war without knowing they will come home to their families or not, the girls step on facing the valley. They look at each other, and gulp down their throat a handful of spit. Their lips are dried and their faces charred, out of coldness their fingers have deserted them, and their legs trembling almost about to give up. ‘What if I push them, now?’

  I remember now I have seen these two earlier as well, they hang out with same bunch of guys, maybe they have someone they are romantically inclined to. So, with a new idea I proceed:

  “What kind of person are you?” “The hurting one? Or the one that gets hurt.” I ask.

  Mum, is their response. “If you won’t tell me, I will find out myself.” Truth can hurt as much as a lie.

  “Call up your friends” I ask them bluntly, they turn around to attend my request.

  “Do you like somebody from these?” I probe further, as I point out to their friends.

  “They are our friends” one says.

  “I said, pick the one you like most.” I add. “Only from guys”

  “Now here’s the deal, you pick one of these two. I offer two choices, I give you girls, a way out. I read the expression of fear and uncertainty on their faces.

  “Don’t worry, I have kept it simple -“

  “Either you hurt or you get hurt“

  They don’t respond to my antics. So, I say with an added poise in my voice and manners:

  “Okay, forget everything” pause. “Just jump”

  “You will be fine trust me, nothing will happen” What kind of daring this is? They must be questioning. In choked voice one of them says, finally. “Sir” She is almost moved to tears. “Sir please let us go”

  “Yeah, you can go,” Pause. “- after you do what I am saying.” I thunder back. A drop of tear runs down her cheek, brushing past the corner of her lips, like the first rain drop on a cracked land. I soften my tone a little, but still not ready to weigh down on my standing.

  “There’s a way out.” “My deal still stands open. Now what would you choose to do?” I pause for a moment. “What’d you choose, pushing them off the ledge? Or jumping yourself”

  “Tell me fast, don’t waste my time”

  One of them gets off the ledge, other is still frozen on her place. Her choice. She goes to the guy, the one with a heavy stainless steel wrist watch. I watch her closely. She stops just in front of the guy and looks at me hesitantly.

  “Come on, go on, what are you waiting for? Huh?“ I say.

  “And you, you are not getting off so easily yourself?” I say to other one.

  She tries to grab hold of his hand but the guy pushes himself away, and these people they call themselves friends? He doesn’t run away but he refuses to cooperate either. It’s not his problem, of-course, he is not the one in trouble.

  “You know what, come here” I order her.

  I whisper to her as she comes closer:

  “You can leave, just walk slowly upto him and –“ She nods partially in agreement and partially in relief.

  She goes close to him but this time instead of grabbing his arm or pulling him, she just puts a punch on his face, as hard she could with her soft feminine hands. Bam! The boy gets down holding his face in the cusp of his hands. I don’t think it’s had much impact - there’s no blood and no sound of broken bones.

  “What is this?” “What did I tell you, on the nose.” I yell.

  I examine the exhibit, and I nod and I look her in appreciation. She now walks upto the other girl, the frozen one, she’s all but shocked, she approaches her head on with quicker steps, and before the other one could think or even move, she delivers, she slaps her hard, real hard, and this time, to my pleasure, few drops of blood gushes through her nose, her face reddened with pain and fear. And, I notice, this time it was different, she was all different, she didn't hesitate a bit before hitting her; it was almost as if she enjoyed doing so, and as if she wanted to slap her all this time.

  If you look at it anything and everything about us can be explained by two basic emotions - Fear and Greed, the myriad human emotions then are nothing but the composition of Fear and Greed. Everything can be broken down to the level of these two.

  What about Love? Does true love or even love per se exist? What is, Love? Fear and Greed, that’s it? You love someone, you fear, you worry about their well being. You love someone you are greedy, you want them to love you, you want them to be with you. They seek your attention, and you seek their approval. This is love, Fear and Greed. Why did she hit him? Her greed for her own well being superseded her friend’s. You give someone a choice the survival instinct kicks-in. You stand for yourself, or you die.

  ~’~’~’

  The guy gives me a stern stare as he walks off. “What? Do you wanna get me? Do you wanna complain about me?” “Go ahead, CSE third year, Raul” “Find me”

  Raul indeed is naïve, and gullible, ignorantly innocent of the shrewd world.

  Chapter 4: We Met Raul

  I look at the watch, it's still few minutes before the second lecture. I slowly begin my walk back to the classroom. I get in just when the bell rings two times, I grab a seat on the bench next to Raul. I look around; I find us sitting alone in the entire row.

  The lecture is Computation Physics, one of my favorites; it’s the only lecture of the day that I eagerly look forward to. People are still pouring in but nobody sits in the first two rows, very odd. It’s true that nobody wants to sit at the place where the sun rays have highest penetration, but the unusual thing is front benches are never left blank in Mr Bahuguna’s, he never teaches if they are unoccupied.

  "Where's Siddhant today?" I ask Raul, elbowing, while looking straight into the blackboard.

  "I donno, he should have come" Raul replies.

  "Was he there in the humanities?" I ask.

