A Hundred Flukes

Haunts of Bleats and Mehs-II

Haunts Of Bleats and Mehs-II

If there was anything that made little Arnav crankier than he usually was, it was when somebody dared to make fun of his sister's limp. Then there were other things which made him not just cranky but virulent like if his mother was hurt or depressed. He could not understand his mother sometimes, like she always taught him to be happy, to let go, to forgive but she herself didn't seem the kind who were always happy or who could let go for that matter. And then she wrote these depressing poems in her diary that made him cry, not that she wanted him to read them but he would anyway. He was a pretty volatile kid who was cranky and irascible but cried reading poetry. He also cried sometimes when Anjali cried, who for that matter cried a lot bringing her knees to her chin. Sheesh Mahal had several low walls surrounding the terraced roofs on many levels- the colonial architecture, Anjali and Arnav used to sit over one of these walls discussing weird classmates, weirder relatives and lousy films. And if any one of them had been scolded, they'd both sit there crying for the heck of it. On one occasion he jumped down from the wall and fractured his leg so that two could limp instead of one, that had made Anjali cry so much that he became cranky. His mother used to joke that he sulked a lot because he thought he looked really adorable when he sulked and that too made him cranky. He really couldn't understand his mother also because she went to that place she often said everyone has to go one day when he was too young to understand her complex life.

Anyone who knew ASR would find it impossible to believe that the man could cry and yet there wasn't dearth of people who would kill to watch him cry at least once but they never got the privilege. He had very less tears left and although they surfaced at the slightest inconvenience caused to his sister but they merely remained at the surface reddening his eyes without ever falling. Like right now, Anjali looked so sore that had they both still lived in Sheesh Mahal, they would have sat over one of the low walls and cried. Anjali was crazy about her husband, one could tell.

"You alright Di?" he asked her the tenth time since her husband had left, he really didn't know what else to say. One thing ASR did not know how to do was to make a sore person feel less sore. He could worsen it anytime though. But he obviously didn't want to worsen it for his sister, so placing his one arm around her shoulder and taking her other hand in his second, he guided her to a chair and made her sit giving her a glass of water. She sipped water from the glass and looked up at her brother, nodding her head gently and trying to form a wan smile. She badly wanted to reassure him, they were a strange pair of siblings with always the one upset trying to reassure another instead of having it the normal other way round.

"I am fine Chotte." she said handing him the half empty glass back. And Arnav knew she felt better for she called him Chotte when she was teasing him and she wouldn't tease him if she wasn't feeling better. Her smile widened a little more and he realized that the source of it was something behind him. He turned to look at whatever was making his sister smile and saw her walking towards them in her usual jumpy gait, her doe eyes looking everywhere but him and the ends of her red dopatta flying behind her reminding him of all the times her dopatta had flown into his face. That wisp of a fabric had a mind of its own, what annoyed the heck out of him was the thought that it must then fly into any random guy's face. No way, he thought, for some insane reason he wanted her dopatta reserved for him and that drove him crazy. He saw a concerned smile flicker across her lips as her eyes met his sister's gaze and he remembered that his sister was smiling at her. Why, he couldn't guess, maybe Ms Khushi Kumari Gupta had a funny face, the kind that amused the likes of Anjali, only that he didn't find it all that amusing, he found her face to be extremely kissable in its entirety, add to that, the wisps of hair that often managed to escape her braid and bounced over her forehead, he felt his fingers itch so bad to tuck them behind her ears that he strode away from the scene trying to remind himself that he had a girlfriend.