The Summer of Absolutely Nothing

5.

I think the concept of having a big group of friends is a marketing gimmick.

It all started with technological advancements, I think. This world becoming a smaller place,and this constant connectivity. Every second of our lives, blazoned on social media. If your exact coordinates are unknown, you’re a social pariah. We maintain the illusion of a large floating group with whom one can exchange ‘inside’ jokes for the public to see. A careless, throwaway ‘miss you’ accompanied by an old photo on facebook, is all that it takes to keep up a friendship - so much easier than actual conversation. No one looks to the nose-picking neighbour for company, instead we choose to foster the illusion of companionship by text on a screen. People reduced to misspelled words, with no voice other than a telegenic whirr.

This makes us choosy, and the nose-pickers, who mainly had the advantage of place, are left out. We no longer make conversation by virtue of mere existence together.

We are a pathetic species.

However, I digress. Complaining about technology is for the older generation to do; I just happen to be old enough to remember a different time.

I brought this up because evidently I have new neighbours.

I was going up to the terrace for the sunset, at around 5:30, a clear slot in my daily timetable now. I was considering a good cry as well. The sick feeling that had settled in my stomach since I puked yesterday never really went. I was getting incrementally panicky, unable to distract myself, as the fear of loneliness pressed down on me. I hate him, and hate myself for missing him. I figured that one way to deal with this would be to go have a good cry; the terrace made a good setting for it, too - to empty oneself out, and be alone with oneself, not lonely.

Unfortunately, I heard voices as soon as I stepped onto the red-tiled floor.

Unable to find their source, I squinted up through blinding sunlight to the silhouette of the upper terrace - the as yet unconquered water-tank terrace.

A narrow rusted iron ladder leading up to it, the small terrace housed the bloated black tank, with a small wall-less space beside it - enough to accommodate about five people. A full one floor higher than the terrace.

I hadn't ever been up there, despite the promise of uncontained freedom it held. My mother’s rather outdated rule. One of those rules made to be broken on the sly, which crossed over the line of logic to motherly overprotectiveness. Yet I never had. In this moment, I regretted it. Someone had beat me up there.

I turned and left, hastily, before they could see me. A girl’s voice, light and articulate, floated after me.

‘Hello?’

I slammed the front door shut, and collapsed on the stool, panting, to meet with my mother’s inquisitive eyes.

Social anxiety:1. Me:0.

*****

I re-emerged from the apartment at around seven, booted out to go buy bread from the small all purpose store downstairs. Descending down the stairs two at a time (I only use the lift on the way up, gravity takes care of things while going down), I had built up too much momentum to abruptly break; and I found myself facing said new neighbours on the landing.

‘Hi.’ said I, flatly.

‘Hi.’said she, sarcastically (I’m not sure what scope for sarcasm there is in hi, either. She must have had a particular flair for sarcasm to be able to inject it anywhere.)

‘Hello.’ said the boy, cheerfully, absolutely unaffected by the unexplained tension in the air.

‘You came up to the terrace, didn’t you? Ran away before we had a chance to introduce ourselves.’ she said, knowingly, with a smirk (I would come to learn with time that this air of worldly knowledge was her preferred facade). ‘I’m Asmita, and this is my cousin  Advaith.’

‘Oh.’

Misconstruing the default blank expression on my face, she carried on. ‘Yeah, he’s not my boyfriend. We come from a big ol’ joint family in B’lore, and went to the same schools. Everyone back at my last school thought we were dating too, after we joined. One teacher even scolded us about it. Hauled us off to the principal before we had a chance to explain. Not that we tried too hard, of course’ she said, with a laugh. ‘Such a typically Indian attitude, isn’t it? If a boy and girl are close, of course it has to about sex.’ The last word rolling off her tongue with the comfort and ease of a pro, when most people spend their teenage years never voicing ‘that word’, their wet tongues garbling it as they read it out in biology class, and later in high school, while whispering at the back benches of class.

I, despite this conservative background, was not amused. One year of college and a lot of adult reading had desensitized me to this form of apparent progressiveness. That, and the faintly trained ring in her voice of someone who had stood in front of a mirror reciting to hone perfect delivery; sex, sex, sex, sex.

I could say it too, with unfeigned confidence. I have no shame in naming my sins.

Advaith smiled, rather unnecessarily, before asking, more perceptive than his sister ‘Going somewhere?’ His eyes met mine, and I suspect that the shopping bag I held was not all that prompted that. Though his question held a faint challenge similar to his sister’s, it was not unfriendly.

‘Yes, down to T-Plus to buy bread-’

‘Oh good, we’ll come with you.’ Asmita took off down the stairs, without glancing at me for affirmation.

I took this opportunity ‘to know thy neighbour’. Gleaned the hard facts - both of them were my age, one year into college; Asmita studying Electrical engineering in SRM University, Chennai (practically a paid seat, she admitted) and Advaith studying the same in SNU, Delhi.

Asmita strode confidently in her platform heels through the mud, strewn garbage and shit which furtively lined the road; past the leering tobacconist/chai wala and his lecherous customers without the slightest acknowledgement. A pinched, pointy chinned face with curious jutting angles,small beady eyes and frizzy wavy hair, atop a skinny figure of average height (bit shorter than me). She did not hold the attraction of good features, but an unusual confident appeal commonly known as ‘It’, in the mid 1900s. This was complemented by a fuck-all taste in clothes - a denim short skirt and a clinging long t-shirt. Rakishly fashionable.

Advaith hung back and strolled by my side. Oval face, set with faint cheekbones, a soft yet strong jawline, brown eyes and untidy hair; broad shoulders, thin, with muscles tightly coiled as rope, he pulled off being good-looking in obvious football-star way. Not particularly intellectual, or very good guy, with those cheekbones. He seemed the stereotypical manifestation of the cool ‘guy’s guy’, the target of every girls’ attraction in school, complete with the bad dress-sense - a faded t-shirt and shorts. The generic genetic lottery-winner who ticked all the evolutionary check-boxes in a modern world.

Asmita, determined not to let the silence fester, touched lightly upon several topics, trying to find one that would evoke my interest. Despite my equally driven attempts to keep up the sullen silence, I found myself warming to this girl, who also engaged in purely hypothetical debates about books and music lyrics. Advaith, who until that point had been maintaining a tactful distance (an action which seemed at variance with his construed character), joined in our literary talk. A voracious reader as well, evidently he had won acclaim in local writing circles back home. Having been a part-time writer before all creative pursuits were sacrificed to the great god of engineering in eleventh, I found myself intrigued. Though I no longer wrote for pleasure, I had evolved into a picky elitist reader of other’s work.

By the time we bid adieu to one another on the staircase, with the promise of meeting tomorrow, I found myself liking these neighbours who took such pains to put me at ease. They spoke of an outside world, with the scope for mistakes and the ability to mess up, where all evidence was not weighed and held against you.

For the first time that night, I pushed away the sick, stabbing sense of failure I felt when I saw everyone in my batch running around being successful, vying for positions in various college teams, while I sat with a pile of rejections in my lap.