Right Here Right Now

by Nikita Singh

  But that’s not what I’m looking at. Harsh is wearing a black button-down shirt, and I don’t know what it is about that black shirt. It just does something to him, makes him look completely dashing. I can’t stop looking at him. I look majorly underdressed in my plain yellow jeans and white tank top that has a print of a girl wearing huge sunglasses and smoking a cigarette on it.

  ‘Hey,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, hi, Kalindi Mishra,’ he looks away from the ancient car and turns his complete attention towards me. It’s just unfair. When he pays this much attention to me, I feel all squirmy and like, I do not deserve this amount of notice.

  ‘What’s up?’ I ask.

  ‘I was just looking at this car here. Don’t you think it’s adorable?’ he questions.

  ‘Umm, I think it’s pretty . . . old and rusty and unreliable. But yeah, adorable. That too.’

  Harsh laughs. ‘You’re just judging it by its age and current appearance. When I see it, I see a car that has spent its lifetime with a family. The model is over twenty years old and it is well-worn, which means it was used a lot. Can you imagine the number of happy memories this car has shared with the family? Taking them to the movies, road trips, annual functions at schools?’

  ‘I . . .’ have nothing to say.

  ‘I think cars represent a sense of anticipation. They take people to places they want to go, places they are looking forward to being at. Constantly. Every time a person gets in a car and drives it somewhere, it is with the intention of getting to point B.’

  ‘That . . . makes sense.’ I find that the experiences of my thirty-four-day-long life are too limited to make an intelligent comment.

  ‘Anyway, let’s go?’ he asks.

  ‘Sure.’ My face has become kind of small. I wish I knew more about the lifetime of cars so I could talk to Harsh about them. I fall silent, thinking about my shortcomings, and about just how much the accident messed up my life.

  ‘I notice things,’ Harsh says after a while, as we walk to his place, side by side.

  ‘I noticed.’

  ‘I also noticed you have a cast missing?’ he motions to my right arm. ‘I felt there was something missing yesterday, but just couldn’t pinpoint it.’

  ‘Yeah, we got it removed a few days ago.’

  ‘You feel better?’

  ‘Yeah. For starters, I can do my hair better.’

  ‘Hair’s important,’ he nods intelligently.

  ‘Don’t judge me! My hair’s like really annoying. It’s cut short in the front and just keeps getting in my face and I have to use a dozen pins to keep it in place and all that doesn’t look pretty when I do it with one hand. It looks like a hornet’s nest.’

  Harsh inspects my head. ‘Definitely better than a hornet’s nest, I have to agree.’

  ‘See? Having two hands helps,’ I prove my point with a flourish.

  ‘What have you been up to, Kalindi Mishra?’ Harsh asks, as we wait for the elevator. I like the way he says my full name.

  ‘You mean since we last met yesterday?’

  ‘Twenty-one hours is a long time.’

  ‘I’ve been reading a book.’

  ‘Which book?’ he asks, genuinely interested.

  ‘It’s called Theodore Boone: Young Lawyer. By John Grisham. Have you read it?’

  ‘I can’t say I have. Tell me more about it.’

  We get in the elevator and he presses seven. ‘Why seven?’ I ask.

  ‘Because that’s where my home is.’

  ‘But we are on the same floor! I mean, our balconies are on the same level and my house is on the sixth floor.’

  ‘Be prepared for low ceilings then,’ he smiles. ‘Anyway, what were you saying about this John Grisham book?’

  ‘It says, Theodore Boone: YOUNG LAWYER on the cover and THEODORE BOONE: Kid Lawyer in all the right page headers. So I’m not sure what to call it. Let’s call it Theodore Boone.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘It’s about this thirteen-year-old boy who wants to become a lawyer or a judge when he grows up. And his parents are both lawyers too. And his friend, April, who’s been his friend since pre-kindergarten. He gets involved in a really grand murder case trial.’

  ‘Is it any good?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Much, much better than my flat narration of it.’

  ‘Your flat narration got me interested,’ Harsh says. We exit the lift and walk to his door.

  ‘You can have my copy once I’m done,’ I offer.

