The Guinea Pig

guinea-pig:

(noun)

1. rodent a little larger than a rat

2. somebody used in an experiment

He asked himself another time, just to make sure. And all he got was precisely the same response, the same cluster of thoughts echoing in his mind yet again, hurting his body like fetters, or so he felt. Without any further considerations, he fastened the knot. He had carefully selected the particular kind from a huge bunch of ropes, all sizes and colors. "Death", he had thought, "seems way more colourful than life", musing within himself about his sense of humor. He had always possessed the darkest of humors and more significantly, been proud of it too. Though his being in serious troubles many a times because of it was a different story altogether.

He had taken care to onfirm from the shopkeeper if it could handle weights of around 60-kg. "Thanks to what they cook in the goddamn mess, I ain't too heavy", he mused again. Atleast for a 20 year old, he wasn't. But for anyone his age, he sure was extraordinarily intelligent, like every other individual belonging to the same league is supposed to be, the league of the IITians.

He was almost laughing, in his usual satirical tones, thinking about what people perceive the supposedly best institutions to be, and what they turn up to be like, for entities like him who become a part of them, when someone knocked. "Atleast let me die in peace", he blabbered, followed by the trademark curse or two. He hid the rope and the box of sweets his mother had sent, in quick succession, and thus pulled the creaky door open.

"What’s it dude?", he enquired uninterestedly.

"Nothing, just need your tutorial notebook. We have a submission tomorrow remember?"

"Haven't dunnit. I don't care."

"Shit he's gonna kill you."

"I said I goddamn don't care."

He was happy he wouldn't have to do any more of copying tutorials. He was tired of being a zerox machine.

"Oh alright. Do you have anything to eat by the way?", the voice brought him back from his Utopia.

"No I do not", he paused, "Actually, I think I do. Here, this box of sweets. Take all of it". His face brightened with the thought of the most generous act of his entire life, while he waited for the "Oh thank you" to tell him in the most casual of tones how it was absolutely okay. But the gratitude never got expressed. He wanted to snatch the box back, but all he could say was

"Now would you mind if I said I wanna study?"

And to that, he shut the door on him, avoiding any further expressions, though he just about caught a glimpse of awe on his friend's face. However hard he tried not to admit it to himself, he still knew that somewhere inside, in the deepest nooks of his heart, he wanted his friend to stay longer, enjoy the sweets together, maybe fight over them, running after each other for the possession of the box. But he was too scared to think on those lines as he did not want to admit that he wanted death to stay away as long as possible. "But I want to die", he reminded himself convincingly, and got back to contemplation.

"You know I wasn't always like that", he remembered telling his friends the day before, after one commented about the dense air of pessimism that had been surrounding him lately. A week into the trauma, he was quite used to people asking it by then. Also, he himself couldn't agree less. "If it wasn't for that goddamn day", he thought once again. It was the 15th of November, he remembered precisely, "Another day in the life of another being, but for some, no less than decider of their fate, the destiny writer", he mused again. This poetic tinge was another possession which used to fill him with pride. He tried to visualize how many people would have had their life changed as dramatically as his did on that particular day, but hurriedly discarded the thought.

He had had quite a debate with his friends then, a serious one, pretty contrasting to the amazingly hilarious and endlessly useless 'bakars' they used to have almost everyday. He was amazed how anyone could be in favor of not allowing students to sit in the exams just because they had an attendance trifling short of the prescribed mark. "Isn't it unethical?", he would say, "Ask the person who suffers". And all they could say was they understood. But that could hardly console him. Instead, that was one line he hated from the core of his heart. The only effect it had was to have them stepping on the same wrong stones over and over again. It hurt, and it hurt bad.

And thereby, had followed, another sleepless night, his seventh in a row. He remembered sleeping till late last Tuesday, the 15th of the month, reaching the department late, missing half of the lectures as usual, and his friends telling him about the notice. He remembered exactly how he stood in front of the students' notice board, reading his name over and over, trying to believe he won't be allowed to sit in the DigiCom exam just because he was one attendance short of the required 75 percent. It had been a week.

