Episode 3: The Ugly Truth

Miral's school had a morning assembly which everyone hated because it was boring. All the students lined up in order of their classes. Since Aryan and Miral were in the same class, Miral hoped everyday that Aryan would stand next to her. Not on purpose, of course. Just a happy coincidence. I mean, it was possible that the girls would line up and then the boys would line up next to the girls in a separate file and it just so would happen that Miral and Aryan would get placed in their respective files in such a way that they would just be next to each other. It sounded confusing to Miral even in her head, but Miral kept hoping for it anyway.

And Miral had good reason to hope. She had spotted Aryan looking at her. Not the occasional 'accidental' meeting of the eyes, but something infinitely more. He had turned his head around to see her during the assembly, just when the first prayer started and everyone was supposed to join their hands and close their eyes. Miral suspected that Aryan must have thought she'd close her eyes for prayer. The good thing was that Miral never really closed her eyes because she didn't like to pray and didn't even know if she was into the whole God concept. Miral's hawk eyes caught Aryan as he turned and now Miral was living in hope.

Unfortunately, so far she hadn't got what she wanted.

The morning assembly was like this- first there was the prayer, then a patriotic or motivational sing, then the Principal's speech followed by a performance by one of the students. Finally there was the national anthem which was everyone's favorite part because it meant the assembly was over. Everybody agreed that the worst part was the speech and the student performance because that was when all the students had to sit down on the uncarpeted courtyard.

"All students are requested to please be seated", said the Principal in his serious voice. A collective groan filled the air, but everybody adjusted themselves in a seated position.

The Principal's name was Ranjit Joshi but he was better known as Principal Sir. He had more hair in his nose than his hair and his tummy looked like he had tucked a globe underneath his shirt. But what fascinated Miral most was the sheer pink, sweaty glow that made his face look like a glowing turnip but also made him look like a sweet person.

"Today we have some very good news to share", said Principal sir. Miral looked around but saw that Aryan was sitting way behind her. As a last tug on hope, she searched for Piya, but they were sitting in height-wise order and Piya was very short, so she was way ahead in the file. Damnit! Miral didn't know what good news could cheer her up at this moment.

Unbeknownst to Miral's feelings, Principal Sir went on, "One of our students has just received the KPSE scholarship. He's one of our brightest students. Now let me tell you something- this is not an easy scholarship to get. It's a national scholarship and only five students in the country get it. But there's just so much talent in our school, nothing is impossible."

Miral rolled her eyes. She'd never even heard of this scholarship. So she'd been a better student lately, doing better than okay on her tests and actually opening her books on a regular basis at home. But she couldn't dream of a national scholarship. Those things were for the especially smart kids, and Miral wasn't one of them.

Miral heard someone choking ever so slightly. She turned her head by ninety degrees. Sitting right next to her was Abhi. He was shaking his head and murmuring something.

"What's the matter?" she said without thinking. She immediately realized she didn't really know Abhi that much and regretted her decision to speak up.

"Huh?" said Abhi.

 Miral could see Abhi was seriously damaged and hence totally harmless. "What happened?" she repeated.

"Nothing", muttered Abhi, but it was one of those 'nothings' which need a little prodding or maybe even an interested silence to be elaborated.

Miral kept her eyes fixed on Abhi. Abhi covered his face with his hands and said, "You know Sanaa, right?" Miral nodded.

Their conversation was interrupted right then as the assembly broke into an applause. Miral shifted her attention back to the stage where Principal Sir was gesturing a boy to join him. The scholarship boy, Miral thought. Miral knew this boy. His name was Shivram Krishnan and he was a whiz kid of sorts. While the other kids struggled to make it through the school year, he just glided to the future, snagging scholarships along the way. For him, IIT and a fantastic career were just waiting on the other side of the short wall called school. Miral suspected he was a sweet guy too because even though he barely knew her from class nine, he always said, "Hi, how're you doing?" when he saw het in the hallways.

"Lucky guy", muttered Abhi, snatching Miral's attention from the stage. "So Sanaa's your friend?"

"Um, you can say that".

