They had a game where Ankur, Niki’s older brother, strapped a cricket pad to his chest, and she hurled the ball at him. She didn’t remember how it started; that never mattered.
What mattered was that Ankur—the boy who excelled in studies and sports, whose name teachers said with pride, the boy their mother relied on to supply witty comments against their father—trusted her with a game meant for boys, for brothers.
“Harder, Niki. Don’t you have any strength?” he would say.
Niki practiced her throws in secret, wary of being caught. Her mother once told her she wasn’t “girl like,” so she threw harder, just to make sure Ankur never said it too.
Sometimes, during play, he slipped in things she imagined boys said in locker rooms, behind tea stalls, in cybercafés. He mimicked the maths teacher when he lost his temper, told jokes about the school cricket team’s failures, hinted at pranks he couldn’t describe fully.
Girls, though considered closer, didn’t share anything of value. Only whispers of crushes and flimsy claims of ownership, nothing Niki could connect to. She wasn’t a tomboy like the girl with the bowl cut and full pants, nor was she the girl with the folded skirt, glossed lips, and kajal everyone fancied. She was average in every way except for her height and for having a brother no one could stop noticing.
Notes from the girls found their way to her desk. She kept the chocolates and saved the notes for the game. She liked reading them to Ankur in a dramatic tone. He barely listened until he found something to twist into a joke. As far as Niki knew, he never had a girlfriend. She figured it was because girls gave him too much attention; he was the type to want someone who wasn’t pursuing him.
One day, when she hit him with her strongest throw, the strap on the chest pad snapped loose, but Ankur showed no sign of injury. He simply nodded and left.
Something in him shifted after that. He skipped his pre-board exam. Rumours sprouted—he’d been seen with a girl in a sheesha bar, in an abandoned park, caught with a pendrive of cheap movies—but Niki dismissed them all. She said nothing to their parents, not even when she saw him stealing money from their mother’s purse or when that same girl appeared in his bedroom when no one was home.
The girl, who never sent any notes or asked about Ankur, came from a strict family and often vanished from school for months before returning. Once, Niki overheard her brothers asking for him outside the school gate.
Sometimes Niki imagined the girl screaming, loud and unmannered, a sound that felt impossible when she was with Ankur.
She was sure she had cracked something in him. So she kept quiet.
Ankur did well on his boards, and the girl wasn’t seen again.
Years later, Niki ran into her again, now a nutritionist and women’s-health coach with a million followers. Niki lingered beside her outside the mall while she waited for her cab. She didn’t ask about Ankur, to her surprise.
Her pinned Instagram video said, “We already carry enough pain inside us. We don’t need to go looking for fights the way men do.”
Niki thought of their last game, just before Ankur left for college to study journalism instead of engineering—a decision that sparked days of shouting at home. At that time, she insisted on wearing the cricket pad. She wanted to change, too. She wanted what he had found, whatever it was. She craved it.
Ankur obliged, but it bored him. It did not offer the same pleasure as before, when there was the electric risk of pain. He tossed the ball lazily, careful not to hurt his fragile, average sister. Niki knew this was not how the game worked for boys. Men invented games like kabaddi, drunken fights over nothing, debates, war: ways of feeling pain and mistaking it for conquest. Chasing the high.
After returning home, she dug out the old cricket pad, yellowed and cracked, feathers of foam spilling out like a dead bird, and she whacked it with the bat until her floor resembled a crime scene. No high, only a faint vibration that wouldn’t leave her hands.