Yaara Tere Sadke
I was sore. Somehow even the reason for me sitting there feeling nothing seemed like an old haunting nightmare. Though the silence around me told a somewhat different story. It was not the first time I had heard him say something mean to me. You couldn't expect anything otherwise from him. That caricature on the class black-board. Those cheeky clichd arguments in D-class. That comment in the corridor. It was a part of who we were to each other - hateful and lethally attracted. Where did the latter though come from I wondered. The silence around was getting mournful now. I was a little less tolerant to sorrow. I picked myself up and backtracked myself to someplace a little less silent. Maybe it was the repetitive ringing of his words to me that hurt me like a migraine, but all I knew was I was sore enough to not know how to put my one foot after the other. Somehow I did manage to escape the place, though not my horrors, he sat there at the bottom of the old winding staircase towards the abandoned attic of Royal as I came down from my hiding place. When we were kids this place was as mystifying as the Hogwarts Castle, now it equaled some horror out of a Shakespearean play. While getting out of this place wouldn't be possible without crossing him, I wondered if he'd even bother to look up.
"Keshav." My breath, my voice, and my "greater" judgment failed me. Though it sounded alien to me, so different than the familiarity of 'stoneface' on my tongue, it seemed like the right way to start.
"Mood nahi hai, Chic... Kiya." My name from him sounded hundred times more stranger. Looking out of the small ventilator window next to me I realized I had sat down next to him on the same step.
"This time you hit home, you know?" I whispered. My family, my non-existence in front of my sister, my ego, they were far more materialistic to hurt me enough to make me think. But this time he had pierced through for the first time. And he was right, I didn't know how to feel, to care.
"You know, kisi ko swimming sikhane ka best way kya hota hai?" He asked. I wasn't baffled. Somehow I knew what he was talking about.
"Nahi."
"Use seedha swimming pool mein dhakka de do." His eyes are brown. Not the warm chocolate brown, but the dark espresso brown that burns your throat with its bitterness.
"Agar itni care karte ho toh kabhi ek dost ki tarah kyu nahi sikha ke dekhte..."
"Dosti khairaat mein nahi milti Chicklet. Show me that you deserve to have a friend and to be cared for, and then maybe someday I might teach you to value yourself, like a friend would." He gazed at me once more before deciding on leaving me alone, again.
Regrets make you feel that you're alive. I had more than enough of my share. Glimpsing at him once again while I mused upon in the corridors between classes, determination coursed through me again. That night I had thought about what he wanted to teach me - to value myself. Truth be told, I didn't value myself enough, there seemed no reason to. If I did I wouldn't let ego consume me like it had over the years. If I were to be asked if I valued my life, I'd say if I were to die this second, I'd die without regrets. And that my pals, is the worst answer you would get. Maybe that was when I decided I wanted to love myself, somehow respect myself. I knew it was not going to come to me as quickly as that. I knew it was not going to come to me by myself at all. It was going to take all that he had, to make me smile for myself, not in awe or flattery, but in joy.
Seeing her flee from there in tears would be a strange sight, but not one that I wouldn't have expected from her situation. What was unexpected was that I decided to follow. Somehow I knew he watched me follow Panchi, but that really didn't matter then. The park benches in the corner of the playground were the cosiest place I had found in Royal. The tissues in my bag were going to be exhausted today. If she had looked up to see who had handed her the swab of tissues, it would've momentarily knocked the sorrow out of her. I cringed at the word in my head - sorrow. Hadn't I admitted I was not clearly hand in hand friends with that one emotion? But sitting with her under the laburnum didn't seem to prick me like a thorn bush was underneath me where I sat.
"You need some water?" I fished out the moss green flask from my bag, proud that I carried a common essential commodity with me. It took her some big gulps of air before her eyes became the normal size from the golf balls that were staring at me and she managed to nod.
To quote Washington, for one of the best things he said, in the current situation, would be a mockery of it. Because my friendship with the "little birdie" had shot up like the beanstalk from then on. Somehow somewhere in the shards inside myself I felt pride. It was this pride that made me wish that he could see me now.
