Diary of a Sanka Devi

Prologue

The story I'm going to tell you is that of a girl. A girl who met a boy (but he was not just any boy, no he was not, he was the one). A girl of many names, she went by Titaliya, Parmeshwari, Pagal and for the purposes of our story? Sanka Devi. And while she went by all of these names, she was most commonly known as one Khushi Kumari Gupta from Gomti Sadan in Lucknow (and this is the place to where her fanmail would one day be addressed).

For all intents and purposes, our heroine was an ordinary young girl. Her parents told her she was pretty, and she knew it must be so, for parents never lied, and she did well in school. She was polite and well-mannered, a pleasure to be around. Then why didn't he like her? He being Arnav Malik, an older boy she went to school with. She had heard the whispers about him. That when Mr Desai would call on him in class, he would always know the answer, even if he hadn't been listening. ... Even if it was a math question. She wasn't sure what it was about him that intrigued her more. His awe-inspiring ability to compute numbers in his head or that he seemed to be the one person she knew who didn't find her absolutely adorable. Not that, that mattered to her.

.... But why did he not? She just wanted to know that much.

'There you go, Sanka Devi,' a voice that sounded suspiciously like Buaji's piped up in her head, 'leave that poor boy alone.' Her lips twisted into a grimace as she imagined the scolding she would have gotten if her aunt could have read her mind in that moment. She would have indeed told her to leave Arnav Malik alone though, if what she had heard about him was true, poor was hardly the word to describe him. The Malik family were renowned through Lucknow for their textile business, living up in the grand Sheesh Mahal that she and Payal would take side routes to catch a glimpse of occasionally. To an eleven-year-old girl, the grand house was no less than a castle out of a fairy tale, and Arnav its prince. In the stories her mother would tell her before bed, the prince would always marry the beautiful, obedient girl who listened to her parents and ate all of her dinner. Khushi Kumari Gupta did all of that. Therefore, the prince would have to marry her, but first, he'd have to speak to her. And for that... she had a plan. Young Arnav Malik, the ice prince who lived up in Sheesh Mahal on the hill, had no idea what fiery storm was headed his way.

... But don't all the best stories start out that way?