Sunsweesh, I don't blame you for your reactions. It is difficult to take every idiot that says that they are going to kill themselves seriously. It gets tiresome after a while. The world is over-crowded as it is. Why not make more room for some happy people, huh? That is exactly what I told myself.

Bouncingback, you asked about my family. I wrote a small story to illustrate my relationship with my family.

Kedar winced. Unnoticeably. A thin smile curled across under his wispy moustache. It was an impish smile. A smile attempting to hide the discomfort, but failing. Kedar smoothed out his hair. He watched across the room at his younger cousins. They toasted each other in silence as spoonfuls of curry and rice was shoveled into politely arched mouths. Kedar should be sitting with them.
Cousin Hari tilted his wine glass pouring the purplish-red fluid unto his protruded lips. Kedar looked down at the Sprite in his hands. He’d rather be home. Kedar had sat with his cousins in previous get togethors. But not anymore. It was hard enough sitting here sifting his plate of rice, dahl and spinach, on the other side of the living room.
Laughter erupted in the room. The music of boisterous cackles made Kedar look up. He might as well have been in a different country. There was a darkness of shadow in the part of the room he was sitting in. Did he smell bad? Is that why people avoided looking at him for too long? Is that why people quickly excused themselves away after making polite some small talk? Is that why, he wondered, no matter how much he tried to make the conversation last more than just a cursory nod it wouldn’t last more than mist does in the heat of noon?
This is when Kedar’s right hand would flicker up to his temple and wipe away beads of sweat that weren’t there. His mouth felt empty when it wasn’t chewing full of food. He didn’t want other people to catch whatever disease he had caught. A wave of feeling of emptiness punched Kedar in the stomach.
Kedar couldn’t blame how they were all treating him. He shrugged. Maybe if he had their careers and had finished school like them, he would be on that side of the white sofa. And which ever poor fool was sitting where he was, he would have been roasting the fella with quiet sarcastic humorous jabs. Kedar wasn't convinced that he would. But he was on this side of the fence. He couldn't help wondering how his life would be different if he was tasting the green grass on the other side.

Kedar went through his mental routine. His mental toy box emptied the dominoes of his life that had collapsed one after another that had led him to where he was. He would stack the events of his life over and over. And each time the black dominoes with random white patterns would keep falling in the same sequences. Kedar would experiment with the ‘what-if’ scenarios by re-arranging some dominos. But the bloody dominoes would not miss to hit the sores of his life as they replayed. Finally, he scraped all of them from in front of his eyes and stuffed them back in his toy box. He would play with them later. He knew he had no choice but to.
Kedar shrugged on the inside. He had tried. He thought he had given it everything he had. He promised himself that he would. And he had delivered. And despite that he had failed. It had been his last chance. And this time it had been so public. The entire family had a plaque over their heads, “Kedar is back in college…and this time he is determined to finish.” It had been only his third try. Cousin sisters close to half his age had graduated from college.
Kedar sighed as he tried to suppress a stench that welled up within him at his own disgust. If there was a way to separate himself from himself, he would. He would discard the ugly parts of what he saw in himself. He would surgically remove it. He would find a way to distance himself from the ugliness in him. He had successfully done it in the past. But this time he couldn’t. He was caught red-handed in his own failure. And knowing that made him blush.
A scorned sentence formed within him that asked, “How could it have been.” How was he caught so helplessly in this mess too?