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.