Memories in gold against a purple sky

Equal (Venky-Shreyas)

Shreyas remembered the time when he'd first come into the KKR camp. 

Everything about his teammates had seemed more irritating to him that it should have. Like Rinku and Nitish's constant fighting on the field about sixes and outs. Like Venky and VC jabbering in Tamil. Like Venky's habit of barging into his room and inviting him for walks out of the blue.

The whole thing...it wasn't a memory he liked to recall. But it wasn't a memory he could discard, either. He could not forget how a bunch of practical-strangers whom he had treated horribly had constantly chosen to look past it till he let himself open up with them.

Now most of it did not seem annoying anymore. One thing still did though: the Tamil bit.

It didn't drive him as mad as it used to do two years ago, but it annoyed the hell out of him anyway. Venky and VC simply refused to address each other in anything but Tamil, even if they were in a group, and if they got into the groove (which was often), they could talk on fifteen minutes in Tamil without paying anyone heed.

Nitish and Rinku tried to counter that by yelling above them in crude Hindi. Russ and (if he felt like it) Narine reminded the others in loud, grievous tones, "See how we feel when we're shut out by a language barrier?"

Shreyas, however, always took a useless attempt to set them straight.

"It's really rude to talk in a language others don't understand when you're in a group," he griped. "You both are really, really rude."

"Oh--I'm so sorry, skip," Venky would inevitably say, with an apologetic shrug. "Didn't realize we'd switched again."

"That excuse would be believable if you hadn't given that fifty thousand times before," snapped Shreyas. "And will you stop calling me skip?"

"I keep forgetting," said Venky, incorrigible as always. "You see, it's weird calling a close friend by their full name."

Shreyas ignored the warmth at the phrase 'close friend', because he knew Venky did it deliberately to steer the topic away from Tamil.

"You call Nitish by his full name!" he said instead.

"Not everyone is me to Venky," commented Nitish serenely.

VC rolled his eyes. Suyash made a face at Dre.

And the topic was changed. Every time.

__________________

Shreyas griped away for the first two weeks of the camp, and there was no change at all in Venky and VC's behaviour. If Shreyas stomped away sometimes, both of them came after him instantly. Venky apologized. VC stared at him owlishly till he relented.

"I will throw you both out of the hotel next time," Shreyas threatened ten times a week.

Venky fell to his knees laughing.

When Nitish got his finger broken while fielding in the first match and had to stay back while the team travelled to Bangalore, Venky became even more obnoxious. He seemed to possess the master key of every room (Chandu sir's favour, everyone suspected) and he strode in without knocking absolutely any time of the day.

"What are you watching?" he'd ask, all cheery, like he hadn't pissed Shreyas off with his Tamil and his pranks earlier.

"A movie," Shreyas would try to say, discouragingly.

"I could have guessed that," said Venky. "If you're watching something, I could take a clever guess that it's either a movie or a web series. I meant which movie?" 

"Not a Tamil one," said Shreyas nastily, "so it's outside your zone of interest."

"Ah, skip, eight of my top ten favourite movies are non Tamil." Venky slipped into the couch beside Shreyas uninvited. "Oh, you're rewatching Hera Pheri, it's in my top twenty!"