In every school, in every class, there is always this one student who is ostracized by everyone. Palak is the aforementioned person I am talking about.
To say that Palak was a "below average" student would be an understatement. It's not that she was clinically intellectually challenged, on the contrary, she possessed a great deal more maturity than most at her age, it's just that her basics weren't clear. Due to this Palak failed most of her classes. This resulted in her being treated dismally by students and teachers alike. If it were a decent school, with actual well-wishing teachers, then perhaps Palak's fate would've been different, perhaps a little less woeful. But this would be wishful thinking, as nothing ever is as it should be.
Like the stories of most troubled adolescents, Palak's begins at home. When Palak's mother was 16, she was married off to some rich contractor. At the age of 17, she gave birth to Palak.
After about a decade, Palak and her mother discovered that her father had another family living less than a kilometer away from them. Being in a loveless marriage, this didn't affect her mother much, but the same can't be said for Palak. When confronted about the second family, her father proudly acknowledged their existence. After all, sowing wild oats, and being a cheating scum is a mark of manhood for the Indian man. Apart from having two wives, her father used to regularly bring prostitutes at home, in front of his wife and children. I'll leave the judging to you.
Lacking a proper father figure in her life, lead to the development of poor self-esteem. Being bullied by all of her peers aggravated her inferiority complex. Her father's amorous behaviour rubbed off on her, and soon she began to have a string of jerk boyfriends. The word "slut" was added to her list of accomplishments, and her classmates and teachers found yet another reason to torment her. The unavailability of any sort of positive reinforcement from anyone around her compelled her to seek comfort from every source possible, and the quality of her boyfriends kept deteriorating. The worst boyfriend she perhaps ever had was Aayush. At first, Aayush was charm itself. Finally finding the solace she sought, Palak lost her "virginity" to Aayush. Shortly, like the chameleon he was, Aayush revealed his true colours. He became scarily possessive, started stalking Palak, and then raped her. Word of her having sex got out, and her tyrannical classmates tortured her further.
Would it have mattered if they knew what she was going through? That she was raped? I doubt it. The classmates would just find another reason to pick on her. In a class of 48 students, not one of them bothered to listen to what Palak had to say, not a single teacher bothered to realize what they were doing to a human being. Are all educational institutes so despicable that everything is taught short of humanity? Perhaps this is the curse of education- it makes us human at the sake of us being humane.
