Beyond The Boundary (Shubman Gill x Ishan Kishan)

19; won't give up

It was the 18th of January, 2023. The day Shubman Gill etched his name in cricketing history, not just by scoring a double century but by shattering records. The youngest to reach the 200 mark in ODI cricket, the fifth Indian cricketer to achieve this feat and the fastest to clock 1,000 ODI runs.

Yet, amid the cheers and applause, a quieter revelation unfolded. It wasn't a new record. In fact, it wasn't something related to cricket at all. No, this was something much more personal, more profound.

It was the day he could finally put a finger on the peculiar feeling that had been tugging at his heart strings for years.

It was the day he finally found the words to describe that feeling that first appeared when he engaged in a conversation with a certain boy whose name begins with an 'I' and ends with an 'n' a day prior to his U-19 semi-finals.

That feeling, it persisted, growing more evident each time he found himself playing alongside or against that particular boy in the months and years that followed.

It further intensified when the said boy secured a spot in the Indian national cricket team, and the two of them became roommates more frequently. And as the saying goes, the rest is history.

Shubman now had a name for that feeling. Yeah, you guessed it. It was this silly feeling called love that Shubman felt for his equally silly best friend, Ishan.

It terrified him. Not only had he fallen for his best friend, but to add more complexity to the situation, the said friend happened to be a boy.

The mere notion of same-sex attraction sent shivers down Shubman's spine, triggering memories of a time during his middle school.

It was a day he so much as appreciated a male classmate's appearance. "Hizda", "gay", "faggot" - words flung at him by his so-called friends back then.

Back then, those words were alien to him, their meanings he hadn't known. Shubman had witnessed people use those words in a fit of rage and so he associated those words with hatred and disgust.

It wasn't until the later part of his mid-teenage years that he unraveled their true meanings when he himself realized that his attraction wasn't limited to females, but also included males.

He had spent nights surfing the internet on all things lgbtq+ only for him to suppress any inkling of attraction towards boys the very next day, locking away the fact that he might be bisexual, in some deep, unreachable corner of his being.

For years, he had expertly concealed a part of himself, burying it beneath the layers of denial and societal expectations. It was a skill, an art almost, to be able to bury a truth so deep within that even he forgot about the existence of it.

That was until Ishan came into the picture, breaking open all those carefully sealed locks and shedding light onto a truth he had long forgotten, or at least tried to do so.

Which is also why he went around drunk kissing girls in the name of celebrating his double-ton that very night. Ah, the classic "I'm kissing other people to forget about you" move.

When confronted by Ishan about that incident, Shubman had balmed the alcohol, saying his decision-making capacity took a detour after a few too many drinks. (mentioned in chapter 8)

Now, it wasn't an outright lie. Sure, he was under the influence, but the choice to kiss girls wasn't entirely a drunken mishap. It was a conscious decision to divert his thoughts away from Ishan, not an after effect of the booze he had gulped down.

And to some extent, it worked. The appaluse, the congratulations and the overall jubilant atmosphere managed to momentarily overshadow the persistent thoughts of Ishan.