4 minutes reading time
I’ve been in Trichy for about six months now. Give or take. I could calculate the exact days, but I’m too fucking lazy. Or maybe I’m just too mentally exhausted to care.
This place is weird. The people here are a completely different animal altogether.
I’ve spent most of my life around peasants, or the proletariat, or the middle-class call center crowd who at least grew up working. I know what normal people look like. But here, everything feels flat. Homogeneous. People have come from every corner of the country, yet they all seem to have been cast from the same mold.
My engineering college, RVS College of Engineering and Technology, was a third-rate dump. It had no proper professors, no proper labs, and it illegally collected ridiculous fees. But even in that garbage fire, there was a real mix of people or at least i felt so. It had a mix including even one Sri Lankan estate owner, local guys, sons of government staff, and people who didn't know where their next meal was coming from.
Here, everyone has the same trajectory, the same cultural vocabulary, the same clean ambitions. I feel like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or a sheep in a wolf’s coat. I don't know the phrase. I just know I don’t belong.
I never even knew these institutions existed until recently. My collegemates had never heard of them. I didn’t plan to be here. It was an accident.
A girl at the call center, Sadia, was preparing for the exam and insisted I apply. "Easy peasy, lemon squeezy," she said. I was curious, and maybe a bit greedy, wondering if a guy like me could actually sit in these fancy classrooms. When I filled the application, I wrote my UG percentage as 51% because I didn't even have my certificate. I finished the course in 2012 but didn't finish the degree for another few years, didn't collect the degree till years later. I just assumed 51% was safe because it was a passing grade.
I applied casually, as a joke on the universe. And now I’m stuck here.
The distance between us isn't about intelligence. I can understand the words they say. It’s the invisible assumptions.
If my old friends wanted to go shopping, we walked or took a bus. Here, booking a cab is the default. It doesn't even register as a decision for them. A taxi ride is just a basic unit of movement. That’s what sociologists call habitus, I think. You can share a language, but you can’t share the silent calculations behind how you move through the world.
And then there’s the money.
They collect a shitload of money for the hostel and the mess. One trimester’s food fee is what my family lives on for a whole year. It reminds me of RVS college (my UG) in 2012: they collected thousands of rupees for a library that didn't stay open many days, and restricted computer lab access to their own department, while charging 1800 a month for mess food that felt like a fortune to me back then.
My school teachers used to tell me to go herd goats and cows. They probably meant it as a casteist slur given that I am an Idaiyan, or maybe they were just standard-issue bastards. But if I wanted to escape that fate, I guess this is the price. A cow's worth of money every quarter, just to eat.
The food itself is like fancy restaurant food. In my past life, I’d only eaten like this once during a forced team outing. The first few days, I was excited. I stuffed myself, thinking I’d eat till my tummy burst since I’d already paid for it.
But now, I hear my classmates complaining. They want more variety. They want different options for every meal. I’m completely mind-blown. What the fuck do they mean by "more variety"?
I’ve lost interest anyway. I skip breakfast, sleep until noon, go to lunch and eat like a pig, then spend the afternoon classes fighting sleep. I stay awake until 5 AM or 6 AM. While everyone else is having sex on campus, I’m just masturbating and looking at the ceiling, trying to kill the hours.
I used to write in this diary to feel lighter. Like offloading a heavy sack of wet sand.
But it’s not working anymore. The screen glows. The words compile.
And I’m still not feeling good.
Image Credit: Hallway, Log Cabin Association Elementary School, Barkers Creek, NC (39684211313).jpg via Wikimedia Commons