CHAPTER 5
A chill breeze swept over my face, I smiled. Man, I was enjoying every minute of this long bus journey. After all, the journey was giving me a lot of time for sweet-bitter recollections. Moreover, there’s no way I would feel less happy when I’m quite far away from the tiring household chores, my publisher and of course, my mother-in-law!
However, my little girl, sitting on my lap wasn’t liking the journey at all. She was looking grim. She kept toying with my handbag. When she finds my handbag less amusing, she would turn to her teddy bear bag, and when she finds both of the bags less amusing, she would simply look through the window or gaze at the co-passengers. She shifted her weight restlessly.
Talking about her weight, it is one of the biggest concerns of mine and my husband’s. Checking Aadhya’s weight gives me the creeps. She is seven years old and she weighs only 17 kilos. I clasped her bony arm. I wondered how such a skinny child would be born to an over-weight woman like me.
These thoughts made me feel uneasy, I forcibly slid back to my memories.
Sometime around the eight grade, we began to feel matured, and our rivalry followed suit. Our rivalry took a new shape. Shalini abandoned her snares and stares and I opted for cleverer and cleaner methods to put her down.
When these undesirable changes were taking place, Rita joined our school. When the teacher introduced her to the class, she beamed at us. She wasn’t looking pretty, but there was something attractive about her. She was cheerful and optimistic. We soon became good friends. We had a lot of things in common. We both admired Aamir Khan, loved noodles, hated our history teacher. Yet our views about a particular person differed to a huge extent. The person was none other than Shalini, the great!
Rita had a peculiar liking towards Shalini. She spoke to Shalini in an unusually cheerful tone. Rita’s sense of humour would be effortlessly provoked by Shalini’s humourless jokes. Whenever I heard her high pitched giggle, I knew that Shalini was cracking yet another silly joke. I hate to admit it, I felt jealous every time Rita appreciated Shalini’s work. I feared that Rita would become Shalini’s best friend.
However, we managed to be close friends until one incident.
Our science teacher had assigned a project to us. We were supposed to prepare toilet cleaner or maybe phenol. We divided ourselves into teams. I was the team leader and of course, Rita was in my team. My team wasn’t working efficiently. The nerve cells of my team mates were completely soaked in lethargy and I truly believed that procrastination was their best friend forever.
On the submission day, when my team couldn’t submit our project, I saw a shadow of a smile on Shalini’s face. I felt frustrated. I felt more frustrated when I found my team mates gossipping, they weren’t worried in the least about the team’s failure. Then, Shalini whispered something into Rita’s ear, I became suspicious.
After a few minutes, Rita told me that she wanted to quit my team. I felt offended. She excused herself and quickly joined Shalini’s team. Rita looked at me. I wasn’t able to read her expression, I couldn’t figure out, if it was guilty or pity. Well, I didn’t want to figure out. I had decided that she is not my best friend anymore.
Shalini led her team with a sense of haughtiness. Her team mates had lined up behind her very obediently. A poet or a person loves poetry would have described the scene in the words, “a shepherd leading the sheep to fresh, green pastures.” However, for a pessimist like me, the scene closely resembled to that of a butcher taking the sheep to slaughter them.
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