Our Life On Replay

Chapter 2

When you belong to Bengali families, it is very common that you would have to share your house with your other family members. This could mean probably, your father’s younger brothers, his sisters, etcetera, and etcetera. With five people in the house, three rooms were shared. My sister and I shared one without any difficulty: this was good for me since I am quite afraid of the dark. The other bedroom was shared by my parents and the remaining one was occupied by my Baba’s 18years old brother, Nasir. He and I were like buddies, also due to our age gap of only 4 years. He compensated for the brother-friend I never had, yes quite disturbing to imagine. I’d spend hours listening to him talk about these girls that he saw outside his campus that day, how he approached one of them, all these teenage stories that somehow made my tummy tingle as to when that day would come when a boy would notice me. Notice the little things about me, you know, the kind that happens in the movies? I honestly blame the movies that we watch these days, the kind where the girl is so perfectly imperfect and always ends up finding her man in the least expected places, and of course the fairytale ending. I instantly brushed off the thought and put myself to sleep, but before that I turned around to find the clock ticking at 9.30pm; with a long sigh, I consoled myself saying ‘one day, I’ll be up till 12 and Baba would not even know’

School was far from where we lived; took almost an hour to go, which also meant waking up at the first ray of dawn. However, before I could wake up, Ma was already done packing lunch and almost on the verge of screaming me awake. Baba was standing in the hallway, which was my cue to wake up, Baba always scares me, it does not take seconds for Baba to fire up. Washing the sleep off my eyes, I opened my small wardrobe to find a pair of tight fitting bell bottom jeans and a long loose t-shirt. I was very conscious of my flat ass, that Ryan embedded onto my head; though sometimes I wish I were more like those skinny, perfect-bodied girls who carried off western style clothing so effortlessly. Before heading off to breakfast I glimpsed at the mirror for the last time just to change my t-shirt and instead to put on a long kameez because it made me feel uncomfortable to think Baba might notice the tightness of it. Baba always kind of scared me.

School was sometimes like an escape for me, from the bounded walls of my home, the glaring look of Baba, “When will I find eternal escape?” I sighed to myself as I climbed up the stairs to class.

“Hey babe, how have you been?” exclaimed Sharmin. Here she was, my best friend, girl-crush, she pushed back her long light golden streaked locks. Not an inch of make-up, yet she was so darn beautiful! I pushed off my laziness and went to hug her, as tight as I could and then before I could enjoy her hugs, came thrashing in Ryan, “You do know Sharmin isn’t into you right? I mean it’s you..” At that moment, I swear if Sharmin had not let me gone, I would have punched the living hell out of his bloody face. How on earth can someone be so disgustingly annoying?

I let it go, I mean what harm can ignorant, dumbass do to me? The farthest he can go is becoming a stripper, that too if the season is very bad and God stops making gentlemen in the upcoming years. Yeah I kind of smirked at that thought; Sharmin got me, she always gets me; she is my person after all. Sharmin always kind of new how to make my day, we’d spend hours on the unfinished floors, talking about her encounters with the hundreds of guys who were crazy to date her. How she really did not care and only wanted to be loved by Tomal.

You see, it is from Sharmin I realized that men can actually be very selfish, men can use you, men can use your body and men can make it seem the next day that nothing has happened. I realized it through her but I was too naïve to imagine myself in it. After all, it’s someone else right?