Chapter One
Her lips would not utter a word but her expressions would clamour for attention. Her eyes and speech never reconciled with each other after the first time they contradicted each other. Her character was as allusive as one of Jane Austen's prototypical heroines and the glassiness of her facial expressions, as paramount as the author's literary excellence. To count how many times she could roll her eyeballs in all four directions in a mere second is to resolve on burning to ashes your assumption that you ever knew Math.
Our hero on the hand used his tongue to tell what he felt. Mostly he just felt retroactive. His disposition was simplistic and calm otherwise. His line of sight was not as hyperactive as his heroine's. Although the aura about him did fetch him more turning heads than his average looks could garner for him.
She was Sharon and he, Swayum. They studied at the same summer school where their failures at English had gotten them.
* * *
It was a cloudless May morning when our story began. Sharon's new friend Simmi with her new and astoundingly dim-witted friend Rinni followed suit as she stuffed her handbag and water bottle inside her locker.
"Want me to stuff myself inside too?" Sharon asked acidly, smiling sweetly.
"Easy, Sharon," Simmi beamed as she and Rinni moved away from her. They had followed her suit right to the extent of squashing her against her locker.
"Never mind, class starts in exactly ten minutes." Sharon declared.
Sharon had not failed to attempt as much as half a question all her life. It was an outrage to have for real failed to attempt one entire English paper and land in a summer school. This was not going to stain her college application, Sharon had decided. Entering the territory of a clan of failures wasn't likely to be sunshine for her. And it was not.
She acquired a bench in the middle row. It was the third bench and something told her it would give her best view to the blackboard. As students began filing inside the class. She murmured to herself how each was ghastly in their own special way. Eventually she got bored of laughing at her own quick parts and focussed on the doorknob of the class.
She meant to look at it without blinking at all for about a minute. She was mentally scratching off every second as it went. It was fun focussing on the doorknob until a picturesque prospect entered the otherwise domain of the ghastly.
A pair of eyes whose colour was yet to register itself in her eyes darted for a split second at her reflection in the translucent door of the class. That person had not given her the type of look she gave them. Even though Sharon gave a wide variety of her looks to everybody, this was far from her regular.
She was suddenly scrupulous of the fact that she was indeed losing her mind or might have lost it on her way to that fateful school.
* * *
Ye Hai Mohabbatein
