Eternal Sunshine of an Ignorant Mind

On the day he was forced to suck the cock of an older boy for the first time, Xavier's mother had made mutton curry for lunch.

The aroma filled the house with a million little cartoon smoke-lines, each line equipped with an index finger at its end, each finger finding someone and tickling his nostrils, making him drool, then making him gently float through space and time, tongue hanging out, tranquilized, moving towards the kitchen with the focus of a serial killer, sinfully anticipating the salivary dissolution of the warm, mustardy meat.

On a usual day Xavier, upon his return from school, would have thrown his bag on the floor, wiped puppy stain and mud-mash from his hands and sat on the floor like a hermit. He would have banged the cheap, aluminium plate with a cheap, aluminium spoon till the house resembled a war zone.

On that particular day, however, the war was being fought inside Xavier's mind. All the cheap aluminium plates and spoons in the world couldn't begin to fathom the noise that was required to keep the incident from replaying in his mind.

Xavier was in the second grade. The boy who made him do it was in the fourth. Xavier was used to being beaten up, made to eat mud, give up his tiffin box, have the front of his pants splashed with water and made to pee in the Girl's Toilet. So when he knelt down in front of the unzipped trousers inside the Boy's Toilet on the school's second floor, he wasn't overtly scared; for him it was akin to a slap. And it hurt less.

Xavier's first reaction was to consider the thing hanging out in front of him. His first feeling was that of camaraderie, he couldn't believe dicks belonging to different people looked so similar. What he knew was that 'pee comes from there' and was confused as to why someone would make him drink pee directly from the source, assuming that that was what this was about, couldn't the guy just pee in Xavier's water-bottle? Why would he risk getting his dick bitten off?

Somehow, Xavier thought, there was more to this than urine.

Xavier's mother made him take a lot of supplements: Vitamins, calcium and syrups, which he invariably didn't like. So he had developed a routine, or as he liked to call it, a magic trick. He had the ability to hold the dosage under and around his tongue, so that he didn't need to inflate his cheek in order to avoid swallowing them, and could spit them out when he was alone. He had managed to fool his mother for over 6 months.

That morning, at school, he managed to fool the guy too. For Xavier, it was magic.

The next time it happened was three days later, when the same guy asked Xavier to do it if he didn't want his mom to know. Xavier appeared terrified, but on the inside, he couldn't be more excited. Finally, he believed that he was growing up. He was part of something absolutely awesome, an older boy was involved and there were secrets to be kept and mothers to be kept in the dark. This was new to him, this was outside the prescribed boundaries of the kind of fun his parents wanted him to have. Sure, he didn't really like doing the act, but then, does anyone really like running and kicking a round piece of rubber, all the while risking loss of life and
limbs? And Xavier loved football, so he understood pointlesness.

It was, as they say, for glory.

This form of bullying was different in another way, Xavier thought. In every other method, something was done to him, whereas in this, he was the one doing all the work while the guy just stood there. This made Xavier think, believe that he -Xavier- was the true perpetrator and the guy was merely an accomplice. This not only erased from Xavier's mind all thoughts of complaining to his friends or teachers but also gave him a sense of responsibility which made the periodic performance of the act an achievement that he was somewhat proud of, like paying bills, buying groceries or going to work. He felt special, important and busy. He felt like what he imagined to be an adult.

Which is why when the guy stopped involving him in these acts a month later, Xavier was devastated. Was he not doing it right anymore? Did the guy find someone better?

No sooner was he ditched than he started getting nightmares. He started waking up in the middle of the night, sweating and scared. A terrible sense of unfulfilment engulfed and filled him. He felt like the plastic mug that he playfully dipped slowly into the bath-tub every morning, feeling the reactionary pressure of the water increasing, then enjoying the relief in his hands when the mug's tip submerged and water rushed to fill it, taking it all the way down to the bottom of the tub.

It started, happened and ended that way; deliverance disguised as severance, so that Xavier went from confusion, to amusement, to hatred, to indifference, to delight, to dutifulness, to devotion and finally to sadness. Xavier lived an entire little sub-life in those few months and learnt a great deal, synecdochically, about life itself.

Years later, when the Internet was up and running and innocence and sin were institutionalized, Xavier read that millions of children across the world get abused on a daily basis. After reading these articles, by experts, Xavier used to have nightmares, where he dreamt of a world where all the children are abused perpetually and everyone is a victim, and the worst part wasn't just that that was a bad thing in the absolute sense, the worst part was that in that sea of haplessness, his story was perfectly unheard and unremarkable.

In those nightmares, Xavier felt like a plastic mug in an ocean.