Six Months A Prisoner
Dear Mom, Dad, and Tinku,
I don’t know when this letter will reach you. I don’t know if it will reach you at all. I have had to slide it into the empty Absolut bottle I kept my fairy lights in and throw it over the wall, hoping that one day someone in Asawarpur will come across it and mail it to you.
I miss you guys. I’m sorry I ever said I’ll do a fifth year to get away from y’all — that was the pandemic speaking, not me. I wish I had never come back. It has been six months since the outbreak on campus, a half year since the virus mutated into the deadliest strain the world has ever seen. As I am sure you know, Sonipat was evacuated and Ashoka was turned into a containment zone indefinitely. I blame the NCR heat and our isolated, hedonistic lifestyle for this. Don’t worry about me, though. I’ve recovered… as much as one can from this strain (PRVLG-21, the FIMS doctors named it). We all have it. The doctors told us we are permanent carriers of it. To quote my neighbour’s slam poem, it has carved itself into our very DNA.
Not to point fingers at the OSL, but the living situation is hell. It’s a real-life purge. We lost network and wifi days into containment and stopped getting outside supplies five weeks ago. Now that everyone left is a recovered carrier, SH5 has been turned into a dumping zone for the trash that cannot leave campus. Late at night, when the wind blows a little too hard, I can hear the sound of empty alcohol bottles clinking against each other in the distance. It makes me sick.
I know you’ve always worried about Ashoka’s reputation for substance abuse, but rest easy. People are on their last few cigarettes, and things are tense. No one even shares lighters in the smoking room anymore. One student attacked another over a fallen cig last week, and since then there have been two guards installed inside. Last night, the stationery shop was broken into and the only thing stolen was the entire glue inventory. Not a blade of grass remains in the lawns since people took to smoking them just to feel something again. Watching my peers pluck it out by the handful reminded me of the Hobbesian state of nature I learned about in my first year, and I thought about PBM and cried.
This is taking a toll on the already fragile mental state of the Ashokan community. People sleep in the mess in anticipation of the five rationed coffees Sandeep Bhaiya sells a day. The Dhaba staff ran away on the first day, and daily candlelight vigils have been held there since. Team Pawsitive has held a wedding for their two favourite dogs, which was attended by half the student body. Also, both the Vitruvian Man and dreaming boy statues have been stolen. The notes left at the site read sorry, but I need something to cuddle at night and rip tinder. I wish I had thought of that first, and judging by the haunted, wistful gazes of my batchmates and my new first year besties, I’m not the only one.
Last month, the OSL finally started making an effort. 5–6 PM are community hours, during which we all have to meditate and no one can speak to or touch each other — except for the married couples. Yes, you read that right. Inspired by Pawsitive, they organized a mass wedding ceremony between UGs and YIFs in hopes of bridging the bitter civil war that has led to dozens in the infirmary and even more in the CWB (psych majors are counsellors now). Last but not the least, they’ve drawn a lakshman rekha around the boundary walls with the mess’s Dal Muradabadi in hopes to stop people from scaling the walls. I don’t know if you know this, but the last desperate escape attempt led to FIMS installing a shoot on sight order for Ashokans.
I know I can never leave. It isn’t safe. But don’t forget me. And PLEASE, don’t send Tinku to Krea.
