There are some incidents in life that you wish you could undo. Unless you can travel faster than the speed of light, it is virtually impossible. I was 15 then, you could say that I was childish, immature, well I was only FIFTEEN, how much of an EQ can you expect a 15 year old to have? Or rather how much of an understanding of intercultural differences can you expect a 15 year old to have? Again the incident that I am going to narrate did happen.
There was this Singh in my class who goes by the name of Rajiv. He always had this massive turban on his head. (The Singh population in Singapore is predominantly Sikh) Needless to say, he was literally the entertainment icon of the class, not by his own will of course. In fact he hated it. I was often behind the cruel and insensitive jokes that were made of him, in front of him. From nicknames like the “turbanator” to jokes about how bad his body odor was. My class even had cash bets to see who could predict the color of his turban for the next academic day and I was the bookie! Rajiv didn’t seem to react much to the jokes that we make about him apart from the occasional “will you guys just shut up” thus none of us really bothered to find out that it is actually a culture of the male Singhs to not cut their hair and hence the only way they could keep it neat is to tie them up in a turban. Rajiv did not turn up on the first day of school after the mid-term holidays. At first everyone thought that he was sick, however he did not turn up for school the following day and the next. He did not turn up for school for a whole week. We were in for a shocking revelation. The principal of my school paid a visit to his home to check on his whereabouts and he came to realize that Rajiv had been missing school intentionally. Apparently, according to his mum, Rajiv came home crying every day after school, he would then hide in his room and only come whenever he needs to bathe. He would also take several showers a day and whenever he came out of the shower, his skin was often red and sore, sometimes bleeding. At first she ( Rajiv’s mum) thought that he was just having a allergic reaction to something he ate in school however she soon realized that he was actually bleeding because he was washing himself with chlorine to get rid of his body odor. Chlorine is a mildly corrosive liquid used to wash toilets. When she and her husband knew what was happening, they immediately pulled him out of school and enrolled him for counseling sessions. They later found out he was in this state because of the insensitive jokes that were made of him in class over a long period of time.
When I heard this, I was overwhelmed with remorse. Why was I so insensitive in the first place? Why did I not appreciate the cultural differences between me and him? All this while, I had been ruining someone’s life without knowing it. Sometimes I wish that by some stroke of luck I could meet him again and tell him how sorry I was for everything that I did.
