15. At Boarding School
To start off, I was in boarding school in India for grades 4-6, so three years. It was a good place, the boys and girls had separate dorms, and everyone was really religious/good. None of the older kids were bullies, more like older brothers. The closest town of Bidadi was maybe some 5 kilometers away, and on Sundays my friends and I ( we were 10-12) decided to go into town. You usually had to take a kid older than 15 with you and had to be back before 8. So my friends and I disregarded this rule and took a rickshaw into town to go eat food and just walk around. Night came, and we could not find a rickshaw willing to drive us back to school for a low price. So we decided to wander around and go into the poorer part of town.
The 3 of us walked up to a rickshaw driver smoking a beedi, or pan (nicotine rolled up in a beetle leaf) as we used to call it, to ask for a ride. I was a bit scared because sketchy part of town, some guy smoking, no one around and there aren’t really streets, more like muddy roads. Anyways, driver reaches into his rickshaw for something, and I turned around and saw a man sort of hustling a girl of my age around the corner. It didn’t look well, I told my friends and we went to look. The guy was slapping her and telling her she could either earn more money for him, or he would kill her. (All conversing in Hindi/broken Kanada)
One of my friends goes to get the driver, and me and my other friend walk up and say something like “are you okay friend, what’s going on” Dude pulls a knife tells us to mind our own business. Friend takes a step forward, he plunges the knife into my friend, girl hits him on the head with a rock as he’s trying to get the knife out of my friend. Guy with knife slaps girl, I take knife and stab him like in the back of his neck, and he fell and I kept stabbing him around there in tears and yelling of course. Driver comes, sees the scene, and we carry my friend to the rickshaw and eventually go to the hospital.
He lived and he has a scar to the left part of his abdomen. Never saw the girl again, but driver said he left her at the police station.
I’m still in touch with my two friends from then even though I came to US for middle/High school.
