Death trail: Three young persons died on three consecutive days on the Metro Railway tracks. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

Apu Basak, 18, killed himself on Sunday, November 15. The day had begun the usual way. Around 8.30 he had gone to the market close to his house in Masjidbari Street near Hatibagan and bought his favourite tilapia fish. Then he decided to get himself a haircut.

The first year Bengali Honours student in the evening session at Shrishchandra College in Shyambazar was not fashionable. Nothing about him screamed for attention. His hairstyle was no exception.

He was a very quiet, shy person.

Around 10.45am, Apu went to the nearby barber’s shop that has no name and is fitted with only one chair and two mirrors, and asked its owner to cut his hair short. He did not mention any length, but the barber, who could only recall Apu after being asked repeatedly by everyone about him after his death, decided to give him a cropped look. Apu went back home without saying anything.

At home he realised that something was terribly wrong. Even his mother Jyotsna Basak, a homemaker, laughed at him. She told him that the haircut looked “stupid”. It made him look like a bumpkin, she added.

“He replied that it was not his fault but the barber’s. He went straight to the bathroom,” says Taru Basak, his father’s sister. Apu lived with his parents and members of the extended family, 14 of them in all, including his paternal uncle’s family, his paternal aunt and his grandmother, in the four cramped rooms of a two-storey house in the “colony area”. Apu’s father Manik Basak is a driver.

“After Apu finished his bath he kept staring at the mirror and asked me if the haircut was looking funny. He said he wouldn’t go to college for the next few days till his hair grew back. He said even some boys had made fun of him while he was returning from the barber’s,” says Taru. She is sitting close to a photograph of Apu, in the same room where she had the conversation with him. A TV sits on the top of a showcase.

Breaking news

On Sunday, Apu had sat there brooding, when his eyes moved to the TV screen. A story was unfolding there. Television was “breaking news” about two suicides at Metro stations, which happened in quick succession.

Madhab Basak, Apu’s uncle, remembers Apu’s conversation with Taru. “He asked her if people died instantly when they jumped on the Metro tracks. I scolded him but he smiled and said that he was only asking,” recalls Madhab, a hawker at Burrabazar.

But Apu was disturbed enough by then. His father, who came back home for lunch at 2pm that day, found Apu loitering in the lane outside the house. “I asked him where he was going. He mumbled something and I brought him back home,” says Manik Basak. But around 3.30pm he was gone again, after playing for a while with his younger brother Dipu, a student of Class VI at Shyambazar AV School. According to Metro Railway sources, Apu jumped in front of a train at the Sovabazar-Sutanuti station, around 500m from his house, at 4.04pm. He burned to death instantly.

Apu’s mother holds herself guilty: she thinks that her ridicule led to Apu’s death. A bad haircut may sound trivial, but on it can depend one’s appearance, one’s acceptability and one’s self-esteem. A short haircut, if it is a disaster, takes long to be redeemed.

Kids’ world

Apu did not have many friends of his age. He was friendly with children, from his own family and the neighbourhood. “He was not much interested in outdoor sports. He also did not like to spend much time with his college or school friends. He always returned home within minutes after his college got over at 9pm,” says Ritu, his cousin.

“He had a taste for music and often used to ask for the latest Bengali and Hindi song collections from his friends,” says a classmate. He was shy of women. He only used to play kitkit and badminton with the colony kids, most of whom were girls. On Sunday, just before he left home for the Metro station, he was playing a game of hide-and-seek with his brother Dipu.

Officers of Shyampukur police station feel his personality led him to the decision. “It looks like the boy was very emotional and sensitive. He was perhaps very embarrassed about his poor haircut,” says a senior officer.

Yet, could it be just that? Did his reticence and shyness, his greater comfort with children, and shunning of adult company, not welcome in a “manly nature”, make Apu feel like an outsider always? Did he feel slightly ridiculed already, though everyone thought he was a “normal, good boy”? Now with the haircut, did he feel he couldn’t bear more scrutiny? He kept looking at the mirror.

