"Debarred."
One word. Stamped in red ink the color of dried blood beneath the humming fluorescent light of the principal's office.
Rahul stood frozen as the clerk slid the paper across the desk without looking up. The man's fingers left smudges along the margin—deliberate, careless, a touch that said he had seen this scene too many times and would see it again. Outside, the corridor breathed: low voices, the click of sandals, the brittle laughter of students who had already decided whose side they were on.
Niraj leaned against the far wall, arms folded, watching with that smile that had learned how to buy futures and lives. He looked like a shadow taught to stand in sunlight—impossible to miss, impossible to ignore. Money had folded the college the way it folded currency notes: neat, efficient, final.
The principal's face was practiced stone. "The decision is final, Mr. Rahul. You are debarred from attending classes for one month. You may return after that, provided there are no further… incidents."
"Incidents." The word hung there like a verdict. As if Rahul had been the aggressor. As if defending himself from a spoiled brat's provocation were a moral failing worse than cheating the system.
Rahul's knees felt disconnected from the rest of him. He turned and stepped into the corridor like a man who had tripped and kept falling—out through the heavy doors, past faces that blurred into a single expression of collective relief. Whispers followed him like moths.
"Did you hear? Debarred."
"He attacked Niraj in class—"
"No wonder. That temper of his—"
"Ananya must be so embarrassed."
That last one landed inside him like a slug. He pushed through the main gates into the courtyard where the evening sun bled low across the concrete. Rain had threatened all day; now the clouds broke as if even the sky had tired of watching this small cruelty play out.
He sat on a bench near the hostel block—Hostel A, Block C—fingered the debarment letter in his pocket. One month. The final exams were in exactly four weeks. His throat closed around the futility of that single word. How was he supposed to—
"Rahul."
Manish sir appeared as if summoned, jaw tight with a disappointment that had edges. Antony sir followed—smaller, quieter, the kind of man who kept old sketchbooks folded in his bag and shelter for people in his voice. Antony taught at the art coaching class on Ashram Road; he ran evening drawing sessions for neighbourhood kids. Rahul had seen him often but never really spoken more than a few minutes.
Both men sat without asking.
"I did what I could," Manish said, voice frayed. "I pleaded with him for twenty minutes. He wouldn't listen. Or couldn't." He spat the last word. "Niraj's father donated to the lab last month. New computers. You know how these things work."
Rahul dragged his fingers through his hair until the world looked like a charcoal sketch with smudged edges. Everything felt unreal—the bench, the sinking light, the sense of futures being traded at the rates of convenience and influence like vegetables at a market stall.
Antony reached out and put a warm palm on Rahul's shoulder. It was a small human thing, immediate and grounding.
"Tell me what happened," Antony said softly. There was a deliberate patience in his voice, like someone listening to a sketch being drawn—slow strokes, attentive. "All of it. Sometimes talking helps."
Maybe it was exhaustion. Maybe it was the unclenched way Antony looked at him. Rahul talked. The story didn't come neat. It spilled out—half sentences, ragged details, moments that stung like salt: the police exam he had prepared for, Niraj's effortless cheating, Ananya's sudden coldness once she heard he'd failed, the classroom fights, the food poisoning that had landed Ankush in hospital and somehow, inexplicably, pinned suspicion on Rahul.
Antony listened as if sketching with his ears. When Rahul stopped, Antony's words fell—soft but edged.
"Don't let this end you," he said. "You can't be on campus for a month, yes. But Bopal Public Library—the one under the Bopal Bridge flyover—is open till nine. Go there. Study. Prepare for the next attempt. If you need a quiet room, my centre on Gurukul Road—there's an empty classroom after six. Come."
The advice felt ordinary and fragile. Rahul slid a small, grateful breath through his ribs. For the first time since the red stamp, a sliver of a plan cut through the fog: library, study, rebuild.
"Where's Mohan?" Rahul asked, an edge of hope cutting through the numbness. Mohan—his roommate, the blunt instrument who always showed when things turned ugly.
Manish's answer came too fast. "He got a warning letter too. Went home to talk to his father. Should be back in a week."
Relief was a small, imperfect thing. At least Mohan hadn't been expelled. At least not yet.
Antony fished his phone from his pocket and offered the screen. "If you need a place, my number's here. Don't be stubborn about help." He tapped the screen and looked away, embarrassed in a human sort of way.
The next morning, Rahul walked to the library with the awkward, determined dignity of someone trying to stitch a life back together. He wore his old jacket, carried battered police-prep books, and kept his head down against the stares of students heading to the campus on SG Highway.
He didn't notice the eyes across the street.
One of Niraj's friends—a thin boy with the hungry look of somebody who survived by being useful—watched Rahul cross and filed the information away like currency. He hustled back to campus.
"Boss, he went to the library," the boy reported in the canteen. "The one near Bopal Bridge."
Niraj sat at a table with three friends—Sameer, Krish, and another boy—an untouched espresso cooling before him. He'd been in a foul temper since the principal's office, not from winning, but because Rahul's silence on the walk out looked too much like defiance. Too unbroken.
"Library," he repeated, slow. Something predatory moved across his features, like an animal that remembered how to be patient. "Perfect timing."
Sameer leaned in. "For what?"
"Ankush is still in hospital, right? Still 'recovering' from the poison?"
