Color Colour

“Hey, Pinecone-head….”

A soft whisper echoed all around Aakash. He wanted to ignore it, he was sleeping. But first, it was a girl’s voice. And second, it sounded unbelievably stimulating. No, that wasn’t the right word, the word was sexy.

Definitely not that woman…. or the landlady for that matter, thought Aakash in his sleep, he wanted to find out who she was and sprung up rubbing his eyes. He hoped that the girl didn’t mind a sloppy looking boy in his pajamas and bed hair which looked wind-blown like he’d just walked past tornado. And his mouth, Ugh! Let’s not get started on that. His luck did not turn him down; looking through bleary eyes he saw who seemed to be the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and he had been brought up in L.A. But a big difference between all those girls and this one was that she was neither cute nor hot, she was beautiful. That was the only word that described her properly. Perfect, flawless skin with flowing black hair curling softly at the ends, a strand of which landed near her blood red lips, he couldn’t make out whether it was lipstick or natural. Her eyes… he held his breath, had naturally thick and dark eyelashes which complemented her electric blue eyes, electric… that hit the spot. And, Oh yeah, a tiny, black beauty spot near the edge of her lips added the cherry on top of the cake.

She just stood there smiling, wearing a black sleeveless dress which matched her curvy yet athletic body perfectly. She had taken over his mind completely, he pulled off his covers and stood up. That’s when he began noticing the small details like how she was a couple of inches taller than him despite being barefoot, also that she looked a few years older to him. This somehow was a bit disconcerting for him. The light around had been set so as to show all her better sides. This brought him down to the earth and he noticed where he was. Wait… where was he? There was just white expanse all around, and the only source of light seemed to be behind him. His vision tunneled when she smiled at him with her perfect white teeth. His body reacted to her by itself.

“Hey girl, do you know whether there are cops around? Cuz now I’m gonna steal your heart.”

Perfect, He thought, now only if she just buys…

“You just picked that off the internet didn’t you?” she answered smiling.

That threw him off balance.

She’s better than I thought. This wasn’t going according to plan, he had impressed ‘several’ girls using that same line which he had randomly read off a website, back in America, she seemed much smarter.

“I know you better than the back of my hand pinecone head,” she said and smiled again.

Maybe it was the expression he was making when he heard her say that, but the next second she broke into a hearty laugh. Was it his imagination or did her laugh just light up the place all the more? It was too good to be true, a girl as perfect as she shouldn’t have existed much less be talking to him right now. But he felt something wrong at that moment, even though the girl had been smiling her eyes were turning red by the moment until a teardrop finally made its way down her beautiful face. He was appalled seeing this and wanted to rush to her and comfort her, but the first step forward made him land flat on his face.

“Aaargh! What the…”

He looked at his feet and the sight made him lose his mind. They are…

“…cut off…”

He screamed. This isn’t happening…

“Stop…please stop moving pinecone head” her voice was breaking but the gruesome smile didn’t fade.

To his horror the blood began flowing out in streams, much more than he thought was possible, flowing through him turning his clothes into a deep shade of red and began accumulating at the girl’s feet.

“It’s OK Aakash please…” her eyes were inconsolable but her mouth maintained the tight-lipped smile, he was beginning to fear it now.

He couldn’t imagine how it could get any worse, but it did. The pool of his blood by her feet began to rise until it became a gruesome sculpture, a foot taller than him right behind her. He wanted to scream harder as it became more realistic by the second and began moving, to wrap what seemed to be its arms around her. The thing that then emerged from the bloody statue made him want to run away from there. It was… It is…

“Me…?” he lost his ability to breathe.

No, it isn’t me. I don’t have black eyes or dry brown hair. Nor do I have that tanned skin color and... He hated to admit it but. I could never be that tall. But no matter which way he looked at it that person’s face looked exactly like his except a couple or more years older. The man now looked at him and gave him a ravishing smile that might have made any girl go crazy, especially with those deep dimples and the out place canines which made him look like a vampire.

“Don’t move please Brother. You’ll die” His voice overflowing with kindness and eyes bleeding tears as he began ripping off the girl’s clothes.

This was too much for Aakash, he wanted to scream at them to stop but the only thing that escaped his mouth, horrifying as it were…

“DO IT... DON’T STOP… DON’T DIE… ”.

Tears streaming from his eyes, he choked in his own saliva and fell on his face. He didn’t want this to exist. His cut-off legs were getting heavier by the second.No! No, no, no, no! This isn’t happening… The girl, the man and Aakash screamed at once.

“NOOOOOoooooo……?”

“OII! Keep it down ya brat” A raggedy yet wheezy voice screamed from below.

“Screamin like a little girl at seven in the morning” Even her muttering was loud enough to be heard from a floor below.

The landlady… wait, it was a dream? But how the heck could a dream be so realistic? For a guy who mostly had had dreamless sleep and the typical dreams of falling from heights, this was something else entirely. Aakash wasn’t a boy who believed in the supernatural, but this dream had put a seed in him. The seed of fate.

He looked around visibly shaken by the dream and rubbed his eyes, his face was wet with tears and cold sweat.

