✧ Arshiya Raizada, daughter of a multibillionaire businessman and a renowned fashion designer. Mega-rich? Check. Spoiled? Most definitely. Brat? On occasions. Rulebreaker? All the time.
✧ Roshan Singhania, son of the state chief minister. Bad boy...
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Arshiya
[Year 2 - March]
[Location: Udaipur]
There are easily over a hundred people here - not counting the staff or my family and close relatives. And, thing is, I know most of them. Generally, business associates are present when its birthdays or anniversary celebrations or holiday parties hosted for everyone else in the family. That is not the case for mine. My birthday has always been kept intimate.
Fact is, it's how I prefer it. It may not fit with my style. Bigger than style though is spending the day with people I care for. People my parents have met in their personal life. People who have influenced our lives.
Deep inhale. Slow exhale.
Another year to add.
In my life's dictionary, eighteen years are a lot. Especially considering that doctors had placed the odds on my survival even before my birth. It didn't help matters when I was born premature and spent my earlier weeks in an incubator. Or when I was diagnosed with leukemia and spent a year in the hospital and another after that recovering at home and taking things slow.
With all these health scares, I have only allowed myself to take things one day at a time, leaving myself no chance to think about my future. I live each day like it would be my last, and no, I do not think it is a sad way to live life. Or even a pessimistic way. For me, it's the best way to live life because it gives me the opportunity to live fully with no regrets. If a thought or desire passes my mind, I follow through with it. I live every moment in the present rather than being stuck in the past or worrying of the future.
Though, lately, my parents have been telling me to start giving my future a thought because I am growing up and I can't keep living as I do. I have to take responsibilities. I have to pick a career path. I have to start doing things that normal teenagers do. Or well... what normal adults do.
It's not that I don't want to live a normal life. In fact, I yearn for that kind of life that I never get the chance to live because of who I am - or more specifically, my last name. It's the entire reason I applied to universities outside of India where I can blend in and be treated equally as others. I have been accepted into a couple of universities as well. I plan on sharing the news with my family at the party tonight. They don't know yet that I have heard back from the universities I've applied to.
Once I tell them, it is set in stone.
The next four years of my life will be called for. The thought that it's such a long commitment is unnerving. The thought of staying in one place for that long even more so. I don't even stay home for more than a couple months at a time. Even when I do, I am always leaving for some surrounding place or the other for a weekend getaway.
