The Stranger

There is reality and thoughts, and there are recollections of these thoughts and memories.

According to my actions then, How was I? Who was I?

My childhood, this first phase of a human life filled with love, happiness and innocence, went by with my family, friends and with myself. I cannot begin to objectively describe how I was. Even trying to do so subjectively, the recollection is not a still image. It’s a blur, unlike the blurred night with drinks in hand; I can’t seem to keep my image still. When I look at my childhood photographs, I don’t recognise the boy in the picture. What was I like?

In the photographs, you can see me smiling, clearly happy. You can even feel the wind blowing on my face. In some of them at least. Most of them, have me making a face that says I’m not ready to capture this moment. There is something dreadful about capturing this moment. Don’t click the picture, I’m not having fun nor am I happy. There’s a deadly storm inside me that keeps me afloat. Doesn’t anyone notice it?

I used to be upset and wondered how long would it take for others to notice. People around me never did. Maybe this dreadfulness had already grasped my soul and I was not happy most of the time. People assumed this was my normal demeanour, my normal self.

A quiet kid, a shy kid. You don’t talk a lot, do you?

And I questioned within myself, ‘But, but, do you see, how I feel?’

When was I truly happy? Does this true happiness that I felt allude me now? Where does the memory of me being happy and content hide from this instance of recollection?

Because if I found it, I would justify the memory as an unhappy one.

I would never raise my voice to people. I could never shout at someone. Though, as a kid, I got into fights. I would let my fist do the talking. The anger that swept through me, I pushed through with my body. However, if there was an instance where no physical altercation was possible, and all I had was myself and my voice, I couldn’t reply to them the same way I did with my fists.

It got to the point where I started to lie so I could speak sparingly. It was a beautiful escape. Never to speak in many words. Somehow I found a lie, this thread I could pull and knit as my persona. A glorious escape. But to live in this world means to be a friend, a son, and to do the things one likes and loves, and all these lies couldn’t harbour the persona I presented to the world. I had to break free from them. Every time I spoke the truth, thereafter, I couldn’t be as loud as my lies. I shook and looked at the ground and never gazed at the other person. So, the truth looked like a lie.

I did show emotions. But mainly it was anger. And this brute rage I felt within me did not feel real. It was as if I was eager to play the part of an emotional teenager. Teenagers can’t control their emotions, they can’t keep them in check. They react. And I wanted to do so as well. Not that I recognised my own emotions. But I played my part. So, even the anger wasn’t anger. It was something else. I couldn’t define it in a few words, even if I tried to do so now. I knew it had enough energy to control all aspects of my life as if I were fleeing from something.

Like a foreigner coming to this world of complexities, I was a foreigner to myself as well. I spent my days with a loss of self-esteem and I was shaky, tremors and all. I had fear in me so powerful I couldn’t even talk about it with anyone. It was as if I shared these feelings, my world would be destroyed by a natural disaster when I went to sleep. Even thinking about sharing my feelings made me restless and I saw vivid dreams of death at night. So, I never voiced it out or even whispered to myself about it.

The fear would creep into me unexpectedly; while I was studying, in the shower, while standing at a bus stop. I dreaded to be by myself and I dreaded to be around people. I knew the fear would be back and it would make me question anything that was in front of me. That is what my childhood was like. Alone but never by myself. It was as if a black sphere with wings floated around me. I was never a human being who was part of the world.

My frantic desire to cater to others became my escape from this fear. If I didn’t get on the bad side of other people, I would never be on the bad side with myself. I turned into a nice guy. I would actively avoid being a respected or passionate person. I preferred the background. In the background, I was fine. I didn’t have to deal with the fear within me or deal with other people.

I had learned to live with myself by then — by creating scenarios in my head and silently smirking or feeling this strange new emotion or that, even raging with animated postures when my imagination led me to a confrontation and I would win the argument.

As I grew older, I became familiar with the corruptness of the world. The darkness and the secret pacts made in a corner of a street. The unruly behaviour and perversions were neatly laid out in front of me. I saw different sides of people and the side kept hidden in front of others, even in front of themselves. It intrigued me that I would find these kinds of things fascinating, and I dived deep into this world, which I don’t think I have washed myself off yet. There wasn’t much to gain from the darkness and the secrets because there weren’t any emotions attached to it. It was an escape into the bliss only shared in darkness.