  "I have just come too"

  "Oh! It maybe that he's not feeling well" I add.

  "How can it be, after his debts were cleared" Raul quips.

  "Precisely that, maybe it was too much of a shock for him" I reply smilingly.

  ~’~’~

  I still clearly remember the first time Siddhant and I met Raul -

  The guy was talking about the evolution of computing, it was not a regular lecture, but a guest lecture. The person had come all the way from Bangalore, he was some senior director in a tech firm, curiously named Radicale Systems. I wondered what radical things they did in there. The seminar hall was fully packed, not because everybody was interested and keen to discover the historical moments but because the lecture was mandatory to attend.

  Siddhant and I are sitting adjacent to each other; he shoulders me, giggling, when the guy says the first ever computer known to man was an abacus, I myself could hardly control the laughter. On top of that, the guy says abacus was a very sophisticated device of that time, there were only few of them made initially.

  “Reason being the cost and the technology required for making them was absurdly arduous.” I suggest.

  Siddhant says, I know what he is gonna say next, "But the biggest advantage of such device was that it didn't consume any power and neither required any cooling of sort."

  "Beat that!" I reply with amusement. “So by comparison today's devices are evolutionary backward”

  “A devolution” He quips.

  The guy continues “Very interestingly –”, some people yawn at the exact moment.

  “– the word calculus comes from the Latin word for pebble.” I remember something like Napier's bones falling to my ears, he talks about Pascaline invented by Pascal at age 19, Pascal, a child prodigy of a guy.

  The part really interests me, for I am nineteen too, I await wh
at the future holds for me. I open my ears and try to listen attentively. But Siddhant continues to fool around, so I ask him to shut up.

  “Oh! Come on, you can't be serious” He says, “Why do we need to know all this, this is all crap and useless.” “How's this gonna help me design a better compiler or solve computing problems?” “Tell me”

  But my mind is somewhere else, apparently Pascal was the same guy who went on to invent probability theory, the hydraulic press, and the syringe and so on. A prodigy who really lived upto his tag. Sometimes I don't know what I am doing, nor I don't know what we are doing; Buddy Holly was dead by nineteen, by that time he fathered the child called 'rock n roll'. What is there in store for me, I cannot stop wondering. What am I destined to do? Lost in my world, I wake up when Siddhant shoulders me again. He says,

  “Look at his sideburns the right one is smaller than the left.” Indeed they are, I admit, and so I smile.

  It was the last straw, I am not sure the speaker was observing us all along or just asked Siddhant to stand up on a random basis, but there he was staring at him, the faculty watching him, all heads turned in his direction. Speaker says, “So I am told by your college, the students here are very bright, can you tell me –“ I felt a question on punch cards was about to punch on his face. Instead he asks, “What is the underlying data structure of a binary heap?” The crowd burst into murmurs, everyone has their own answer.

  How are we supposed to know all this, we are in first year. And yet everybody the faculty and the speaker and even the students expected an answer; Siddhant is quiet, very quiet his smirk wiped-off clean from his face. His hand is shaking, and palms look wet and probably he is sweating from inside too. He knows, he has been made to look a complete idiot in front of whole department. As if it was not enough the speaker fires back, “In which department you are in?” “I requested the admins not to send non-CS students.” He adds, cutting sharp into Siddhant's self-respect. A tight slap on his already red hot face.

  He has almost given up, and when he is about to say something really stupid like apologizing or saying something in defense, a guy sitting behind bends forward very slightly and says in a the quietest tone possible 'binary tree'.

  “Binary tree” Siddhant repeats as loud as he can, he didn't care he was correct or not as long as he had something to say, something that made him look intelligent.

  “And what would you use to implement binary trees?” He probes further.

  “Arrays.” He replies again echoing the-guy-behind's answer. “It's stored in breadth first order.”He adds.

  “In computing how can we use BTree? You know of any real world examples?” Siddhant pauses for a moment and looks down as if contemplating. Someone in the crowd quips, “Looking down? You lost your answer? Need a flash light?“

  “Googly” Another shouts.

  The-guy-behind thinks for a moment, Siddhant repeats after him as the guy begins,

  “B-Tree is a data structure that can be used to quickly find the maximum or minimum value in a set of values. It's used in Dijkstra's algorithm (shortest path), Prim's algorithm (minimum spanning tree) and Huffman encoding (data compression).” He adds,

  “Binary heaps are used in the priority queues, scheduling in the kernel. The highest priority process is taken first.”

  Stunned silence takes over the arena, some people are even applauding loud, the speaker accepts his defeat graciously, and continues his magical journey through the history of computing. I feel like a bug myself lost somewhere in the gears of the first electro-mechanical computer - Mark I.

  He says, addressing the women, “You should be proud of yourself, the first ever high level language was invented by a woman, and the word debugging too was coined by the same woman.” He goes on to tell his own experiences of early computing, when he wrote his first program, the first computer game he designed, and the decay of computer industry in the recent times.