For real? Over a dream? Damn, that was… A raspy scream made him jump. It made him look at feet where the sound had come from, a bird with bright green plumage had been watching him intently all the while. The landlady’s Alexandrian parrot he thought, for such a dumb money-maniacal lady she was incredibly knowledgeable about birds and definitely knew her parrots. The first thing she had done since he had come to live there was to drill the differences between various types of parrots into him. But this parrot was particularly annoying, not only had it been copying the noises he had been making in his sleep but had also made him sound much girlier than he thought possible.

“That you again ya brat?” this broken scream from below ended with a fit of dry cough.

This is going to be the end of her. He thought and yelled back.

“It’s your STUPID parrot, lady!”

“Sheru isn’t stupid ya spoiled brat!” cried the voice again, a bit weaker this time.

Yeah, RIGHT he thought and jumped off the bed, flinging his covers away. The parrot squawked and strutted off whistling.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid”

He didn’t have the time to contemplate the dumbness of this human-bird pair. Schools in India started incredibly early. Seven Thirty? What kind of ungodly hour is that for school? Also, they had uniforms, just who had invented that idea? And I thought that schooling in America was dull, but this took it to the next level. Thoughts like these weren’t exactly brightening while preparing to go to one such school. Of course, this whole mess wouldn’t have been created if his Dad hadn’t suddenly come up with the bright idea to send him to India. It made no sense that his father would send him to the other end of the world with no reason in particular.

“You will receive well-rounded education there.” He remembered his father saying.

Well rounded, like hell man! The schools here didn’t even have compulsory Phys Ed, in fact, teachers here took every chance they could to remove what little physical education the students had to drill em with the syllabi. Thinking of every word he knew to curse his situation while staring at the boy in the mirror with a brush in his mouth. Brother… His hair was absolutely disheveled, he did not like his morning look. He slapped mirror boy’s face but not too much in case he shattered. The mirror boy shook in fear, this somehow irritated him all the more and he spat in the basin. The room he had wasn’t that bad but for the landlady; yet he wished he could have stayed in the hotel where he had lived when he first came here, courtesy of his millionaire father. Thanks to that fact he had received admission into the best private school in the city, but he didn’t seem to appreciate that in the tiniest way. Several minutes later he was munching down burnt toast and scrambled eggs or what the woman glaring at him across the table adamantly called bhurji.

“You are not getting a step out of this house without drinking your milk, boy,” she said while shoving a tall glass of milk at him.

This made him want to groan loudly, but he figured that the large bite of toast going down his gullet may prove to be dangerous for his health. Suddenly out of nowhere, the parrot which had been minding his own business flew down and stuck his head in the glass to get a big gulp of the milk. The old lady just chuckled and plucked him away.

“Ooh! Ooh! Naughty boy! That milk is for him, I’ll give you some later” she said to the squawking bird.

This made Aakash almost throw up his bhurji, he stared at the glass.

There’s no way I’m having that thing now, he thought. The most shocking thing was that this entire action hadn’t really affected the glass or the milk itself, except a few drops of spilled milk, it had remained there as if it had been there since morning. He definitely didn’t want anything with the creepy glass of milk now, and he needed a way to escape. The old lady was a cripple… hmmm…

“Lady the milk is boiling!!” he screamed picking up his bag.

This got the old woman good and she fumbled away towards the kitchen, wheezing. This was the break he needed and he rushed at the main door to the great outside. It took less than a second for the fumbling lady to see through this, but he had already reached the curb and picked up his cycle for the getaway. He knew what caught home-makers here the most.

“That smartass rascal…” she mumbled a little softer this time, and smiled looking at a black and white photo of a pair of young men with neatly oiled and combed hair, the face of one adorned with a thin pencil mustache and the other clean-shaven, on the patio.

“He’s a lot like you, isn’t he?” she said to it.

Racing through the roads of Mumbai on a cycle, especially during morning rush hours isn’t a great idea, but it is plenty better than racing on something like a car or a bike for that matter. You could run up the tiled pavement and the pedestrians wouldn’t really mind unless…

“Hey watch where yer going!” yelled a passing salaryman to the boy who had just run over his foot with his MTB.

…you really want to pull stunts but you don’t know any.

“…Am Sorry!” the boy yelled back.

His American accent took the salaryman back for a second but he then resumed rubbing his foot with his other, wincing and cursing all the while. The boy barely dodged a fisherwoman and rode up the fly-over towards his school. The traffic police didn’t mind non-motor vehicles at all, why would they anyway? Managing a city of three million vehicles was hard enough. The boy then slowed down when he noticed that the wind was messing up his hair, but not enough being aware that he was fifteen minutes late for school. The school was just a couple of miles away from his PG, but Aakash knew for a fact that all schools in the country ran a morning programme of assembly and prayer, he might just make it in time and slip in. Besides, the teachers would excuse a transfer student anyway.

