Reflecting on My Life: Feeling of Betrayal
Here is the fourth part of the story about how I was feeling during my school days, how everything was going in school days, and how I learned
It’s hard to accept but sometimes we all make mistakes (Part 5).
Now, most things were good, and I was able to make friends and slowly settle down in the class. Although there were a lot of segments in the class, with time you learn a lot about people’s behavior, how they treat you, and why they treat you that way.
I was good, and I was catching up. I made a lot of friends, and we used to play cricket during recess and during games period. My cricket skills were decent, so most of the time I used to open the match. We used to divide the boys into two teams and play. There were two boys named Amit. One was Amit Kumar, who lived near my house, and the other was Amit Mishra, who was from a different colony.
Amit Mishra used to be the captain of the team most of the time, and Amit Kumar used to compete with me. I think he still competes with me.
Amit Mishra was a huge cricket fan, and he always bet money on cricket matches. At that time, we were all cricket fans. Some of the players during that time were Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Robin Uthappa, Yuvraj Singh, Mahendra Singh Dhoni (captain and wicketkeeper), Rohit Sharma, Irfan Pathan, Yusuf Pathan (in some matches), Harbhajan Singh, RP Singh, and Sreesanth. We used to watch matches a lot and discuss them daily in class.
Also, we invented a game — or maybe it was previously invented — where we played cricket with our fingers. Similar to how we play odd or even, we played cricket with our hands, and the same outcome led to getting out.
From the start, I was an MS Dhoni fan, and before Dhoni, I used to admire Sachin Tendulkar and many other team players apart from the Indian cricket team, like Ricky Ponting and AB de Villiers. To be honest, I only watched players who played fast on the pitch, especially batsmen who played like Virender Sehwag most of the time.
So cricket was the only game we played. Even on Sundays, we used to gather at the ground near our homes and play cricket the entire day. Everything was fine, I guess. Most of the days were good, but until now, I had not made any close friends. Most of them were friends but not very close.
I guess I had one friend named Vikas. He was quite close to me because he lived near my building. When we came back home after school, I used to talk to him. He was also not that good at studies like me, but he was better than me as he had been studying in the same school for a long time and was also taking tuition from a teacher at the school.
I was kind of close to him, but his mom was quite strict when it came to playing outside and spending time playing, so he used to study all the time at home. I didn’t talk much with him at the start.
One day, I needed notes because I was behind or had missed class due to some sickness or another reason — I don’t remember exactly. So I asked Amit Kumar for the notes, as he was the only person in my class I had naturally been introduced to. Even though I could ask for help from Meenu, I didn’t do that often because I was too shy to talk to girls and didn’t want to look stupid all the time. So I decided to ask Amit for the notes.
He agreed and said that in the evening, I could take it from him when he was done with his homework. The same day in the evening, we were playing on the ground, and I asked him for the notes after playing. He said, “Let’s go home, and I will give you the notes.” We reached his house, and I was standing outside. He went inside, and after waiting for more than 20 minutes, he didn’t come out. I realized he wasn’t coming, so I went back home, had dinner, and went to sleep after watching cartoons.
The next morning at the bus stand, I asked Amit Kumar what happened yesterday and why he didn’t come back. He said, “My mom didn’t allow me to give you the notes.” I said, “You could have told me. I was waiting outside. If you had told me, I could have gone home without the notes or asked someone else for them in school.”
He wasn’t that guilty and was okay with it. It wasn’t entirely his fault; maybe his mom was involved, or maybe not — no one knows. There was one problem with him: he was a child without a father. His father died when he was a small kid, so he lived with his mom. That day, there could have been a thousand reasons, but I understood one thing: from now onwards, I didn’t need to ask for help from anyone, especially him. Later, I helped him a lot but never asked him for help in my life because I sympathized with him and never thought anything wrong about him.
I also learned that sometimes people don’t develop the same emotions you carry inside yourself. As you’ve always heard, bad things always happen to good people, but that’s not true. Good people don’t understand something: they always see things as they are, always try to find good in others, and never think rationally in most situations.
So, that taught me that not everyone is the same. It’s not always that if you ask for help, someone is going to help. Maybe most of the time, some people will help, and sometimes not. There can be a thousand reasons behind why they are not going to help. But always remember, selfish people are not going to help you anyway because they will always give you a million reasons for not helping. On the other hand, selfless people will help you without hesitation.
He was selfish, and I had witnessed it many times because he studied with me until class 12th. The reasons for his selfishness were justified because he didn’t have a father, so no one taught him how to give away things. He only knew how to take things from others, and many people in this world are like that. I guess it’s not their fault.
The only thing that makes one selfless is their own willpower because sometimes, in order to give something to someone, we have to be ready to pay a certain price. This price varies from time to time.
In school, you might get scolded by your parents if you give up your notes to someone. After a certain age, if you give someone your money, they might not give it back; at that time, that can be the price. When it comes to relationships, your efforts can be the price.
Every time you give something, you just pay the price, and the one who takes it, in most cases, never realizes what the other person has gone through to do that thing.
To be honest, throughout my life, until today, I never listened to my parents when it came to helping someone. I helped a lot of people, even though, in most cases, they betrayed me. Later, my parents told me that they had warned me not to get involved with that person.
All of that taught me a lot. To some extent, I am still the same because I still try to help others if they ask me; I have not said no to anyone when they come to me for help.
Today, the entire world is teaching you to say “no” if you want to be successful in life because saying “no” saves you from a lot of trouble.
I agree with this point because the person who says no to everything might not get involved in a lot of things, and there is always a chance that they will be safe from most of the negative consequences. However, the only thing they will miss is the experience of life because walking through life means living along with life, not away from it.
A lot of events happened to me in my life that made me think I needed to learn to say no because some of them were really painful. However, I am still not fully able to learn. To some extent, I can say I might have improved, but not fully.
After this, I never asked him for any help in my life. Although he is still on my contact list, I never talked to him again for many reasons. One more thing I have learned in my life is that it’s not always true that someone whose father has died is going to be a good person. Sometimes, they use that as a shield while engaging in other activities.
To be honest, I have seen people who use their dead loved ones as a shield to show how much pain they are in, but in actual life, they hardly remember them with heartfelt feelings more than once a year.
There was one more friend of mine named Vishal. His mother died in an accident while she was in the village doing something, and a wall fell on her, causing her death.
While we were in 7th grade, Vishal’s nature was totally pure. He always helped people and never mentioned his mother’s death; he was just normal.
I remember when we bought cold drinks from the canteen, and somehow our cold drink fell, and one bottle broke. He gave me his bottle. I think it was a gesture of his truly pure heart. I was with him until 9th grade, and I never remember him doing anything wrong. He was quiet after his mom’s death, but I never saw him using that as a shield. He always lived with an open heart, played along with us, and helped others.
It’s very contradictory to understand whose loss is bigger: a mother’s loss or a father’s loss. Many say that one who has a father has a roof over their head, but I feel like both losses are significant. If you are young, a father protects you from a lot of things, but a mother’s loss is even more impactful. She is the one who teaches you, protects you, saves you, and pampers you as a friend when you’re alone.
Most of the time, people whose father is in the “Army” live without their father because he isn’t always there to talk to them, see them, or do other things like normal parents. In most cases, they can only see their father for about three months a year.
All of this doesn’t matter. The only thing that counts in the long run is what kind of person you are deep inside and how you treat other people.
Here are the other parts:
Pushpender Yadav
Pushpender Yadav
Pushpender Yadav
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