I spent most of Saturday morning in self-pity. The beginning of the semester, after a three-month break, is never a happy occasion. It is altogether unbearable when marred by feeling about the general pointlessness of life, a feeling that even a 8^th or 9^th (I have lost count) re-viewing of Sherlock’s first episode couldn’t alleviate. Priyanka seemed to be in a similar mood. She was reading Poverty and the Un-British Rule in India, but I could see her heart was not in it. Twice, she put the book down and sighed audibly. I looked questioningly at her the second time, but she simply shook her head. I removed my headphones and paused the video, and waited. She would come around to whining eventually, I knew. This wasn’t a first.

“This is never going to end”, she said finally, staring at the book with infinite sadness in her eyes.

“It will. You want to discuss what you just read? That might help...” I offered.

“I haven’t been reading anything”, she replied.

I pointed out that it could hardly be the case, since she had been glued to the book for the past two days. That seemed to touch a soft spot.

“I haven’t been reading. I have been just staring at the words. Nothing seems to register”, she said with a strain in her voice.

“I am sure some of it has,” I tried to reason with her. “If nothing else, it will at least ease the second reading”, I said reassuringly.

That proved to be the last straw. Without warning, tears started pouring out of her eyes. I would say she was sobbing, but the more appropriate word would be wailing.

“I can’t read it again”, she spluttered through her tears.

“Don’t, don’t read it if you don’t like it”, I said worriedly. Then got up to move closer to her, and hesitatingly laid my hand on her shoulder. That seemed to only increase the sound of the wailing.

“I don’t want to read it ever again.”

“Don’t. I am sure it’s irrelevant. They will never ask you about all this.”

“I don’t want to read anything ever again. I hate all of it. ALL OF IT” she said, notching up the sound levels, just a bit more.

 “Listen, you study all the time. Just take a break, I am sure you will be fine”, I said, picking up the book from the floor and closing it.

“Why do I have to read any of this anyway?” she bemoaned.”What good will it ever do, if I am to become an administrator? Will I refer to books about the colonial period to solve the problems of the people under my administration? Will wading through middle school physics help them? Or writing interminable essays in impeccable English?”

“No but...”

 “I am not doing it anymore”, she said, with the same suddenness with which she had started crying. She wiped her tears. “I am not doing it anymore’, she repeated, this time her voice steadier.

 “Yeah, just let’s relax. Start preparing again from tomorrow”, I said encouragingly. That is how all her whining sessions ended. Not in tears generally, but with her taking a break, then getting back to studying vigorously, immediately after. With the firm determination to make up for any time lost.

“No. I am moving back home. I have gone through this torture once and I wasn’t good enough”.

I opened my mouth to object, to remind her that most didn’t do well in the first attempt. But she pre-empted me.

“Don’t worry. It’s a good thing it took me only a year to realise I am not good enough. At least I know I will find something that I AM good at. Most people go through their life, wallowing in mediocrity, just because they are afraid to leave the security of the path others have eked out for them.”

I momentarily wondered why she thought interminable essays in fancy English was not her forte. Then, opened my mouth to object again but she interrupted me.

“Get me my phone. I need to talk to my parents”, she said.

She took the first train home today. At 6 in the morning. It’s probably only a temporary breach in her resolve. She will be back before late, back to the grind, same as the others. I have already started looking for a new roommate though.

Priyanka has had a fever for the last two days. I told her to pop a crocin and take it easy, but I think the latter is an alien concept to these civil service aspirants. Fever or not, the girl wakes up at four every morning to swot for the exams. She is still doing it when I leave for college, then sometime after that she leaves for her own classes. When I return at around five in the evening, she makes us chai, and we chit chat for a while. That is the only break she takes in her entire day. Even then, I am the one making the bulk of the conversation while she thumbs through the Times of India, the least taxing newspaper of the four that she reads in the course of the day. She is generally in bed by 11. That is when I sound a missed call to Maa to call me back.

I never really have much to tell her. I remember when Didi used to work in Hyderabad- Maa and she would talk for at least an hour every night, and the conversations were simply never ending on weekends. With me, I crib a little about the tough course, about how I have no life, and before exams, I tell her exactly how confident I am about failing. She has learnt to sidestep these issues over the months, and moves swiftly on to gossip about the family. Sometimes I listen with a lot of interest and ask her a lot of questions about everything. At other times, I mumble that I am sleepy, and then promptly spend the next two hours surfing through what is mostly drivel, on the internet.

Anyway, last night I told her about Priyanka’s fever. She suggested I take her to Doctor Bannerjee, our ex-family doctor. The ex part is because I am the only bit of the family left in Delhi now, and I have a surprisingly strong constitution. At least I don’t catch anything that a Crocin and taking it easy won’t treat. But I remember I used to love him as a child. His clinic was really the basement of a dreary grey forbidding bungalow that has father-in-law owned in C.R Park, right opposite Market 2.The doctor himself was the complete anti-thesis of the building he worked out of- young, cheerful, and sharing wonderful chemistry with all his patients. 

 The elderly would dote on him because he would make house calls for none but them, and charge lower fees for the retired, like for my grandma. I loved him because he would keep up a friendly stream of conversation especially when administering injections. And offer a toffee afterward. My dad, a sufferer of the White Coat Syndrome loved him for the same reason. For diverting him with the chatter while checking his blood pressure I mean, not the toffees. The women loved him too- his studious good looks may have had something to do with it. But also because he wasn’t like a lot of other jaded doctors at the big hospitals, who would spend less than a minute to check what was wrong and immediately pass judgement on the unhealthy lifestyle you led. Instead, he would laboriously explain what was actually wrong with us, with the help of pictorial depictions of the human body that hung from the walls of his office. Admittedly, that was when I would lose interest and start salivating about the varieties of rolls that Dadur Dokan in Market 2 offered, fully intending to throw a tantrum if my parents refused to buy me my choice of delicacy that day- fever or not.

Priyanka smiled when I reminisced thus, but baulked at the idea of going all the way to C R Park for just a fever. However, when the fever did not abate for the third day in a row, she acquiesced.