One Punch, No Bell.

January 1979. Dehra Dun winter: the kind of cold that makes your thoughts brittle and your lies freeze on the way out. We did PT in blazers and flannels because changing into whites felt like a luxury the mountains hadn’t approved.
Boxing season. An annual plague in the name of house pride. All you needed was a pulse and the idiocy to put your hand up.

We, the fresh shipment of eleven- and not yet twelve-year-olds, wrists like matchsticks, were marched out for inspection. Seniors circled, smiling the way butchers smile at lambs who’ve been handed gloves instead of a last meal.

Mine were museum pieces: cracked leather, dark with someone else’s old wars. My fingers swam inside them like minnows in a bucket.

A senior I vaguely knew (thirteen going on prehistoric) was told to teach me guard. He demonstrated “guard” with the enthusiasm of a man teaching a chair to sit. Left up, right up, chin somewhere in the vicinity of shame. Good enough.
It was the universal male message: figure out the rest when the hurting starts.

“Spar.”

I lifted my gloves like a prayer I didn’t believe in, elbows wide, chin sightseeing in another province. He slid inside my guard the way smoke finds the gap under a door and planted one clean shot flush on the cheek.

The field kept moving. Jumping jacks carried on their moron parade. A whistle blew somewhere, bored. I stood ringing like a temple bell someone had hit for fun.

He stepped back, signed his work, walked off.

I tasted blood and the sharper taste of revelation: this wasn’t boxing.

This was baptism, RIMC style.

We were being tested for who would cry, who would flail, who would file the moment away for later.
I did none of the first two.

That night, lying in the dorm listening to twenty boys pretend to sleep, I made a promise to the dark: Never again will someone hit me and walk away smiling.

I kept it. Not by turning bully (zero originality points), but by becoming impossible to bully. I grew tall, sure. More importantly, I grew certain.

The cheek healed in a week.
The lesson stayed.

I made the team anyway. Probably because I just looked at him until the horizon got interesting. Something in the eyes passed inspection.

From that morning on, I boxed. Not because I loved the sport (though I grew to), but because I refused to let one cheap shot write the ending. House matches, inter-house, inter-school, then the Academy years later: every time I wrapped my hands I felt that original sting, a tuning fork reminding me what frequency I never intended to hum again.

The senior ? He and I have been friends for almost 40 years now.

That day, he was just the hammer.
 I was the blade.

Some punches don’t knock you out.
They just knock you awake.