Dark Horse Arts and Sciences

Summer of `15. My first year at college. I didn’t have any high expectations for anything; neither studies nor any girlfriend. First of all, I wasn’t that handsome at all to have a girlfriend in the first place, but I wasn’t sad or anything that I wasn’t handsome or didn’t have any gal. I might have a bad face, but I adjusted that with my brilliance in sports, especially football and badminton. I never watched these sports on TV, but I loved playing them. I loved cricket too, but I won’t talk about it as it’s too common in India. I used to run really fast, probably the fastest among all the lads in our team. You can call it a boon, but that day it occurred to me that sometimes your biggest strength had the capability to shatter everything in your life. 

That match against the seniors, we were leading the score as 3-2, Abhilash passed me the ball and as I was taking the ball at my fastest speed, an opponent came in the way of me and we collided really hard. I fell face down on the field; maybe my leg got broken and he also had similar circumstances. I was taken back to the dressing room on a stretch and the medical team advised our team to urgently take me to the hospital for scan and x ray and all those stuff. 

The next moment, as I opened my eyes, I saw before them my left leg being plastered as it was severely broken. When I asked the doctor about all this he said that I wouldn’t be able to play for at least one to two years. I became completely devastated upon learning this from the doctor as football was everything I had ever had. If you take away sports from my life, there’s nothing left anymore, but a shallow empty body made up of blood and bones. I would be there, but simultaneously I wouldn’t be there either. That’s how serious I was about my game. But now it was all gone. I couldn’t comprehend what I would do after this; laying down like this for the next 2 years. First I felt like I was inside some hallucinatory dream where someone was taking away the most precious thing of mine. I wish it were the case, but it wasn’t. What it was, was simple yet hard-boiled truth that I had to shallow like a pill without any interest in taking it; I had to pile up all the courage inside me to fight the situation, but again that sense of hopelessness still kept residing within me as I thought how much pain and suffering I would have to go through to get out of it all. As days passed by, I started recovering slowly and slowly. But I kept thinking about that incident. Why did I run so fast that day, though it wasn’t that necessary? Had I been a bit careful, I wouldn’t be having all this trouble right now. But it’s already happened and I can’t erase it any more. Sometimes it strikes my mind, how we human beings will ever know what’s gonna take a wrong turn for us. How will one know whether one’s biggest strength will one day ruin everything for him or her? How do we know anything at all? The question keeps circulating my mind over and over again; like a snake running after its own tail.