The Zeroth Law

CHAPTER 1: THE BEGINNING

It's your college story, a typical college story that promises you all the melodramas of an eighteen year old college kid's life - may it be raging teenage hormones or budding romance with promise of ever lasting first love or the clique culture or creating and breaking stereotypes or pressure of exams and your relentless urge to make a mark on society or the promising friendship and bromance - it has it all. So being the clichéd story that it sounds to be how can I, the protagonist, be anything out of ordinary. Of course I have to be the female version of R. K. Laxman's 'common man', if he had been a college going student. Seeing how everything till now screams nothing else than 'generic', its quite obvious that my choice of field for graduation would be what every other Indian student goes for - engineering.

As if to save my too much common ass, my parents took pity on me and named me Adira, a name you hardly ever come across in India. Whenever my self- esteem takes a huge hit I go on internet to check how many more Adiras are available out there and when the search comes empty, I reward myself with a satisfaction of winning the Nobel Prize.

Common though I may be like every other brick in the wall, this gorgeous guy walking by my side I am drooling all over in no way is ordinary. He is one of the hot shot jocks of my college, captain of college cricket team - a game every household in India worships as much as they worship Lord Ganesha, has a face and body worthy enough for Calvin Klein underwear model and a brain that doesn't need to take much effort to score a GPA of nine point something. So what, you may ask, is this Adonis like Einstein doing with someone like me? Well, he is my best buddy since first day of my college, which was somewhere around this same time last year and I wonder to the day why in the world does he even hang out with me. Nevertheless, being best friends with a person at the top of the food-chain in college has a lot of perks and I am trying to convince my oh-so extra-ordinary friend with a very ordinary name (he is named Karan by the way, did I mention?) to shower me one of those favours on a fine August noon where we are experiencing clear skies and a hint of sun after two whole months of constant downpour.

"Please Karan, just look at her once. I promise you, she wont disappoint you", I say running alongside Karan to match his long strides. We were heading for cafeteria after two hour long boring lecture about saturation curves (a Thermodynamics thing, don't screw your brows in confusion, no one needs to know what it is).

"She had her chance and she failed to make her impact", Karan replied looking tired with my bugging which had been going on for more than a week now.

"That's because she was nervous, she hasn't done this in a very long time", I was near panting now that we reached our destination and looked around the crowded place for an empty table, chances of finding which were thinner than Karan listening to my request. However, the moment we entered, a loud booming voice of a guy greeted Karan and waved him in his direction to offer him an empty seat at the table. Despite my efforts to butter Karan up, I couldn't help a groan escape my mouth.

"We don't have another option, do we?" Karan rounded on me with an apologetic smile but I could see mischief brewing behind his eyes.

"Just yesterday you shooed a bunch of your juniors away because you wanted an entire table to yourself", I stamped my way to the guy who had called Karan, "so no, I know we have a lot of other options."

"You can sit with Komal and gang if you want. I can see them in that corner", Karan pointed out a gang of girls from our class and I grunted again, not to show my disapproval but to hide my hurt. It's not like he was trying to get rid of me, I know that he was merely trying to make sure the sanity of my head won't be disturbed because of the tall and gangly guy towards whom we were headed, but it hurt that Karan chose 'him' over me today.