Portals- By Arathi Menon

The Arrival

"Long time no see" 

Ashwati woke up and rubbed her eyes. Then she took a better look around the tangerine-painted room.

She noticed a pair of black eyes looking at her with excitement and an air of concern.

"Are you okay now?" the girl asked.

Ashwati did not know what to say. She had only just begun to see and comprehend things clearly, after a seemingly long episode of nauseating dizziness. It was not painful though, but quite irritating. To her relief, the feeling was surely slowly abating.

"You okay?"

"Shall I get you something?"

A middle aged woman entered the room with a jug of some clear-pink beverage.

"She must be tired now, Kavya. Let her take some rest"

She paused to turn her eyes back to Ashwati.

"Oh my! All these years and you haven't changed a bit!"

Ashwati looked at the lady, more shocked than confused now. This is a phrase she had heard very often, usually coming from distant family members or acquaintances of her parents on various occasions of social gathering. Not that she would recognize all of them. Neither did she know anything about the lady nor much about her daughter, who also looked at her with a sense of familiarity she could not reciprocate. Unsure of what to do, she simply smiled at them.

"Here, have some tea"

Ashwati waited for the mother and daughter to leave the room. Then she immediately poured the pink beverage from the jug into a clear cup. Hopefully, she thought, this might help with her nausea.

The liquid in the cup was a pretty thing to look at, as it assumed a lighter pink shade and glistened as the rays of light from a window passed through it. It was piping hot though, and she had to blow over it to take each sip. It tasted slightly sweet, a little like green tea, with some notes of strawberry, lychee and rose. A pleasantly weird taste, but it did help with her nausea.

In the tray where the jug was placed was also a white plate that held some biscuits, those that were only noticed later. There were five of them, all flower shaped, bright yellow in color with some white glaze and rainbow sprinkles. She ate just two of them and found that they had a cake like texture, which she liked. However, she stopped after eating just two of them as she found them too sweet.

She then looked around the room. Quite a tidy one, with only a purple couch and a yellow set of a table and two chairs. The table had a neat stack of books placed on it. She got up from her bed and looked into the mirror placed nearby. She still looked the same as she remembered, a slightly stout woman right in the middle of her third decade of life, with really messy hair which was now, for some reason even messier. The room in which she stood was still strange and she was unable to find any memory of it, old or new. She thought and thought till too much of thinking became tiring. 

Probably just a fever dream, she thought. Ashwati had nothing better to do, so she went back to sleep.