Rewind

One

One

Maya could hear a distant voice cutting through the heavy blanket of sleep. The voice was one she knew.

“Maya? Maya, it’s six-fifteen. It is time to wake up.”

She kept her eyes closed, though she was wide awake. She would have usually jumped out of the bed, but today, she had to be careful. She waited for the pain, which her body had lost temporarily to sleep, to sear through her leg and head, but it did not come.

She felt a hand pat her head gently. “Come on, child. You’ll be late for school.”

School?!

She was thoroughly confused now. Her eyes opened with great difficulty and instead of the white walls of the Infirmary, her eyes met with the familiar walls of her hostel room.

“How did I get here?” she muttered, running her hand through her, which she realized was longer than she remembered it to be. Hadn’t she cut it a week back just to spite him? Then she remembered.

 “You already forgot you joined here did you?” asked Nahla Akka, her house-parent, with an amused look on her face.

She was Lebanese and had skin smooth as cream and light brown hair curling into ringlets.

“Joined here? What do you mean?” she asked skeptically. It’d been seven whole months since she’d arrived in this boarding school.

“It’s your first day at Gemstone Boarding…” Nahla Akka said, her smile widening further with amusement.

She stared at her as if she had lost her mind, as she walked to wake the others. She blinked perplexedly at the surroundings and saw girls, some of them bright-eyed, in contrast to the ones with puffy red eyes, were scuttling hurriedly into the large bathroom that consisted of four bathrooms and four toilets. She remembered the scene unfolding in front of her... Preethi was staring desolately outside the window, Zia was lying on her bed, an arm across her eyes and Nahla Akka bent over her trying to shake her awake. Megha was folding her red skirt slowly while looking outside her window.

The whole thing felt like a replay. Déjà vu.

She stared at all of them, not understanding whether what she understood so far was right or if she was misunderstanding the whole scene. With apprehension and nervous excitement, she looked at her watch and stared at it for a few seconds before reeling in shock.

1st Jun’13  it said. First day of school.

The last time she fell asleep, she was sure it had been January, the 2nd.

*

The room was a large rectangular one with dark brown wooden beds separated by windows lined up against its length and cupboards lined up against its breadth. The entrance to the room separated two beds from three and the wall one faced as soon as they entered the room was lined up with six beds. Every bed was separated by a long window about one and a half meter in their width. The bathroom was set in the wall to the right of the entrance and separated three cupboards from two.  The walls of the room were white in color and the room looked unusually bright for a cloudy June morning.

Maya walked into the bathroom and turned to the right, where a long sink made of stone was attached to the wall and above the four taps, was a slab of stone, presumably for storing their toiletries. Maya reached out for her toothbrush but grasped only empty air. She blinked in confusion, realizing her toiletries must be in her suitcase.

As she walked to her unpacked suitcase, puzzling over it, she was stopped in her way by a plump girl with frizzy black hair and thick glasses, grinning at her. Her face was red with crying. “Aren’t you a heavy sleeper?”