  And all the while he was telling us such fascinating stuff Siddhant sat quiet, unmoved, focused. It was the day Siddhant began his metamorphosis from a jocular guy into an earnest person. He was never the same after that lecture. He grabs the the-guy-behind after the lecture, “Well done” The guy says to Siddhant smilingly, embarrassing him further.

  “No, Thanks to you” Siddhant says. “You saved my life today.” Pause. They look each other in their eyes, it was friendship at first sight!

  “I am Siddhant, by the way” He extends his hands. the guy grabs it and gives a big firm shake and replies “Raul”

  ~'~'~'

  I am into my thoughts when I notice the movement at the door, a mouse sneaks in, squealing in its own language. And it is then shortly followed by another mouse, Miss Radhika, to my bewilderment, Miss Radhika, not to mention is our Humanities expert. Shorter in height, higher in weight, wears high heels all the time, to compensate the generosity God forgot to bestow on her, small printed flowers on her dark green salwar-kameez makes her look like as if she is some walking-talking garden.

  “What the hell?” I say with utter frustration, under my breath. This is going to be the first time in two semesters that I have to sit through the entire one hour period of humanity, what an inhuman torture!

  The architectural design of our class is little weird, even though it’s in our favor; we sit on the ground floor and there’s a big window at the back of the class, window that big that even a ten feet high and four feet wide Gorilla can step out of the pane without pain. Shortly after the attendance, people start seeping through the window. Every time she turns to the blackboard, someone sneaks out, Thank god she’s not really good at Mathematics.

  “Merlin is an allegory of desires of Santiago, the sea is an allegory of the - “My mind goes blank, I appreciate it for its life-saving ability of selective hearing. I float among the white clouds, somewhere, looking for a black pearl, I see a drop of water falling into the ocean, and an open shell, waiting for the nectar for eternities -

  ~'~'~'

  My own thirst for meaning in the reigning chaos is shrouding me in a blanket of restlessness; the irresolute, the nomads looking for something they do not know, perhaps a sorcerer's stone or a …black pearl? Or the rendezvous with the destiny herself. Children of unborn men, the morally corrupt, the puritans, the forever hesitant, the sacred Brahmins, what is he?

  Chapter 5: Memories Of Tomorrow

  I like to show her how to hold a gun, how to aim and how to blow a hole through the dummy's chest. We come here together, to the ranch, sometime, looking for some fun. I'd hold her little fingers, wrapped around the trigger, and I'd shoot with her.

  'What do you want to be when you grow up?' Whenever she's at home she's confused and usually answers with a – I donno know look or a choice between a cabbie and an archeologist. Her such atypical choices of career baffles me completely. But when she's here, she's almost certain - she wants to be able to use a gun and she wants to be a Secret Service Investigation (a division of RAW). I tease her that you become an investigator not an investigation.

  She has such a natural talent for shooting, it's not that she hits all the time, it's how composed she remains throughout. Whether she hits right there on the target or whether she misses it completely altogether, she remains completely unperturbed as if she's some professional laboring days and night. And then she fires with the same vigor and the same intensity until she meets her target, and finally when she does, she reloads the gun again and looks at me smilingly.

  That smile, that one smile, that is what I long to see, that is what my holy grail is; the nomad does live for something.

  We have the Indian Military Academy here, maybe if she works really hard and toughens up, she can get into army, it'd do father a lot of proud, ha! ha!, but I know I wouldn't let her sign up, I'd freak out just by the thought of it. But then why am I teaching her all this? What use she possibly could have learning to shoot? I wouldn't know, maybe I have to wait till that day comes.

  Baba Ramchandra niwas is the
only one left now to take care of this facility; it was at its peak about five years back when my uncle, my mother's brother, real brother, set a world record in 10m air pistol, a score of 699 that still goes unbeaten. And he then shortly followed it with a final berth in the World Championships. At that time, at the pinnacle of success, he was center of the nation's interest, and media's undivided attention. Everybody expected him to do what nobody did so far for the country, to get an individual gold at the Olympics. But then it happened, he faded away, his glory faded away, he failed to qualify for the semi's in the Barcelona and then at the WCs at the Kazakh and then got disqualified at Common Wealth - all within a year; He was labeled a failure, the media that worshipped him earlier tagged him as nation's disgrace. Overnight, the eminence, the government aid, the sponsorship everything just swept away. His finances and his self respect, both, crumbled.

  His story a classical reminiscence of a rise and a fall, and in the years that followed people forgot who Bijendra Singh Kala was. I think about him sometime, and I think about his accident, which probably was a suicide, it’s hard to tell though, for whatever it is, the burden of expectation weighed him down, the albatross of his dreams killed him, the people and the media killed him. His car, it is said, fell into the Alaknanda while he was driving back to Hrishikesh from Joshimath. If it's not suicide why then he chose to drive by himself, leaving behind his driver in Joshimath itself, asking him to come back by bus, and why didn't he take Sonu, his son, along for the trip, he knew all the way, he is gonna take his life, and he did, finally.

  But I know he actually died much before that, he died when he was ridiculed, he died when he was forgotten, he died when the sport, his lifelong passion, was sidelined. He died many times before he really got killed in that accident.