I was sure that if I were to meet Esha today, she’d still have unflattering things to say about the way I looked, especially my body. But why did she have that sort of power over me? Because I gave it to her. I frowned. There was no way Esha was going to have any sort of power over me. I wasn’t going to let her. I was no pushover.

I decided to think about this more, after my exams, when my phone pinged.

It was Raghu, sending me a meme that had Jon Snow crying, the heading at the top reading, ‘Me after studying for 1067 hours’ and the caption below, saying, ‘I do know some things.’

I grinned.

Both mother and son were monopolizing my texting time all of a sudden, because after our chat on the phone, Raghu had started sending me texts every day.

I still spent an unnecessary amount of time over them, mulling over my replies. Sometimes I hunted down the right memes to send back, sometimes I would let it be because it became too exhausting to be clever and funny all the time. I figured he wasn’t holding his breath, waiting for me to reply. I felt sad that I had crossed over into the friend zone.

There were many times when I just wanted to come right out and ask him if he was single, if he was seeing someone in Mumbai, but I stopped myself. The messages we shared were almost generic. I couldn’t pop in with a personal question casually. At the same time, I felt maybe there wasn’t anyone or he would have mentioned it. I couldn’t be sure.

And this wasn’t something that I could ask Aunty V. She was very shrewd and I was trying to avoid direct discussions with her because I didn’t want to end up talking about my body issues.

So we continued this way, texting on and off. And soon my exams were over and I was a free bird.

I was glad to be home, but beginning to worry about what I would do once the results were out. The admission forms for various colleges were already available on their websites. I would have to make a decision soon.

I knew I wasn’t cut out for a professional course like medicine or engineering or even architecture, like Nisha. That left me with the usual humanities and commerce streams if I wanted to escape science, especially organic chemistry.

I sat at my desk one morning, when everyone was still asleep, writing down the different options I had. As usual, I was torn—glad that my parents were so busy with the baby, and hadn’t started hounding me about what I wanted to do with my life, but also slightly resentful that the baby had managed to eclipse my needs at this hour.