The Girl in the Gym

Nostalgia

Inaya had always been a hard worker, and none of the temptations that girls her age faced had ever made her stray. Her single-minded focus was the key to her success, the reason that she was the youngest and the best trainer at Zero Bulge.

It still pained her that some of them thought badly of her. She cast her mind on to the foolish guy who had threatened her, and his even more foolish friends who had dared to accost her. He was literally of no consequence to her, but he had made her feel angry and inadequate, just like the poor orphan girl she had been once upon a time. And that propelled her to even the scores with him. Underlying all that was her deep-seated hatred for the patriarchal male, who constantly sought to undermine women.

She had worried that he would complain about her to the HR but realised that her worry was unfounded. A man such as he would never tell anyone that a young girl half his size had flattened him and his group of friends in a fight. If anyone had cause for complaint, it was her. Even though the HR didn't look kindly upon inter-staff fights, they would have no choice but to fire him over his unprofessional behaviour at the workplace.

I taught him a lesson he will always remember, she thought fiercely. She was still in bed, going over the past day's events, and inexplicably, she thought of her parents. Remembering them always made her gloomy. And she usually countered that gloom by doing extra reps of an exercise to sweat away from the unwanted emotion. But her pensive moods had been coming more frequently and she couldn't figure out why that was. She prided herself on being stoic and pragmatic, but her tightly held fabric was unravelling.

She had thought that the memories from her childhood had finally been relegated to the back, fading slowly. The recollection of fear, horror and hunger were not as paralysing as they had been years past. Those hardships had sculpted the woman she now was – tough, unyielding, strong and determined. She had worked hard all her life, but now, she had this feeling of restlessness. Something was out of place. She would be perfectly happy one second, then annoyed and agitated the next. Usually, her mind was always in the present, concentrating on the task at hand, whatever it was. But lately, the emotions had been haywire; she had caught herself spacing out a couple of times while training. And she had been thinking more and more of her parents. Their faces had been blurred with time, and she couldn't recall their exact features, but their voices were still as strong in her head. She remembered vaguely, the stories that they used to tell her. Something about bridges in the sky, but whenever she tried harder to grasp at the frail threads of memory, she came up empty-handed. It was tough enough to have lost both of them so early in life, but it was even more heartbreaking for her to lose the bits and pieces of preserved memories. She had been thinking of going to Gujarat to visit her childhood home for years, but each time she postponed it. God knows what she expected to find, or not find, but it was as if she was not ready yet, to face her past. The truth was that she knew things would be drastically different from how it was when she was a child. And she didn't want to tarnish what remained of her memories by superimposing them with the present. Maybe the only way to hold on to everything is to keep it in the past, remember it the way it used to be, she told herself. Thus, she cautiously made her way through life.