Did You Get Your Period?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Now that the words have been said, does it make her feel any better? Does she feel like the pressure's been lifted? Not yet. But she does feel some sort of security to hear it. It feels more real, less imagined, and more tangible. But she knows she needs to get the entire story out. There was no one she could talk to this about but her phone. And so, she did. She conversed with the slim, black rectangle as though it were her most intimate friend. And sadly in enough, in that exact moment, perhaps it was.

And as she speaks, she remembers.

Just another day at the hostel. Shruti sits on her bed with a Biology Module in front of her. The endlessly vast material has bored her out of her mind and the little doodles on either side of the text show that. Her long hair has been tied into an unruly bun and wisps of hair that has escaped fall on her brown skin. It's a sweltering day in Kota, but she hasn't switched on the AC yet for fear of receiving another whopping electricity bill. The hostel owners needed only one excuse to drive up the electricity bill by another thousand rupees and Shruti wasn't prepared to give them that. So, she sits in her rather hot room clad only in briefs and a t-shirt. Her green eyes dart around the room desperately trying to ignore the textbook and looking around for a distraction of any kind.

Until, of course, the ominous knock on her door.

"Beta?" The hostel warden says, as she raps on Shruti's door incessantly.
(Beta: child)

"Ji?" Shruti says, opening the door.
(Ji: yes)

"Beta, your father is here to meet you. He's waiting downstairs." The warden says, looking at Shruti's room suspiciously. She sees the book lying open and looks back at Shruti, satisfied.

"My father? I don't have a father!" Shruti laughs, wondering at the ironical ways of the universe.

"What? He has the exact same eyes as you. He must be your uncle then. Maybe I heard papa when he said chacha? Anyways, you need to come downstairs." He's waiting in the lounging room for you. The warden says, looking puzzled. She beckons Shruti to follow her.

Shruti follows feeling very unsettled and queasy. Same eye color. It couldn't possibly be him. How could it be him? He had been as good as dead for the past eight years. And she had assumed he was dead. Not alive. And definitely not coming back.

The warden opens the door to the lounge room and ushers Shruti in.

The man sits there, his posture nervous. Dressed in formal attire with a plain wristwatch and shoes, he looks like a teacher. He sits there looking nervous and almost queasy. Sweat beads form at his hairline and he's constantly tapping on the floor with his fancy shoes. He fumbles with his watch yet again and his other palm rests on the couch in the lounge.

Shruti felt it was some mistake that the warden had made. That she'd walk into the lounge to look at a total stranger and hed look back at her equally puzzled. Then she'd explain to the warden that he wasn't her relative and he'd confirm the same. Then the warden would laugh embarrassedly before realizing that she'd mixed up the names. Perhaps some other girl named Shruti in the large hostel?

She hadn't anticipated walking into a whole new dimension.

Shruti hadn't anticipated that when the door opened the man would raise his head. Or that the man would stand up so quickly. And she definitely hadn't anticipated that she would be staring back directly into a pair of green eyes. Green eyes that had coincidentally given her own green eyes. Green eyes that belonged to a time long gone and so deeply buried in the past that it felt like an altogether different world. Shruti might have as well seen a corpse actually rise up from a coffin or a person walk out from his own burning funeral pyre. She stood there numb and absolutely stunned. It was as though she'd seen a monster rise from its death. And in Shruti's life, her father was the monster no less.