WAI WAI

She was still sleeping in her couch when I woke up. Even by that time, her eyes remained unfeeling of the gentle caress of sun-rays making their ways through a pine tree lying by her side. Yeah, it had already been 6:30 am and she was still contracting her head, holding her stomach tight and folding her knees so as to place her complete self within the surface of paper mattress that had once served as noodles box. I could fluently read the large letters printed towards the bottom of her bedding. There was written “WAI WAI” in green bold letters. Her body seemed to lye there for a long ago, as if for decades; for centuries. By that time, I didn't had that shrewdness to determine how long does it takes for one to acquire such tarnished skin, cracked heels, and tangled hair. Though I boasted with my friends to be nine, but to be honest with you, I was actually eight at that time. I didn't understand it, when she was still not agitated by the loud horns from the buses and heavy trucks passing by her, though in a slow motion. Well yeah, that's why, me, my father and many others had to spend the whole night on the not so comfortable seats of bus. I didn't liked it, in fact, I hated it, the very slow motion of the vehicle we were traveling in. I was painfully disturbed when at times I glanced from the window of my bus the never ending queue of buses, trucks, cars and many other different varieties of vehicles. And so it was a pleasure to these eyes to watch her sleep, a beautiful stance I believed.
My senses hadn't developed enough to predict the age, yet, I knew that she was of my size; of my friends' size. She was wearing a short pink skirt with myriad number of blemishes and countless number of holes that looked uncannily beautiful when showcased over her thin and numb body. Till then, I had never seen anybody looking deceivingly graceful in such dry, brown, rough and tangled short hairdo. My mom had long, black hair which she always oiled and combed to create an amazing chignon towards the back-end of her head and all those years I believed for her to be the most graceful creature in the world.
The gentle play between her hair and mild breeze amused me, and may be it did amused her as well. Yeah, trust me, it was a moment of pure ecstasy to watch her smile with locked eye lashes. Suddenly, she woke up waking me up from an excited state of my happiness. Soon after waking up, she wore her slippers with two different colored laces those she had placed in the trunk of the pine tree. Then on, she folded her mattress and placed it from where she had took out her slippers. She then sat beneath the tree holding immense emptiness in her capacious eyes. Nothing of this realistic world could match up to her, perhaps. Her slightly stretched chin seem to steal away the ordinariness of her otherwise round structure. Her high held nose gave me a feeling of alert guard assigned to protect the precious voidness present in her eyes. The small mouth her face consisted finely denoted her indifference to the things around her. It was an apathetic mouth that had lost its voracity long ago; it happened to me. She had inordinately long and thin legs for her age that had added an extra sensuality in her of which she was barely conscious. Her posture at that time was incredibly elegant, I would say.

All of a sudden, she stood from the seated position and tilted her head aside. There was a man standing beside her, a man who had just walked out from our bus. She was not staring at him, but yes, she was following his sight. He was arduously smoking a long and thin cigarette, very different from the one my grand-mother used to smoke furtively. My grand-mother's cigarettes used to be much shorter than the man's, I remember. Suddenly, I got surprised. Things turned quite unanticipated. She hurriedly run towards the remnant of the cigarette the man had thrown, picked it up and started smoking it. I was thrilled to watch her smoke in so much cool fashion. One could easily comprehend her addiction towards the thrown remnant of the cigarette. She seemed unduly used to it. I was not able to keep my eyes off her. She had got many things to hold my heart upon her. She was a completely unorthodox being. She was a matured human being in a frame of a juvenile child. Her every acts were dissimilar to mine. I was wondering time and again; why she wasn't like me? Why did she preferred to sleep in such coarse and rough noodle's cartoon? Why did she opt to dress in the ragged skirt? Why she seemed to enjoy sitting lonely and not playing with other kids as I do? Why she loved smoking cigarette rather than drinking milk like me? As I was hitting myself with such questions, the bus started increasing its acceleration. And that time I was not liking the fast motion of the vehicle I was in. Just when I was taking my head out of window to look upon her, my dad scolded me by calling the act as a mischievous and careless. I was obliged to move away with the moving of bus..