It’s Sunday evening. Swapna who is never organized has ironed and hung the clothes she will wear for her Monday morning lecture, her laptop is charging on her desk, her fruits and bread have been stowed away in the illegal mini-fridge that she has in her hostel room and she is folding clothes, warm out of the dryer.
She is twenty, she knows, but she feels like a proper adult today. Doing very adult things on a Sunday evening instead of bemoaning the end of the weekend on her WhatsApp group with her friends.
The thought is an out of body experience and she has to sit on her bed, in the middle of folding. “Oh god, I have become responsible,” she moans, as she removes her phone to share this earth-shattering realization with her friends.
She doesn’t receive much by way of commiseration because one is napping, one is out grocery shopping herself and one is washing a mother load of 2 weeks’ worth of clothes. “I have nothing to wear tomorrow, Swapna,” he says in all caps as if she didn’t appreciate the urgency of his situation.
She does feel better though; once she realizes her friends are adulting as hard as her. She goes back to her folding and once she’s done, it occurs to her that the number of clothes on her bed are too few.
She’s frantic as she searches high and low, going back to her laundry bag, then the washing machine and even going through someone else’s load rotating in the dryer to see if she has left anything behind.
She hasn’t. Then how, what, where, why, when?
She trundles back to her room, entertaining the idea that perhaps her roommate is stealing her clothes. Would the roommate hate her too much if she went through her wardrobe? Swapna thinks that may be taking it too far so goes back to her pile, counting the number of t-shirts, tops, jeans and pyjamas she has. They all check out.
She goes to count her panties and bras and that’s when she realizes her error. She had been home for two weeks; her sister had come to visit and they had had a reunion of sorts. In that time, she had gotten used to seeing all their clothes, neatly folded on their bed, ready to be distributed between her, her sister and her mother.
Here, on her bed, with just her load, the pile looks small.
She will not cry, she tells herself sternly, as her eyes fill. She is an adult and adults…but before she can finish that thought, her eyes have released the tears and they flow down her cheeks. She curses. She doesn’t know if she is angry with herself or her sister but she throws her neatly folded clothes into her wardrobe and prostrates herself on her bed.
She lets herself have a good cry – adults are allowed to do whatever they want and right now, she wants to cry – but her sulk is short-lived. Her stomach grumbles and mumbles and she knows she won’t be able to sleep or function tomorrow if she does not eat.
She goes to her mini-fridge, removes the tiffin her mother had packed for her and marches to the pantry to heat it. She makes sure none of her floormates catch a whiff of her bhuna chicken and daal fry. She will share her maggie, even her fruits and bread – the shirt off her back – but she draws the line on her mother’s bhuna chicken.
This time, while eating the chicken and daal with slices of bread, Swapna does not begrudge her adult tears.
Song: From this moment on by Shania Twain
Check out the other posts for 2023 here. Written as part of #BlogchatterA2Z
Header image: Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash
tales of Suchita 
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