"Did she tell you?"

“She did”.

"I don't know what I did wrong. I always did whatever she asked me to".

Maybe that was the problem, Miral thought.

"I don't know. I was just so impressed by her. She has this cool way of handling everything. Take this for example- she and I have this common friend, okay? So the friend went to her and talked trash about me. But she still dated me. It was only after we were two months did she bring up what the friend said. And she didn't just accuse me or make fun of me like most people would. She was real cool about it. She asked me in this very casual way, you know."

"Is that so?" said Miral, raising one eyebrow. She knew about this incident. Sanaa had told her one day during recess. This was Sanaa's version of the story- "That Abhi guy is such a cheap. He keeps sending me emails and I have this one friend who said he's the clingy type. Like, he's so pathetic, he just hung on my friend's shoulder like a dead weight. And my friend is a boy and it’s like totally a gay thing to do. What a psycho". What confused Miral was that Sanaa had the option of not talking to Abhi, but she always talked to him in this very animated way and eventually went to date him.

Another round of applause. Shivram was on the stage now. He was smiling his usual smile. He had one of those rare smiles that are non-obligatory. It looked like his smile came front just...being happy. And he had no reason to be unhappy. He was the school genius. He wasn't handsome and not the kind of guy every girl has a crush on, but he made up for it by being friendly and everyone loved him. He was the real good guy- nothing fake, nothing out of obligation.

Shivram started with his speech, "It feels great to win this scholarship." He searched for something to say and ran his eyes over all the people in the courtyard. He wasn't one to act like he'd just won an Oscar. Everybody smiled at how unsure he was. He smiled broader and went on, "But it's not like I'm the only one who can do this. A lot of people here can. And you don't have to lock yourself in with your books. I mean, I keep having my share of fun all the time. Whatever I win it's all because of my teachers and my friends and my family, because they're just so helpful".

Shivram said a few awkward thank yous and exited the stage. Miral clapped along with everyone else. A lot of kids got asked up on stage for their little achievements, but they always acted like they were so great. Shivram was refreshing in that way.

Abhi clicked his tongue. "I guess this is just how our lives are".

"What do you mean?"

"The rejections. They happen to us. There are the guys like Aryan and Shivram and girls like Sanaa. The rest of us just have to keep on falling."

Miral sat up straight. "Wait. The rest of us?As in people like you and… me?"

Abhi nodded and it hit Miral like a ton of bricks. Sanaa had once told her the 'Reacher-Settler' theory. It was during Miral's initial days in the school and Miral had asked her something about her then-boyfriend. Miral didn't remember what her question was, bit she remembered Sanaa's answer clearly. "Every relationship has a Reacher and a Settler. I just happen to be the Settler here. He just has to try to reach my level." At the time, Miral had thought that Sanaa was just being mean and arrogant, but maybe Sanaa was just giving out the harsh truth. In that case, Miral would always be the Reacher in her equation with Aryan. It didn't matter if he stole glances in her direction or chanced to stand next to her during assembly. He would always look at her like she was beneath him somehow because he was hot and popular and she was nobody.

Miral heard the sound of het heart break. She was disappointed with herself. Sixteen years of her life behind her and she still had nothing. Nobody noticed her in school and home was an empty, fireless hell because of all the reasons- the reason everything was quiet, the reason they moved from Darjeeling to Mumbai, the reason she had zero motivation to do well at anything. But she didn't want to think about the reasons anymore. She had a choice- be like the pathetic, broken guy next to her or the accomplished guy like the one on stage. She wanted to think ahead. She didn't want to rejected by anybody else. That day, during the national anthem, Miral rejected herself and convinced herself that she'd be exceptional.

Episode 2: Some Things Never Change

Miral's friend Piya was smart and fat. That was the truth and that's what everybody said about her. Actually it was all people said about her because she wasn't all that popular.

"So I'm going to Runtime because my family friend went there and he said it's the best", Piya said.

"Huh?" said Miral. She could be a little distracted between periods, especially since the whole Aryan Kanwar incident.

"Runtime", repeated Piya, peering at Miral from behind her thick-rimmed glasses. "The coaching class".

