The tale of my legendary T-shirt
Many years ago, I had this grey T-shirt that had the following words printed on it:
I maybe wrong, but I doubt it.
This shirt still represents my cockiness in situations I’m familiar with, and while I’ve regretted being cocky and made amends several times - a little piece of that attitude remains.
I used to enjoy gloating and showing people the shirt when I was right, but alas, that shirt is no more. Where did it go?
Storytime!
I got that shirt around 2014 — it was gifted to me by an unknown relative who probably didn’t bother to read the text on the shirt. I liked that shirt a lot, it was light, easy to wash, quick to dry, and easy to wear.
I kept it around for a long time in my college until March 2017. It was the festival of Holi. So, being in the hostel, we were playing with water and colors since early in the morning, I was already covered in colors and soaking wet by 10 am. 😂
Playtime was over soon, and around 11 am I cleaned myself up — put on my legendary T-shirt, and went outside to look for some food. Holi is a big festival and the mess was closed that day, so I went out, sparking clean — and expected the rest of the college to understand that since I’ve cleaned myself, I do not wish to play Holi anymore for today.
So, on my way to the college gate, I could hear some music playing. The boys had managed to get a DJ for the day, and a group of roughly 300 boys were playing Holi in the college garden.
As I was walking past the college garden to the gate, I was interrupted by my juniors, who were soaking wet. They requested I join them in the fun and games — which I refused, claiming that I have cleaned myself up and that I have my phone with me.
They kept insisting, and as luck would have it, another colleague of mine was going back to the hostel from the gate. I said, “Screw it”, and then I stopped the colleague, gave him my phone, glasses, and other things that I had on me, and requested him to drop them in my room, which he agreed to do.
As soon as the last object left my hand, the juniors picked me up by my limbs. One junior on each limb, and carried me to the college garden where the party was going on. As the music grew louder and we passed the building that was blocking the view of the party. I could see the mess that had been created.
Yes, they had arranged for a DJ, but they had also arranged for a water hose, and they were spraying each other nonstop. They had hosed down the place so much and trampled everywhere that the grass of the garden had completely changed into mud.
It was just now that I saw all my junior’s feet were covered in mud, and before I could say anything, they started the countdown:
3–2–1 … Yeet!
I was tossed and landed in the middle of the pile of mud. 😂
Before I could even recover, I was surrounded by people and they started to kick mud all over me. I was completely covered in mud at this point and finally managed to get up.
More people started to get tossed into the mud and going with the flow, I managed to toss 2–3 people in the mud and kick mud all over them. 😂
I, along with my legendary T-shirt, at this point, was covered in mud.
This is when things changed. On the other side of the garden, someone tore off the shirt of another person — this trend quickly spread, and people started to tear each other’s shirts off. And if anyone was seen with a clean body, they were immediately lifted and tossed into the mud again.
I managed to tear off the shirt of a junior I knew, and managed to toss him into the pile of mud. But just as I was enjoying the sweet revenge of tossing the junior in the mud, I was caught off guard and a bunch of people caught me, tore off my shirt, and pushed me into the mud again. 😂
As the mud was kicked onto me again, and the fact that I didn’t have my glasses anymore — the only thing I could make out was the blue sky and the brown color. 😂
Everyone was covered in mud, or shoveling mud at each other or tossing people in the mud. Soon, the whole group of boys were shirtless and covered in mud.
Just as I thought — alright, it’s over, I heard the sound of a wet shirt being thrown hard onto a back of a person. “pyaaat”!
Someone threw a mud-covered shirt to another person.
Again, like the previous trend, this one spread even faster. People were picking up torn shirts from the ground, soaking them in the mud, and throwing them at people.
I’d like to repeat at this point again, that we were all shirtless and completely covered in mud — the only thing that we could see was the blue sky and the color brown. I am sure that no one could recognize the person that they were looking at.
Shirt pelting began — I threw a shirt at a person I didn’t know, and some other brown mud-covered person threw a shirt at me. Chaos increased further to the point that we couldn’t hear the DJ music anymore, all we could hear was the sound “pyaaat” everywhere. 😂
We surrounded an unknown person in a circle and pelted him nonstop with mud-covered shirts. While we were pelting the person in the circle, another larger circle formed behind us — and they started to pelt shirts on us. We countered by throwing shirts and it again broke into chaos. 😂
In a seemingly endless fight with supposedly unlimited ammunition, mud-covered shirts were being thrown all over the place. And that’s when finally the administration came and stopped the party and dismissed us all. 😂
However, they refused to let us back to the hostel, because we were covered in mud. They asked us to clean ourselves up before we return.
Unfortunately, there was only one hose, and there were more than 300 boys in line. So, roughly around 100 people, myself included decided to leave the college — shirtless, covered in mud, all to look for some food around the city. 😂
Of course, we didn’t eat whole meals, we just went for some tea and snacks and returned to the college to clean ourselves up and return to the hostel.
So, there you have it, my legendary T-shirt is still in that garden today, with 100s of other shirts, probably with new grass grown over it. It might have been torn off, but it went out in glory — by pelting random people from college. 😂
Missing details
- Yes, we had women in college, but they were all locked inside the girls' hostel to prevent this exact kind of chaos from occurring. 😂 Do not worry — they had their color and DJ party.
- The girls' hostel also had arrangements for food on the day — they didn’t have to exit the hostel nor were they starved inside. 😂
- I have used the terms “shirt: and “T-shirt” rather interchangeably — I always meant the grey T-shirt with the text in it.
Thank you so much for reading till the end. Hope you enjoyed it!
— Samridh Tuladhar (@tsamridh86 )
