We once decided to run away from home.
Not the way children casually threaten to run away because someone scolded them. We meant it. We were in eighth standard—old enough to know what we were saying, young enough to believe it was possible.
There were four of us:
Jonnie, whose real name was Abhilash Johnson—our leader in this mission.
Drishtant, whom we called Dushy—gentle, and worried about his marks.
Debasheesh, whom we called Dabba—sensible, rational, hovering at the edge of our madness.
And me—in a toxic relationship with studying, desperate to break up.
The crisis, as far as I was concerned, had a name: Mathematics.
Both Dushy and I were terrified of failing Maths in eighth standard. Our report cards felt like verdicts waiting to be delivered. Jonnie, of course, had no such worries. He wasn’t running away to escape bad marks. He wanted adventure.
The adventure had a blueprint: a book he had read called The Secret Island by Enid Blyton.
In that book, a group of children run away from home, find an island, and build a life there—collecting eggs, tending animals, cooking their own food, and staying hidden from the adults who don’t understand them. Jonnie had read it. We had not. That automatically made him the subject-matter expert on running away.
He had the authority of the only boy in the group who knew how fictional children had successfully escaped.
The plan, as he explained it, was elegant.
Near our colony, about a kilometre away, was a railway track. Sometimes trains stopped there for a few minutes. We decided that on the day our exam results were declared—on the day Dushy and I would inevitably fail Maths—we would walk to the tracks, wait for a train to stop, climb in, and go wherever it took us.
After that, according to Jonnie’s “topographical analysis”, the train would somehow deliver us to a place with hills and forests—somewhere in Jharkhand, far away from adults and tuition classes. There, on a suitable hillside, we would build a small hut. We would get a goat. Maybe some chickens. We would live off the land, like the children in the book.
It was, in our heads, less of an escape and more of a promotion.
We began to prepare.
We understood—thanks to Enid Blyton via Jonnie—that one could not simply run away empty-handed. A new life required capital—not money, but objects. So we started quietly stealing from our homes.
Candles. Matchboxes. Sugar. A few old pots and pans. A saucepan to boil the milk the goat would one day produce. Anything that felt vaguely “survival related” was fair game. Each item slipped into pockets and bags with the careful guilt of middle-class crime.
For a brief while, our homes became warehouses and we became low-grade smugglers.
There was some debate about whether we should also take Dushy’s dog, Tommy. The romantic in us wanted the image: four boys and a dog, walking into the sunrise like heroes from a storybook.
But the realist in Jonnie pointed out that a dog on a train might attract the attention of the ticket checker and get us caught.
After a surprisingly sober discussion, we decided not to take Tommy.
We were willing to abandon the dog to protect the mission. It all felt very grown-up.
We also needed a place to store our loot until the big day.
The colony was expanding; there was a construction site on the edge of our world, complete with piles of bricks, half-built walls, and one large tree that overlooked the area.
That tree became our bank locker.
We hid our pots and pans and sugar and matchboxes in its branches, wedging them between thick limbs and leaves. We would go there in the evenings under the pretext of “exploring” and check if everything was still in place, the way adults check whether their fixed deposits are safe.
There’s a particular kind of thrill that comes from knowing your parents have no idea that their utensils are hanging on a tree, waiting for your disappearance.
As the day of the results approached, our excitement grew.
We exchanged furtive glances in school. Our conversations became coded. Ordinary sentences were loaded with secret meaning.
“Kal milte hain?” meant: “Tomorrow we are one step closer to the forest.”
A shared laugh in class meant: “We are going to be free soon.”
Something in the air around our friendship changed. It was as if we were no longer just boys who played cricket in the evenings—we were co-founders of a soon-to-be-launched life.
Only one person remained non-committal: Dabba.
He listened to our plans. He knew about the tree, the utensils, the goat, the chickens, the railway track. He never quite volunteered to join, but he never tried to stop us either.
He lived in that peculiar space only some people can inhabit—present but not entangled, amused but not judgmental.
It was, in hindsight, a very Debjit place to be.
The closer we got to result day, the more our hearts pounded. Our fantasy had a countdown now. One printed sheet of marks stood between us and our new life in the jungle.
Finally, the day arrived.
The school felt different that morning: heavier, louder. Result days always do. There’s a collective tension—a smell of sweat and chalk and anxiety.
Parents lurk. Teachers look oddly powerful.
We stood in line with our classmates, pretending this was an ordinary exam result, knowing that for us it was the border checkpoint to a different existence.
I can still remember the teacher’s handwriting on the report card. The columns. The slow reveal of each subject.
English.
Science.
Social Studies.
And then: Mathematics.
I had not failed.
My marks were bad enough for the school to classify my promotion as “conditional”—a term that felt like an official warning stamped on my academic forehead—but I had still been moved up to tenth standard.
Dushy, too, had passed.
It is hard to describe the feeling that followed.
It was not joy. It was not relief. It was something stranger: a sudden collapse of one universe and the reappearance of another.
The forest evaporated. The goat disappeared. The chickens, the hut, the arbitrary train carrying us away—all of it vanished in the small space between a number and the word “Promoted”.
We did not meet at the railway tracks that day.
We went home with our report cards. We were hugged, scolded, lectured, advised—whatever passed for parental response in each of our houses.
And slowly, almost without speaking about it, the plan to run away started dissolving between us.
The next time we met, we were awkward.
Jonnie, of course, had passed comfortably. His relationship with Maths was not fraught. He had never needed to escape because of marks. For him, the escape had always been pure adventure.
For us, with the threat of failure lifted, the forest suddenly seemed very far away.
I don’t remember the exact sentence in which we told him we were not going. Maybe we didn’t say it directly at all. Maybe he just understood from the way we avoided mentioning the tree, the utensils, the train, the hut.
Maybe he saw it in the way we looked at our own shoes.
What I do remember, with absolute clarity, is his verdict.
Jonnie shrugged, looked at us with theatrical disdain and said:
“I knew it. Losers.”
We never dismantled the plan properly.
At some point, the utensils must have been taken down from the tree. The sugar must have melted into the soil, or been eaten by ants. The matchboxes must have gotten damp and useless.
Time does its work quietly.
What remained was the story.
Over the years, that failed escape became one of the canonical legends of our group. We retold it many times, each time adding minor embellishments, each time laughing at the same moments: the goat, the chicken, the precise seriousness with which we had discussed whether a dog on a train was compatible with a life of crime.
It became part of how we recognised one another—as the boys who once prepared, with full sincerity, to leave everything and everyone and follow an imaginary train into a forest.
We never ran away. We stayed. We studied. We got “conditionally promoted.” We became good boys again.
But somewhere in that plan—in the sugar hidden in the tree, in the goat we never bought—another version of us kept walking into a forest we never reached.
I miss the boys who almost left everything behind.