"Oh", said Miral. Coaching classes are the after-school activities for a God-knows-how-many Indian teenagers. They're places with classrooms and teachers which make the students do lots and lots of hard questions so that at the end of two years,  they're smart enough to get IIT, which are the best engineering colleges in the country.

"The places you go to so you can have all the creativity beaten out of you", Miral joked.

"Yeah, but you could get into IIT", countered Piya.

"Not for people like me. I'm not smart", said Miral.

"Yes, you are smart", snapped Piya, but she didn't say it in a consoling way. Instead, she had a stop-making-yourself-small-and-get-on-with-your-life tone.

"Okay, so here's the thing. Do the Runtime people keep telling you to focus on studying for the IIT entrance because that's the only important thing in life", asked Miral.

"Yeah", admitted Piya in a slow drawl.

"And do they give you so much homework you can't focus on the school studies."

"Um..yeah".

"And do they always give you really hard questions, the ones that only make you feel stupid because you can't solve them."

"Okay, yeah".

"And you think a student like me needs to feel stupider than she does already".

"What? No, no. That's not the point I thought you were trying to make", whined Piya.

"I'm making the point. I get to decide what it is".

"Whateever". Piya shook her head. "We get our test results today."

Piya always cared about test papers because she always did very well on tests.

Miral was about to say something, but lost her train of thought as Aryan entered the classroom. He always roamed the hallways between periods because he had friends all over the school. He mostly came in just before the teacher, but sometimes he was late. Their eyes met, and not in a random way.  He specifically looked at her, she specifically looked at him and then they turned away their gazes before anybody saw. This was how it had been going on between them ever since that day when they met backstage. Miral wondered if the semi-romantic Bollywood dance music had something to do with whatever connect she had felt to Aryan that day and wondered whether playing a song in her head every time she met him would improve their present situation.

She observed Aryan from the corner of her eyes as he went back to his seat and turned around to talk to Ruchi Singh, a very thin girl who giggled around boys a lot.

Miral's nostrils flared up at the sight of Aryan with the stupid, attention-craving attention seeker. As usual, she vented it out on Piya.

"Who cares? You're the genius and you'll do great on the test. Why would you mention it to me? When was the last time a test paper was kind to me?" She didn't even realize she was snapping.

"Your mood swings can be so freaky sometimes", Piya said. She said it like it was just an observation, not so like she was irritated or offended. And that was that- no grudges, no fighting. Just plain old best friends again.

The teacher, Astha Kaul, came in. She kind of bobbed from side to side when she walked and her face was always scrunched up like she was smelling something bad. The class stood up because they'd all been taught to rise and say "Good morning/afternoon, ma'am" whenever a teacher came in. It was run-of-the-mill Indian-school-with-English-as-medium-of-instruction etiquette. But somewhere on the road from nursery school to eleventh standard, the tradition had fizzled out, and now it was just a bunch of students rising up lazily, with the dragging sound of chairs getting pushed back accompanying a few "Good Mornings".

Astha Kaul nodded and everybody sat back down. Miral noted the bundle of papers she had tucked under her arm. Mrs. Kaul put the bundle on the table. Miral already knew what her test paper would be like. An average score circled in red in the top margin, alongside some feedback to the effect of "Can do much better” or something. Miral decided she didn’t want to have much hope.  

“First of all, none of you have done well on the test”, Astha Kaul said, as shee sniffed briefly like a little rabbit and pushed her glasses further up her nose. Miral sighed. Here we go, she thought. This was classic teacher pep threatening to happen. Miral braced herself for the lecture she had heard way too many times now.

Astha Kaul went on. “You all think it’s so easy, don’t you? Last year, only four kids got into good colleges. Only four! The rest of them went to private colleges, and those are just places you pay money to get into.”

Miral wondered if Mrs. Kaul would say the exact same things to the kids who came to study next year. Something told her that she would.

After that, Astha Kaul said the same things that all the teachers said: if you don’t study now, how will you get into a good college and if you don’t go to a good college, what kind of future will you be looking at? Miral thought how much of the things teachers said was effective because she couldn’t remember the last person who found a teacher’s pep talk life-changing.  

