Scarred for life

When I was seven years old, a little bubble pagri sardar (term copyrighted by Weird Hair Anil) who was happily running in the school playground, trying to flee from his friend, without looking where he was going, rammed straight into me. His sharp metal kada (bracelet) went straight into my right eyebrow, just about missing my eye. Suddenly all I could see was a spurt of blood, which started gushing down, covering almost the entire right side of my face. It was horrifying.

I blacked out for a while so I can't really remember whether I was rushed to a doctor, or a doctor was rushed to me. But I do remember the large bleeding gash on my eyebrow pressed with a large white handkerchief, which was turning red at an alarming rate.

Later, someone reported the matter to my class teacher, who incidentally adored me to death. She took out this thick cane, tucked the end of her sari pallu into her waist and charged forth on a mission to find my assaulter and whack the hell out of him. Later, as I made my way back to my class to get my bag so I could go home, I saw what were the last few strokes from the cane of the very furious teacher. And to my horror, I realised that she had been caning the wrong guy black and blue without listening to his protests!

I know the name of neither the actual culprit, nor the innocent guy (I do hope Virdi is not one of them!) but I have certain things to say to both of them.

Actual culprit - Damn you. You owe me a lifetime supply of eyebrow pencils.

Innocent guy - For some reason, I wanna apologise to you for the beating you got. It was all a mistake, and if I had made it to the scene of crime in time, I'd have stopped the teacher and rescued you from her wrath. But the damage was already done. I hope you harbour no hard feelings against me, buddy. And in my heart, I hope you are around somewhere, reading this blog post with a forgiving heart.

Just remember this -- if you were scarred for life, so was I.

Quite literally.