Natural actor, gifted storyteller: Best friends recall most loyal of buddies who died by suicide

“Film is something he always wanted to do.” The skit, the boy’s friends said, was a breezy, exaggerated endorsement of Bhojpuri comedy cinema, filled with dramatic pauses and sharp one liners. It was a two-actor play, and the boy gave himself a particularly punchy line that had the class in splits.

Their teachers found the play a bit too irreverent, though. “We were not allowed to perform it in the classroom, so he came up with an alternative — a speech describing himself,” another of the boy’s friends said. He gave that speech in school on November 18. Later that afternoon, some of the friends got calls saying he could not be found. “We thought he was upset about something that may have happened in school, so we went looking for him,” a friend said. They searched Metro stations, calling out his name, but the boy could not be found. As dusk fell, the friends got the news. The boy was no more. He had jumped to his death at Rajendra Place Metro station.

What the boy’s closest friends, a group of eight boys in his batch, remember the most was his penchant — and talent — for acting. They recalled vividly his performance in a school skit in which he played a boy who takes to vaping due to the stress of examinations.

“His timing, his gestures, the way he built a scene… The whole class clapped,” one of the friends said. “His acting blew my mind.”

In short films that he recorded casually with his friends, the boy also went behind the camera — narrating, laughing, directing. “His voice could light up a dull afternoon,” a classmate said.

The boy also told beautiful stories. On school trips especially, classmates waited eagerly for him to begin, and hung upon every word. His friends remember a night in Jim Corbett last year, when he told stories of ghosts that made them huddle together in the small hotel room.

There was a naturally caring and loyal side to the boy. If someone forgot their tiffin, he quietly split his. If a classmate got into trouble, he stepped forward to share the blame.

The boy’s one insecurity was about his weight. “He was very skinny,” a friend said. “People would make fun of him and call him names because he was so thin.”

Another friend said the boy had told him, ‘You lose weight and I’ll put on weight and build my body.’ “He would get healthy fats for lunch every day. He brought extra rotis, and he planned to hit the gym regularly after the exams got over,” the friend said.

The boy played basketball, ran relay races, and won medals. He danced with abandon, practised his poses, and sent his friends funny memes. Now that he is gone, those memories seem clearer, the friends said. “On my birthday last year, we went to Pacific Mall,” a friend said. “He started cracking jokes with the cab driver. He was always outgoing, always looking out for his friends, and always trying to make more friends.”

How would the boy’s friends remember him?  “As the funniest boy,” said one. “He used to make everyone laugh. He was such a genuine person.”

To the boy’s closest friends in school, he appears as fragments of memory — the offer of bhindi from his lunchbox, a joke tossed at a taxi driver, a ghost story told during a school trip, a dramatic line from a script written minutes before class.

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