The Care Package

Edited by: Malavika Kishore

This is not going to be a long article (or, maybe, it will be). I have a tendency to ramble indefinitely about things that are seemingly one-liners. I cannot summarise, and often go on tangents that have nothing to do with what I have to talk about. This is one of those tangents. Okay. I have to stop. The article. 

My friends (hell, best friends) made me a care package one day to cheer up my mood. Let’s call them Sophie and Amanada, as I am so white-washed, these were the first 2 names I could think of before any Indian names. 

It was a big, white paper bag with 8 objects in total.

1. Mad Angles: my favourite chips. Sophie and I share a love for them. Whenever we go to the vending machine, we buy just 2 packets, always the same: mad angles and red lays. Amanda hates red lays, so we get her a can of coke to satiate her with caffeine, which she is addicted to. (You are not a part of the friend group, so you won’t understand just how funny this is. But if you were Sophie and Amanada, you would be rolling on the floor right now.)
2. Mogu Mogu: my favourite drink. I fear I have monopolised (Soph, do you want to write this word down so we can use it in the essay next semester?) a love for this drink so much that at least, my friends will never be able to think about it without thinking of me and my weird obsession with it. It’s just one of my things now. Everyone has a thing. Sophie, for example, hates kids. So, whenever I see a kid being annoying, I think, “If Sophie were here, she would punch that little rat.”
3. Face Masks: This is another tradition of ours. Face masks and movies. I never put them on right, the space that should cover your nose usually covers my mouth, but I am always just as excited to put them on. After I got the face masks, I begged Amanda and Sophie for days to get together and apply them (they are not as fond of sheet face masks) and the day they finally agreed to it, I realised I had lost them. That’s another thing about me. I lose things. I lost my keys, like, 7 times in the first semester. I have lost things you couldn’t even fathom losing.
4. A small bottle of honey: I actually am not entirely sure why they gave me this. I do like honey, but I don’t remember having ever told them. Maybe, it was some metaphor pertaining to how sweet I was, but I am really not that sweet. I still have it, resting on my table. 
5. A small cup from Fuelzone with flowers from around the campus: I kept them with me. They wilted, and turned brown, but it didn’t matter. The flowers, or their colours, were secondary. What mattered was that my friends got me flowers.
6. A chocobar: It’s a staple. After dinners on many occasions, we go and get ice creams, and it’s always a treat by someone or the other. At some point in a friendship, you start owing each other so much money, these little transactions go obsolete. Nonetheless, I always get chocobar or the choco-vanilla cornetto, and my friends always get the orange or raspberry ice cream that makes my teeth hurt. I am not kidding. The sight of someone eating flavoured ice literally makes my teeth hurt, and fall off.
7. A lip balm: The non-tinted kind. I hate tinted lip balms. I honestly think Amanada wanted me to have the lip balm, so I would stop stealing her lip gloss. Was the care package just an excuse?
8. A colouring book: They had thought I had colours. I didn’t, but it doesn’t matter. I loved it just the same.

That’s the end of it. Little snippets of me, enclosed in a big, white paper bag. Most of the contents of the care package are long gone. The lip balm is on its last legs, the packet of chips, eaten and forgotten. But it doesn’t matter. The memory still brings me as much happiness as it did when they gave me that white, paper bag. It is not even about what was inside it (says I, after explaining in detail what was inside it) but about the fact that they took out the time in their life, and the money in their scarce budget just to tell me they care about me, so I would not be sad. And that’s when I knew. I had really stumbled onto the greatest treasure in the World, and if I didn’t hold onto it, I would be the biggest idiot in the World. I know I am always losing things, but I will never lose them. 

One last thing. I bet you 100 rupees (I have only that much left due to my over-fixation on Boba tea) that I can predict their reactions to reading this. Amanada will laugh at the little jokes, and then once it ends, will say, “Bro, this was so good.” It doesn’t matter if it was good or not. She will say that. And Sophie. She will get extremely emotional, and say, “I am having one of those moments again.” And then she will say the most romantic thing in the world.

• care package
• college
• friends
• happy
• university