Chapter 2

Aranya did not like Mango Madness, she liked Orange. Orange was one colour, unlike the yellow-and-white-striped Mango Madness.

'There's no Orange,' said the mother.

'Cola?'

'No Cola.'

'Vanilla?'

'No Vanilla, just have Mango Madness. It's good. Your brother likes it,' said the mother and shoved the ice lolly in her palm. She knew better than to fight her brother's choice—he was her parents' favourite child.

She would have rather stayed home and watched Evil Dead for the thirty-third time on her brother's computer, a second-hand AMD 1.2 GB Thunderbird Athlon, with 320 MB SDRAM, SoundBlaster Live sound card, a CD drive with a 12 GB hard disk.

She was making a list of her favourite movies in her head while her parents talked about the next loan instalment and lamented about the rising prices of onions, potatoes, lentils, ladies' fingers, brinjals, textiles, cable subscription, electricity, petrol, water, and even bribery rates! In her list, Evil Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Blair Witch Project were the top three horror movies of all time.

'What do you want to watch these for? They are all so scary,' her mother would ask whenever she wanted a new VCD.

'They are not scary at all,' she would protest. But they would all go by her brother's pedestrian choice of movies.

'Let your brother choose,' her father would say.

'Is it because I'm this way?' she would snap, pointing at the skin on her arms. Back then she was gradually beginning to realize there was something off about her. She knew she was different. She was yet to find out that the world treated the different with hatred.

'No,' her mother would lie.

Generalized vitiligo was one of the first phrases Aranya had learnt to write down. It's what her prescriptions had said. It's a disease with no certain cause. It causes the skin pigment cells to die resulting in patchy, sensitive skin. Since people can't pronounce the scientific term, they often use the Hindi words 'safedi' and 'fulwari'.

It started showing up when she was only two. For a little kid it wasn't much of a bother, in fact it was a delight. 'Hey! I have two skin colours. I'm fair and I'm tanned. So cool!' she used to say.

The condition slowly worsened as her entire body went light pink and white in patches. The 'condition' didn't matter a lot to her, at least not till she turned nine. She thought it was just something people had, like short height, or a bad nose, or a shitty attitude, a brain less smart, or pointy ears.

Now she knew that pointy ears would have been better.

As she grew taller and wider and bigger, the patches swelled in size like an ink dot on an inflated balloon. Soon she was a 'freak' in school.

'Don't touch her or you will get the same disease. Don't share pencils with her. Don't use the washroom she uses,' warned the ignorant parents of her classmates. Even her own brother wouldn't share a towel with her.

She grew up without friends.

While they licked on their ice creams that night, she could feel someone's eyes on her, not for the first time. Her skin often attracted a lot of unwanted attention. People would look at her and then look away, repulsed. She had learned to forgive.

She turned to see a boy staring at her. After a few moments of indecisiveness, the boy started to laugh at her, at first slowly, and then out loud, pointing fingers and such. Aranya's face flushed, her ears burned. Her mother put an arm around her and shouted at the boy, 'There's nothing to see here,' as if she were a policeman at a scene of a grisly accident.

The boy laughed some more and ran away. The brother sucked on his ice cream like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Aranya stared at her hands—olive brown like tanned Brazilian models in patches, and pale white like the women in the fairness cream ads; two perfect complexions like spilled paint cans on a floor. She was a shade card.

'He didn't have to laugh. Why did he laugh?' Aranya asked her brother, who was playing Doom on the computer later that night.

'Because you're different.'

Her brother picked up the CD cover of Chucky and threw it at her.

'I'm like this?' snapped Aranya, still hoping it was a joke.

'Not really, but you get the idea. You should get used to it.'

Aranya stared at the monstrous face on the cover of the CD. After her brother went off to sleep, she spent the night on the Internet searching for what being different really meant. Sameer woke up the next morning with a slip of paper with her sister's beautiful handwriting on it:'Sameer bhaiya, you're shorter in height than the national average of seventeen-year-olds in the country. Your BMI is lower than the accepted healthy ratio. Your scores in Hindi and social science have been way below your school average. So, I am left thinking that what does different really mean?'

The note was passed on to their mother who would have slapped her had it not been for Aranya's scholarship interview for the new school. Without the scholarship, Aranya would have to miss a year and try again the following year, a chance her financially strapped family didn't want to take. Luckily for them and for Aranya, the interview went well. In two weeks from then Aranya would join her new classmates, a patch-faced orc amongst fair, and dark, and lovely little kids.

I Love u Rachu

https://www.patreon.com/aditya6499