But that night had an uncanny air about it, he could smell it even from a mile. It was different. One, he hadn't cried that night, which had become a kind of de rigueur by then. But more significantly, it was then when it had first occurred to him, when he had first asked himself that question, the question of life, or more aptly, of death. "Do I deserve to live? What for? How would I face everyone, my family, my friends, most importantly myself?" He had remembered the time when he had come to Roorkee with the best rank, and the highest head. He couldn't afford to flunk in a subject for heavens' sake. He couldn't afford to have that blot and live with it. And in a wink, he was sure what he deserved. He asked himself over and over, through the night, and the days that followed, if that decision was just an impulse, but there was no looking back then.

Over these days, another strikingly important thing he had been doing was reading, reading his own compositions, both in verse and prose. Writing was one thing that used to give him infinite pleasure, and he wasn't bad at all. Infact he was a delightful writer and quite a number admitted it. He realized it had been quite some time he had written anything. "There wasn't anything significant to write about as such", popped the afterthought. Next moment, he found himself with his diary, though he took quite some time to find a pen, he never had one you see. The last time he had bought one was when he had joined the campus, he remembered, quite happy about that fact. He wanted to write about his every 'goddamn' moment in the 'goddamn' institute, how his life had changed, or in his words, "turned upside down". The thought that "he was a part of a huge experiment, and everything in the universe was busy conspiring against him" had been haunting his mind for quite a while then. He visualized a cluster of men in white coats (quite funnily, one of the faces he clearly saw was the professor who had failed him), holding test-tubes with colourful chemicals in them, experimenting over lifeless rodents in a glass jar showing rare signs of life only when their artificial habitat was moved. He looked carefully and found himself in another of those neatly labeled jars, with his name and enrolment number printed over it. The enrolment number, his identity in the campus, reminded him he was just another one of the lot, everytime he saw it written. And so he scribbled:

"Handpicked out of numerous specimens, experimented, being synchronized in every octave, molten self being poured into many moulds, each as juvenile as melancholy, surreptitiously, scripting the most jocular twists, my life, my relevance, is of a guinea pig, and they, my Gods, it seems are satanic!"

He then read it over and over, adoring his beautiful handwriting (another asset he was proud of, wrongly this time), pondering endlessly over every word, wondering when he turned into such a pessimist, awestruck how he could be something he used to advise others not to be, doubting the times he used to be labeled as an 'over-optimist'. The video of his friend telling him "We're all mere guinea pigs my dear" played in front of his closed eyelids not any less than a thousand times, as if a scratched compact disc in an antique disc player had got stuck in a loop.

He hadn't even known its meaning at the time, when in a usual discussion about their miseries, the oh-so-intellectual friend had said that.

"We sure are overburdened pigs", he had quoted then, and joined in the laughter. But then when he found out what 'guinea pig' meant, from wikepedia.com, the ultimate knowledge source that he never could pronounce right, he had contemplated for days about how life at IITs had been so contrasting to what he had imagined, how he had felt cheated when he discovered the kind of knowledge he was being exposed to, how he found himself at the mercy of some incorrigible mortals known as professors, how he had gotten to know that the only difference between IITs and other technical colleges lay not in the education but in the inexistent females and desperate males his campus housed, how he had always been a misfit, just an extra piece of lego in the jigsaw. He was happy he wouldn't be one for long. He secretly commended the five people who had committed suicide in his campus during his stay, for the first time advocating their cause, though he always used to criticize their act in public. Once had even written a critique for a local daily, labeling them as cowards. But for the moment, they seemed like the bravest of souls.

At that thought, he tied the rope. He was just about to kick the chair away from under his feet when his phone buzzed. It was her.

"Hello", hesitantly, he picked it up. He had to, after all it was her.

"Hey, are you coming over for the party?"

"Well, actually..."

"Come quickly. You're already late."

"I… I'll just take fifteen minutes", he found himself saying.

"I am not as brave as those five. In fact, they weren't brave at all. It was mere cowardice, and they were senseless in committing such an act", he told himself, recalling excerpts from his article. "Or maybe I am just running away", he wasn't sure what was right, what he wanted. But now there was one thing he did not have any doubts about, that he needed to give it another thought. He left it for 'some time' and started thinking about the more important question at hand, what to wear for the party. After all, it was her.

A week since, a rope hangs outside room no.G-71, bearing the weight of not more than a wet towel and a pair of undergarments, definitely not 60-kg.

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