Sanaa Riyaaz

She looked around the class and saw that for the three years she had been here, she hadn’t seen anybody change. Piya was the faceless brain. Two years ago, when Miral first met her when she sat two places ahead of her in History, she was the girl who nobody noticed but always did well on tests and she still was the same girl. Shagnik Maity, who had appendicitis when he first meet Miral, was still into anime and manga and spent most of his day playing video games and most of the school year flunking tests and attending parent-teacher conferences because he just couldn’t manage to be a good student or even an average student. Shagnik’s friend, Chirag Hegde, still rated girls on a scale of ten with all the boys standing around him in a circle to hear his verdict. Chirag didn’t appear to know that all the girls knew about his rating system. Miral knew that Chirag called her a four-on-ten, but she couldn’t ask for more because she didn’t think she deserved more. Sanaa Riyaaz was the it-girl. All the boys wanted to be with her and she was a ten-on-ten. She was bubbly and excited all the time and Miral suspected at least a bit of her bubbly personality was fake. She was kind of the female Aryan Kanwar. If the school had a gossip column, she and Aryan would be all over it because they were the people everybody talked about.

And this was how it had always been. People never changed. And Miral never became special at anything, for anybody.

And so Miral switched herself off. She didn’t give a damn to Astha Kaul as she gave out the test papers one by one. She looked down and started peeling off the skin around her fingernails, only to be interrupted by Sanaa Riyaz.

Sanaa tapped her on the shoulder and Miral turned around. Sanaa and Miral were kind of friends despite Sanaa being the it-girl and Miral being the normal girl. On her first day, in ninth, Miral had sat with Sanaa and that was how they became friends.

“Did you hear?” said Sanaa.

“What?”

“Me and Abhi. We broke up”.

“Oh”. Miral didn’t know what to say. Abhi (short for Abhishek) was this really smart, lanky, pimply boy who wasn’t in the same class as Sanaa and Miral but everybody knew him because he went out with Sanaa. Miral suspected that the only time Abhi had plucked up some courage in his life was when he had asked Sanaa out (but he’d done that via an online chat and not face to face, so Miral wasn’t sure if that counted as courage), because Miral hadn’t heard him talk since then. It was always Sanaa who spoke for the both of them. The only thing Miral had ever heard  Abhi say was “Have you seen Sanaa?” and that was all he seemed capable of saying.

“I thought it was brutal”, said Sanaa shaking her head. “I mean I didn’t want to do it. I knew I was hurting him”.

Miral’s peripheral vision gave her a good view of Piya gagging at Sanaa’s words. Piya and Sanaa were from different planets and like everything else, Miral knew this could never change.

Miral didn’t like way Sanaa said ‘hurting him’, but she couldn’t put a finger on why. So she went along with the discussion. “So why did you do it?”

“Because I knew I didn’t want to be with him forever. I mean, I didn’t want him in college. Plus there’s the whole family Muslim thing. My parents would never approve of a non-Muslim”.

“You know what, Sanaa? You keep saying that but you also keep dating non-Muslim guys like they’re toys coming off a conveyor belt,” Piya pointed out. She didn’t even look at Sanaa as she said this. Miral braced herself for a catfight, but it didn’t happen. Sanaa heard Piya, narrowed her eyes and then rearranged her face- all in a matter of less than a second. Miral guessed Sanaa wasn’t in the mood for a catfight right now.

It was true though, what Piya said. Sanaa was never single. She was always with someone. She said her family was very strict about her having relationships with non-Muslim boys, but she kept having them anyways. Miral scratched her head, trying to remember the boys who had preceded Abhi. She couldn’t come up with a single name. It was as if Sanaa’s aura just overshadowed everyone else.

It was Aryan’s turn to take his test paper. He walked up to Mrs. Kaul in his confident swagger of a walk and all of a sudden the whole world swirled into a pink hue for Miral and the only two people in that swirl were her and Aryan. Never mind the fact that he didn’t glance in her direction. Aryan took his paper and scowled before walking back to his place. He was a worse student than Miral and unfortunately, that was another fact that didn’t look likely to change in the near future.

