For All the Wrong Reasons

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There was a time this monsoon when I had switched off my phone and taken my entire social media accounts offline. Dad, a budding tech saviour, suddenly couldn’t track me on his newly found fun-thing called Facebook. He decided that I was depressed.

Funny thing, you don’t appear on Facebook and suddenly you are questioned on how you live. I just didn’t want my life to be lived online.

Big deal?

I tried to explain it to him that I am taking some time off to write. He smiled, as if I was throwing some tantrum. Whatever I do, it seems very small to my parents. Unless I start telling them that I get stoned, and that I will be soon joining Ri’s brother in his drug gang, nobody was going to take my stuff seriously.

Dad said that he wanted to read my work.

I wonder sometimes if I smoke subconsciously to show myself that I am up to big, mature things. I wonder if I rebel every time I smoke.

Ri used to call me on landline and this pissed her off every time. She bugged me into switching my phone on. I, however, got us to land a truce that I shall only switch my phone on to receive calls. No online presence.

Three days later, after she broke up with her previous boyfriend, she took herself offline as well. She reasoned it with saying, and I quote, “We have hardly – what? – twenty more years of healthy life on this earth. I mean, c’mon, with global warming and all, we’re bound to be doomed. And I don’t want to live this shorter life online. Online has already messed things up enough.”

This one time, Little Gar shrieked my name from the living room. When I floated downstairs, she broke it to me that mom and dad weren’t home. And they wouldn’t be for another two days. I was somehow happy that they didn’t even call me to inform me. They just left. I was happy because it seemed like they respected me for the first time. They know I don’t care for such measly gestures. It was important that I got the message and Little Gar would inevitably do that.

“So, what are you going to do?”

“I want to go to your spot and smoke some dope with you,” she smiled.

I squinted at her. In disbelief, maybe?

“Wh-what?”

“Oh, c’mon Horse Shoe, you know I know what that smell is—the one that lightens up the place every night and morning. You be glad that Dad never shows interest in your dirty room.” She smiled, swinging her two part ponytails like some maniac.

Next thing we know is that we were sitting before TV, watching ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’, a large pepperoni pizza sprawled on table before us. Little Gar gagging and coughing on earthy smoke. I might just have been the worst brother in human history. But after that, Little Gar never so much as even asked me to get her to smoke. She hated it so much, she almost wanted me to quit. I realised that if she had really wanted to try that, she would have gotten anyone on the streets to get her to try that. It was much safer it was me.

Those two days were lit because I recited every work of mine to Little Gar. Every short story. Every poem. Then, I hadn’t even started writing the twenty pages long of shame. The one I threw in the bin. It is a ticking bomb in my room. It is an impending doom. If anyone ever reads it.

When mom and dad came back, I got in serious trouble. There are some unsaid rules of the house where if you’re the older one, you have to take care of everything in the absence of your parents. I took the rule very lightly. Lightly in the amount that I completely forgot it existed.

The plants that no one was watering were in near-dying condition. Who plants such weak plants? All it took was two days of sun and no water for them to die. The milkman had left the milk can on the door regularly for two days. No one had attended to them. They had gone stale and smelly. Garbage was so full it made the whole house smell like a dumpster.

My mother called me ‘good for nothing’. Father was so pissed off he decided that he had failed raising me as a responsible kid. And may more things than I can remember.

The worst part was I didn’t even spare the whole thing a thought. I forgot it as it happened.

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