  ‘That’d be great. Which makes me think: we can be really successful borrowing neighbours. You could just throw the book over to me when you’re done and I’ll catch it. You could get DVDs of movies and games from me in the middle of the night if you get bored. It’s brilliant actually. We can have a long-lasting symbiotic, borrowing-lending relationship.’

  Harsh turns the key in the slot and we go in.

  ‘How will we borrow sugar, but?’

  ‘What do you need sugar for?’

  ‘I don’t, but neighbours borrow sugar, don’t they?’

  ‘Let’s make a deal to borrow only things that we actually need,’ Harsh says and I laugh.

  We pass through his living room, walk past the kitchen and enter his bedroom, where Michael is sitting on the bed, playing a video game on a laptop, looking really fierce. Sarabjeet is in the balcony, talking on the phone. I look around the room. ‘Whoa.’

  ‘I know, right?’ Harsh grins goofily.

  ‘It’s like you don’t even have a wall!’

  ‘That was the intention. We got the place repainted and the colour I chose for my room didn’t turn out the way it looked on the placard. Dad refused to have it redone. And so the infinite posters covering every square millimetre of the wall.’

  I look around, trying to make sense of it all. There are posters of all sorts of sizes, shapes, colours, textures. There’s a white one that says ‘THE BIG BANG THEORY’ and has four guys and one jumping girl on it. One is black and red and says ‘TOP GUN’ with half a face and some military looking stuff on it. One is multi-coloured, but mostly yellow, red and black, saying ‘SHOLAY’ with two men and two women on it. I recognize one of the men as Amitabh Bachchan. He’s the one actor in the whole world that I know of. I’ve got a lot to learn.

  ‘This is . . . something else.’

  ‘Why do I feel you’re not saying that in a good way?’ Harsh raises his eyebrows.

  ‘I’m not one to judge. Out of these many, many faces on your walls, I recognize one. There’s no way I’d know if your taste is good or bad,’

  ‘Who do you recognize?’

  ‘Amitabh Bachchan,’ I point to the Sholay poster.

  ‘Aaargh, darn!’ Michael suddenly yells. ‘Sorry. I just got killed in my game because I got interested in your conversation.’

  ‘Hi, Michael,’ I say.

  ‘Hey, Kalindi. What do you mean you know no one except Big B?’

  ‘I don’t know what a Big B is.’

  Nobody laughs at me or makes fun of me. ‘It’s a nickname for Amitabh Bachchan.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah, I kind of lost all memory of people and incidents when I had that accident, so I don’t know any movie stars,’ I explain.

  ‘We must start your education immediately,’ Michael says with a sense of urgency.

  ‘You know what the good thing is about that?’ Sarabjeet asks, entering the room and keeping her cell phone in her jeans pocket.

  ‘There is a good thing?’ I ask.

  ‘That you get to watch F.R.I.E.N.D.S for the first time. I don’t know if you’ve seen it before or not—’

  ‘Neither do I,’ I interject.

  ‘Which is exactly my point. You have no idea what people would give to experience F.R.I.E.N.D.S for the first time again!’

  ‘It’s a TV show,’ Harsh explains to my puzzled face.

  ‘It’s not just a TV show. It’s the BEST TV SHOW EVER MADE. TV isn’t TV without F.R.I.E.N.D.S,’ Sarabjeet lets out.

  ‘She l
ikes it,’ Harsh mutters.

  ‘I gathered,’ I mutter back.

  ‘We need to show her The Dark Knight right away,’ Michael insists, like his life depended on it. ‘There’s a lot to catch up, not enough time.’

  ‘I think she can live without watching Batman,’ Sarabjeet rolls her eyes at Michael.

  ‘Says the F.R.I.E.N.D.S lunatic.’

  ‘Like you are any better. Gushing over a stupid superhero like a little child.’

  ‘It’s better to be a child than watch stupid sitcoms like a middle-aged woman.’

  ‘What did you—?’

  ‘Guys, guys, GUYS!’ Harsh yells to shut them up. He turns to me and says in a lower tone, in a manner of explanation. ‘We don’t have visitors often. The kids get over-excited.’

