I maybe ten or eleven years old.
I was playing cricket in the lane outside the house. My neighbour friend got out early and it was my turn to bat. For some reason, that made him angry. Really angry. Instead of bowling properly, he started throwing the ball straight at me.
Not at the stumps. At me. The first one hit my arm. Then my leg. Then my back.
He kept saying I wasn’t out yet, so I had to keep playing. But this wasn’t cricket anymore. He was just throwing the ball as hard as he could. I didn’t shout. I didn’t swing the bat at him. I didn't go full IPL-Pollard on him. I just stood there and kept getting hit.
Looking back now, that part bothers me the most. I keep thinking I should have done something. Shouted. Hit back. Walked away. But I didn’t. I stood there like a statue. Finally, I threw the bat on the ground and ran home.
I remember falling face down on the bed and crying into the pillow. My sister saw the bruises on my face and body. She didn’t say anything. My mother went outside and fought with his mother. There was shouting. But it didn’t change anything.
For the next few days, that boy kept laughing at me whenever he saw me. The bruises disappeared in a few days. But something else didn’t. What stayed with me was the silence.
I had come home hoping someone would sit next to me and say something simple. Something like, “You didn’t deserve that.”
Nobody did.
And somewhere around that time, something inside me made a very unusual decision. I stopped crying. Not loudly. Not dramatically. I just shut down. And strangely, that worked. No complaints. No visible pain.
People seem to like that version of me better.
Years later, I realised those emotions didn’t disappear. They just got stored somewhere inside. Packed tight. Waiting. Back then, crying would have been the easy option. Letting it out. Moving on. But when nothing comes out for years, the pressure builds. Sometimes it feels like even a small spark could set everything off.
That scares me now. Because the people around me today didn’t create that fire. But they might get burned by it. If I could go back to that lane today, I wouldn’t teach that boy how to fight.
I would just pull him out of that stupid game and hug him. Tell him he wasn’t weak. Tell him he was just a kid who didn’t know how to deal with cruelty. And that’s okay. Today, I have a son who is a lot like that boy. Sensitive. Emotional. Soft in the way children are supposed to be.
I’ve put him in Taekwondo. Not because I want him to hurt anyone. But because I never want him to feel that helpless.
He lost his first match while training for his Green Belt. I wasn’t angry. I was proud. Because he is already standing in places where I never did. These days, when he cries, I let him cry. I let the storm pass. Then we talk.
Because strength is not about knowing how to hit back, strength is knowing someone has your back.
I wish that boy in the lane had known that. Maybe he would have cried a little longer. And maybe I wouldn’t have spent thirty-odd years learning how to do it again.
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