Hackschool Project # 16 Confrontation and continuation

COVER STORYLeena, Inaya and Jasir have their cousin Arisha over for the weekend. She is busy creating a disturbance wherever she can. She starts with Jasir, then Leena. Now it’s Inaya’s turn…Inaya was sitting at her study table, scribbling away on a notepad with a pile of textbooks beside her. When Arisha entered the room followed by an anxious Leena, she didn’t look up.“Hey, Inaya.” Arisha put her arm over the back of Inaya’s study chair and leaned forward to see what she was doing. “No protocol for me, your special guest for today?”Inaya paused in the middle of drawing a diagram for the tenth time, shot Arisha a sideways glance and said, “You’re coming into the room in the middle of my study session, isn’t that protocol enough for you?”“Let’s see what you’re working on.” Arisha snatched a stack of papers and flipped through them quickly. “Such detailed notes. I think they will be useful. I’m taking them with me.”Leena stepped forward but Inaya raised a hand to stop her. “Take it. Take it all. That’s all you’re good for. Taking.”“What?” Arisha went red in the face.“You heard me,” Inaya snapped. “I’d be surprised if you even had anything of your own to begin with.”Arisha looked like she was going to explode with anger at any moment. She shook the stack of study papers in Inaya’s face, trembling with rage. “I’ll teach you to talk to me like that!” She exhaled fiercely and audibly. Leena couldn’t look at the state Arisha was in without thinking that a) it looked like she was going to breathe smoke or blow fire any second now, b) if Inaya kept matching Arisha’s attacks blow for blow, Arisha was going to get angrier with each one, c) this looked like it was going in the opposite direction of the planned peace offering, and d) all of the above would ensure an explosive conclusion to this experiment very soon. Inaya, borrowing a tip from a long history of losing sisterly battles to Leena’s calmness, faced Arisha with a composed expression. “The only thing you have to teach me is trickery and lies. Begone, thief!” she said with a dismissive gesture, indulging her inner actress. Leena suppressed a groan. She knew that Inaya enjoyed having the upper hand too much and was getting carried away by the power of it all. Before Arisha could react to Inaya’s dramatic line, the door opened, and Mama walked right into the middle of the brewing storm like a cool wind. “What kind of play are you rehearsing in this cramped room?” Mama flashed a smile at the three girls and went over to the window to pull back the curtains. “You need more light in here. Air, too. Keep the door open if you’re going to shout and get excited like that. Otherwise, you’ll tire yourselves out needlessly. No, girls, don’t give me those looks. Be quiet. Hush, Arisha. I’ll listen to what all of you have to say at the tea table. Tea is hot and waiting. Hurry, now!” In this manner, Mama shepherded the three girls into the living room, where Papa sat already enjoying his cup of tea and Jasir sat staring at the almond cake in the middle of the tea trolley.Inaya and Leena slipped into the roles of gracious hosts and served Arisha well, though Leena took pity on Jasir’s unrelenting gaze and passed him a slice of cake first with the declaration, “Let’s serve the littlest at the start.” Arisha sat with her plate piled high with pastries, chewing slowly and deliberately as if taking her feelings out on the food. Inaya tried to catch Leena’s eye to get her assessment of the situation through Leena’s facial expressions, but Leena persisted in the role of host long after Jasir had drowned his second slice in his cup of tea and Mama and Papa had moved onto discussing the evening plans in front of the TV. Inaya turned to assess Arisha instead. Arisha seemed to have given up on the idea of trying to complain about them to their parents. Usually this meant that she was cooking up something worse, but Inaya guessed that Arisha had retreated for now. The Arisha vs. Inaya situation that had been continuing from childhood and had dragged Leena and Jasir into the mix was not going to be resolved any time soon. There was no need to waste any more energy on it for the rest of the weekend unless Arisha decided to take a hostile position again. As it was, the weekend concluded and Arisha gathered up her things to leave without further incident. Yet a mysterious feeling hung in the air and made Inaya wonder whether Arisha was going to leave them with one last parting shot. As the three siblings gathered to see her off, Arisha stopped just as she was about to get in the car and said, “Thanks, you three! I will use your things very well!” She held up Inaya’s stack of notes on which she had written her own name with the tube of Leena’s lipstick that she had taken, and grinned. Leena merely unlocked her phone and held it up with the screen towards Arisha without saying anything, after which Arisha, looking startled, got into the car and slammed the door.