G075 - Sharma, Aditi [DECEASED]

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DECEASED

Name: Aditi Abhijit Sharma
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: 12th
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Debating, yoga, classical Indian dance, biology, makeup and fashion, gossip, softball, cheerleading

Appearance: Primarily of South Indian (specifically Tamil) descent, Aditi’s skin is a fairly uniform dark brown, mainly free of marring or blemishes, much to her pleasure. Extensive time outdoors has tanned her skin, however, which means that she looks somewhat darker when compared to her family members. Her face is oval in shape, containing wide brown eyes which seem to almost be permanently half-lidded, arched and tweezed eyebrows, a prominent nose, and naturally pouty lips. Of all her features, it is her nose that Aditi wants to change the most, believing that due to its size it sits awkwardly on her face. At 5’4 and 110 pounds, she is a hair below average height for a girl her age, and her lack of bodily fat means that she is lithe, but without much in the way of curves. In fact, her body is roughly tube-shaped. Due to her dance training, cheerleading and softball, her legs and arms are fairly well-toned, although muscle is more evident in her legs.

Aditi’s hair is one of her biggest points of pride; she takes care of it religiously, using an array of hair products and a rigorous washing regimen in order to make sure that it is always in great shape. It is black in color. It is also naturally wavy, and while she prefers to leave it hanging down to just past her shoulder-blades, she does tie her hair back for dance performances, typically with some traditional hair decorations. In fact, most times she is found outside of her home, Aditi is wearing some sort of hair decoration; usually, it is either a flower or a colorful headband of some sort, but she has been known to experiment with more elaborate ornaments at times. When working out, however, she tends to tie her hair back into a tight bun.

With regards to clothes, Aditi tries to dress formally without it coming off as rigid or awkward. While colorful, her garments of choice tend towards cardigans and free-flowing sundresses, as she enjoys the feel of lighter fabrics. She also tends to dress in pastels, particularly enjoying shades like lilac, lavender, and mint. As for her makeup, she intends for it to correct any markings or acne on her face, but not much more than that. As such, she usually only wears some light concealer and a blush that matches her skin tone, although she will bring out her eyeshadow and lipstick for more formal occasions.

On the day of the abduction, Aditi was wearing a cropped mint cardigan with three-fourth length sleeves over a spring green spaghetti-strap top, matched with an also spring green skirt with white polka dots, that ended a few inches above the knee. She wore this with mid-calf length dark brown cowboy boots. Additionally, her hair was worn loose, with a forest green hair band completing the look. On her left knee, a black knee brace was present, covering the knee-cap as well as a few inches above and below it.

Biography: It was during a fairly quiet night that Aditi was born, on July 11, 2000. She was born to Abhijit and Janhavi Sharma, the second of two children, her older brother Ujjay, or Jay for short, being two years older. By this point, Abhijit’s family had been in Chattanooga since the 1980s; his father, and Aditi’s paternal grandfather, had moved as a young medical professional along with his wife to Tennessee because of a job offer at Erlanger Baroness Hospital, a move from Pondicherry, India. However, Janhavi was a much more recent immigrant, who moved to the US from Chennai to attend medical school, which was where she met Abhijit. Due to the pre-existing familial ties to the area, they both agreed on settling down in Chattanooga, Abhijit as a internal medicine specialist and Janhavi as a general practitioner, occupations they still practice to this day.

However, when she was three, Aditi’s paternal grandfather Sanjay died in a car accident, leaving Brahmi, his wife and Aditi’s grandmother, a widow. Fearing for his mother’s well-being now that she was living alone, Abhijit sent for her to join them in their three-bedroom home. This decision was not purely sentimental, however - due to their time-consuming jobs, both Abhijit and Janhavi knew that it would’ve been hard to balance both their work lives along with caring for two young children, and so they hoped that by letting Brahmi move in, she would be able to help take care of both Jay and Aditi.

As a young girl, Aditi developed a fascination with traditional Indian dance - especially Bharatanatyam, in no small part due to the influence of her grandmother. Back in Pondicherry, Brahmi had been a teacher at a classical Tamil dance school, and even in Chattanooga, she had once considered setting up a cultural center to coordinate arts festivals for the local Indian community. Wanting to pass on her knowledge to the next generation, she heavily encouraged her granddaughter’s burgeoning interest in dance, and took it upon herself to become for all intents and purposes, her coach. While still a fairly avid dancer, Aditi's performances at local cultural gatherings have decreased in recent years, both due to an increase in her extracurricular activities, as well as a decrease in her interest in performing in recent years. While she still considers herself a fan of dance and sees it as an important part of preserving her culture, Aditi also feels like it is something that took up too much of her time, especially as the demands from friends, family, and school grew.

