Jhumka Gira Re....
"Gir jaye to phir na kehna,
Jhumka gira re,
What jhumka,
What jhumka,
What jhumka....."
"Kaha gira re?"
Aadhya lifts up the same pillow the 3rd time pulling away at the pile of clothes on her bed. Her looks drift to earring on the dressing table, gets excited, gets sad, realizing that she had been looking for thats thing's soulmate for half day now, probably.
"What Jhumka, Kyo Jhumka, Bhaad mein gaya Jhumka!!!" She sings along, rather yells along to the song in the background, throwing the pillow back onto the bed like it had personally betrayed her.
"My playlist seems to have a sick sense of humor."
She slumped onto the bed, staring at the ceiling for exactly two seconds before her eyes drifted toward the clock on the wall.
Three already. Perfect. There wasn't even enough time for her to be dramatic properly.
She kicked the stuff on her very deranged bed in frustration. The bed looked like it had lost an argument with her wardrobe sometime that morning. A dupatta hung from the chair like a surrender flag, and her phone was somewhere beneath at least three layers of fabric she didn’t have time to identify right now. The AC kept swinging in full blast, contributing to cooling down her temper.
"Now, it will seem like I only made it to the wedding for food," she sighs, "thats what everyone does anyways......though looking at how late i am i wont even get to eat the food there......ugggggggg!!"
She springs upright, and pulls out a gigantic box of earrings from the shelf. "There has to be something in the pandoras box....lets dig in..."
She flipped through pairs too fast to properly see them—silver hoops, tiny pearls, the oxidized ones she always promised to wear more often, something shaped like diseased leaves. Why had she bough half of them?
She finally picked one up and held it to the pale afternoon light spilling through the window.
"You. You never match an outfit,"
She threw it onto the discarded pile.
"Honestly, if my neighbors heard me talking to stuff, they must think I’m crazy. And the fact that I just said that out loud… Great . Fantastic. This is how people start losing it" the words of regret, embaressment of oneself leave her mouth, like a habit.
She looked at the spread of jewellery on her bed and picked two pairs, putting one piece from each into her ears.
Tilting her head toward the mirror, she examined one earring at a time. The soft sky-blue Patiala she’d ironed that morning suddenly felt like a poor life decision. The poor life decision had actually been last night—dreaming about how amazing she was going to look in that outfit without planning the accessories, or at least thinking about where she had kept them, let alone taking them out in advance.
She gathered her hair into her palm and lifted it into a messy bun, tilting her head left, then right, trying to convince herself the earrings worked with it. They didn’t. The bun made the mismatch more obvious, not less. She dropped her hair again.
Defeated, she grabbed her phone, cursed at the time, and started taking off her earrings. She pushed the mess on the bed into a pile in the corner and grabbed her usual studs from the TV table.
“Keys, light, phone,” she muttered, her eyes sweeping across the flat while her hands haphazardly screwed the earrings in without a mirror.
Her phone buzzed.And it buzzed again.
Where are you? I am almost there. ~Padmaja HR. The notification glowed. Padmaja had been HR at her previous accounting firm, back when Aadhya was still working there as a marketing executive. It made sense she didn’t want to arrive alone. She’d already submitted the groom’s name for an informal PIP review three times as a joke, and enough people from the office were attending that the story had travelled. Besides, she herself was the former employee the groom had once taken a jab at about her looks. He’d called it a joke. Everyone else had called it nothing at all and just smiled politely. Which meant she had to look good today.
“Relax,” she muttered to absolutely nobody. “People get married every day.”
Throwing one last look in the mirror, she adjusted her bindi, dabbed on some cherry red lipstick, and nodded. "Katilana lag rahi ho," She winked at herself. Then she made a face at the mismatched earrings.
She opened the shoe shelf and pulled out what she believed to be her drop-dead gorgeous heels. Her friend believed otherwise.
She rushed out of the house, locking the door behind her and scurrying down the flight of stairs. The stairwell smelled faintly of damp concrete and someone’s overenthusiastic tadka drifting up from the first floor.
“Khusboo gajab aa rahi hai, aunty,” she called out, catching a glimpse of first-floor-wali Khusboo aunty through the kitchen window.
Aunty lived up to her name every Sunday.
As she headed to her scooty in the parking lot, the earthy smell of mud made her smile as light drizzle began its mission to ruin her outfit.
She kickstarted her scooty three times before finally giving up and booking an Uber to the nearest mall.
“Impromptu shopping,” she mutters, typing out an excuse to Padmaja. The uber arrived notification interrupted her texting. She rushed out the gate.
"8486." She told the otp to autowala, while typing out the rest of her message, adjusting her sling brown purse on her side, pulling out her EarPods.
The auto pulled up at the mall entrance while she kept scrolling through reels—panicking about the time and laughing anyway. Her brain clearly refused to cooperate with urgency every damn time. She had exactly one errand, exactly one stop, and exactly one wedding to reach. Somehow her brain still chose this moment to care deeply about a reel titled relatable clumsy moments compilation. No wonder it was relatable.
“Scanner, bhaiya,” she said, scanning the QR quickly, finishing the payment, and hurrying inside. Five minutes. I’ll be out in five minutes, she promised herself.
