Poles Apart

Chapter Forty-Two (2)

I demand a lot of comments on this chapter! Trust me, you'll know what I mean.

Arvi

Once upon a time, a sixteen-year-old me, and an eighteen-year-old Rishi, our neighbour back then, snuck out of our house with Karthik's help.

I had to blackmail the former head-boy into committing to the plan at first, but soon enough he understood the cause and contributed to it voluntarily.

"Is this it?" I asked Rishi, looking around the neighbourhood. The house was in a colony of independent houses, all identical.

"Yes, we came here this afternoon to check it out," he confirmed. Perhaps because of the adrenaline rush, or because I zoned out, I hadn't picked on the 'we' part of the sentence.

With the proudest grin on my face, I shut Karthik up, when he tried to dissuade me from my life's purpose.

Rishi and I silently got out of the car, and into the sultry summer night. Closing the door with minimal sound, we duck-walked to Prabhakar's house. Well, we didn't have to duck-walk, but I insisted it added to the mood of the night.

We checked the nameplate on Prabhakar's house. The intolerably proud and ostentatious man had mentioned all of his qualifications on the nameplate. Well, he had two, but he had also included his father's name and another nameplate below the previous one had included his son's qualifications, too, however, I knew his wife was a lecturer at a university in Hyderabad, but neither her name nor her qualifications were mentioned anywhere.

I shook my head. How much could I expect from a man such as this one anyway?

"Shall we?" I asked Rishi. I found it incredibly hard to wipe the grin off my face that night, but Rishi's response would help me with it.

"Wait. I've called my friends, too," he said.

I stared at him in disbelief, stopping myself from knocking some sense into him with my hands. "You dumbass," I scolded him. "We're here to egg Prabhakar's house, not make eggs for him and his family!"

"Sorry," Rishi apologises. "I had no choice."

"What do you mean—"

I was cut off by another voice. "Why are you sitting like that?" The voice had startled me from my position as a duck, causing me to fall on my ass.

If I thought Rishi's friends joining us was undesirable, I didn't know what to think of the face as I saw.

Arjun.

He extended his hand out to me. Perhaps, it was a nice gesture, but I was supposed to be cross with him. I stood up by myself, dismissing the stretched out hand of the smug face in front of me.

"What? You're afraid of even touching me?" he teased.

I wanted to ask him to fuck off, but I went for a smile so sweet that he winced.

Satisfied with his response, I looked to his right to see three other seniors; not the ones Arjun usually hung out with, but I knew the others as Rishi's friends from their frequent visits to his house.

"Stop looking at him like you want to kill him," Rishi told me, grabbing the cover of eggs off the road. Thankfully, I hadn't fallen on them.

"What if they wake up from the sounds of the egg hitting the house?" I asked Rishi in a hushed whisper.

The thought had come to me before, too, but I refused to acknowledge it. The danger of being caught seemed far too minor compared to the adventure it would be, to throw eggs at my Math teacher's house.