“God, do you think he’s crying over me right now?” purred Sanaa.

“Who?” said Miral incoherently, rudely dragged back to her real life.

“Abhi!” said Sanaa. “Duh?”

“Oh.”

And it hit Miral like a ton of bricks falling on her head- she too could very easily be overshadowed by Sanaa. With Sanaa around, guys would never notice her. And that probably included Aryan. For the first time in her life, she felt a slight but sickening lurch in her stomach at the very sight of Sanaa. It wasn’t jealousy. It was something else.

“So?’

“What?” It kind of came out as a snap. Miral could feel Piya silently applauding her in her head.

Sanaa didn’t note Miral’s tone (or maybe just ignored it) and simply rolled her eyes. “Do you think Abhi’s crying over me right now?”

“Um, I don’t know”. But then Miral thought maybe it was possible for a guy to be over someone like Sanaa. Abhi was a good student and all and he probably had a good beyond-high-school future. Why would he cry over Sanaa?

So Miral decided to buck up a little bit. “You know maybe he’s not crying. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s not like he thought you guys were forever unless he’s, like, dumb or something.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about”, said Sanaa, once again ignoring the acidity in her tone. “You know, I’ve tried to break up with him before and he’s just always so…. I don’t know. He gets all emotional and guilts me into staying with him because he knows that-”

“Knows what?” challenged Miral.

“That he’ll never again have a girl like me”.

Sanaa could afford to say things like that. The words hurt Miral and she wanted to say, “You know what? The world doesn’t circle around you, Sanaa”. But she couldn’t. She didn’t feel like she had the right. She was a four-on-ten. She didn’t get to challenge the hottest girl in school. Despite what Miral had thought all along, she now saw that maybe some things needed to change.

“Miral Rai?” Mrs. Kaul called out. Miral had actually forgotten all about the test. Chemistry was her weakest subject. Sometimes, she made no sense of the aromatic rings and the ortho-, meta-, para- of functional groups. She had tried to study for this test, actually started preparing for it way ahead of time, but she was Miral Rai, the average student, and she didn’t expect anything special.

“How much did you get?” Miral asked Piya as she rose from her seat.

“Twenty-nine out of thirty”, Piya nonchalantly answered.

“Highest in class?” asked Miral, already knowing she’d get a ‘yes’ in reply.

“Up until now it is”, Piya said.

Miral shook her head and walked up to Astha kaul. Mrs. Kaul eyed her test paper and then handed it to Miral. “Do better next time”.

That’s what people always kept telling Miral. Miral took the paper in her hand and even though she had decided not to care much about this, her eyes went straight to the top margin where Astha Kaul always put the marks and remarks. Miral’s heart skipped a bat and she just stood there for a second, unable to believe her eyes. She was also unable to believe that some things were changing after all.

Episode-1: Meet Cutes Don't Just Happen In Movies.

Prologue

  

Miral Rai was your ordinary teenaged Indian girl. Skin color- average. Weight- average. Height- just above average. She always got okay marks in school, which means she never failed but never topped in her class. She had a small group of friends, but most people in her school didn't know she existed. But you can't make out anything from that because not being popular is just a part of being, well, average.

Miral lived with her parents, so theirs was a small family. As a child she had wanted to add a puppy to her clan but that was before she knew that puppies grow to become just like the sharp-toothed creature that had once chased her down the neighbourhood and finally bitten her in the thigh, an incident which resulted in her having to get rabies shots. All of her extended family, with aunts and uncles and cousins, lived far away in Kolkata and rarely visited.

Miral's story begins in the big, bad city of Mumbai. If you don't know, Mumbai is the commercial capital of India with a population of God-knows-how-many-million. Everything is just busy and rushed and crowded and there are big buildings stacked very close to each other. Houses are small and offices are enormous. And the sound of local trains chugging over tracks forms the background music. 