At the same time, I stumbled into Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe. They portrayed a different side of the darkness. These people and their words took me by surprise. I found another place to lose myself in. I read The Famous Five series and The Secret Society series. I was lost in their world. I was a teenager and so were the characters in these books. Even after I closed the book and put it away, I was still there in their world, walking alongside them asking questions and solving mysteries. I started to imagine more and daydream that one day I would be a private detective or someone who would solve crime and figure out a mystery.

The fear I felt every other time disappeared when I was a part of this imaginative world. The characters gave me the courage to observe, to be patient, and to understand what an adventure is. Seeing the little good in this book, I started to contemplate if there was a bigger truth, an absolute truth that would make my fear disappear. Like the burning Sun that would swallow me, burn all my fears and bring me back to the happier side.

And so I started praying to God. I was scared of the dark, so I prayed to be okay in the dark. And I didn’t just pray half-heartedly. I prayed for my life. The fear was intense so I prayed intensely too.

I prayed for good weather, I prayed for good grades and I prayed for love. And sometimes my prayers were answered. I had finally figured out a way to step away from the fear.

It wasn’t religion I concerned myself with. Yes, I prayed according to my religion as those were the only words or mantras I was familiar with. Any religion that took me towards the absolute truth or God, I would use. The prayers might have kept my fears at bay, but they weren’t extinguished. It was always there, keeping an eye on me, and if I forgot to pray for something, it would pounce at me, and my heart would ache as if it were the end of the world.

So like flipping a coin, I saw some prayers work and some didn’t. In the evenings when my dad was taking me home after school, I would pray that he would take me out to dinner rather than to eat the homemade meal which was a mundane routine of my life. Sometimes, my prayers would be answered as my dad did take me out for dinner. And sometimes the mundane would win. I never believed I had the power to make things happen because I never did speak out loud about the things I wanted.

A world lost because I never gave a chance for its birth. I was so deeply buried by my fear that I never spoke about the things I wanted. I don’t recall if I even liked anything. And sometimes when I did speak out loud, it was felt by everyone as a random event. They would ask questions like, ‘Well, that came out from nowhere, didn’t it?’

But I knew it wasn’t random at all. The thought had been in me for days or weeks. I never dared to voice it out.

Once my mother took me to an orphanage to meet this person who saw people’s future and for some reason, she also spit out some crystals on their palms, which the visitors later made into rings and other accessories.

It was our turn, we sat in front of this person. She was an old lady covered in an orange shawl. She told me I had a lot of anger in me. My mother greedily agreed. I had expected more from her than the faint horoscope-like statement that was flexible enough to pass as the truth. I wondered if she could see what I felt within me — the fear. But she never did. Yes, a teenager with anger issues. I was truly disappointed and knew that nobody would ever know how I felt.

In those days, I found females as different species. It was as if I had to take on this different role to talk to them. At least that’s how I saw the other boys talk to them. It wasn’t a genuine persona the boys put out, but it didn’t seem to matter to the girls. I felt like there was a social contract people signed unconsciously that gave them the freedom to be someone else entirely for the sake of the conversation. I never could find the contract. The boys in my school tried their best to decipher the females. But with each conclusion they drew, the females would change their demeanour as if they were playing a game with the boys. All the hard work was in vain. From this experience, I realised that females were more attuned to the world and could step into a male’s brain and make changes. Whereas the males would, well, let them. At least that was one of the generalisations I made.

If I had to describe my childhood in a sentence, it would be, ‘I am a species of the disoriented.’

Years later when I graduated from high school, I stumbled upon the recommendation letter written by one of my teachers. There were phrases ‘People pleaser’, ‘Lives in the shell’, ‘inflicts pain within himself’, and ‘now and then shows his true, authentic self.’ It had been years since I thought about the plan of escape I had made to never be on people’s bad side. It was my second nature to be on people’s good side. It made me realise there was someone who noticed, even if they noticed the effect or reaction that I had set up to escape from the fear. Solace, that’s what I felt for the first time in my life. This disoriented and never-still image of a stranger, that’s who I am.