Due to this, Aditi and Brahmi have always shared a fairly close relationship, Aditi counting her grandmother as one of her longest and biggest supporters, even if she sometimes feels the expectations placed upon her to be somewhat grating, especially as she has grown older. This is because when seeing young Aditi's passion for dance, all Brahmi wanted was for her granddaughter to follow in her footsteps - and as Aditi began drifting away from it, she initially found it hard to let go of the dream she held for her. Eventually, they were able to reconnect and reforge their relationships, but Brahmi makes it clear to Aditi that she has no further expectations for her - only wishing for her to be happy and successful.

Beginning school, Aditi was an attentive and studious student, who performed exceptionally in all of her subjects. However, this was maintained through an extensive study regimen and hard work, rather than any sort of natural aptitude in given subjects. The one area of study she enjoyed the most, however, were the life sciences, especially biology, with her enjoying getting to learn the workings of her own body, as well as that of others. While in elementary school this often only meant venturing to the playground and inspecting the creatures that lived there, she was enthralled, her parents proudly listening on as she explained her newfound passion to them. To them, this seemed a confirmation that Aditi would follow in their footsteps, their dream of keeping a medical legacy in the household realized.

Early on in her childhood, Aditi did not exactly have the most vibrant social life. While polite and courteous, especially to authority figures like teachers which she would seek to impress, her interactions with her classmates were often stilted and awkward, which may have grown from the somewhat snobbish attitude she possessed. While her parents, especially Janhavi, who worked her way up from a lower-middle class background to become a doctor, tried to instill values like mutual respect into their daughter, their insistence on other concepts including hard work meant that Aditi regarded most of her classmates to be beneath her, wasting either innate intelligence or refusing to work past their shortcomings.

Still, a lack of friends was seen as worrying by Abhijit and Janhavi, who did their best to improve Aditi’s temperament by impressing on her the value of kindness and respect. While their efforts didn’t exactly help, the one person who got through to her was her grandmother Brahmi, who she was (and still is) the closest to in the family. It was Brahmi who told her that if she was to be respected by others, she should at the very least respect them. However, Aditi only took this at face value. While on the surface she became much more pleasant to classmates, bonding with some of the more academically-oriented students, internally she still held much of the same beliefs she always had, just being much more private about sharing those. With these lessons, tension was placed on Aditi's relationships with her parents - while acknowledging their efforts and message, she found them preachy and unneeded, desiring more independence and control in her life.

Despite the lack of authenticity of her change in personality, her surface politeness meant that Aditi, by the time she entered middle school, had found a group of her own. It was during this time, though, having made friends with some of the more obviously snide students, that she discovered the power of gossip. Whether it was gossip about the teachers or other classmates’ crushes, she listened on raptly as she began to hear about all of these lives and all of these messes, none of which, thankfully, directly involved her. To this day, though, Aditi remains an avid gossip, although she prefers to simply listen to her friends gossip rather than her, although her reputation as someone who can keep their mouth shut has enabled her to punch slightly above her social weight.

In seventh grade, pushed by her parents to pursue additional extracurriculars, she joined the debate club, Janhavi and Abhijit believing that it would help improve her public speaking and research skills.To their satisfaction, they were proven right, and over the years Aditi has found herself to become a more than competent debater, capable of constructing a wide variety of arguments to support her reasoning and positions. As an honest outlet for much of the negative emotion she often keeps internalized when around others, she has grown to enjoy debate, even if research is not exactly her greatest passion. To this day, she remains an active and passionate member of the debate club.

Continuing from her late elementary school days, Aditi found herself more often than not socializing with those considered popular or at least aware of the social hierarchy, both due to her propensity for gossip and her upper-middle class background. While still notoriously slow to trust and more comfortable hiding the more negative parts of her personality beneath base politeness, she grew more comfortable traveling in these social circles, and regards them a fair bit more positively than many of the rest of her peers.

Through the influence of her friends, however, Aditi began to develop a burgeoning interest in fashion and makeup. Although initially only joining in out of obligation, she soon found herself enjoying the whole process of coordinating outfits and applying makeup. This interest was especially amplified when using it to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative. In fact, while she does not often wear heavy makeup, she appreciates the use of it as a tool to fix any imperfections, and enjoys doing her friends’ makeup in her spare time, although only when asked.

Continuing into high school, Aditi maintained her position in the social hierarchy, keeping much of her snide comments within herself, acting as a prompt listener to gossip, and being perfectly attentive and respectful in class. While this has ended up giving her a reputation as something of a teachers’ pet, she doesn’t mind, believing that if her efforts to improve her future prospects come at the expense of offending a few other students, it is perfectly fine.

Throughout her time in George Hunter, Aditi has kept up with many of her extracurriculars, remaining a devoted member of the debate team, as well as participating in more medicine-oriented extracurriculars including the biology club, although she isn’t particularly devoted to club activities. When she has the time, she still dances during cultural shows for the local Indian community in Chattanooga, although opportunities for such are often few and far between.

