The story of a Pakistani girl born in a desi middle class household. Being part of the society that believes Fair is Lovely, Madiha has a hard time settling with her brown skin and ordinary looks.
All her mother wants, like every other desi mother...
Hearing the broken voice of your best friend at half past twelve on a winter night, when you're snuggled in your warm blanket and ready to welcome sleep with dreams of your future wives, is what Nile Malik defined as suffering.
He didn't have any other defination for the word.
Here was his dainty beauty lifting a juicy, half bitten cherry towards his mouth, while the other one massaged his feet with her expert fingers and another laid her head on his chest complimenting his muscular bicep, as the last one had her fingers burried deep in his hair. He, the majestic king, laid upon his 7 star throne, revelling in the luxury with a satisfied sigh, when the phone rang, and his dream shattered.
Nile didn't know who to hate more, his luckless fate, his idiot best-friend, or the emotion called love.
Love was his greatest foe in the end. Love was everything wrong with humanity.
He could set right the longest, most jumbled up accounts for a customer and send them home with a neat little portfolio. He had his boss fawning at his feet for his perfect calculations. He could make sense of large crazy numbers that gave others headaches.
But he couldn't make sense of a heartbroken man.
He couldn't deal with deep complicated emotions.
Nile liked to keep things straight. 2+2=4, there was no second answer, there was no alternate to it.
But Daniyal was never in that straight line equation, he wasn't even a quadratic equation, he was an equation math had yet to devise.
Nile wished he knew that bit in kindergarten when Daniyal offered him his Cocomo.
That is why they say gluttony is a sin. If 4 year old Nile had had the self control to refuse that chocolate goody, then he wouldn't have been stuck in this disastrous friendship.
If only he hadn't fallen for that chubby faced boy offering him the whole pack of Cocomo, the whole pack, he wouldn't be here suffering.
But it was a whole pack... Nile was only 5 too.... And he was a hungry bear... A bear drooling at the sight of the pack of Cocomos...
Sigh, if Only he wasn't as vulnerable and naive when he was a kid..
It was too late to regret that day,18 years too late.
