YA kar rahe ho aaj kal?” The former India junior captain stepped over the concrete slab over the drain that runs in front of his house last Saturday morning, stopped for a moment to ask his neighbourhood pal to join him for tea, then walked away alone. Through the twisting, cramped bylanes of old Kanpur, he wandered along till he reached the Green Park Stadium, where he had first picked up a bat years ago. But he didn’t go inside.

Instead, he walked to the nine-storeyed shopping complex opposite, walked up the stairs, stopped at the balcony on the sixth floor, paused. There was the stadium down below, the Ganges snaking its way through eastern Uttar Pradesh, just beyond, cargo boats bobbing up and down, a thin green line of trees framing the horizon. He stepped over the ledge, paused again. And then, he stepped into thin air.

First, the life insurance hoarding on the fifth floor, then in a blur, the fourth, and before the gardener at the stadium, watching in horror, could blink his eye, the third, the second and the loud thud.

Kya kar rahe ho aaj kal? Subhash Dixit had finally managed to come up with an answer: he had killed himself.
India under-15 captain for the World Challenge in 2000, Uttar Pradesh under-19 captain till 2002. But then: kya kar rahe ho aaj kal?

Failing to live up to that early promise, dumped without a second chance by his state’s cricket association, counting the days in his “pool in” accommodation in distant Kolkata, playing club cricket, his cricket dreams fading out, no job, his grandmother dead, his grandfather suffering from brain tumour, his father mentally unstable, living separately.

... contd.