What is the punishment for laziness? There may be many in the long term, but the immediate one is boredom. Visualize this, a friend has told you about an art exhibition in town and asked you if you would like to join. You are supposed to meet your friend, say at 3.30 in the afternoon.

You have had a heavy lunch. It is 2, and you decide to take a short nap, planning to wake up at 230 and go and meet the friend. You don’t wake up at 230, you don’t wake up at 330, you wake up at 5 and drearily look at the watch and realize you will never be able to meet your friend at 330.

You call up the friend and apologize, the friend tells you it is not a problem, other friends had joined him and they are going for a drink and if you want to, you may join. But you know it is too late, that if you start now, you will be in time only to see them off. So, you sit down, switch on the TV, watch Independence Day for the 100^th time, sulk, and think about how pointless life is, and steal an apple from your roommate who is suffering from Malaria.

Darkness falls and you become desperate. You go to the nearest liquor shop (We used to call them temples of peace, while in college), buy the strongest beer and buy a suspicious looking fried fish from the street. Come back, forcibly keep the Malarial roommate off the beer and fish because you don’t want to deal with ambulances, hospitals, mortuary, postmortems etc now. Drink the beer, eat the fish, watch a chic movie and shed a few tears. Try to eat the half-cooked potatoes and elastic roties that bai has made for dinner. Watch a science fiction movie about time traveling and stuff like that make you wish you could go back to the time when you were 15 and had just miserably failed the Maths test in board exams and was about to become a failed case. Feel how minuscule your place is in the world and how purposeless the existence is and switch off the lights and trudge up the stair case hoping to meet the ghost who some of the guests to the flat had seen (you suspect the ghost was your roommate because the guests who saw the ghost had overstayed their welcome and some more).

Check if the Malarial roommate is still alive and settle down uncomfortably on your bed because you can’t simply rest your body on the bed because the part of the body that is in touch with the bed gets heated up and has to be cooled by exposing it to the fan and this process is cyclical and is not very sleep inducing. Get up, go to the balcony and check if your girl next door is strolling on her courtyard again. She is not and you stand and watch the sky for a while and notice the stars and wonder when was the last time you saw them. Get back to bed, and decide that a suitable suicide plan has to be made tomorrow and drift off to temporary death.