How's It Goin?

          The life under training leaves little time to sit back and think, lest write about it. You end your day in your bed with a pillow against the wall, light a tiny flame on a candle and let the static of the room invade you. More often than not, there is soft music playing on the Alexa. Books are staring like skulls on the shelf. The nine brief months have left the room strangely foreign – a temporary space between the four walls – you spent too little time there to make it your own but it is the centre of your existence. The need for introspection often overtakes you but you feel it only in the form of exasperation and an evening of depression. You sigh audibly and some of that which is clogging your nerves washes away. Some good things shine.

Running calms you. You often try to find someone to go on a run with but you mostly run alone. There is nothing new to that. But you are running more now, and faster. It is one of the things the Academy has done to you. You tell yourself that this is going to continue beyond the training. There will be no regression. Your aspirations are as great as running marathons and ultramarathons and as petty as achieving a healthy weight. Later you will look back at the memories of running, that snakelike periphery you ran on and all those you ran with, and that will calm you. Good old times, you will say.

Your upper body strength was always weak but you are doing more push-ups today than ever in the past. You can even do chin-ups now but there is a huge avenue of growth there. At least the thought of gym and exercise does not make you nervous anymore. At least your thoughts imagine bigger biceps for yourself now. You repeat that pledge of no regression every day when you miss the gym. In the background lingers that mental shift which came with great suffering – that you will barely be average at most of the things, but you will be better than yesterday and that should suffice. You now see yourself as your only competition. You look at the weapons you have dropped on the floor, and the ones you are still holding.

Policing is complex. It involves understanding of the law, humans and human relations. You are weak at all of them. You are new to neither. Yet the thought of living on the field excites you. You see the field as your laboratory, as your class from back when you were a teacher. The challenges will be tougher. There will be new mistakes to make and lessons to learn. There will be sorrow, deception, corruption, intimidation, and you will try to make your mark – to ensure that you are able to serve some happiness, some justice, some fearlessness.

Images flash before your eyes. That first time you were able to rescue the football from the opponent team. That time when you went to the swimming pool and stood on the lowest diving platform with shaking legs and a dizzy head and jumped, and then jumped nine more times and climbed on to the higher platform and then the one above it and then you stepped off those haunting ten meters. You burst a lip and your mouth bled. You remember that time when you stood with your trembling feet hanging on to inches of cracks on that rock face in Mussoorie. You see those senseless dances which have crumbled into thin memories. You know how excited you were before your first parade. You cannot understand how you still find that first fifteen-kilometer route march harder than the last forty-kilometer one. You can only imagine your anguish during those days in the jungle and laugh at how it now seems childish.

You think about the current: unlike the past, you talk more today and to a larger number of people. You don’t tell yourself anymore that you are socially dysfunctional. People you have met have also given you the courage to stand alone, the confidence to fit in your own skin. There undoubtedly are many rough edges here. Sports. Running. Diving head first. To be more fluent in your conversations, maybe sprinkle a few jokes in your sentences. Be more persuasive without being aggressive. Keep the professional before the personal. Leave that other odd part of you behind.

You often see yourself descending a black hole. There are hands reaching out from within and pulling you in. You want to befriend those hands too, hold them as you are engulfed.