At this point the whistle blew, signalling that it was time for a break. "Fall in," Jayachandra said gruffly to Venugopal and Sachdev. Although his shin was aching, his ass was burning, and his face was streaked with tears, Sachdev remembered to jog back into ranks. Venugopal whose ass and thighs were burning began to limp, rather than double timing it, back into ranks.
"Baanchooth, " shrieked Guruswamy. "You always do things on the double, do you understand?"
"Ha sahib," yelled Venugopal.
"Run around the field twice before you take your break," ordered Guruswamy.
So, Venugopal had to jog around the enormous parade ground with the sun furiously burning down on him as the other boys began their break. While he jogged, he was painfully self conscious of the other boys sitting at the other end of the parade ground watching him. At the same time, his ass and thighs were burning and throbbing. He was not alone in being singled out, though, he noticed, for a boy from another squad, another delicate dark skinned South Indian (a Malayali called Kurian though Venugopal was not to know his name for another month) was not being allowed to have his break because he had been clumsy at drill, confusing his left and his right. Poor Kurian had been made to kneel in the middle of the parade ground by his NCO with a shoe in his mouth. Kurian's squad had been a short distance away from Venugopal's, and he had been dimly conscious of one of the other NCOs yelling abuse at the Malayali soldier and the familiar crack of the swagger stick, but of course, he had not been able to see the soldier. Now in the midst of jogging, he noted that Kurian had delicate, boyish features, large dark eyes which were slightly moist both from the humiliation of kneeling and from the pain of having been slapped hard across the face a few minutes before. The shoe dangled grotesquely from a full boyish pair of lips that were just ripe to be kissed by someone like the hairy perv at the fence. But no such luck, Kurian's full ripe lips would be wasted on the calculating female whores in the town when he got his first pay. And furiously _f_u_c_k_ing them, he would attempt to assert his manhood and blot out the remembrance of the humiliations that his NCOs visited on him.
The boys had a fifteen minute break, during which they smoked cigarettes, drank water, and went to take a leak. The NCOs left them completely alone during the break mercifully. Sachdev after washing away the tears from his face sat down gingerly, his ass was still burning. Being a naïve young boy, he had been shocked not only by the casual brutality of the punishment, but by Guruswamy and Jayachandra's unabashed _s_e_x_uality. Apart from Guruswamy casually rubbing his erection against Sachdev's head, when Jayachandra had parodically rubbed the hapless boy's ass, his index finger had playfully poked Sachdev's asshole in a way that the soldier found distinctly disturbing.
Venugopal joined the other soldiers after jogging around the field. He came upon his cousin, Ramesh. The two boys were slightly awkward. They were good enough friends at home, but now Venugopal was painfully self conscious about his cousin having witnessed his humiliation, and Ramesh was painfully self conscious about pretending not to have noticed his cousin's humiliation. The two boys had eagerly discussed joining up when the news of the skirmishes with Pakistan began. But those discussions full of young men's ardor for adventure and full of rather cliched nationalist sentiment seemed a world away from the reality that faced them in basic training. The reality of surviving what seemed like constant, painful humiliation, the reality of being reduced to nothing.
Pity the poor boys all you want, but don't forget the unwitting pleasure that they were giving to the hairy perv witnessing their humiliation from behind the barbed wire fence. Even at fifteen, he was not hoodwinked for a moment by nationalist sentiments. Armies of uniformed soldiers existed to be sadistically punished for his delight was what he secretly felt, and after all who could have created a better arrangement than that. Sadistic voyeurs of the world rejoice. Venugopal and his friends' torments have just begun. It's still the very first day of training.