RUMOURS

Charlie from “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” has said about news and if I paraphrase him, to use in the context of rumours, that “I don’t know how rumours in high school travel so fast and how often they are true.” But in my case the rumours were not just false but far away from the truth. The thing with rumours is that they are always about the other person’s private life and mostly concerning his/her love or sex life. I haven’t come across any rumour that is something about say, food, something like a certain Mr/Miss X loves butter chicken! And it’s baffling because food is the most important thing under the sun!

When you are a teenager everyday you learn something about yourself or about other people and most of those learned lessons stay with you for good. Rumours about me only made me aware about something I had no clue. I wasn’t a very popular kid in school. I wasn’t a class topper or a famous athlete and neither did I win any of the co-curricular activities, but I was someone whom the other kids from the other sections and classes would know by name. You can say that I wasn’t well known but I was fairly recognized. But all of that changed one day and only because of rumours.

By the 9th standard I was very comfortable in my skin. I knew I was gay and I was okay with that. And unlike many of my straight friends I wasn’t looking for friendship with girls so that it can lead to somewhere more meaningful. I had girl-friends in school and outside school and that was it. There was no hidden motive.

I used to attend coaching classes and my batch had students from my school and as well as from other schools. I had made some good friends over there and one of them was P. P was from different school but lived in my locality. Small town, you know. P was exceptionally good. She had a great sense of humour and a knack for getting into trouble. We bonded over our shared liking of weird humour and gossip. In a short period of time we had become good friends. It helped that we had made a certain routine. Everyday after coaching classes we would take a  walk together to her home and then I would leave for mine after dropping her off. Sometimes we were joined by other kids but mostly it was just us. And yeah, apart from P, in my coaching classes there were two or three girls who were not only my schoolmates but also lived in my locality and one of them was my neighbour. And the rumours took shape with the help of  these three girls.

My friendship with P and the fact that I was friendly with other girls had put me on the spot; I was starting to get noticed more in my school, not just by students but also by teachers. Suddenly a lot of people had started teasing me that I had lots of girl friends, and I got frequent requests from the guys who wanted to know more about this particular girl. It was just a matter of time before all of these would turn into some nasty rumour that I was some sort of a freakster who ran behind girls.

Couple of days later, a friend of mine informed me about these rumours.

1. I am a freak.
2. Every day I follow and basically stalk this girl
    all the way to her house.
3. I am dating three girls at the same time.

I had a really good laugh thinking that someone got it all so wrong, monumentally wrong. I didn’t correct him because I didn’t think all this would snowball eventually. And true to my character I enjoyed the little attention I got. But the rumours hit the peak in the next few days. One evening during the last lecture, Mrs N, our SS teacher who knew me personally informed me that all the teachers in the staff room were talking about me, and that I had to be very careful. Just imagine the kind of life in a small town in early 2000s. Claustrophobic is an understatement.

Our classroom had three columns of benches. To the right sat girls, boys sat on the left side and in the middle sat the girls only on the first two benches while boys occupied the remaining ones. I was sitting in the middle section and my seat was the extreme end of the bench towards the right meaning towards the girls’ side. As soon as the assembly prayers ended the girl sitting next to me said something, some casual remark, and our class teacher saw that. She stood up from her chair, came to my place and with an intense look asked us, what is happening between you two? I knew that instant that the situation had turned ugly. The first thing that came to my mind was that my parents should never come to know of this. But the day just passed.

The next Saturday after school hours when I was walking home, I was joined by those three girls, the Gujarati versions of mean girls, who had a bigger hand in spreading those rumours. They walked right behind me, keeping some distance but making sure that I wouldn’t miss a single word they were speaking. Referring to me in the third person, they gossiped about me for 30 minutes. And I heard every word. I knew they were the ones who started it and turned something innocent into ugly.

Next day, on Sunday, for some neighbourly work my father sent me to one the girl’s home. I wonder what came onto her but she apologised to me for the previous day. And my reaction to that, my genuine reaction was that I couldn’t care less about it or about those ramous. I really didn’t care and it hadn’t affected me in any way whatsoever. And that was the truth. It dawned on me that even after the whole drama which included teachers also, at the end of the day, I really didn’t care whatever people thought or talked about me; that I didn’t pay attention to rumours and nothing was going to change my behaviour or my way of living. I was surprised that how naturally this "art of living" came to me. I couldn’t help what people would think or believe about me, so why would I let it have any positive or negative effect on me? Even after all these years, I have remained the same. I do wish people rather than believing in rumours try their best to know the truth but there anyway isn't going to be any effort from my side to correct them. I am just not interested.

P and I remained good friends till the end of the high school. Our friendship didn’t survive when we moved to different colleges. But that’s how life is.