The girl sits and stares at the others that have come. There
is an awkward silence in the air. The kind of silence that sounds busy to those passing outside the room. The strangers sit facing each other, trying very hard not to stare at each other. She feels like apologizing to all of them.
Opposite her sits a girl with immaculate nails painted a fuchsia pink. Her own hands however look like work. Anyone can see dish soap and phenyl in the brittle looking fingernails. She wonders if average people are able to think intelligent
thoughts. She wonders if the fact that average thoughts of average people
projected intelligently by writers is what results in pseudoism in the same
average people who cannot express themselves without sounding moronic.
Privately, she believes that it is all a farce and that she wouldn’t be
surprised if one day it all turned out to be whatever she thinks. She believes
that people give up at a certain age. She has seen it often, on faces at bus stops and in her office. There is nowhere to go for some people once they become adults.
When she walked into the office there
were women strutting around in high heels. They looked busy and important. The
girl tried to read her book and forget that she had turned up in kolhapuri chappals in a place where women were wearing shoes that belonged to companies
with names. She thought it sad that her chappals didn’t belong to any company. It was ironic that the name of a company would trump that of a city.
As she gets up to retrieve her bag at the door, she catches a
glimpse of herself in the mirror on the opposite wall as she passes it. It’s as it always is. Sometimes
she is too good for the places she strides into in maroon heeled shoes, and
sometimes the places are too good for her in her old chappals. It strikes her
as ironic that she puts in her best efforts for places that don’t need them.
She has secret contempt for the places that she finds awesome, as if she
resents that effect that they have on her.
It occurs to her one day that perhaps everyone thinks the
way she does, and feels the way she does. She feels a pang of jealousy and
sadness. This is the one thing she feels sets her apart from the human race and
the realization that every other being may have it too makes her feel
small. She wonders what it will be like
when she is older. She feels that in her country life never really begins.
People take the plunge at an age they set for themselves and plummet headfirst
to the bottom so that they can spend the rest of their lives crawling up into
tiny crevices of ecstatic victories. They remember this when they slide back
into the gaping holes of defeat and quote it for the rest of their life as the
inspiration for positive thought.
She wonders if worry permeates the air in all rooms in all
households once it is unleashed. She believes her skin is permeable. She feels
weighed down with all that she has seen and heard. There is a window in the
room. She can see a tree outside with a bird on the corner of a branch. She
watches it for a while before picking up her bag and deciding to leave.
