Friday, May 15, 2026
The Day He Wore the Cane Like a Medal
Weekends in Wamrong Junior High School carried a different smell altogether.
The classrooms emptied themselves of noise, boys disappeared into distant villages carrying tin trunks and dirty blankets, and the hostel slowly turned into a hollow concrete shell haunted only by a few unlucky souls who lived too far away to walk home.
But our half hero, half menace, belonged to the fortunate category.
And wherever he went, few boys followed him- this time four of them.
Like ministers to a reckless king.
That particular weekend, they had spent two glorious days doing everything except what respectable students were expected to do. They climbed trees, bathed in freezing streams, chewed doma stolen from elders, smoked biris borrowed from Indian construction worker, and spoke endlessly about martial arts, impossible adventures, and girls they were too frightened to actually speak to.
Now came the return journey.
The road back to school was long, dusty, and cruel to tired legs. Trucks carrying timber, pebbles and cement groaned endlessly through the winding roads like tired mountain beasts. The boys walked lazily at first, kicking stones and teasing one another.
Then suddenly, their leader stopped.
A dangerous silence entered his mind.
That silence, many years later, would be recognized by his followers as the beginning of all trouble.
A slow-moving truck approached from behind, coughing black smoke into the mountain air.
Our hero looked at the truck.
Then at his followers.
“What kind of fools walk to school,” he declared grandly, “when modern transportation exists?”
Before wisdom could interfere, he sprinted toward the truck and climbed onto the back with alarming confidence. The other boys, loyal beyond reason and intelligence, followed him immediately.
And so five boys of Class Eight rode illegally and triumphantly toward school like victorious warriors returning from battle.
The wind struck their faces.
Their ghos fluttered wildly.
One boy nearly fell twice but laughed both times.
Another shouted songs into the valleys below.
And our hero?
He stood near the edge holding the railing with one hand like a cinema actor, entirely convinced the world belonged to him.
Just before reaching the school gate, they jumped off the moving truck one by one and dusted themselves proudly.
Then our hero turned dramatically toward the driver and shouted:
“Thank you, Dasho!”
The driver did not wave back.
That should have worried them.
But wisdom, unfortunately, had not yet reached Class Eight.
By evening study, disaster had already arrived.
A messenger appeared at the classroom door.
“The Headmaster is calling all five of you.”
Now, there are few sentences in boarding school life capable of draining the human soul faster than those words.
The boys walked silently toward the office.
Inside sat the Headmaster.
Beside him stood the truck driver.
And resting quietly on the table was betrayal itself.
A report.
The Headmaster already knew who had masterminded the entire operation. Everyone in the school knew. Even the dogs near the hostel would have guessed correctly.
Still, procedures had to be followed.
So the questioning began.
“Who climbed first?”
Silence.
“Who told the others to follow?”
Silence again.
The Headmaster’s voice hardened.
“You boys understand this is enough to get expelled?”
Still nothing.
One of the boys, who had lost his father years earlier, began trembling badly. The teachers softened their tone and tried persuading him gently.
“You are a good boy. Tell the truth.”
But loyalty among hostel boys is a peculiar and frightening thing.
The boy lowered his head and said nothing.
Not one of them spoke.
Not one betrayed their leader.
The Headmaster finally lost patience and ordered them to call their parents.
And thus, another great tragedy entered our hero’s life.
His father arrived the next morning carrying a long stalk of fresh bamboo.
Not a small one.
Not a symbolic one.
A proper village bamboo, thick enough to straighten generations.
The sight alone nearly killed the boy.
His father apologized repeatedly to the Headmaster while gripping the bamboo with terrifying calmness. The teachers, now satisfied, agreed not to expel the boys.
But punishment had to be delivered.
As father and son walked back across the school grounds, the old man occasionally lifted the bamboo slightly for the boy to see.
No words were necessary.
The entire school watched from classroom windows.
Unfortunately for our hero, destiny had not yet completed its performance.
The Headmaster later summoned him privately.
“You have two choices,” he said.
“Suspension for several days…”
A pause followed.
“Or public punishment during assembly.”
