Chapter XXIX
Cold Shoulder: The Lunch Box Journal

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Story so far: The Pondicherry plan was put on an interim hold somewhere in the future, while the Midnight Cafe seemed like a good place to hang out and talk about things, and they decided to go there again in the future. It was followed by a sleepover at Gautham’s place, though neither Aryan nor Gautham slept that night or the next day. 

The next day the office resumed as usual. While playing badminton at the office seemed like a temporary fix since there were too many people coming and overcrowding it, Aryan and Gautham decided to play outside of the office. There was a badminton court near to Gautham’s place. They pitched the idea to Sameera who along with her husband were ready to play since the court was too close to their place. Their plan included playing the game after office hours, after they have reached their home and had their dinner. It sort of because a routine playing twice or thrice a week and Gautham used to crop Aryan every night since he didn’t have any means of transportation and it was close to 10 min distance on a two-wheeler. Aryan didn’t want to impose too much on Gautham and also he had to travel back to his home late at night on the very unsafe roads and locality. To mitigate this, Aryan got himself a bicycle. The idea was that it would be good exercise and also help in the transportation, without having to depend on someone else for the transportation.

In one of the odd days when they weren’t playing Aryan went out on cycling and ended up at the Coffee Shop which was his midnight hangout place and have coffee. Meanwhile, Akhil was being a little cocky and sent some message with a sensitive topic. Aryan was usually the calm guy who used to let this thoughts and opinions slide since he didn’t want to be one debating for the same. But this time he tried to correct the presumably-light-weight statement, which wasn’t well received by Akhil who got furious immediately. For some reason, Akhil wasn’t understanding the other side of the conversation, or even trying to listen to it, to which Aryan replied saying that there was no use trying to straighten the dog’s tail, as a metaphor, which made Akhil even more furious because he saw the word dog. In response to that, he stopped talking to Aryan for a whole two weeks and even after that there was still a bit of cold distance between the two. While Sameer stepped up to help resolve the issue, while Akhil still maintained that cold shoulder for a little while longer.

While the whole squad was looking forward to a trip, one of their colleagues suggested going to Sri Lanka. This wasn’t that bad of an idea, but if they plan to go out of the country they would most probably go to much place much better than to a neighboring country. Meanwhile, Neil’s family were already involved in searching for suitable matches for him. The other weekend he even went to the community marriage gathering to see if there were any potential people suitable for him. There was one person who was from the same office campus as Neil and there were quite a lot of possibilities that could happen. Meanwhile, Gautham’s family are in the initial stages of looking for a girl for him though he is hoping that it will take another year or so before they could even find a suitable person for Gautham. And on the other end, Akhil’s fascination towards Srestha was increasing exponentially.

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(To be Continued …)

How long will the shoulder be cold? Will they plan to go on a trip to Sri Lanka? What happens with Akhil and Srestha?
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The Lunch Box Journal

ak, mmxviii