"I think you should stop being so mean to me, Zahed."
"Why would I ever do that?"
Aryan grins, a bright, wicked thing.
"Because I kiss you like this."
•
Mira Zahed and Aryan Shankar are at war.
When her best friend and his cousin decide to fall in...
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♥ ♥ ♥
"YOU COMING TONIGHT?" I lean a hip against a low cupboard near the doorway of Kajal's art studio, careful not to get green paint on my jeans.
Kajal is not so careful.
I don't even think she knows that there's a smudge of it on her nose. Maybe she just doesn't care, her small form balanced on a stool behind an easel twice her size, legs tucked neatly below her.
Kajal's studio was formerly my bedroom, tucked up in the attic of my grandmother's big old house in the suburbs of Pasadena. Now, the wall where my bed frame used to be jammed against has been broken down entirely, replaced with open glass that let pure sunlight stream directly into the space. My dresser removed, tucked away into the basement, the space now occupied with Kajal's drawers upon drawers of art supplies. The teenage chaos of the room has since been overtaken with Kajal's artistic chaos.
The home in Pasadena was much larger than the quaint house in Harrow I'd grown up in, sitting at a small kitchen table while my mother zipped between the Maths homework laid before me and the pot on the stove, a pencil stuck through her chignon because while balancing being a mother, keeping her no good son in line in terms of homework, a cook because her husband would burn down the house trying to use the microwave, she was also a primary school teacher.
I'd grown up, dad learnt to use the microwave and my mother graduated from teaching primary school to lecturing at UCL. That little kitchen table stayed the same size though and the maths problems got harder.
When her mother got sick all the way in California, she sold that little house in Harrow to help pay the medical bills and sent her family to live there. But she clung on tight to that teaching post she'd earned, refusing to leave it, and still held it to this day, settling for making that ten hour flight at least seven times a year to visit. And my grandmother, she was a fighter too, like Kajal, like my mother, because she made open heart surgery her bitch and was back on her feet before anyone could say sit down, Nani.