So anyways, Miral was living in Mumbai at the point where her story begins. She was sixteen years old and in the second to last year of high school. In the two years she had spent in her reputed school she had come to realize that she was not very good at making friends and that was why she had very few of them. If you counted her number of boyfriends, you would probably get a a negative number. At that point, nothing interesting was happening in her life.

When you turn to the next page, Miral's story will begin. But don't shut the book yet because it's about an average Indian girl, because as you will soon see, a thing like that doesn't really exist.

 Now Let's Begin...

Miral was in love with a boy. He was tall and dark and handsome, the most popular guy in school. She spent a lot if time thinking about what it would feel like to be with him. He had this bouncy walk and it always made him stand out in a crowd. It was like he owned whatever ground he walked over. All popular high school guys in the world have this quality, but Miral didn't know this at the time and she thought this boy was just so special.

His name was Aryan Kanwar.

Nobody knew how Miral felt about Aryan. Not even her best friend, Piya. For all everybody knew, Aryan and Miral belonged to different planets. She was the simple girl with close friends and little popularity. He was the school hot property who played sport and had about a thousand girls chasing after him. Given these differences between them, everybody just assumed Miral and Aryan didn't know each other.

But that was not true.

Miral and Aryan had met only once, at a school event. It was a dance competition between all the schools of the city and Miral's school was hosting it that year. Miral was one of the kids helping out. Miral was always helping out with things, so she didn't expect this time to be any different. Very dilligently, she put banners on the backdrop of the stage and helped put up the curtains. She also brought the podium to the stage and placed it in a corner that was visible from the audience's side but not obstructive to the dancers. She made a rangoli in front of the stage, which is a design Indians make with flowers and colored powder. Everything looked beautiful and by the time the show began, Miral was exhausted.

But Miral had been wrong. This time was special, because this time, Aryan Kanwar was also helping out.

 

She spotted him backstage after the show had begun. He was standing alone, shoulders square and arms folded over his chest. Miral had seen him before- in the hallways, playing on the basketball court, talking to the dumb and skinny girls who act like school groupies- and every time she had thought he was so handsome. But Miral had never had the chance to talk to him. This time, it just felt like destiny. He was alone and she was alone and they erred separated by a big stage from all those people who thought Miral and Aryan together was a big joke.

It also felt like destiny because the dancers on stage were swaying to a romantic Hindi song from the 1990s. Over the piercing stretch of the emotional violin and the softness of the piano in the song, Miral decided she wanted her chance with Aryan. Her steps matched the rhythm of the song as she slowly walked to him.

"Hi", she said. It was a low hi, but there was a pleasantly nervous undertone to it. She spotted the undertone immediately and hoped he hadn't.

"Hi", he said. He looked at her briefly and then went on to watch the silhouettes of the dancers through the translucent black cloth cutting off the backstage area from the stage.

"So you like dance, huh?" Miral knew it was a stupid question. In her school, nobody really helped out at these things because they liked dance or music or whatever. People like Miral did it because they were nice and incapable of saying no if a teacher asked for help. Some people did it to set a good impression on their teachers. Some participated because they were actually quite talented and wanted the platform. The moment Miral asked the question, she started wondering what category Aryan fell under.

"I don't do it", said Aryan shyly. "But it's okay to watch".

The words sounded so sweet when he said them.

"So, how long have you been in this school?" Miral asked.

"This is my fourth year".

"One year more than me."

He didn't say anything to that. So, Miral went on. "Do you like Mumbai?"

He shrugged. "Kind of."

Even Miral knew this was going nowhere. She took one last chance and said, "So if you're not into dance, what are you into?"

Miral already knew the answer to this one, but it proved to be her lucky question because after this, Aryan just went on talking. He told her about basketball and his last game. He said sports in India presently didn't have much scope, but things could change. He didn't make eye contact with Miral, but that just seemed sweet and shy.

"So do you have any siblings?"

"Yeah. A brother."

"Younger?"

"How did you know?"

"Lucky guess".

