"What's wrong with the electricity today?" I screamed at the top of my lungs as the ceiling fan huffed and puffed & then finally stopped.
"Stop shouting. We are not deaf. Don't you read the newspaper?" My elder sister had appeared at the door of my room and she was certainly miffed at the way I had raised the issue of the power failure.
"I know about the power cut," I said quickly "I was talking about the inverter" I raised my finger towards the fan.
"Do you really live in this house?" she made a face "the batteries of the inverter are dead and will be replaced tomorrow."
"Shit" I exclaimed, "2 hours without a fan in this excruciating heat?"
My sister looked at me amusingly "It is five in the evening. You're impossible Anshu" she shook her head and left the room.
I rested my head on the wall, raised my chin a little, and folded my hands on my chest. Though it was hot there, this was my preferred way of thinking whenever I was in some sort of crisis.
And this situation was no less than a crisis.
A week had gone by since my outburst in front of Rashi. We had not spoken since that day. Though it had partly been my fault, and I was ready to accept that, her stubbornness had certainly not helped the matters. Noone had tried to reach each other over the phone or in person. It was a kind of stalemate that was now reaching a stage where someone had to take a step back or forward and with each passing minute, it seemed that the onus lied on me.
I looked at the clock. Just around 2 and a half hours were left now to fill up the choices online for the preferred engineering college from over 70 colleges in Rajasthan. Rashi had not called me so far.
'Let me wait for another hour. Anyway, without electricity, I can't do anything' I thought
Finally, at 7:15 p.m., I was left with no other option. I swallowed my ego and called Rashi.
"Hey, what's going on?" I tried to sound as if nothing had happened last week.
"Nothing much. I was just reading a novel. How are you?" She was in a jovial mood. It was a bit of a surprise for me. Here I was worried over filling up the choices for the colleges where I will be spending the golden time of my adult life and there she was busy with reading some stupid novel. A thought quickly entered my mind. There was no use wasting time over some sweet talk about 'what's going on?'
"Have you filled up the choices?" I asked quickly.
"Yes" pat came the reply "last week only"
I was speechless for a few seconds.
"Hello! Anshu, are you there?"
"Wh ... which college?" I asked
This time she went silent for a couple of seconds.
"Anshu" her voice went from cheery to dead serious in a span of few moments "I had already told you"
I disconnected the call instantly and threw the phone on the bed. A huge rage had built up inside me. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. I had been in a fool's paradise for the whole week. What was I expecting? A Whatsapp message diverted my attention towards the phone. I thought that it might be a message from Rashi, but it was one of the stupid forward in the family group. Then my eyes noticed the time. It was 7:40 p.m.
I was brought back to the earth in a jiffy. I had only 20 minutes to fill up the choices. Putting my anger and frustration aside, I quickly turned on my computer. Unexpectedly, the site had become too slow. Perhaps, there were a lot of others like me who had chosen this final hour to mark their choices. By the time I had logged in and moved to the page where choices were to be entered, it was already 7:50 in the clock.
'Damn!' I had started sweating even in the presence of AC. I quickly opened the pdf file containing the codes of the colleges and the engineering streams. For the next 10 minutes, I forgot everything apart from what I was doing.
I slumped into my chair 15 minutes later after the final submission. Thankfully, there was no last-minute drama. The only thing I was worried about was whether I had filled up the stream choices correctly.
'What I had done today could have been done last week too sans any drama. In the end, I will be going to SLC college only.'
That was my thought that evening. I didn't know then that my destiny had some other trick up its sleeve. Merely 15 days later, on a crazy summer evening when the temperature during the day had breached the 40 degree Celsius mark, my father summoned me in the drawing-room and asked me a peculiar question
"JEC, which engineering college is this?"
To be Continued …
This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
