It's 2003, you are 16, and you are in your maths tuition. You’ve claimed your place in the middle of the side-bench and resumed whatever nonsense it is that keeps you laughing like a maniac through those years, and which cement your reputation as an obnoxious, loud troublemaker. You are having the time of your life when in walks a girl who stuns you, and the entire room, into silence.
You are smitten. Your friends notice, they tease you.
You don't know that a year later, you'll hold her hand as you walk through a Pondicherry evening.
But for now, you are just quiet.
The blackboard has trigonometry on it, which you are good at. What you aren’t good at is differential equations. You hate those. But those come later.
Your red bicycle is outside; you'll have bhel puri on the way home, to watch World's Most Amazing Videos on AXN at 8.
Dinner is mom's delicious fish curry with dosas, and you tease your little sister for a bit before your old man whacks you.
You are reading Michael Crichton’s Timeline, a weird time-travel book which you love because you are a bit of a nerd and there’s a lot of shit in it that sounds like science.
There’s a match tomorrow and you make a mental note not to go to your slower delivery early in your over. It tends to get hit. But if you get it right on the 4th or 5th delivery, you are in with a good chance of hitting the stumps.
The book sags, and as you nod off, you think of her.
Life is good. For a while, at least.
Written in December 2019.