Semua Bab The Ordeal: Bab 1 - Bab 10

It was half-past six in the morning and the Garden City was sluggishly wakening from a sunrise slumber. In a place like hers, the month of May marked the peak of summer and the morning light was playing hide and seek through the window curtains. Rithanya was still sleepy as she woke up to some unusual bustle, rubbed her eyes and looked around her. Scratching her head, she slowly walked down the hallway to the living room. Her family was assembled there and a tense atmosphere prevailed. She looked at her father. The 5’6” figure with his tummy outgrowing his body and salt and pepper hair on a balding head, kept on punching numbers on his Nokia 1600 on the veranda. His face showed annoyance.Probably the other person is not picking up the phone, she thought. Wonder what worries him. Varadarajan – Her father, whom they called Dadda, was a headmaster in a reputed city school who taught science to the super senior level students or the Grade 12 ‘kids’.Rithanya's eyes looked for her mother.

For a girl born and brought up in the hustle and bustle of a metropolitan city with high rise buildings and snail-paced traffic, rural villages were a wonder. Rithanya’s new school was located 380 kilometres away from her home city, Bangalore, with a tedious eight-hour journey by bus and no connectivity via rail or air. So her parents decided to take their car and drive to the village where the school was located. Loading the extra-large suitcase, bags and books, and all other miscellanies, Dadda and Satvik occupied the front seats with Dadda driving; she and her mother were seated at the back. Rithanya relaxed enjoying the scenery. Her parents never knew how village atmosphere could offer boundless happiness to a city-bred girl of 16 years. On both sides of the road, the vast countryside spread in green splendour cultivated with paddy, sugarcane and bananas bathed in bright sunshine. It was a feast to the eyes of one who loved nature without any bias. Rithanaya liked the place wholeh

It was five in the morning. Alarms shrieked from every room in the hostel. The whole building reverberated with the sound. On top of it, the warden was walking through all the corridors, calling out to everyone to wake up and get ready.With shivers, Rithanya woke up from her sleep. It was a very different experience for her. She had never got such a wakeup call in her lifetime. Amma used to give her a lovely wake-up call which would eventually turn into a wake-up yell. Dadda would come to her room to give her a wake-up kiss and Rithanya would pull him next to her, hug him tight and get back to sleep. Finally, she would give in to the wake-up-call-turned-yell and sluggishly walk to find Amma in the holy, sacred room called the kitchen, doing something or the other, mumbling a prayer. She would inhale the blissful aroma of her mother's cuisine. Like a cat, she would slowly get behind her, hug her and get admonishments for diluting her piousness. Rithanya shrugged and got up from her b

The first two days were jolly good. There were no female teachers for their class. Physics, Chemistry, Biology, English and Language classes were all handled by male staff. For the language classes, there were only three girls who opted for Hindi as an alternative language to the native or rather a regional language "Tamil". Rithanya, Fowzia, and Hera went to another small room to learn Hindi. Along with them, three other girls from the adjacent classes also attended. "Whoa! Six in a class", Fowzia exclaimed. "Is Tamil so common or is it a sin to learn Hindi?" Rithanya voiced her doubt. Their Hindi teacher was a very young guy who spoke so softly that Rithanya could barely hear anything in the class. His tone sounded like a lullaby to her.The lunch break. The girls went to the dining hall for food again to find a long queue. It was total chaos. Rithanya could not understand why such chaos happens all the time. Why not follow an orderly line for taking food? Someone in the crowd shout

The girls got busy packing their dirty clothes. They locked their suitcases and trunk boxes with big locks. Excitement reached its peak as they quickly freshened up and were all set to escape the hostel after finishing their morning classes.Rithanya felt odd seeing the excitement all around. She would not say that she was not at all eager to meet her family but she could not feel so much excited. She felt the hostel was all of a sudden transformed into an asylum and the girls had undergone some multiple personality disorder. The girls at the hostel, the seniors and juniors alike, who behaved like score- generating robots all these days, always focussed too much on studies and scoring high marks, started behaving like normal humans with emotions. It was too much to digest for Rithanya. She didn‟t pack her dirty clothes. She didn‟t dress up to look pretty. She didn‟t scream and yell in the rooms. She never planned to bunk the classes. She had never failed to pay attention in the class.