Tea, Kit Kats and unfulfilled hopes

Illustration: TBS

During my stay over an uneventful new year's in the mental institution, I was called to the office for a treat. Being carefully ushered in front of an un-inconspicuous camera, a pleasant nurse handed me a ziplock full of kit kats and cookies that would go well with tea. 

I suspected that someone from my family was spying, but we were not allowed to meet. I lustfully looked at a pile of release forms, when it dawned on me that this was no stint. The ultimate prize of having a form filled out on my behalf was a distant dream. 

Instead of that, I asked for some loose paper. I was given a couple of pages of what looked like a doctor's prescription pad. I asked for tea and began scribbling some immature, unpolished verse, romanticising suicide in the style of a teenaged novice; no idea that things were bound to get better once I got older, if I made it that long. 

I began to doubt whether I wanted to or not.

My psychoanalyst arrived, looking like a specter of the man from Porlock. He must have been coming to collect his prescription pad the nurse had graciously granted me. 

"What is this you have done?" he raged. "You are mad! How long do you expect to stay here?" The uncultured philistine looked concerned.

"Do you know when I can get back to school?" 

"I don't think you need to worry about that now." 

My anxiety caught up to me. Just as I was about to push aside my tea and jump off the office chair, a takeaway bag from a fast food joint was dropped off and placed in front of me.
 
"You need to stay here for at least six months to a year, by my expectations." 

After a series of many shaves and haircuts, the glorious day of my release had finally come. I had missed so much school, going was no longer an option. 

Luckily, my affluent uncle hooked me up with a job as a stock market apprentice where I was allowed to attend coaching sessions for my exams after trading. They were so hard, I was totally f***ing up. 

I sat at the computer filled with the worst imaginable anxiety I had ever experienced, inspired by a lifetime of underachievement. I googled the easiest way to commit suicide. The results said, "there are no easy solutions in this life." 

The morbid actions I was too much of a coward to try out were out of the question; I had never broken any bones or been in any fights or bled in the fashion that would result in what I imagined to be the most peaceful departure from things that felt like they were getting out of my depth. 

I decided the best thing to do was to adopt a work hard, play hard, lifestyle. My friend Emmy picked me up late one evening and it seemed that she was the kind of friend who liked to hook her girlfriends up with nice boyfriends. 

We went to visit her friend Athar's house, where there were two girls ready to go out with us for the night. One of the girls was named Rebecca and the other was Sarah. 

Sarah was studying in America at the University of Wisconsin, and I was told that I should probably sit next to her. She told me that she was the kind of girl who used to read poetry in the auditorium at her school, and thought that was weird. I said I used the same thing, except with dramatic monologues. We seemed to hit it off, so she gave me her number.
 
The next few weeks, when Athar, Emmy and Sarah were free, they usually dropped by my house to chill. One night, I got a call from Sarah and she seemed pretty freaked out. 

"I'm with Emmy and we're in this mansion in Baridhara. We've been here for hours and this dude is not letting us leave." 

"Is his name Jewel Bhai?" I asked, not really sure what was going on.

"Yeah, how did you know?"

"I was over there actually a couple of weeks ago. People who are grown up have so much money," I said. "I hope that happens for me when I'm like that." 

I didn't really understand what was going on, or what she seemed to be distressed about. I calmly reassured her that Emmy was sure to drop her back home, eventually. 

Sarah told me she was going to go back to school in the fall and that she would be leaving soon, but she would come over to see me before she left.

When she finally came over to my house I pretended to lock her in my balcony so that she couldn't leave and would never go back to college. It freaked her out, but I was just kidding, and let her know that pretty quickly. 
She explained to me that night she had all of a sudden been locked in the bathroom, and one of the shady characters outside had had a gun, when she decided to call me. We were sitting on my bed and talking when my maid came into my room, at which point I screeched at her, "Get thee to thy cold bed and warm thee," in Bengali. 

Sarah was shocked at the way I spoke at the sweet girl who had come to see what we were up to. She was so disconcerted by the way I spoke to the help that she decided to leave.
 
On my birthday that year, I called Sarah up. I was upset because I had found out that I had failed a couple of my exams. They were financial accounting and economics papers. I would rather have been dead than have gone through the roller coaster of staying up all night studying for weeks just to fail. 

"Hello?" she answered.
"Hey Sarah," I said. "It's my birthday!"

"I'm just going to grab a pack of cigarettes," she said. We talked and caught up for a really long time, considering it was an international call. 
"I was such a bitch," she said, out of nowhere. 

"Don't say that," I said. "When you come back, we can bitch about it later." 

After I hung up, I finally found sleep, after a really long time.