Chapter IV: Chaos
"Dear Life, when I said "Can my day get any worse?" It was rhetorical, not a challenge."
It had been close to forty-five minutes already since they had commenced their journey, and Khushi, for all her meticulous vigilance over Google Maps and the physical map spread before her, had found no added advantage of her monitoring since Arnav had not given any unpleasant surprises behind the steering wheel yet. That however, had not stopped her from giving him a solid glare every now and then when the speed would take up just a notch, or when they encountered any road bumps, or when he would occasionally remove his right hand from the steering wheel and place it on the window, resting his head upon his forefingers. Not that he seemed to care, though. His eyes seemed to be set straight on the road and his mind somewhere back in Delhi perhaps from the distracted look on his face. Slowly, she could feel the lack of sleep catching up with her and before she knew, with one hand clutching her coffee mug while the other held with dear life on to her phone-- live Google Maps lit up on it, and another map spread on her lap, her eyelids slowly fluttered close as she resigned to sleep.
Arnav, had had just about enough now. He was quite sure that he had not been subjected to this level of scrutiny even while having given his driver's license test. What was this woman thinking anyway? That he would attempt to just drive them all off some cliff and she would save the day heroically with that pathetic excuse of a map she had spread all over the passenger seat merrily obstructing his access to the clutch every now then? Also, would she just stop glaring at him like that? Like, couldn't a man occasionally rest an arm on the window without having to feel like he had just taken it off from after having pressed a nuclear power button?
Khushi's slow lapse into slumber, therefore, came as immense relief to him. He turned his head in her direction and saw her head bent sideways gently resting upon her shoulder and the coffee mug in her hand precariously tilting closer towards spilling all it's contents over the map spread across her lap. The cool breeze entering through the rolled down window on her side was doing a fine work of playing with the hair, spreading them in disarray across her face.
When he became positively sure that the coffee mug was about to sacrifice itself all across Khushi's lap in the next few seconds unless active discouragement was offered to it, Arnav took one hand off the steering wheel and cautiously extended it towards her hand, gently easing the mug out of it and placing it on the holder positioned by the clutch. Her hand fell limply by her side, and she sighed in her sleep. Arnav eyed the lit up screen clutched tightly in her hands and saw that after some reckless sleep induced finger work, it was now showing directions towards the Eiffel Tower in Paris (Khushi in her post divorce zeal for life had bookmarked the seven wonders of the world on the App as an ambitious list to be covered in the coming years of independence). Arnav's eyes rested upon her face for a moment, before he shook his head in disbelief and turned his attention back to the road, placing his hand back upon the steering wheel.
What was it with her hair though.
Every time Arnav would attempt to increase the speed of the vehicle ever so slightly, as the pace picked up, the breeze from Khushi's window would enter with a stronger force, play a little more erratically with the hair on her face, and she would shift in her sleep and her brows would cross together ever so slightly in annoyance, before he was forced to decelerate. It was distracting was what it was, he thought in annoyance. Here he was trying to derive a few moments of peace driving through serene mountains, and she would not stop the goddamn fidgeting. Who slept this restlessly anyway.
Yes please, wear your waist length hair a little looser the next time you drive through windy mountain roadsides.
He wouldn't think of it was what he was going to do. Let her be annoyed and restless. It was her hair after all. Let it make a spider web all across her face and wake her up for what he cared.
Yes, wake her up and have her glare judgmentally at him the entire journey like he was about to blow the damn vehicle up any instant. Whatever. Like he cared.
Arnav Singh Raizada famously had an obsessive compulsive disorder of having an irrepressible need to have everything in perfect order, perfect alignment, and sequence. He would notice when a pen on his table had been kept at the wrong angle, would quietly push back an errant paper peeking out of a file, and even noticed if his table did not ever so correctly align itself with the marble square on the floor. His office suits were always spotlessly clean, shoes as black as the midnight sky, and hair gelled into place with such commendable obedience that a tornado could pass over it without displacing a strand of hair.
So, therefore, it was only for so long that he managed to keep his attention solely concentrated upon the road without being able to do something about the goddamn hair and the constant disturbance it seemed to be causing her. He had tried using the master switch to roll up her window but it did not seem to be working, or perhaps had been intentionally disabled for the rented car. He threw one look at her sleeping form, another at the rolled down window by her side and half considered the idea of waking her up to ask her to roll it back up.
"Khushi?", he called out softly, careful not to disturb the entire sleeping boggy behind them. Her eyes remained shut, although she did sigh a little louder and further snuggled into her seat.
Great.
When OCD finally trumped self restraint about twenty minutes thereafter, Arnav decided to take matters into his own hands. All he had to do was to roll up the window on her side which would take approximately five quick seconds, without having to create any sort of disturbance or chaos. Disturbance and chaos, however, had other plans for Arnav Singh Raizada.
Considerably slowing down the speed of the vehicle, Arnav unclasped his seat belt and with one hand still on the wheel, bent considerably to his left to press the window switch situated next to Khushi.
Several things happened in the next few seconds-- Khushi Kumari Gupta, who had felt constant tickling upon her face throughout her sleep, sensed movement at a distance of hardly 6 inches from her face and opened her eyes barely enough to see the side of Arnav's face. Horrified, she quickly realized that the car was still in slow movement. With all the force she could muster, Khushi took a sharp, terrified intake of breath and lunged forward (an action that caused her forehead to hit Arnav's jawline with full force, causing him to wince) and then with both her palms out flat, pushed Arnav Singh Raizada away from herself as forcefully as she possibly could. The coffee mug, as has been discussed earlier, after two previous unsuccessful attempts at suicide, decided to take the final plunge and fell from the holder, spilling its contents every which way it could conceive, including upon Khushi's smartphone which caused the Google Maps running on it to, in an all new haze of disorientation, now redirect its attention towards the Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Arnav, who had not yet recovered from the assault on the left side his face, was now combating a bigger assault on the right side of his face that went and hit the windshield. The car did a dangerous zig zag on the narrow road and Khushi screamed and threw herself towards the driver's seat to take control of the steering wheel and brakes. All the commotion caused the three occupants on the backseat to be rudely shaken out of their peaceful slumber and with eyes the size of saucers, stare horrified at the commotion on the front.
As the car came to a screeching halt, the quiet, peaceful, hills of Nainital heard the loudest "WHAT THE!-" they had ever heard since their magnificent inception.
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Hope you enjoyed reading this part as much as I enjoyed writing it! Anxious to know ❤️
Thank you for reading, and a BIG thank you to all those who leave their thoughts behind, it is a sheer delight to read them. To all new readers, welcome on-board!
Edited by AnExIPKwriter - 6 years ago
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