Miral asked him more and more questions- his favorite book (Percy Jackson), favorite film (Mission Impossible), favorite game (basketball, duh!) and so on. When she was done with the basic questions, one group of dancers took their bow on stage and everybody did the obligatory applause. It wasn’t all that great a performance, really, because the dancers were doing a Bollywood number and the song was something about a girl asking someone to stick her lips on to his chest with Fevicol. Miral shrugged. She didn’t know how school authorities allowed a song like this, but she had to admit that Fevicol was a great adhesive because she’d been using it all her life  to stick things.

“Okay, so who’s your favorite actress?” Miral asked.

“Huh?” said Aryan, as if the question had caught him off guard somehow.

“Or the hottest star”, Miral elaborated. “I mean, that’s what’s important to guys, right? Guys your age, I mean”.

“That’s not true for all guys”, Aryan said defensively, but he was laughing a little bi.

“I’m sure it’s not”, Miral sarcastically said. “Come on, tell me”.

“What- Why would you-”

“Hello? I’m a sixteen-year-old girl. It’s important for me to know what guys think is hot”.

Only Miral could talk like this in the whole school. Maybe in the whole state, or even the whole country. Miral didn’t know why, but she wasn’t living in a planet where boys and girls are always frank to each other.

“Megan Fox”, said Aryan.

“What?”

“Megan Fox”, repeated Aryan.

“I know, right. I wish I looked like that. But try again”.

“Better than Megan Fox?”

“Megan Fox is not very original.”

Aryan pretended to think and then said, “Katrina Kaif’s pretty good”.

“Yeah, I wish I looked like her too”.

“You wish you looked like everybody”.

“No, it’s just that… Okay, so maybe that’s true”.

They both laughed.

“It’s like God made some rule that only people on TV get to be good-looking.”

Aryan laughed again and nodded his head in sympathy, “It’s not fair”.

“It’s not. It’s plastic surgery”.

“Don’t say that. It spoils the aura”.

At that moment, the vice-principal, Mrs, Perreirra,  appeared backstage. Miral didn’t like her much and she had a feeling the vice-principal didn’t like her much either because she didn’t even notice Miral standing there. She was a fair-skinned lady with short, poofy hair and her saris were always immaculate.

“Aryan”, she said, flapping her hands like a duck. “Oh, thank God. It’s break. We need to give out the food packets to the audience”.

“Yes, I’ll see to that”, Aryan said. It sounded great when he said the words as if he was the most reliable person in the world.

Vice-Principal Perreirra smiled in a way that made people think if maybe even the teachers had a crush on Aryan.

“I’ll see you”, Aryan said and left.

Miral followed him with her eyes. He went to some of the younger kids and pointed at the stacks of food packets. The kids nodded eagerly as if they were hearing a prophet’s sermon. Then, they started picking up the packets on by one and taking them to the audience. Miral wondered how Aryan did it- make people fall in love with him. She also wondered what was in the food packet because she was kind of hungry.

Miral didn’t see him anymore that day because a teacher asked her do make-up on a dancer who was doing a mime-inspired performance. Miral had to paint the girl’s face white and her lips red. It was harder work than it looked because a lot of the backstage crowd kept coming up to ask her what she was doing. Miral guessed they had never seen a mime before, so she kept saying, "You know Batman's enemy 'Joker'? She's doing a Joker-inspired thing today." The mime girl laughed at this joke in the beginning, but afterwards her face was too caked with white paint to muster even a smile.

Miral floated home on a cloud. No, actually she took the very crowded bus no. 511, but it sure felt like floating. She’d done it. She’d talked to Aryan Kanwar and he had laughed with her.

Miral’s mother opened the door. When Miral entered with a smile, her mother asked, “What happened?”

“Nothing”, Miral said, because this wasn’t something she wanted to tell her mother yet. She fought the smile away from her face till nightfall.

That night, as she lay in bed, she congratulated herself. But Miral was intelligent, so something came to glare at her in the face. It was the fact that Aryan had said he’d see her but hadn’t, had never asked her what her favorite book, favorite movie or favorite game was. These facts gnawed on Miral like a rat that you know is eating your cheese, but you’re still hoping it’s not there. He had also not asked her who her favorite hot actor was, but somehow, Miral hung on to that like a ray of hope.