SITTING ON THE FLOOR, a bespectacled Sankar was leafing through my sketchbook while we sat around him, working on the brain to calm the nerves down. “Awful.” He said, not looking up at any of us as I sat there chewing on my nails and saying nothing. My stomach hurt with the blow I had received a while ago, a missed shot but a powerful one. I peeped from my peripheral vision to witness the boys, mimicking my body language. They were quite, thinking, and thinking. “Awful.” He repeated and I didn’t know quite what to do. It was not the first time we had quarreled, going fist to fist was something to be tagged normal in the boy's group but intensity and anger were strange, so much that no one knew to handle it then Sankar who was the only one among us who had not lost his temper, subsequently
