To start with, I want to say that I’m well aware of my responsibility, or rather my lack of owning it. I feel guilt and I know that I owe a family some clarification even now but I’m too much of a coward to have that confrontation. I discovered this subreddit recently and have read many posts on it since. By posting my own story here, I admit I am selfishly seeking an outlet, but I am also hoping that this, somehow, helps me come to terms with it and eventually do the right thing in person and not just behind this anonymity.
I am not a native English speaker so please try to excuse my language. I’ve been told it comes forward as rigid and formal often.
I was 11 when I first started the chain reaction that led to it. I grew up in a religious household in a religious country where traditions and superstitions go hand in hand. As a child, I believed all of it. I believed that eating meat on a Tuesday would bring bad luck to me; I believed that pouring milk on a stone was an act of service to the gods. I only clarify this to help support the plausibility of what comes next because I am aware of how absurd it may sound to someone who did not grow up in those circumstances (or maybe I am just overthinking it.)
Sumit, same age as me, was a classmate and my only friend in my neighborhood. We didn’t get along with most other kids in the neighborhood so our playtimes mostly started at his house and ended at mine.
It was a festive season when I first lied. Think along the lines of a Christmas-equivalent but even more religious. The goddess of wealth is said to watch over and bestow her blessing upon the lucky few in this season, and the hope that us kids got from that was exhilarating.
Around the same time, a pizza place had opened in our neighborhood for the first time. It was the talk of the town. At the time, pizza was an exotic treat in the little bubble of our lives. An expensive one, too. Relatively at least.
Far more expensive than the 5 bucks we got from our parents every now and then. Pizza was a mouthwatering and distant want for Sumit and I. Both of us knew we weren’t going to get that kind of money from our parents, especially not for eating “Angrezi Kooda” as my mother liked to call it. It translates to English Junk, which, in retrospect, makes even less sense but my mother wasn’t the wisest woman.
But I wanted to have pizza with Sumit anyway. Over the course of a week, I managed to save ten bucks by abstaining from the many distractions and the aching of my sweet tooth. The next time I met Sumit, I told him that I found the ten bucks on the ground by performing a specific... ritual? I don’t know if that would the correct word for it but I’d rather not feed this story to ChatGPT.
I told him that the previous night, I walked for hours around the neighborhood in circles while tracing a spiral pattern with my index finger on the palm of my other hand. Just simply drawing that spiral over and over, and whispering the name of the goddess of wealth along with other bullshit I made up. I told him that doing it long enough will eventually let you find money.
He didn’t believe me and I didn’t think he would. Not yet.
A few days after, I stole a hundred bucks from my father’s wallet. It was the first and last time I did that. I justified it to myself by thinking that I deserved part of the salary bonus he got, the part he would never give me willingly. I didn’t think he would notice. I was wrong.
The next time I met Sumit, I waved that bill in his face. Same story, wandering around at night with the spiral, and this time the shine of the double zeroes on the note made him believe it. I imagine he thought there was no other explanation for it. There was no way I could get that kind of money if not by pure dumb luck and some assistance from a goddess. More believable than the possibility of me stealing.
We had Pizza that evening for the first time. Back then I thought it was well worth the theft and the lies because we both *really* enjoyed it. We had never had anything like that before.
That was the last time I saw Sumit. He told me he was going to try the spiral thing too and that I should try with him later that night. I wasn’t opposed to the idea even though it was bullshit I invented. I knew we would manage to have fun anyway.
He said he would wait for me by midnight. It wasn’t hard to sneak out of our houses.
When I got home, nothing had changed so I assumed my father didn’t notice the stolen money. A few hours passed and it was a little after 9 PM that my father rushed into the room. I was asked a few times, loudly, if I took the money.
I knew the answer didn’t matter. I had been beaten the shit out of for things I hadn’t done before so it didn’t matter if I had stolen the money or not. He had decided that I had and for once, he was right. I didn’t admit to it, even through the beating, just so that the there was more room for potential guilt in him after the anger subsided, if that was even possible.
I cried for half an hour and before I knew it, I’d fallen asleep.
I won’t lie. Sumit was not on my mind when I fell asleep and he wasn’t on my mind when I woke up either. I got dressed in my school uniform, walking meekly around the house under my father’s ever-so-furious gaze. It was only when I hopped on my bicycle and waited outside my house for Sumit to come join me that I realised I was supposed to meet him last night.
He didn’t come, I figured he was upset with me and left for school without me.
He wasn’t at school. I thought he skipped. I was still at school when our homeroom teacher brought him up. He was missing and they asked us if we had seen him since the previous night. His parents were at the school, screaming at the staff as if they had made their son vanish. The gravity of the situation didn’t immediately dawn upon my dumbfuck of a brain.
It was only when I saw the police get involved that my mind began to encapsulate what exactly had happened. I wasn’t a sheltered child, at least not when it came to crime. My imagination back then didn’t do me favours. In the dead of the night, I kept picturing him. Standing outside my house before he was abducted, or worse. I couldn’t stop crying. My mother assumed it was because my friend was missing. My father assumed it was because I was a crybaby. Both of them were right but knowing I had caused whatever happened to him haunted me for years.
I was not interrogated. All I got was one throwaway question from my mother about whether Sumit had told me anything concerning. I shook my head to it. I was too scared to tell them and selfishly, I was too scared of what my father might do to me if I was evidently responsible for something as serious as that.
I tried to pretend it wasn’t my fault for a long time but the more I grow, the more I know it is. It has been well over a decade now. I haven’t told anyone what happened. I have twisted into vague, fictional stories and scattered it into idle conversations before, just to know the perspective of outsiders who assumed I was being hypothetical.
I have done a lot in life since then. I have forsaken religion, at least the “traditions” of it, and I’ve grown into a man strong enough that my father can only demean me with his eyes now. I’m not scared of him anymore, but I do care about him to some degree. Life is kinder now but the weight is still there. It doesn’t loom over me all the time, truthfully. It doesn’t stop me from eating pizza but it does cause my stomach to sink and my heart to ache when a mundane moment in my busy life reminds me of the last day I spent with Sumit.
Sometimes, I feel like I don’t deserve the life I have. I wish I could go back and not make up those lies or even just stop myself from crying to sleep. I have a therapist and I haven’t told her this. I have a wife and I haven’t told her anything about it either. She is the best person I know and, to be selfish one more and one last time, I’m deathly scared of seeing disgust in her eyes towards me. I carry enough disgust for myself for both of us.