Junak Baruah wants to win the prestigious short film competition in his university. But with hundreds of participants and a stellar jury on board, winning means making a film that's never been made before.
And that means breaking the rules and taki...
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Dikhou knew fear. Intimately. His whole life was built around it, after all. Fear defined him, made him who he was.
Fear – of getting bullied by his peers, of disappointing his parents, of losing what was left of his family, of people finding out his secret, of people's judgements, of them humiliating his family. People, people, people.
He was terrified of people.
So as he stood in front of a whole crowd of angry people who were confronting Junak – the only person who ever truly gave him the courage to be himself – he could not say a single word to defend him. He tried, but it was not nearly enough.
And then, one random remark by Madhab, that scum on the face of this earth, had all the people's attention poised at Dikhou and all his fear solidified as if it were a real entity.
"You wouldn't know because you haven't been around here, Jiri-ba," Madhab said. "But we've seen how cosy Dikhou is with Junak. God knows what those two get up to behind closed doors."
The world crumbled around Dikhou like a house of cards. And he fell with them, into some deep, dark void. He felt weightless. Numb. After all his painstaking efforts to hide, it was almost cruel to be exposed like this. In front of a crowd of unknown, disgusting people.
He suddenly thought of Junak, at a party, standing like this in front of a crowd of strangers as his girlfriend outed him. God! How did he survive that?
Dikhou was not sure if he was going to survive this. Or how. But amidst all the suffocating dread, he found a pinprick of relief. Amidst the numbness, he felt light at the prospect of not having to carry this burden anymore.
But then, the unexpected happened. "Don't be ridiculous!" Junak shouted. Junak, with his soft heart and kind eyes, Junak with his fear of ghosts and spiders, was standing tall and bold in front of all those people and saying how Madhab was wrong, how Dikhou was straight and ugly and Junak was only using him for his own gains.
It was suicide, his declaration. The people were already there to harass him, and yet here he was, taking away the arrow pointed at Dikhou and pushing it into his own chest.
"Junak," his grandmother warned.
"Sorry, aita. I'm my father's son, after all."
Dikhou was teleported back to a day, seemingly from a different lifetime, when Junak, with his shoulders dropped and head downcast, had said: I'm not my father. I don't care if you hate me, but I want you to know that I'm not like my father.
Dikhou's mother was the first to react. She gritted her teeth, held up her chin and walked away. Jiri glared at Junak and said, "Dikhou, Kopili, we're leaving."
It all felt like a dream – hazy, uncertain, time transitioning in jumps. One moment he was there in front of all the people and the next moment he was in his house, Jiri pacing and shouting how Dikhou should have seen this coming.