"Yeah, but boss, doctors said—"
Niraj's smile cut the air. "Doesn't matter what the doctors said. What matters is what Ankush says. What he is willing to say when it helps him. Get Ankush's number."
Across town, in a private ward that smelled of antiseptic and the thin perfume of money, Ankush lay pale and small beneath a branded hospital blanket. Niraj sat beside him with a smile that promised worse than the last dose of poison.
"Listen carefully," Niraj said, soft as a priest. "You will say what I tell you. You do that, your family's debt? Gone. All of it." Ankush stared at the ceiling and, broken and fragile, nodded.
The strings were being tied—slow, deliberate.
Inside the library, under the yellow lamp of the reading room, a different kind of pressure sat with Rahul. It was the smell of old paper and lemon polish, the taste of dust. He opened his criminal law book to a chapter about evidence tampering and tried to make the words mean something other than the irony of his own situation.
Even in the quiet, the city pressed. Outside the tall windows, evening pooled like a bruise. Rahul's reflection looked back—darker at the edges, a shadow rostering under the bone. For a breath he thought the face was someone else wearing his skin.
You should have hit him harder, a voice said from the back of his mind. Should have made sure he couldn't smirk like that again.
Rahul slapped his palms against his knees as if to jar the thought away. The voice was his and not his—colder, older, a lesson learned without his consent. It tasted like the teachings of someone he'd once admired in theory but now feared in practice: a voice that measured outcomes with lethal clarity.
He turned a page. Focus, Rahul, he told himself. Focus on the book. The thought returned, a whisper that could have been memory: Ananya's face when she went cold, the way she'd said things that were almost violent in their indifference. "If you can't pass, I don't know what to do," she had said once, voice brittle. She hadn't said kill you aloud; she'd said it in a look—a small, quiet thing that left an afterimage in his head: the word, the consequence. He heard it now in the library's hush, not from her mouth but from the hollow inside himself. Kill you. The phrase scraped like a key against his ribs.
He shoved the image away. He needed the exam. He needed to be steady.
A small slip of paper slid under the reading room door with a deliberate precision that made his skin tighten. Rahul stood and picked it up. One word, in steady block letters:
DEBARRED
His breath snagged. He turned it over. Blank. No sender. The single word hanged like a mirror to the morning's humiliation.
Who would—
The lights flickered once, twice. In the front desk, the librarian announced, "Closing in ten minutes!"
Rahul jammed the note into his pocket and gathered his things. His skin felt too tight, like he'd been zipped into a suit one size too small. Walking toward the exit, he froze—there had been footsteps, he was sure of it, soft and close. He turned. The room was empty.
Outside, the night had already made its decision; it would not be kind.
On Gurukul Road that evening, Antony locked the coaching centre and looked at Rahul's number on his phone. He worried in the small, practical way teachers do when they cannot fix the world with chalk. He didn't know the full shape of what had happened; he only knew a boy had been shoved into a corner and needed a place to breathe.
Back in the canteen, Niraj scrolled through Ankush's messages. He crafted a sentence that would be believable because it would come from fear: "He made me put it in the food. I thought it would just make me sick." He typed, deleted, typed again. The pressure of the typed lie was a cold, useful thing.
On the other side of the city, Mohan spoke into his father's calloused hands. He spoke in hurried sentences, in apologies, in plans. He promised to come back in a week. It was what they did—repair the edges, then return like nothing much had happened.
Rahul walked home under the sodium orange of streetlamps along Ashram Road, the city's sounds compressed into a low, constant hum. The vendors by the bus stop shouted in the mixed lilt of Gujarati and Hindi, their cries a backdrop to his battered equilibrium: "Khao khao—samosa garam hai!" The smell of frying oil and coriander hit him and for a second he wished for a plate and a small, unremarkable happiness.
At the gate of his hostel he paused and slid the debarment letter back out of his pocket. The red stamp looked uglier in the dim—they had turned his name into an announcement. He thought of Ananya, of Antony's steady palm, of Manish's angry helplessness, of Niraj's smile. All of it braided into a tightness behind his ribs.
He wanted—there, again—the dark whisper that tasted of something absolute: Make them stop. Make them not smile. Kill you. The phrase returned mortally precise, not an instruction but an echo of the hunger that sometimes lived in men when they were cornered.
Rahul breathed. He pressed his back to the hostel door and closed his eyes. For now he had a plan, lame and honest: library at night, Antony's empty classroom, books. Prepare. Survive the month.
But the city did not allow him many soft beginnings. On his phone, a message blinked—unknown number. It was a photo of the principal's office door taken that morning. The caption was a single word.
DEBARRED.
Rahul held the phone until the light from the screen faded in his palm. Outside, somewhere between the hostel and the street, someone laughed—small and perfectly ordinary. He wanted to answer the phone, to call somebody and make the world explain itself. Instead he pocketed it and walked inside.
Across town, in a hospital room that smelled of antiseptic and whispered promises, Ankush turned his face toward Niraj. He mouthed the words that would set Rahul's life on a loop of blame and consequence. Behind him, the strings pulled taut.
Rahul slid onto his narrow bed. His hands shook when he opened his books. He read lines about tampering with evidence until the words blurred; he read them until his eyelids threatened to close. Somewhere in the half-light, the darker voice waited, patient as a shadow, whispering possibilities it had no right to name.
Outside, Ahmedabad breathed on—indifferent, loud, without mercy. Inside, the first cut had been made. The bleeding would take time to show.