Was it a girl? One of his classmates said though he was “not crazy” about girls, of late his friends used to link his name with a girl from the history department and he seemed to like it. “I don’t think he ever spoke to her but we noticed him stealing a glance or two at her. He may have been scared of being laughed at by his friends and especially the girl because of his funny haircut,” says a classmate.

Or was it a bigger problem? In his moment of humiliation did something flash in his mind, telling him that life would always be like this, a series of humiliations, with even a decent haircut seeming impossible, despite the effort he was putting in to make life better?

Apu was serious about his studies. He had worked for two months in Burrabazar to pay for his college admission. “He told his teacher after a class test on Saturday that he could not write the paper well and promised to do better in another exam on Monday,” says Ayan Mukherjee, a classmate. Apu’s principal Anjan Sengupta and the head of the department of Bengali, Kuntal Mitra, spoke of Apu as “a very good boy”.

“He was very attentive in class and very regular. He was more like a school kid than a college student,” says Mitra. “We have asked students to approach me or other teachers in case of any problem and never to follow the steps taken by Apu,” said Sengupta.

But sitting in his room after the haircut, looking out through the window at the cluster of unpainted, decaying houses in his colourless north Calcutta neighbourhood and a few scraps of the November sky, Apu thought differently. Perhaps he only saw how impossible it would be to get out of there. How could he make a place in this strange adult world, where the rules were much more complex than a game of hide-and-seek? How could he think of love?

When he looked at the TV, reporting the deaths on the Metro tracks, he knew he had a swift, painless way out.

What of the future?

Apu was not alone. The week had been crowded with the news of death of the city’s young. The coming days would bring more such news.

On Friday November 13, Arnab Mukherjee, 25, who was undergoing counselling for his unhappiness over his career, had jumped to his death on the Metro tracks. The microbiology postgraduate was working as a medical representative.

The same day, 16-year-old Bhaskar Sarkar, a Class IX student of Bally Jodasattala High School, was found hanging in his home in Howrah in the morning, a day after his parents were summoned to school. Bhaskar had apparently misbehaved with a teacher.

The same day again, Sophiya Chatterjee, 16, a student of Class IX, was found hanging in her room in her KD Mukherjee Road home in Behala. The police suspect it to be a case of suicide.

On November 14, Sujata Mehta, 22, a student of chartered accountancy died after being hit by a Metro train at Girish Park. Her family raised the possibility of an accident arising from a medical condition, but the police haven’t ruled out suicide.

On Wednesday, November 18, 15-year-old Sunita Kumari, a Class X student of Howrah Shiksha Sadan, jumped to her death from her school terrace after she was allegedly caught cheating and rebuked by a teacher.

Sunita was the second of tea-stall owner Radheshyam Chowrasia’s five children, four of them girls. “She was a happy girl and average in studies,” said her uncle Ganesh Bhagat.

A teacher with 20 years’ experience said children these days tend to be “hypersensitive” and she was wary of scolding or punishing them, lest they “do something drastic”.

Perhaps the young today find life far more complicated than they can handle.

Complicated motives can lead to suicides, but no one had a clue to why these young men and women, boys and girls rather, would take the extreme step of killing themselves.

“He was unusually quiet over the past couple of weeks but I had no inkling of what was in his mind,” says Arnab’s mother.

Bhaskar’s mother had said she would accompany him to school. He wanted his father to go with him. So, he hung himself.

The future looks daunting.

six lives snuffed out

• Nov 13: Arnab Mukherjee, 25, jumped on the Metro tracks at Rabindra Sarobar station

• Nov 13: Bhaskar Sarkar, 16, found hanging in his room

• Nov 13: Sophiya Chatterjee, 16, found hanging in her room

• Nov 14: Sujata Mehta, 22, hit by train at Girish Park Metro station

• Nov 15: Apu Basak (picture right), 18, jumped on the Metro tracks at Sovabazar-Sutanuti station

• Nov 18: Sunita Kumari, 15, jumped from the school terrace