Written in a bleak (and broke) mood

Mansi sits at her laptop, calmly ignoring the pain clawing its bloody way up her left side. An old Lata Mangeshkar song plays, and scented oil clouds the air of her room. It is late March, and by all accounts, spring has sprung. She is glad of her green sweater top, and shudders at the glistening raindrops winking at her window.

A stubborn piece of code is acting up, putting her CSS design right out of reckoning. She frowns, and tests it again, on a different browser. It still does not work. She would have liked to get up and have a cup of tea, but there’s no one to make it for her. Her assignment list is miles high, and her room like a mini dump. Clothes needing laundering mix cheerfully with freshly washed ones, and the iron looks dolefully at a solitary boot. Mansi stretches her legs, and inadvertently kicks over the rubbish bin again.

She sighs, and leans towards it, and slides off her chair.

“Bloody FAKKIN hell!”

She straightens and hits her head against the table, which immediately causes the mounds of paper perched atop it to wobble. A paper landslide ensues.

“I HATE deadlines,” is followed by a string of fruity expletives. She manages to restore some order to the chaotic mess on the floor and swings up to her chair again, wincing at its hardness on her now tender arse. The music is abruptly turned off as she blinks her sleep fug off, and gets back to typing.

“Aha! A simple, stupid error. Forgot to close that bracket…” she lights her sixth fag of the day. Strictly speaking, smoking isn’t allowed in any of the university’s accommodation, but she’s wrapped a plastic bag around the smoke detector. She draws deeply, sighing with pleasure.

The rest of the code works like a dream. She tests it out on Firefox, brilliant. Firefox is the most unforgiving browser…it’s a nightmare if you’ve made any errors…

Hidden somewhere among all the junk is her mobile phone. It rings now, and she jumps. It’s past midnight, too late for her family to be calling.

“Hullo!” –snarled.

“Hello, missus, you comin out tonight?”

It’s her classmate Betty. “No, it’s late dammit, we have a project to hand in tomorrow, it’s pissin it down with rain and I’m fuckin broke. So no, I am not coming out tonight.”

She grits her teeth, and punches the wall.