@Indu: Who better than an editor? 😃
Here goes...
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Kal
Palak waited for the furour to die down near the school bulletin board. She was more or less sure of what she was going to see there and didn't fall prey to sense of the urgency that seemed to consume her classmates. When the crowd around the newly posted rank sheet thinned, she walked up and without bothering to search for her roll number, or name, glanced at the top of the list and read:
Class Ten: Second Mock Examination
Scindia, Ansh Y.
Percentage: 94.5
Rank: One
Palak heaved a resigned sigh and read on:
Scindia, Palak Y.
Percentage: 94.2
Rank: Two
No, it was too cruel! She followed her finger in a horizontal line across sheet for their individual subject marks and indulged herself a moment of righteous anger as she found she had beat Ansh in almost every subject and violently cursed the one subject that had dragged her average down, mathematics 88.0%. Oh, and he would gloat, about getting first rank, even if it was by 0.3 marks, about girls being weak in math, even when she had beat him by 4 marks the previous exam! He was insufferable!
As her rage at the impending injustice simmered, her finger, perhaps exerting more pressure on the thin marksheet than was strictly necessary, leaving a dent in its wake, stopped short when she saw Ansh's marks in English, 90.5%. "Not bad, Nangu," she thought to herself, "not bad!" Her mind immediately went to the innumerable nights her mother had sat up, trying to explain to Ansh that there was beauty and meaning in poetry, when all he could see was incorrect syntax and a convoluted use of words. "Why does he use so many words when he could say it in one?" was Ansh's constant, whiny refrain to which Aarti had patiently explained again and again, that it didn't just matter what you said, but how you said it, an important lesson for Ansh, considering it was his dream to be a lawyer.
Aarti was right, of course...about the poetry, but Palak knew better; Ansh didn't need poetry, or maths or any of the other subjects they studied to become a lawyer. He was a natural. If there was anyone that could make a jury believe that the sun rose in the west, it was definitely Ansh. Palak smiled indulgently at the thought of her brother's gift of gab, a gift she had resented bitterly and admired fervently by turns. Her smile widened as her mind wandered further back to the first time they had competed, how he had taunted her about her stage fright, how she had hated him, how it had all seemed so important! She chuckled softly at the memory as she caught sight of her friend, Dhriti, whose concerned expression was swiftly replaced by a grin mirroring Palak's.
"Someone looks awfully happy. I knew it. How much did you beat him by?"
Palak was disoriented for a second. She had almost forgotten where her thoughts had started, the marks sheet.
"Oh, I didn't," she said with a shrug, "He got me this time. Bloody maths. It's okay though. We still have the final exam to go, right? How'd you do?"
Palak looked up saw Dhriti's expression go from bewildered, to confused to downright furious.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN, IT'S OKAY?!" bellowed Dhriti. "Palak, you kept me up ALL NIGHT with your calls and texts, agonising over the possibility that Ansh beat you, going over every exam paper in your head for the hundredth time, wondering if it cost you marks that you failed to mention the significance of clothing imagery in King Lear or drew that pie chart wrong or didn't justify well enough why the arms race was one of the main causes for World War I...and…oh, I don't know! And now you're saying IT'S OKAY?!"
Palak smiled sheepishly at her friend, who hadn't even begun to describe the minute anxiety Palak had felt and amply expressed, "Yeah, it's not like it's the final exam right?"
"That's what I said LAST NIGHT, but NO...YOU SAID that the mocks decide how you are going to do on your boards and if you didn't beat Ansh, you would DIE, or worse, quit school and let your dadi-bua teach you how to become a trophy wife, because that's all you'd be worth!"
By this point Palak's eyes were dancing with mirth, looking at the exasperated face in front of her; she made a heroic effort to control her laughter. Eight years later and she was all too used to this. Nobody really understood the way her and Ansh worked. To put it plainly, they were inseparable...most of the time. They studied together, helping each other, each filling in as a de facto tutor when the other needed it, only relying on others when they hit a roadblock that neither of them could solve (like Ansh and his aversion to poetry!). The family seemed to have learned over time that it was better not to interfere in their study sessions unless solicited, knowing that when they were done, the duo would come out on their own to fill the house with their special brand of laughter and chaos. Ansh would start with his dramatic retelling of mundane events at school, and Palak would interject with her dry, caustic one-liners and soon the whole family would be in gales of laughter. Ansh and Palak, Palak and Ansh: they completed each other's sentences and read each others' thoughts.
But all the camaraderie, the friendship and the kinship stopped completely, twice a year: exam time. From the day before their exams started, the two would start studying separately, being secretive about their schedules and refused to help each other with anything. The family had long learned the hard way that it was futile to try and make peace during this time. When forced into a conversation with each other, the two would snap and mock relentlessly, and before anyone realised what was happening, there would be a full-blown turf war on their hands, and so the Scindia house remained sombre and for the most part, deathly quiet during this time every year, their sister Payal being the only one who remained carefree and unaffected by the tension mounting between her fiercely competitive siblings.
The friction would abate only slightly after the examinations as Palak and Ansh awaited their results, each swearing some dire consequence if they didn't come first, torturing their friends and relatives alike, until the tension rose to a head the night before the results. But miraculously, as some would call it, they would snap back the moment the results were out, once again the best of friends, once again inseparable. They met at the main gate after school on these days, the second rank would buy the first ice cream and the latter was allowed to gloat precisely as long as the ice cream lasted. It was tradition.
Palak sighed. "You want to come for ice cream?" she asked Dhriti, "My treat." She saw her friend give her a look of complete bewilderment, throw up her hands and walk away. Poor Dhriti, she was new to the school this semester, and hadn't learnt the way most of Ansh and Palak's friends had that they were not to be taken seriously during exam time, but Palak liked her and hoped she hadn't scared her away forever. She shook her head and made her way to the main gate where Ansh would be waiting---or gloating rather. "Better get this over with," she thought with a determined smile.
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