Panchi had told me a few times in the past week that I looked better with each day. If I knew any better, she wasn't talking about the way I had begun to comb my now simply black hair, or how I had begun to carry a better bag than one that was supposed to be a style statement. She saw it in my eyes, something I never could, that I was beginning to be true.
Telling her that I loved her most for every little thing didn't seem cheesy. Nor did hugging her fiercely when we met first thing in the morning. Yet having her in my world hadn't changed the world of Royal around me... the brat still hated me, more fiercely than before for "stealing" his bestfriend away. He had stolen her chance at first love, so... touche. And the rest of them still somewhat treated me as Harry Potter under the invisibility cloak. Though I had found a newfound love in hot chocolate, which seemed like summer from the winter of my pure coffee shots... his eyes had changed colour to a warm Cadbury brown.
Now all I did was waited, for him to take my long extended hand in friendship. His lessons for me had begun the day he threw me in the pool, now all wanted was for him to pull me out and teach me. The shiny Royal purple paper that fluttered out of my locker was still adorning my study table in front of me, for the past two hours into the night. Amateur Night had forever been Royal's biggest entertainment event. Calling it a talent show would be a civilized way of mocking it for what it really was - a circus. While a lot of us - Royals to me were a "us" now - took the courage of opening the closet door and stepping on the stage, only a few managed out alive and unscathed. For the risk of sounding Trelawney-ish, I was talking about their consciousness and pride. Accepting to what I had felt over the past few weeks, I was happy to admit I had none worry about being wounded, I had let go of the wrong parts of those.
You take with you to sleep the last thoughts of the day. With me, I took to bed, gratitude for him, for bringing me to my second lesson.
There is a limit to how much noise you can hear before tuning it out of your mind, though it doesn't help ever so little, maybe standing backstage a slot before yours wouldn't be that bad an idea if it wasn't a genre of music you seemed to think of as grumbling trolls. A hand on my shoulder was softer than a feather, thus it was not Panchi. Before I turned around the stage lights did blind me. In that one moment I had glimpse of a girl with red highlights, a haughty air about her and a mournful aura around her. A moment later I saw another image in a pair of fiery bronze orbs, of a girl with similar brown eyes who was beautiful for herself to care, begone the world. We've all got both light and dark inside us, what matters is the part we choose to act on, that's who we are. I was going to do Sirius Black proud.
The next breath brought along a moment of intimacy I was much too comfortable in to be shocked about. There are lovesick lyrics about the fingers of entwined hands filling the gaps that we came into the world with, which I did publicly and mentally scoff at before I knew there was some way you could fit into someone like you belonged there. His words in my hair were a sweet tickle of breath on my scalp, though I heard him. My brain was turning the words around pushing my sanity away while it overjoyed me to an extent of nothing making sense - I'm proud of you.
A few heartbeats later, I parted my lips to begin singing. Enveloping my words was a sound far more sweet that was emerging from deep inside me. In my own words I could feel all that had once been alien to me - love, respect, care, trust - all for myself and a few more people. I sang with all my might, not to please the people, I didn't care, but to let the message across to him because these words were the only thing I had, to let him know, he mattered, and only he mattered.
Tu paas mere, jag paas mere
Main hoon hi nahi is duniya ki...
**
The pitchforks and torches are welcome! And so are comments and critiques...
My other OS on TBP:
KD-Kiya OS - Streetlight:
https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/topic/3140246
Panchi-KD OS - Friends:
https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/topic/3145660
TBP OS - Starting Anew:
https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/topic/3141467
Since I started out with D3, If you wish to read any of my D3 works, here are the links.
SwaRon OS - Without You:
https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/topic/1708079
My RiMar OS - Mere Jaana:
https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/topic/1713045
SwaRon OS - Cinderella's Man:
https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/topic/2938373
SwaRon OS - The Last Dance:
https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/topic/2943123
SwaRon SS - Falling For The Beast:
https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/topic/2946173
SwaRon OS - Sharon's Monologue:
https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/topic/2949942
SwaRon OS - Fidelity:
https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/topic/2955588
SwaRon OS - Red Bull Hangover:
https://www.indiaforums.com/forum/topic/2962784
SwaRon OS - I'm With You:
https://www.india-forums.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=3089087
Luv,
Pree.
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