Loktak was having a bad day. Having a bad day was something that was not new to him. It had always been like this for him, day in and day out, for the last nineteen years. His life was routine, as routine as routine can be. From the day he had become aware, he remembered being average at everything: average build, average height, average student; name it and Loktak was average at it. He hated the tag average so much, that sometimes he performed even worse than what he was capable of.
Today was his graduation day from school, and where everyone looked forward to college and the future with great expectation, Loktak looked at it with dread. He, like everyone else, wanted to carve a name for himself on the mountain that was the society. A deep-seated desire in him to be recognized by one and all tore away at his heart and he felt restless all the time. Whenever he saw, or read, about someone his age, or younger to him, achieve something, he felt jealous and wished that he could be in the shoes of that person.
When he was younger, it was easy to convince himself with a: “ I have a lot of time still. I will get there, sooner or later”. But days turned into months and months into years and yet there was no spark of brilliance, not even a momentary flash in the pan. Desperation was setting in. His teachers, parents and people around him were not of much help either. Everyone wanted him to do this or that or something else. What he wanted to do he did not know himself, for he had been too busy trying to come up to what everyone expected of him. He, more often than not, failed these expectations. He never thought about what he should do, just what he thought people expected him to do and now a feeling of helplessness was taking over him. He knew that time was a relentless force always eating away at his life and he felt unable to stop it. It never occurred to him that if instead of trying to stop it, he went with it, time would eat away at him less than what it was doing now.
Anyone who has gloomy thoughts overriding all other thoughts in the mind, sooner or later, will begin to think about death as a release. It was no different with Loktak. For some time now he had been contemplating suicide. It seemed to him the only way out of his sorry life. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that it was the right thing to do.
“What use it was”, he thought, “to live like this?”
The thought had become so overpowering lately that he had gone to the extent of doing some research into ways of dying painlessly. The result of his research was that he had decided that if he ever chose to do it, he would poison himself. Pain was something that he was scared of. Someone who wants to do something usually finds a way and one day Loktak managed to get hold of some kind of poison that, he had read, was very effective. With the little vial of poison close at hand, Loktak’s mind had been wandering in that direction more than usual in the last couple of days. Today watching everyone happy at school, his misery, in contrast, appeared magnified to him and all of a sudden he was convinced that if he had to do it then the sooner he did it, the better it was.
He was scared and afraid of death, hell more than death, because he had read and been told that people who committed suicide went straight to hell for all eternity. Hell was unending, unceasing torment. Was he jumping from the frying pan into the fire, he thought to himself? But something within him was strong today and wanted him to go ahead and end his life, whatever the consequences might be. Reason is the first thing that parts from a person on whom ill luck falls.
He was alone at home. His parents were away for the evening and his brother was staying over at a friend’s house. It seemed to him that even heavens had conspired to give him a chance to do what he had resolved. He had always read and heard that it was a coward that committed suicide, but now he wanted to tell everyone that doing it needed a lot of courage. No one wants to part with the thing that is most dear to them: their lives.
“So, this is it.” he thought, “My stay on this earth it seems was for nineteen years only, well if it was to be like this, so be it.”
He went and got out the bottle of poison from its secret place.
“It surely must taste bitter. And if I have to die let it be with a sweet taste on my tongue. He took out the carton of orange juice from the refrigerator and, in a glass, mixed some poison and orange juice. The color of the juice turned a sinister red. It was not a good sight to look at and the mixture smelled very bad.
“Beginning of hell.” Loktak thought to himself as he drank the whole glass in one go. For a few minutes, he felt nothing. He went about the house, watched Television and then began to feel drowsy and it seemed that the sound of the Television was getting farther and farther away. He increased the volume of the TV and still he felt sleepy.
Suddenly it occurred to him that he should at least leave a suicide note to tell his parents that he loved them and what he had done was in no way their doings. He was beginning to fade and knew that whatever had to be done, needed to be done quickly.
With faltering steps he went to his room, took out a pen and a paper and wrote:
“ Dear Mom and dad, I don’t know why I am doing this but I love you very much and I am very sorry for my deeds, this that I am doing now, and the others in the past when I hurt you, intentionally or unintentionally.”
He could think of nothing else to write and was fading fast too, so he just added an “ I love you” , folded the paper and grasped it firmly in his hand and somehow reached the couch in the living room and slumped down on it. Slowly, he faded into oblivion.