  I just look at the three of them, wide-eyed. In my short thirty-four-days-old life, I have never once seen seventeenyear-olds acting like this. They have no trouble in the whole world. Sarabjeet doesn’t have to worry about her eyeliner not matching the colour of her clothes or her lipstick smudging, or having the perfect pair of shoes for every occasion. She hasn’t even put on so much as some lip balm. Michael just cares about video games and superhero movies, and I can tell by looking at him that he doesn’t spend hours applying gel to his hair and setting it just right.

  And Harsh . . . oh, Harsh. He covers his walls with a zillion posters and observes old cars closely. He comes to walk me from my place to his and his to mine. He plants fireworks to go off during the school assembly. He tells me I look pretty up close. He wears a black shirt that turns him into a knockout. He plans to get into a long-lasting symbiotic, borrowing-lending relationship with me, as neighbours.

  And they want me to hang out with them. They’re actually fighting over who gets to show me movies/TV shows of their choice first. I can be one of them.

  I am so glad I came over. I could make real friends.

  There’s just one thought in the back of my head, bugging me. I look at Sarabjeet and say, ‘I thought you didn’t like me.’

  ‘Why would you think that?’ she looks confused.

  ‘You know, the day we talked? You were in Harsh’s balcony and I was in mine? I just—’

  ‘Oh, I knew it!’ she shouts suddenly. ‘I remember. You asked me why Harsh was grounded and I didn’t tell you.’

  ‘Yeah, and after that, every time I bumped into you guys at school, you never spoke to me.’

  ‘I get nervous. You were one of them. I thought you were like them.’

  I don’t need to ask who them is. ‘And now? What has changed?’ I wonder what kind of rumours have been flying around school. Did word get out, of the events of the night of Sameer’s birthday?

  ‘Well, now you seem alright. You clearly don’t like them much. Anyway, the thing is: I couldn’t tell you why Harsh was grounded that day, because it is not something you tell someone over a distance of six feet.’

  I am confused.

  ‘Harsh was grounded because—’

  ‘SARABJEET!’ Harsh yells.

  ‘What? She wants to know,’ Sarabjeet points at me.

  ‘Yeah. I want to know,’ I chime in.

  ‘Man, I should never have let you two near each other.’

  ‘Try and stop us now,’ Sarabjeet challenges and comes close to me. She mutters in my ear, while Harsh turns away from us, looking absolutely embarrassed. ‘He was grounded because his parents came back early one day. And they heard voices coming from his room’s computer.’

  Then she stops and looks at me expectantly, like I’m supposed to connect the dots or something. Well, I can’t. ‘And?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh God, kill me,’ Harsh groans, his face still away from us.

  ‘Harsh was . . . busy, engrossed in . . . stuff. He didn’t hear his parents come in. They entered his room and,’ she looks at Harsh with an evil grin on her face, absolutely enjoying humiliating him, ‘let’s just say: he was in a hurry to zip up his pants.’

  Now it dawns upon me. From where I’m sitting, I can’t see Harsh’s face, but I can bet my face has turned even redder than his. Sarabjeet and Michael laugh loudly, while I blush and Harsh gets annoyed.

  ‘What? It’s only normal. Find me a seventeen-year-old boy who doesn’t do it and then we’ll talk,’ Harsh defends himself, heatedly.

  ‘Still. It doesn’t make the story any less hilarious!’ Michael jokes.

  ‘Sure doesn’t,’ Sarabjeet adds.

  Once everybody returns to a more normal state, we vote on a movie (I just second Harsh’s vote, the least I could do after embarrassing him so much) and shut all the doors and windows, draw all the curtains and watch it in silence.

  It is an animated movie called Up which is about an old man who wanted to be an explorer as a kid, and after his wife dies and some builders want to run down his home and build a mall or something on that land, he makes the house fly, with three hundred thousand or so balloons and this small but fat boy scout gets trapped in the house too, and thus is added unintentionally in the old man’s journey to this Paradise Falls that he had dreamed about going to. There is a large bird called Kevin and a lot of dogs who can talk and a very dangerous villain, who is also an explorer.

  The movie makes me cry at three different places, and gets pretty intense by the end. It is awesome.

