Ravi was always the quiet one. The kind of boy who sat in the back of the class, listened more than he spoke, and smiled even when no one smiled back. He never told his parents how, every day, that smile was stolen from him by the laughter of others.
The bullying started small — a shove in the hallway, a mocking nickname, stolen pencils. But over time, it became routine. A part of school life he could not escape. He told himself it would stop one day. He told himself that being good, being patient, would win over cruelty.
Then the lockdown came. For months, school disappeared into silence. Ravi felt peace for the first time in years. He studied, read, and built small hopes for the world waiting after the pandemic. “They’ll grow up,” he told himself. “They’ll understand.”
When schools reopened, Ravi walked through the gate with nervous excitement. Everything felt new — the air, the noise, the sun. The same classmates greeted him with friendly faces. Some even smiled. It felt unreal. Maybe, just maybe, this time things would be different.
For a few weeks, it was.
No one mocked him. No one pushed him. He began to believe that the world had changed — that kindness had finally won. But slowly, the laughter returned. The small jokes began again. His bag went missing, his water bottle vanished, his tiffin was taken. It wasn’t rage or hatred — they did it for entertainment.
To them, Ravi was not a person. He was a break from boredom.
One day, when he found his lunch thrown into the dustbin again, he went to the teacher. He spoke softly, trembling, his voice shaking with honesty. But the teacher barely looked at him. “Ravi, they said you started it. Don’t lie,” she said, turning away.
The world, once again, chose to believe the louder voices.
After that, something inside him broke — not loudly, not visibly, but quietly. Like a thread snapping inside his heart. The world seemed to echo with laughter that wasn’t funny anymore. He stopped bringing lunch. He stopped carrying water. He stopped hoping.
Each day, he watched how easy it was for lies to win, how easily good could be crushed, how justice could look away. He realized that the world doesn’t always reward kindness — sometimes it feeds on it.
One afternoon, as he sat alone under a tree behind the school, he whispered to himself,
> “Being good is just foolishness.”
He didn’t mean he would become cruel. But something within him hardened — a new silence, sharper than before. The boy who once smiled to hide his pain no longer smiled at all. He learned that sometimes, goodness doesn’t win. Not because it’s weak, but because the world refuses to see it.
Years later, no one remembered the jokes, the laughter, or the stolen lunches. But Ravi remembered. And that memory built a fire in him — quiet, controlled, and waiting.
Because though he once believed the evil always wins, deep inside, a voice whispered that one day, he’d prove them wrong — not with revenge, but with success so loud that no laughter could ever drown it.
