Here's the third instalment of my attempt at a short story series...

Taste 3: Bitter

“All students are requested to get into their classes. Prayer is about to begin.” As clichéd and boring as this may sound, that’s how college always began....every single day for the years that I was there. And as an extension of the cliché, students who were otherwise as high spirited as wild horses would simmer down to sniggers and inside jokes while the speaker blurted out the pre-recorded tones of our ‘dear’ principal, a bob cut bearing woman of the name Mrs Jebaraj. I slowly walked in and sat down at the first bench, a place that I had staked simply because no one else was willing to do so. As I was trying to wipe the sleep out of my eyes, I turned back as I did every day to see the sparkle dance in her eyes. My Avi’s eyes.....

Avi and I had been best friends for the last 5 years, ever since I moved to the city after my parents’ bitter divorce. She was always the cheerful sort, never short of a smile and always ready to counter anything I said with a cutting remark, initiating arguments that became the norm every day. Everyone around us always thought there was more to us than met the eye; and they were right, just not in the way they thought they were. Avi and I loved each other like siblings and our greatest regret was that we weren’t actually so. Those eyes that lit up my day and that twinkle meant only for me were what I lived for and what got me through everything life could throw at me. We were so happy....till ‘she’ joined.

Alaina came to our class in our second last year as an exchange student, but never left after experiencing life around here. She was actually a very sweet girl, smart, pretty, affectionate and most of all, helpful. Avi and I instantly gravitated towards her and the three of us began to spend a lot of time together. But I knew I was losing my hold over Avi when she started paying more attention to Alaina, leaving me in the dark many a time. It started with little things: a coffee after college, partners for a quiz competition and jokes. But things slowly got worse, with them going off on trips without me, having their own inside conversations and most of all, being very secretive around me. I was starting to disappear from both their lives and become a non-entity to the rest. Life became constant agony as I could neither tear myself away from them, nor bear to watch as they got closer and closer. The day we graduated, Avi was asked to give the valedictory speech and in it, she spoke the words that haunt me to this day,” Life has so many twists and turns, but when you have friends to help you on your way, it becomes the greatest journey you can ever make. Here’s to Alaina, my one and only true friend. May the world be our oyster!”

 I’ve never stayed back in college before, but that day I felt like it was the only thing I could do to clear my head. After everyone had left, I decided to take a walk around college. Nostalgia dogged my footsteps, not of classes and experiences, but of Avi and the things we had done together. There was a wall where we had convinced everyone to write what they wished about any teacher they hated and then showed it to the teacher concerned at the end of the year. Here was the canteen where Avi and I mock fought about what to get for lunch and who was on a diet. A bench there, a small step there....everywhere I looked, I saw me and Avi. Before I went home, I decided to go back to the stage one last time, just to take in the fact that it was all over. When I got there, I saw the both of them under the lamplight holding hands and talking as if they’d never see each other again. I stayed in the shadows where they couldn’t see me and watched them embrace, kiss each other and walk out of college hand in hand. And just like that, it was all over. My Avi was gone...

It’s been 20 years since that cold day when we graduated. And today, as I sit on a park bench in the frosty morning air, I look back on everything that happened. I heard the both of them got married a few years ago and now have a little family of their own somewhere. They never contacted me and I didn’t try to find them either. Sometimes, I wonder why things had to turn out the way they did. But then it strikes me; maybe it was because I loved Alaina too...