Did You Get Your Period?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

Shruti had had a good time, which was what she realized on her way home.

She was always having a good time and when she wasn't, she made it a point to make sure that it looked as though she were definitely having a good time. But at the juvenile basketball match; what she'd considered a pathetic excuse for a date, she was actually having a good time. She of course wasn't silly enough to assign all of the credit to the tall ex-classmate seated next to her, but she was certain that he had something to do with it. When he'd reached out to her on Instagram with a surprising confession about his crush on her in the school days, Shruti had been flattered. And when he'd asked to meet her, she hadn't even thought of saying no once. It didn't require the normal amount of waiting that she always made necessary before a date; she'd known him for a long time. It was just natural. What she had expected was for there to be some fumbling, bumbling awkwardness about having met an old classmate. But there was none, the scrawny-looking Ashish had grown into a man suave and charismatic; almost making her charisma look dull. Almost.

And while she beamed up at him every once in a while, giving him smiles that invited conversation; for she was actually interested in what he had to say, that was not all that was on her mind. In between the matches, when he asked her if she wanted to leave and gallantly put his arm around her while walking through the crowd (as if she were a precious celebrity and he, the security personnel); not even the deliciousness of his warm arm against her slightly bare shoulder had been enough to distract her. No, she was worried about her sister. Not because of the boy Vaibhav- Shruti trusted Shweta enough to know that she had good instincts- but because of the rest of the things. There was the fight with their mother that hadn't been like any of the fights that the hot-headed Shweta and Seema always got into.

No, this had been personal and cruel enough to cause a frigidity to settle over the household; the spite and insolence from both the sides driving her mad. And there was the fight with Riddhi that Shruti had found out about, quite surprisingly from Riddhi and not her sister. Riddhi had been genuinely concerned; asking Shruti to maybe find out what was going on in Shweta's head so that she'd realize she didn't have to be as alone as she pushed herself to be.

Now, while deduction and extraction of information was something Shruti was never bad at, there was the listening that she didn't quite enjoy. And when she'd spoken to Shweta, she'd wanted her to listen. Shruti had been too hasty in handing out her advice, she knew. But, at times she felt too frustrated and overwhelmed; to always having to play the role of the listener in their tightly knit, nuclear family.

Shweta was the hot-headed little baby of the family. Loud and cheery when the mood suited her, loud and angry when it failed her. Always jumping head-first into everything; her saving grace was the resilience with which she withstood the often-explosive consequence of her ill-thought-out decisions. Then there was their mother. Stubborn and rigid; too obstinate at times to even see where Shweta got her obstinacy was. Shruti was in no way their soft and sweet counterpart; having learned very early that at times the only way to break a loud argument was to scream louder. While she had also been blessed with the sunny-ness that Shweta had, she hid underneath it an emotional maturity that Time had taught her when Shweta had been too young to learn. The tendency to mask her feelings under an unreadable expression of perpetual bubbliness; the price of which she was only learning was very hard to bear.

In a way, both the sisters were identical- they were both afraid, hesitant, and tense when it came to romantic relationships. What they'd seen their mother go through, however young they had been, had imprinted them, made an unerasable mark. It was like a bruise, an invisible scar that left behind memories that scared them. Both of them covered this up with incessant jokes and a sunny attitude. Whereas a bit of maturity had erased Shruti out of her angst and given her a better perspective of the loneliness that haunted her so. Shweta, on the other hand still naïve, with little exposure to the world beyond her hometown hid behind a roguish view of life that shielded her and damaged her equally.