1. Lost

In the mid northern part of India, we have an under developed state, which due to poor administration & governance regressed & slumped into poverty & ignorance. There were no schools around to get education & no jobs around to be employed. Poverty was rampant & only health department thrived on expense of expanding grief stricken poor population.

In this scenario, one girl was born in Brahmin affluent family. Her family wanted her to complete the education & hence she has been sent to boarding school at very tender age. The hostel was very far away & she visited her family twice in year. She was never attached to her family & somehow felt that she was never given her share of care & love.

She spent her life in girl-centric Hindi medium hostel, where wearing traditional clothes were compulsory. No mobile phones were allowed which further limited her communication with her family. Girls were expelled from college for having boyfriends. They had access of one movie in a month at common place & limited internet connectivity which was mostly used to befriend with random guys.

Alia was good in her studies & since she paid huge price for her education, she wanted to achieve something in her life. She got admission in Institute of management & she wanted to make the most out of it. But joining new college was huge cultural shock. All of sudden her life has changed as if she was thrown from sunny dessert to very cold mountains & brittle harsh winds are blowing on her face freezing her spine. She was not able to be friendly with any guys. She was hardly fluent in English speaking. So far, she always shared her room with 5-6 girls, now she was allotted her own room. Of all the challenges, living in single seated room was biggest challenge for her. She felt uprooted, scared & very lonely. To make the matter worse, she scored average grades. She felt humiliated & cocooned herself in a shell & tried to save little bit self-esteem she had. she ostracized herself from the few friends she had.

In summer 2009, when a guy named Atul asked her out during her internship, she was so desperate to be attached with someone, she did not think twice. This affair went on for 4-5 month & left her very bitter at the end. Atul was very self-obsessed, unhygienic, tightfisted person & always looked down at her. It was she who spent money on him, traveled on local buses to be with him, but he never gave a damn about her.

Atul-“I come to girl’s hostel not to meet you only but to gaze upon other girls”

In January 2010, when most of her college mate got placed & left college, she was struggling for placements & trying to recover from her breakup, she saw Dhruv, walking in campus, smiling to her. He always smiled at her & she thought, let’s speaks to this guy & sent him friend request on Orkut, then a popular social networking site.

Few days later, a reply came-“I have no interest in being your friend.”  Alia thought, who knows, whether he will like me or my nature. She accepted his proposal only to distract herself from the reality & to bring back fun quotient in her life.