“What on earth do you have on your phone that silences Arisha?” Inaya asked curiously as they went back inside. Leena gave her a look.“Show us!” Jasir said.Leena showed them. There was a pause where Jasir let out a hoot and Inaya clapped her hands over her mouth. It was the photo of Arisha when she had gone to Leena’s college campus, in which she looked bothered and out of place. It was a bad enough photo to keep Arisha in check for as long as they had it, but Inaya had acted on her feelings of guilt and told Leena to delete it, which she had done in front of all of them. Leena giggled in a very uncharacteristic way as her siblings looked at her with wide, questioning eyes.“You know that’s not fair,” Inaya began. “We deleted this and were nice to her while she was here just so we could patch things up.”“Yeah, right!” Leena looked at Inaya and shook her head. “I kept this in my backup files just in case. See? It was needed. Inaya, you said we were all going to be nice to her but then you went on and triggered Arisha by standing up to her. You know Arisha is like a coiled spring. She will hold a lot of pressure before she deliberately lets it all out on you. I had to flash this in her face to slow her down in whatever direction she was going next with her plans to get back at you.” “You are a mastermind,” Jasir said, fixing Leena with a stare of admiration.“Besides,” Inaya said, “She only thinks she made me pay with the things she was doing with my belongings while she was here. Those notes of mine she took are my own notes which I just take in class to look busy. I study from a photocopied set of notes from the topper in our class who doesn’t mind letting us copy her notes. Arisha can have her fun holding those notes from me and thinking she’s making me suffer.”“Yeah,” Leena said. “The lipstick she took from my makeup bag was actually a tester that I managed to get a saleswoman to give me because I just wanted to have it. I don’t put it on because it’s a tester so there must be so many germs on it. Arisha can have her fun writing with it if she wants to do that, though if she tries putting it on then she may have more fun than she bargained for.”“Why, does the lipstick have a deadly virus on it or something?” Jasir looked interested. “No, silly.” Leena shook her head. “The cold sores you get from that sort of thing are just annoying, that’s all.”“Hmm.” Jasir looked thoughtful. “Good thing that I am a mastermind at the level of Leena.” He chuckled. “I keep all my game save files backed up in case they get corrupted or deleted by someone else. When Arisha saved over my file, I knew if I could restore the save from the cloud, I wouldn’t lose my progress completely. As for the high score she overwrote with her lower score, that can’t be restored but now I have a new goal to aim for when I play that game, which is to reach my old high score again.”The three siblings looked at each other and smiled. “That means we know how to prepare for and survive a crisis,” Leena finally said. Inaya’s face fell. “What are you thinking about?” Leena asked her.“I’m just thinking that it’s time to go to the bookstore and get a set of past papers, so I can polish my preparation for my O Level exams,” Inaya said, looking worried.“What good are past papers?” Jasir asked.“You can look at the previous years of questions that came in the papers and see which topics appear more frequently, that sort of thing,” Inaya said gloomily.“Cheer up.” Leena nudged her. “You can do this.”“I guess.” Inaya sighed. “I just remembered, I have to go to the bookstore, too,” Jasir said. “I’m going to be in the pre-Matric class now, so I have to get new textbooks.” Both Jasir and Inaya turned towards Leena. “You’re lucky!” Jasir said. “You’re just coasting along to the end of your second semester, aren’t you?”“I will have finals and tests just like you two, so don’t make it sound like I’m the one having all the fun,” Leena said.“Oh, well.” Jasir shrugged. “Different things come and go but at the end of it all we always come back to the textbooks.” He looked bored.“Don’t worry, Jasir,” Leena said, pinching his arm. “There’s enough life to be lived that even all these textbooks and tests can’t take it away.”“I’m just counting the days until summer holidays,” Jasir said, stretching lazily.“Don’t remind me.” Inaya shuddered. “O Levels exam results and all that.”“Children!” Papa walked up next to them and clapped his hands around Jasir’s shoulders. “Jasir, I have a mission for you: go get your list of required textbooks and then come with me. Inaya, confirm one last time with your classmate about the brand of past papers you should get. Leena, will you make me a cup of tea for the road? Put it in a thermos. Now then; let’s get going.”Where will the road of life take the Moin family next? We’ll see in next month’s episode of Hackschool Project.

from The News International - US http://bit.ly/2RM1MbQ