Aditi joined the cheerleading squad in her freshman year, due to both a need to cement her social status, and because she believed that with her dance experience, she would excel at the activity. To this day, she remains one of the key members of the squad, especially as a flyer, although a partial ACL tear she sustained during an awkward landing three months ago has meant that she has remained on the bench since. While she did get reconstructive surgery on the damaged ligament, she is currently attending physical therapy classes in order to rebuild leg strength, and has been required to wear a knee brace at almost all times to reduce the risk of further damage.

To some extent, tensions have flared between Aditi and her more conservative parents, especially with regards to her clothing choices and use of makeup, and often Brahmi is the one who has to act as a peacemaker between them. While not completely closed-off, Janhavi grew in a fairly conservative Hindu family, and sought to impress those same-beliefs on her daughter, especially with regards to her cosmetic interests in relation to partying. With Aditi often not putting on large amounts of makeup except if to go out, Janhavi became suspicious, and eventually confronted Aditi after staying up all night to wait for her to come home from a party. This argument happening toward the end of her freshman year, relations have cooled somewhat, with Abhijit mainly acquiescing to his wife's wishes, and Brahmi arguing that her granddaughter should have the right to do as she pleased. For the most part, Aditi’s relationship with her parents is average to middling. While they do care for her, and are proud of the way she maintains her grades, social life, and extracurriculars, they have much more concern for the company she keeps. Already discovering that she goes out and parties, they are gravely concerned that she has fallen in with the wrong crowd, and although she does throw in token efforts to placate them, by and large Aditi feels that her social decisions are ones to make for herself. While this has not escalated into a full-out argument yet, tensions are brewing, and so Aditi is glad that she is graduating soon, Brahmi often the only one she feels truly supports her in her family.

Despite these parental conflicts, Aditi and Jay have never been particularly close, with he being more inclined towards activities like robotics and academic decathlon. While this has not ended in conflict between the pair, it has resulted in a fair amount of distance between the two, with communication between the two after Jay left for Georgia Tech for college fairly sparse and somewhat stilted.

Out of a desire to spend more time out of the house, Aditi joined the softball team during sophomore year on a whim, despite having had no prior experience with the sport. Surprisingly, she began to enjoy the sport, and although her weaker grasp of mechanics often mean she isn’t great at bat, her years of dancing have given her a fair amount of agility and speed, allowing her to be an effective runner and fielder. Oftentimes, she finds it one of the few places, like debate, where she can be herself, and not be weighed down by the expectations of her family. Intensely competitive, she is often one of the most motivated players on the pitch, and enjoys hanging out with the other members of the team after practice, seeing it as a entertaining deviation from her primary group.

Aditi has also recently taken up yoga, as encouraged by her grandmother, in an effort to delve deeper into her cultural roots. While able to speak conversational Tamil, and a devout-enough Hindu to the point of being a vegetarian, her relative lack of engagement with Indian and Tamil culture in recent years with her drop-off in dance performances has been one of the factors in the gulf with her parents, especially considering their more traditionalist leanings. While not the most enthusiastic yoga club member, she helps organize events, and finds it enjoyable as a lower-intensity workout than softball.

With the tension in her home situation, Aditi has let more and more of her negative emotions seep out into public. While this mainly consists of snippy comments which she quickly tries to make up for with an apology, she has had urges of doing something more extreme, such as physically lashing out, she has curbed those efforts for the most part.

Academically, however, Aditi has remained the largely-stellar student she always has. Through her continued hard work and diligent time-management habits, she has remained with straight A’s across the board in her subjects, particularly enjoying AP biology and chemistry. While naturally somewhat weaker in History due to her lack of interest in learning dates and events, she diligently studies and applies herself, leaving her with no gaping academic weaknesses.

After graduation, Aditi plans to attend Duke University, where she plans to major in biology to follow on the pre-medicine track and hopefully become a doctor. While her parents were happy about the news, she sees it as a relief, having taken Duke’s offer not just due to its prestigious reputation, but because it was out-of-state, allowing her to lessen the communication between her and her parents.

Advantages: Hard-working and determined, Aditi is used to only achieving things through great effort - often meaning that once faced with an obstacle, she will not stop until it is completed. Years of dancing and cheerleading have left her both nimble and with great reserves of stamina, yoga has given her above-average flexibility, and softball has given her good reflexes and improved upper-body strength. Skilled with putting on a false front, she has the ability to misdirect the suspicions of others.
Disadvantages: Stuck-up and self-centered, her attitude has the potential to offend others if she is not careful. A lifelong vegetarian, she will become nauseous if forced to eat meat, her body almost incapable of handling it. While presently able to curb most of her aggressive tendencies, a high-pressure situation such as the island may cause these to become more extreme and evident in nature. Due to a partially torn ACL, her mobility is hampered, and further strain on her left knee could result in further injury.

Designated Number: Female student No. 075

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Designated Weapon: Browning Hi Power 9mm

Conclusion: No taste for blood and no love for any pride but your own. You are a wounded lioness, child, and the scavengers are unkind. Bad luck.- Adimabua Lawal

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