Elysian

She stares at the white stone floor dotted with uneven specks of brown, black and so many shades of grey she loses count.

She hates it.

It makes her skin crawl, makes her want to scratch her spine, from the inside.

The narrow window doesn't let in much light, but she can see that the sky is a taupe grey.

It is going to rain. It is going to rain since a week but it hasn't.

These days, the sky is forever a shade of grey, sometimes a dark pewter, sometimes a lighter steel.

The weather is not unbearably hot, the kind of hot which causes your back to erupt into prickly heat and makes you want to invent cuss words just so you can curse the weather.

Neither is it the kind of cool and breezy and wet-earth smelling which makes you want to bring out your best smile and smile up at the sky and search for the gram flour in the kitchen cupboard because you want to make pakoras.

It is just a something shade of grey sky and no rustling of leaves with a heavy something lingering in the air which you wish you knew but don't.

She hates it.

The weather is stuck, somewhere in between.

She does not like the idea of somewhere in between.

A pigeon is sitting on the window ledge, staring at her with its calculating beady eyes, head tilted, puffed up feathers in shades of blue and a grey darker than the sky.

"What are you doing, sat beside the window, with a pen in your hand?" it seems to mock. "Fly, see the world, the filthy garbage-thrown-here and a sodden plaster-peeling-off-the-building-there world, take it in, take it all in. And when in doubt, just take a dump somewhere, anywhere."

She hates it.

She is not fond of birds.

She can see the strains of some hard rock music travelling up from her brother's room opposite hers and making their space in her head.

I've been looking at the sky

'Cause it's gettin' me high

Forget the hearse 'cause I never die

I got nine lives.

She hates it.

It makes her want to bang her head or the door of his room or his precious electric guitar on the floor. It makes her want to cover her head among the not-so-soft pillows scattered on her single bed with no head rest. The words are permeating across her brain cells, making her want to pick them out like she picks out the soft gooey onions from her mom's casserole which make her want to puke.

She was more of a jazz person anyway.

Her mother is preparing ghee. She can see its stench floating from the tiny stuffy kitchen to the tiny hall through the it's-not-really-a-lobby finally to her tiny room.

She hates it.

The smell has wrapped itself around every corner of the small house, settled comfortably on the tacky hardback taking centre space on the coffee table and hidden itself among the thin paper backs wedged between Elementary Physics and the Britannica on the floor-to-ceiling book shelf in her room. There is no running away from it, no escape.

She steps out of her small house and walks along the wide empty street lined with trees unfamiliar with the idea of personal space to his.

She knocks on the door of his house, similar to hers, using the intricate Victorian-style brass knocker which she finds out of place in a small Indian city like theirs.

Somehow, she ends up knocking her knuckles hard on the wooden door instead of the knocker. Her fingers quickly turn from a pale white to a fiery red to a mellow crimson to a fading pink to a pale white with a tinge of color.

She hates it.

She knows intricate Victorian-style knockers with imposing animal heads for decoration can't be trusted.

She passes a polite smile towards his mother, busy preparing dinner in the tiny kitchen with innumerable un-labelled boxes of spices, a pendulum clock on the wall which tells time like a ticking atom bomb, and their fat family cat-Bert, for company.

She knocks on his door, foolishly using the same bruised hand she knocked on the wooden door with, that has the intricate Victorian-style knocker which is a trap for fingers of people like her.

She can hear shuffling inside and seconds later he is standing at the door with a smile on his face.

"Hi" he breathes.

"Hi to you too" she breathes too.

He lets her in his room and she can see the single bed with a fancy headrest, it is like the landfill some kilometers from their neighborhood. She can see his laptop's charger splayed across the bed, along with some crumpled balls of paper and a big crumpled ball of what he calls his favorite duvet. She spots the bookmark she made for him using her favorite paints tucked between the pages of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy which she had gifted to him on his birthday two weeks ago because she had loved it and knew he would love it too.

She points to it with her chestnut brown eyes and senses that he realizes what she is looking at.

"That bookmark is a better piece of art than the book, you know" he says.

"Really? I thought you hated the bookmark, said something along the lines that it was too garish for a book like this." she says, tongue in cheek.

"Oh, is that so? Maybe I digressed from my original words." He says, tongue in cheek too.

She scrunches up her nose in amusement and collects all the crumpled paper balls from the bed and from the floor, throws them into the metal waste basket in the corner of the room and then settles comfortably on the still untidy bed.

He makes himself snug on the couch opposite it, its posh looking leather having lost its sheen long ago even as it sags now, unable to take his full weight.

"So?" he asks.

He doesn't have to say the whole question for her to understand it. She understands him too well for that.

"I hate the weather. A pigeon was mocking me. Bhaiya was practicing hard rock on his guitar. Also Maa was making ghee. Unbearable smell, so came here pronto." she says.

He doesn't laugh, he never laughs at her predicament.

"In that case, I will get you some blueberry muffins mumma made today. It will help forget the smell, and of course, everything else." he says, getting up from the leather couch.

She knows that her situation was just an excuse. He knows she loves his mother's blueberry muffins, and would have got them anyway.

Now as she sits in his room, as much as hers as it is his', she sweeps her eyes through the small space in all its glory.

She glances up at the garish painting which his mother insisted he hang on the wall behind his bed, even when he did not want to.

It's what art aficionados would call abstract, with all its purposeful stokes of crimson red and cobalt blue and a deep yellow and a meaningless green.

It's a rainbow, no doubt, just not pretty.

She hates it.

She was never into art, and even if she was, she thinks she would never like a painting like this one.

She moves her attention to the photo frame on the bedside table by his bed which is jostling for space with his alarm clock and a stack of his art books and a glass tumbler. Inside the frame is a Polaroid photo of both of them, several years younger, staring goofily at the camera with her smile missing one tooth and his floppy black hair covering his forehead. He has one of his arms wrapped loosely around her shoulder.

She likes the photo.

But the frame,

She hates it.

It's too tacky with its wide silver faux-metal borders which catch the light from the overhead focus lights rather unattractively. She winces. Way to ruin a beautiful picture.

Soon, he returns with a tray with four muffins and two glasses of rooh-afza, before she can find more things to hate.

"Intend on giving me a sugar coma, huh? she asks.

"Something like that." he says, already stuffing his mouth with a muffin.

She swats him on his arm.

He chokes up on the muffin.

She shoves the glass of rooh-afza in his face and tells him to drink it.

He complies.

"Idiot" she chides.

He goofily grins up at her.

She stares at his eyes, a jet-black, his nose with a bump because he fell down while learning how to ride the bicycle and had driven straight into the neighbor's well-trimmed hedge and she had been the one who had dragged him out of the mess and apologized fervently to the hot-tempered neighbor.

She stares at the birthmark near his left eye which reminds her of that constellation she read about in her encyclopedia on space.

She stares down at his long slender fingers with pink stubby nails and smeared with ink which shows that he was writing in his leather-bound journal before she came here.

She stares at the t-shirt he is wearing, a vintage band tee she knows he got from Denver when he had gone there to visit his aunt because he wouldn't stop raving about it for days and she had threatened to push him in the neighborhood club's pool (she knew he didn't know how to swim) if he did not stop.

She stares back at his eyes, a jet-black, his smile still as wide as it was a minute ago. He is kind of a smiler.

She smiles back.

Because she might hate a lot of things, but she doesn't hate him.

And for someone like her, that's kind of big.