Have you ever broken a bone?
This isn’t an ideal prompt, I wasn’t gonna write based on it but I have a few days break for my next exam (yes I’m currently in the middle of my semester examinations, they’ve been going on since first week of May) and sleep eludes me to the point that I cumulatively get less than 5 hours in a 2 day span. I know it is unhealthy and terrible, but I’ve just not been able to sleep lately, I’ve been asked a lot what is keeping me awake, and I don’t have an answer other than thoughts and memories. Regardless, coming to the prompt, no I’ve not broken a bone.
Fin. See you guys in the next week’s prompt 🙂
My Cultural Identity
Haha, that was a joke but if it counts there was a time when I injured myself terribly in hopes of impressing someone. I was 13 I think, the most odd age to be, and I’d had my extended family over for a get together after a lot of years. I always hear people tell me stories about their times at their grandparents during summer vacations where they would hang out with their cousins and enjoy the countryside life every year.
That was never the case for me, as I’ve mentioned before, we used to shift quite a bit. In hopes of acquiring a better livelihood, my mom and dad had come far away from their roots. Roughly 1,600 – 1800 kilometres is how far my extended family,including my grandparents and cousins lived. Yearly summer vacation to that side of the subcontinent was a far fetched idea for us at the time. This meant that it wasn’t often that I would ever see anyone besides my parents and sister.
I think that’s one of the reasons I find it so hard to identify with them. Your culture is a very deep part of your identity. Your belief system, your principles and your morality are derivatives of your culture’s beliefs as well as your upbringing. However, as we grow up our version of our culture assimilates with the identity we choose to identify with. Like when my father had explained to me that he doesn’t expect a certain behaviour from me because to him we are a whole generation apart and we don’t share the same culture and he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it.
Cultures which we traditionally believe in are also derived from such variance that it is hard to completely identify with a singular one. So for me my cultural identity is a complicated issue. Born in the East, childhood in North and the West and finally teenage & adulthood in the South. I’ve gone on a lot of trips and strangely I weirdly identify with everyone and nobody at the same time.
Going Hard Left
If you’re going hard enough left… you’ll find yourself going right
Doc Hudson (From Cars)
So during that time, when my cousins had come I wanted to show them that I was cool, particularly one of my younger brothers. My family had a Scooty Pept that they’d bought for my mom to use, but after she never learnt to ride it, I decided to make it mine. I would ride it quite a bit everywhere. I used to do minor drifts on it. We had a lot of construction around where our house was, a lot of upcoming individual houses and plots surrounded by a significant amount of vegetation. So I had a lot of places which were suitably empty enough for drifting. So I decided to take my younger brother (who was 7 or so) and show him the trick.
There was a particular track that I used to do the trick on, it was a path that was inclined. So I would go all the way to the top and then speed on the decline and then brake hard towards the end and drift. It was a very regular thing for me and hanging out with a younger cousin who I wanted to impress because I’d never had a younger brother close by, I arrived at the top of the incline with him standing at the deep end waiting to see it. I turned it on and then revved it with the brakes and counted down.
I’ll let you all guess what happened next.
I hit the brake so hard while curving that I curved off the edge instead of drifting and fell such that the scooty was on top of me as I landed. The handle might have pierced into my chest scarring it.
It was so ridiculous. I wasn’t very sharp back then. The poor kid was petrified yet rushed to me and tried so hard to get the scooty off me but weak little arms couldn’t pry it up. I had to do it myself, funnily though I didn’t cry or even remember feeling the pain from the chest and the bruised limbs. I had just one thought in my head ‘if my family got to know, I’ll never get to be on this scooty again”. That, along with how embarrassing the story would be to tell everyone (including the extended family of over 20 people), how it happened, how I got there and what led to the accident.
I got home and I had pulled my t-shirt down a bit so it wasn’t super obvious that I was bleeding. I told my younger brother not to tell anyone about this, he was not impressed to say the least. He rushed inside the house while I parked the scooty and got in through the back door and avoiding everyone I got into the washroom and started cleaning my wounds.
I was able to hide it for half a day before I started bleeding through another t-shirt and got caught. My parents being my parents just helped me with real first aid and then told me to not do wild shit like this again. My uncles and aunts joked around and it was all okay at the end of the day. Funnily enough, that wasn’t the last bike accident I’d have on the incline path.
Moral of the story kids, don’t try to impress your younger cousin brother by drifting down a decline.
It’ll end with savlon and cotton on your chest.
Sam Is A Critic 