In Thick Soup

Having come back from a class on The Fly, Anamika busily sat down with her mobile phone, managing replies and responses. At the back of her mind was the assignment she had to submit at her tutorials tomorrow. RB would flare up if she did not write a satisfactory answer. She was terrified of disappointing her. Damn you Nivedita, trust you to come up with a useless brawl with Ashish today. And tagging me along in it. Bitch. 'Mom, what's for dinner?'

Ten minutes later, Anamika was served a thick sweet corn soup with grilled bread and a scoop of boiled vegetables. Her notebook was open next to the plate of grilled chicken which she chose to ignore. So were the text of The Fly and her laptop. She had converted the dining table into her work-station. With each spoon she had, she forced herself to think something good enough for RB. Almost halfway through, she gave up. Today was just not her day, she had to face RB's temper. As she shut down her laptop and bit on a boiled inch of carrot, she picked up a boiled pea from the grilled chicken plate and dropped it in her soup bowl. Become a fly and tell me how you really feel!

The green pea obeyed her command and out came tiny wings of shoots from two sides of its diameter and it became a Harry's Green Snitch, flying over the soup and fighting its way through the yellow corns to find its way to the bottom of the bowl, where one Mr Mushroom awaited it under its umbrella. That was the goal -- to hold its breath for as long as possible and stay underwater, ooops, under the umbrella below the soup. The green-pea maneuvered its way -- left, right, left, left, left and finally right into the centre. A steel fork helped it, almost humanely, to move those monstrous yellow golden-moulds. I am the champion! I am diving down! I don't care! As soon as the fork was lifted though, the pea popped up, back to the surface of the soup. It failed to fly, it failed to die, it failed to stay, it failed to slay. "I am a Pea, not a Fly! Eat me Alive!"

Almost as if someone were screaming such slogans into her ears, Anamika returned from her trance into the cold bowl of sad looking corns swimming shorelessly in the soup. She had no answer, not from the pea, not one for RB. As she left the dinner table, she knew she was in thick soup and there was no way she could fly out of it.