Page 113 - The World's Best Boyfriend

‘Okay. That seems plausible. What about it?’
‘She’s pretty. Her Facebook, Instagram and Twitter profiles have a cumulative
strength of 764 pictures, with an average “Like” and “Comment” rate of 123 and

34 per picture respectively.’
‘I still can’t see where you’re going with this.’
‘She hasn’t read a book in her life and thinks Africa is a country. Blue, red,

pink, purple are the colours she got streaked in her hair in the past nineteen
months, none of which looked ridiculous on her, in fact they looked very pretty.
In the pictures she wears spectacles she’s called a nerd, an intellectual even. She

poses with books and coffee mugs. The only consolation is the grammatical
mistakes in those comments.’
‘So what’s your point?’ asked Raghuvir.

‘Her fiancé is Harvard-educated, lives in Mumbai and is a hedge fund
manager. He drives a loan-free Audi.’
‘So?’

‘Do you have any idea how much pressure that puts on me, Sir?’
‘No. I’m not in marriage dealings or I would have known.’
Aranya took a deep breath and collected everything she had been thinking in

the past few days into a cogent argument. ‘I ignored her for the majority of my
childhood and adolescence despite my parents’ constant reminders. While she

blossomed like those women in fairness ads, I bloated and battled with my
disease, my weight problem and my facial hair. While she wore little black
dresses to family functions, I wore sweaters and jeans and thanked God for not
giving me polio instead. I was either invisible or someone to maintain one-arm

distance from to my extended family and she was talked about in verses. I
waited for my time to come—the tenth standard board exams. Something that

separates the winners from the losers, and I knew it was my time to shine. I
scored a 97.9 per cent and she came down with jaundice and passed with 43 per
cent. She was the success story, the brave one who battled a life-threatening
disease, not I, who would have preferred getting jaundice for a lifetime over

what I have. Later she took humanities, because she claimed to be artistic.
Imagine! Humanities! A subject where marks don’t matter and people lose track

of how to judge you. How would I ever outshine her? I knew that no matter how