Now suspension, though painful, carried one unbearable consequence:
his kingdom would collapse in his absence.
And so, after a brief silence worthy of a war film, the boy accepted public punishment like a condemned warrior accepting execution.
The following morning, the entire school gathered for assembly beneath the cold Wamrong sky.
Teachers stood stiffly.
Students whispered endlessly.
His four followers looked half terrified and half proud.
Then his name was called.
He stepped forward calmly.
He was told to lift his gho.
The cane landed sharply before hundreds of watching eyes.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
Some girls looked away.
Some boys nearly fainted in sympathy.
But our hero?
He refused even the dignity of pain.
By the time the punishment ended, he walked back into line carrying himself not like a defeated student, but like a decorated soldier returning from war.
And strangely enough, the punishment achieved the exact opposite of what the Headmaster intended.
His followers respected him more.
The younger boys feared him deeply.
And somewhere within the mythology of Year Eight hostel life, the story quietly became legend:
The day their leader took beatings before the entire school… and wore them like medals.
The Boys Who Followed Him
By the very first year of its establishment, life in Wamrong Junior High School relocated to Zookpola had already settled into its own strange mythology.
The hostel corridors woke before sunrise — metal buckets scraping cement floors, sleepy boys fighting for bathroom space, cold mountain air drifting through cracked windows. Yet one boy in class 8 always woke late.
And somehow, the entire hostel adjusted itself around that fact.
By the time he finally stepped outside, half-awake and hair standing in all directions, a jerry can of water would already be waiting for him near the washing area. One boy poured water over his head while another handed him soap. Someone else ran to the mess hall to save breakfast before the best portions disappeared.
No one questioned it.
They followed him everywhere.
On the walk to morning assembly, boys moved around him like a loose bodyguard while girls whispered and laughed from classroom windows. He walked through the school grounds untouched, unbothered, as though the entire campus had silently agreed to make way for him.
But what confused everyone most was this:
He never studied.
Not once.
During morning study, he sketched logos for their little group in the last pages of old exercise books. During evening study, while others bent anxiously over textbooks, he leaned back against the wall teaching boys imaginary kung fu techniques, drawing dragons, or planning ridiculous adventures that would never happen.
And yet, every time teachers asked questions in class, his hand rose lazily into the air.
Every answer came effortlessly.
Mathematics.
History.
English.
Science.
It did not matter.
The teachers slowly stopped being surprised.
At the end of every term, his name sat quietly at the top of the class ranking sheet while the boys who worshipped him stumbled behind. Some failed repeatedly. A few eventually disappeared from school altogether, returning to villages and farms before they were old enough to understand what they were leaving behind.
Still, none of them blamed him.
To them, he was larger than school itself.
When the board examinations approached that year, the teachers finally panicked. Certain that he was surviving on luck alone, they summoned him to study outside their quarters in the afternoons where they could keep watch over him.
He sat there obediently with books spread open before him, nodding seriously whenever they checked on him.
Then, the moment the teachers disappeared inside for their afternoon nap, he slipped away barefoot through the back paths behind the hostel.
And by evening, he would be found again near the basketball court, surrounded by boys listening to him as though he carried the answers to life itself — while unfinished textbooks waited quietly somewhere far behind him.
Years later, the boys would remember very little of the lessons taught inside the classrooms of Wamrong Junior High School.
They would forget formulas.
Forget dates.
Forget examination scores.
But they would remember him.
They would remember cold hostel mornings where they carried water through the mist before sunrise. They would remember walking shoulder to shoulder beside him to assembly as though protecting someone important. They would remember the sound of laughter outside the dormitories after evening study, the smell of kabzays and tengmas shared after lights out, and the strange confidence of believing their small world would never end.
Some became farmers.
Some became drivers.
Some disappeared into towns and cities.
A few never studied again after leaving school.
And the boy who never opened his books during study hour?
He too became just another man carried quietly forward by time.
But somewhere, in the fading corners of memory, class 8 still remained untouched — a place where mornings began with jerry cans of cold water, where friendship felt permanent, and where a group of boys once believed their leader could never fail at anything in the world.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