The school grounds in Mumbai were small for lack of space in the city and generally had entrances at the main road, so noticing a school would be no trouble at all for the rush of all students trying to get in. Today was different though, except for a few stragglers and teachers the school compound was quiet like Sunday. One of those stragglers got off his MTB, parking it next to a row of two-wheelers and walked up the pathway to the school reception. Aakash had no trouble finding his way around the school, all schools have the same basic simplistic design when it came to their arrangement of buildings, well at least to the reception. His phone began ringing suddenly as he walked up the circular lobby of the school, it was his father.

What’s that old man up to now? He thought for a second before turning the ring down and returning it to the side pocket of his backpack. He could wait. The receptionist had a quizzical smile on her face like she had no idea what to do with the casually dressed boy before her.

“Who…”

“Uh… Aakash Mehra third year high school, I’m a transfer student.” He cut her.

The receptionist’s permanent smile was the only thing holding her fading perkiness, and Aakash knew it. That was the problem with his Indian American nature. Not Indian enough to be treated like the rest of the students but not American enough to impress anybody, the only thing proving his Americanness was his accent, but even that was slowly rolling away to dust as many Indian teenagers these days put on fake American accents. A peon came to his rescue. The tall sickly thin man in all-blue janitor’s clothing walked in and began whispering something in the receptionist’s ears, the receptionist nodded like she understood and gave Aakash a blindingly bright smile, raising her perky nature to new heights altogether.

“Aah… yes, Mr. Aakash Mehra Welcome to our school. Well… Akash here will take you to your classroom I hope your learning experience will be enjoyable” she said, raising a hand towards the peon.

Just cut the good-naturedness already, I just saw your true colors… Wai… just what did she call the janitor? Aakash? He looked at the peon, the poor guy seemed to be smiling to the fact that the two of them had the same name. The peon asked him to follow in Hindi.

“C’mon kid, let’s go meet your new friends…” He smiled obliviously to the souring expression on the face of Aakash. He knew a bit… no, a lot of Hindi despite growing up in America. He had a lot of Indian friends back home in L.A., the Hindi speaking community was quite large there in his neighborhood.

Watch it, buddy, don’t act all friendly just because both of us hold the same name, thought Aakash, but he didn’t want to burst the poor guy’s utopian bubble yet, he might prove to be useful later. Besides, he didn’t want to get lost in this school and end up running around looking for his class like an idiot, schools in Mumbai may be small but that doesn’t mean their maze-like structures don’t get you lost. The peon led him along a long corridor and out of the building through a large exit to the back of the main building. Beyond it lay an older, plainly painted and smaller building for the higher classes. There was an obvious drop in quality between the two buildings, but the two basketball and tennis courts between the buildings earned the school some extra brownie points from Aakash. As he approached the building, he noticed that it was much quieter than the first building, maybe because of its drab nature. Something was definitely odd about it, upon reaching inside he found that it was prayer time and every student had stood up and joined their hands in prayer and were listening to a recording being played over a cheap speaker placed at the top of the blackboard in each class. All… except for a couple of jokers in the back of each class, this seemed to relieve Aakash a lot more.

They actually do the morning prayers in schools in India, also when there are no teachers to watch over. And to make it worse it’s the singing kind, his head stuffed with these thoughts he didn’t notice that the peon had stopped when he ran into him. They had walked up to the second floor without him realizing.

“Shhh… your class is over there” he said pointing over to a room to his right in the corridor.

Just how long is this prayer gonna last, mused Aakash.

After what seemed like an eternity the speakers quit their warbling in each class and then all hell broke loose. A ruckus which he hadn’t heard even in the primary and secondary sections erupted from the lower floor, but the seniors to his left remained surprisingly quiet. The peon didn’t wait for any cues and barged straight into the class, Aakash barely had time to read the class name 11 Science written in Roman numerals and font, before he was pulled in and displayed as a trophy by the overexcited Akash.

“Kids, welcome your new friend Akash, he has come from America!” he shouted to a shockingly silenced class.

The announcement of his name by the peon made him wince, a snort was heard from the back of the class. There were a couple of gasps from girls in the back when they heard the word ‘America’ but most of the class remained silent like stone, staring. This was unbearable, he wanted this entire thing to be done with. Throwing in the bomb, the peon left with just as much excitement as he had come with. Aakash didn’t want to stand around much longer, he immediately walked up to the nearest empty seat and plonked himself and his stuff there, trying to ignore the stares and look busy. But that did nothing to stop the heavy atmosphere, no sound was heard except the ruckus from the lower floor. A few excruciatingly long moments passed before he couldn’t bear it any longer and he looked up. Every single person was still looking at him and the first face he met was that of the boy sitting directly before him. He had dry, blackish brown hair and tanned, golden skin color. He wore a pair of frameless spectacles and his face held a jaw-dropped expression revealing a pair of out of place, well-defined canines. But what caught on him the most was that the boy’s face looked exactly like Aakash’s and this made his jaw drop just as hard.

A bottle rolled off a table and crashed down on the floor spilling water onto it. The first source of human speech after several long moments was of the boy sitting next to the Aakash look-alike.

“T…t…twiiinnnnsss!” He yelled.

To this, as if on cue, the class roared to the doppelgangers screaming at each other