Party And Prejudice

1. Opening On The Way

Riya was climbing fast. Zoya too was hobbling up the rocky mountain path with some effort. I was way behind them as I struggled to move myself upwards along with the luggage fastened to my back. Also, I don't get along well with the law of force and acceleration.

Yeah, there's so much that the eternally brilliant Mishti Kanwal sucks at. I can't even climb into the bathtub at my home properly, forget about climbing the Western Ghats.

My hands began to sweat as I tried to clamber up. Enough of this shit, I decided. I released my grip from the rock I was holding onto and fell headlong into the valley.

I woke up as the Innova came to a halt with a massive jerk.

All of us jumped in our seats.

My boyfriend Reyansh opened the door and leapt out. Riya frowned as she sipped her fourth Fanta bottle.

"Come on man! Couldn't you control it for another few hours?", she said.

"It's not that", Reyansh said going around to the rear of the car "I just thought....I was right!", he said triumphantly, "We have broken down uncle", he told Kichu bhai who was driving.

"Oh God! First the AC, now the engine itself. We should've hired some other car", Riya said.

"We just entered into Tamilnadu border and madam already thinks she's Nayanthara", Zoya said. Maya and I laughed long enough to make Riya chuck her Fanta bottle out of the window.

"So much soda! You're going to get acidity tonight, see", I said grappling in the seat for some more space.

The Innova had seven people in all. Me, Riya, Zoya, Reyansh, Maya, Joshua and Kichu bhaiya who was driving us all the way from Mumbai.

We were headed to this resort in Ooty because my friends Riya Dixit and Zoya Fakhri had signed all of us to work as volunteers for a children's welfare camp which was conducted there every summer.

I still don't know why I agreed to do this. It was only because tbe others were all for it and I couldn't think of staying back without them. It was the first time I was going to South India and I'd heard so much about Tamilnadu. But I would've been more excited if the prospect of work hadn't been there. Because honestly, who wants to spend the last few weeks before college, doing a volunteer job?

Reyansh had insisted that it was the only way we would be allowed to go on a trip by ourselves.

Which was true.

Personally, I didn't feel mom or dad would be inclined to let me go on a Goa vacation with my friends. But still, I would've preferred to just stay at home till college started.

Two weeks back, Riya's mom was down with a surgery and so me, Riya and Zoya moved our meeting base to my house. Unfortunately, my own mom and dad did not the share the same notions of new age parenting as Mr and Mrs Dixit.

My parents had got fed up of Riya and Zoya practically living in our house.

"They're not staying for the night, are they?", Dad who couldn't bear house guests, would ask me every time I announced that Riya and Zoya were coming home that day.

But my parents weren't exactly at fault. The chaos that Riya made alone was enough to challenge the mayhem at the Crawford fish market in Mumbai. Anybody would be terrified to have her at their house. I always felt Riya's own parents had her at their house only because they had given birth to her. And anyway, no children's home would have admitted a hyper specimen like Riya.

So after all this, when Reyansh came up with the offer of the volunteering at the children's camp in this South Indian town, my parents were understandably upset.

Riya's mother and father, Zoya's mother, Zoya's aunt, Reyansh's mother, his father, his stepfather...all these people had to descend in our living room to coax my parents to agree to send me.

To be honest, I actually felt like agreeing with my parents. I wasn't interested in the working part at all. I'm terrible with kids for heaven's sake! I just skulk in the background whenever we come across kids. I can't even ask their names or which class they're in. How on earth am I supposed to work with them?

We were all over eighteen and perfectly capable of taking the flight by ourselves but thanks to Riya's argument that air travel would not offer much of the 'adventure' factor, all of us were crammed into the Innova that Riya's dad had arranged with his trusted driver.

It was a twenty-one hour journey, according to Google but we had already surpassed twenty four hours, thanks to someone wanting to stop every once in a few hours to eat or pee or just enjoy the fresh air.

I didn't know whether we were on a road trip or we were actually headed somewhere. At this rate, it looked like we would reach Ooty only by the end of that month.

The Innova that had magnificently sped across Kolhapur, Davangere, Hiriyur, Srirnagapatna and Mysore in the last one and a half days seemed to have finally decided to make a fuss.

I was irked with all the chaos. I had thought it was only fair that I felt I deserved to just binge eat and sleep and watch Netflix till college started.  I mean, these are things that I have mostly sacrificed to get all the good grades I did in school. But my best friends wanted me to abandon those few weeks too and go to South India and work in a resort.

Were they crazy? Oh yes, they were.  But my life would be nothing without them.