It had been almost 2 weeks since Nishant had joined Lit club and his days had been very hectic. Trying to catch up with daily dose of academic books before getting started with endless torture of essays. He had constant urges to pull his hair out in frustration. 'Write about your opinions and thoughts' was an easy advice to give out but when it came to actually writing, it was one of the toughest things nishant had to do. He actually realized that being opinionated was underrated. Everyone thought it was easy to formulate opinions and just share it publicly. But only he knew how difficult it was becoming. Only good thing about this assignment was, somehow there was a friendly vibe between him and shradha. He had no idea what that meant or was it even helpful to him, but her words were oddly comforting. Nishant had started to give out faint smile to her even outside lit club and she seemed to not mind about this development. "Are we friends now?" thought Nishant after one such smiling in the class incident. It was actually computer lab and they had to write some programs which was a part of 2 hour lab session.
Shradha was engrossed in the program. She liked coding. That was one of the reasons for her to choose Engineering despite of disagreement from her family. The program she was working was of designing a webpage with few input and outputs. Others were still working on coding part when Shradha had already finished hers and was scribbling something on the notes. Nishant thought "Hmm so she is not stupid. And certainly uses her brain during exams" he was also done with his code and was simply helping out the guy next to him. From where Nishant was sitting, he had clear view of Shradha's monitor and it looked like she was now modifying the code again. She had been trying to add advanced features and was currently struggling with something. After thinking for a second, Nishant got up from his seat and walked over to say " I think logic is very much correct. Just use DO WHILE condition instead of WHILE."
This was a miraculous moment for Shradha. Someone had voluntarily helping her and that person was Nishant, was even more shocking. She always thought that Nishant was someone who would stay away from risky things as much as possible and hence they would never be friends despite of the tiny smile he often gave her these days. But now he had walked up to her and offered help, on something that she would get it eventually anyway.
Shradha managed to say "oh! I will try." She tried the modification suggested by Nishant and it worked. She turned to thank Nishant, but it was almost end of the Lab timings and everyone had started to leave. So she decided to talk to Nishant later.
Lectures ended early that day and Nishant had some lit club assignments to work on. He thought of finishing some of the assignments in college, as it was peak traffic hour. The mini park in the college was beautiful place to spend time. Although it was mostly filled with couples, there were study groups as well. Nishant always liked sitting there under a tree and studying. Classes were getting over for many other departments and students were leaving the campus. Nishant concentrated on his assignment and did not notice when shradha approached him. "Thank you for helping me today". Only when shradha started speaking, Nishant looked up and saw shradha was standing in front of him. Before he could open his mouth, Shradha continued, "I don't like being in debt. So I am telling you this. You should read more. Maybe some fictions and magazine articles. Reading and observing writing styles can be really useful." She was walking away before Nishant could understand and react to her words. Nishant thought,"What a character". But more he thought about what she said, more it made sense to him. He had never read a fictional book in his life. Sheela used to buy him some of the self help books which talked about improving confidence, motivation etc but those were never able to interest Nishant. So thinking maybe he should read some novel, Nishant went to the college library. He knew they had some fictional books, but it was the first time Nishant going to the section.