  Afterwards, we hang around for a little while and talk about the movie. When everybody gets ready to leave, they say ‘see you at school tomorrow’ to which I make a face. Harsh asks me why I don’t come to school and I don’t tell him the details, but just that I had a fight with them and I don’t have any friends. At that point, the three of them insist that I can hang out with them and make me promise I’ll come to school tomorrow.

  We take the stairs and part ways. Sarabjeet and Michael take the Metro to their respective homes again. Harsh walks me back home again. As I wave goodbye, I have a wide smile on my face. I was worrying for nothing. Today has been better than I could have hoped for. I look forward to tomorrow.

  Sixteen

  6 MAY 2013

  I spot Harsh waiting at the bus stop. It takes me thirty-three steps to get to him.

  ‘Kalindi Mishra!’ he says, as a way of greeting.

  ‘Harsh,’ I tilt my head to the side happily.

  ‘What a pleasure to see you.’

  ‘Only, not really. You knew I was going to come.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I cannot feel pleasure seeing you here,’ he explains.

  Before I can think of a response, bus no. S-21 comes to stop in front of us. Once again, we step back and let others board it before getting in ourselves. ‘I’ve arranged for a seat to be reserved for you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  When I get in, Bharat and Kapil half get up from their seats to let me know where they are sitting, as if they really think I am going to join them. I look away and sit with Harsh.

  ‘Hey!’ Sarabjeet greets us.

  ‘Hi,’ we respond in unison.

  She shifts to make space for us. I sit next to her and Harsh sits next to me. We are all very quiet; there seems no need for conversation. Harsh takes out a comic book called ‘Lee Folk’s PHANTOM’ to read, while Sarabjeet and I silently stare out of the open window. Apart for once, where Sarabjeet fights a little with the kid sitting behind us for the ratio of window sharing, we don’t speak till the bus stops inside the school campus.

  I sigh and rest my head against the seat in front of me, while students begin to disembark.

  ‘Didn’t sleep well last night?’ Harsh ask.

  I shake my head a little, forehead still against the seat in front, which messes my hair a bit.

  ‘That’s too bad; we have a strict stay-up-at-all-times rule here at school.’

  ‘Too bad,’ I nod, messing up my hair more.

  When Harsh gets up, Sarabjeet and I follow suit. I rub my eyes and walk with them to class. A few people stare, but I ignore them. We get to class to dump our stuff, and Michael is already at his seat. I sit with
Sarabjeet, and Harsh joins Michael at the seat behind ours.

  During assembly, I notice that Ada and Tisha are not sitting together, and when we come back to class, weirdly enough, only Ada and Bharat share a bench. Sameer sits at the end of the corner-most row, Kapil at the second-last seat in the row next to Sameer and Tisha three seats ahead of where Ada and Bharat are. For a second, I get curious about this division in the group, but quickly let it go. I have nothing to do with them. I should not care.

  The thing about people who’re considered nerds at school is: they study in class. As soon as the lectures begin, Sarabjeet is engrossed in every word that leaves the teacher’s mouth. Her concentration is Yoda-level. I turn around to see Michael and Harsh were more or less like her too. Although Harsh does meet my eye for a second and wink at me before turning his attention back to the teacher.

  The rest of the day goes by without anything of note happening. During the break we go straight to the mess, which is good, because I know they are at the canteen. After lunch, we hang out at this secret hideout, which is right opposite where the buses are parked. We sit on the broken benches surrounding what once used to be the football field. But it was too small and they eventually shut it down and built a new one on the other side of the campus. Now they park the school buses in half the area and the rest is unused and neglected.

  The twenty minutes we spend there are the best twenty minutes of my day. Harsh is, like, really funny and Sarabjeet and Michael fight like little kids. Even though I’m in kind of a sombre mood and don’t really talk much all day, it’s fun to just hang around these people.

  The last two periods are optional and the periods I dread the most. Harsh, Sarabjeet and Michael, they all have to go to Computer Science, while I have to sit alone outside, attending PE when I have no one to play with. ‘Come with me,’ Harsh gets up and says.

  ‘What? Where?’ I ask.

  ‘Just come.’

  I get up and get my PE book with me.

  ‘Harsh, we have to get to class for CS,’ Sarabjeet says, referring to the computer lab.