Suprising people

When you are one of those few people in class who does not smoke, people will be surprised to see you near those smoking addas. I cross the smoking lane several times a day, because all the eating, recharge, juice shop and whatever shops you can’t survive without are either in that lane or we have to cross that lane to go to those shops.

R likes this particular lime tea made in the shop which is in the smoker’s lane. Since last week both of us have been coming to this shop almost regularly and because of her I have also grown fond of that tea. I don’t know how come people from my class never saw us before in that lane. Today when we had two hours free before the next class, R and I went to that tea shop.

I don’t know what happened to both of us at that very moment, but we started recalling all those eating places we had made a mental list of since the starting of this semester. So instead of actually going and buying tea, we started contemplating whether we should go to the cake shop near R’s hostel or whether we should go to that another tea shop which is a bit far away. Then we started thinking if we go to these places, would we come back on time or not. We started thinking everything, except for actually buying the tea.

Meanwhile three of our classmates came to that lane, and the moment they spotted us, they came to us and asked us what we were doing there. I looked at R because I wasn’t very sure why were they asking us this, then I realized that because it was the smoking lane and both me and R are “non-smokers” they were shocked to see us there. We told them we come to that lane often (I don’t think there is anyone in college who doesn’t come to that lane, it’s like an informal extension of college).

They went to the other side of the road, where most of the smokers usually stand. R was looking at me, and I knew she was thinking exactly what I was thinking. Why was it so strange for them to see us in the smoking lane? We soon forgot about it and started arguing again about which tea shop to go to. We decided we will just drink our usual lemon tea, and go. Meanwhile the crowd infront of the tea shop had also increased so I decided to wait (we anyways had ample time with us and we had nothing else to do).

We started talking about why it was so unusual for our classmates to see us there. Maybe they think we can’t stand smokers, or maybe they have this notion that we both are nerds who confine themselves only to library (I like library, but that in no way makes me a nerd).

Then another group of our classmates walked towards us. The moment S saw us she had this wide-eyed expression and she asked us very seriously what were we doing there. Her expression was so serious that for a second even I got tensed. A jokingly asked me If I am picking up this new habit of smoking or not. I told them that we just came there to drink tea. They were still in shock I guess.

They thought we were scared to go to the tea shop and buy tea, because there were so many smokers standing there. A went and told M that we need help. She came to us and asked what we wanted. Both me and R were tired of getting that shocked expression from everyone. I just didn’t give any explanation anymore and told M that we wanted two glasses of tea. She being the helpful one got us our tea. We both quickly drank the tea and went from there. Till the time we didn’t reach class, we were smiling and thinking about their shocked expression, specially the wide-eyed expression of S.