Chennai, 2016

It was the fall of 2016, Chennai. There were no streets covered in brown leaves, no cold wind announcing the end of summer, no particular change in colour that could have warned me that something in my own life was about to change with the season. I thought that love would come with some unmistakable sign, that one would somehow know when a certain afternoon, a certain conversation, a certain person had begun to matter. I did not know then that most of life happens far more quietly than that. Important days look disappointingly ordinary while you are living them. You wake up, attend classes, complain about assignments, worry about exams that will eventually mean nothing, eat whatever you can find and go to sleep without once suspecting that years later you will try desperately to remember the exact details of that same day. There was no reason for me to remember the end of September in 2016 differently from any other week at VIT.

And somewhere in that completely ordinary October, there was this girl.

The funny thing is, our first conversation was not memorable at all. It happened in an ECE class. No dramatic introduction, no accidental collision in a corridor, no movie-like moment that would later make for a good story. I simply needed a notebook.

So, I asked her for hers. That was it.

Looking back, I find that almost absurdly fitting. Of all the ways two people can begin speaking to each other, ours began with something so forgettable that, had the years not turned out the way they did, I probably would never have remembered it at all. I must have looked at her, asked for the notebook, taken it, perhaps said thank you, and gone back to whatever seemed important in that ECE class. There was no reason to notice the moment. No reason to think that the girl handing me a notebook would one day become someone whose smallest habits I would remember more clearly than most of the syllabus I was trying to copy from it.

It feels strange to write about her like that now, with almost ten years sitting between the person I am and the boy who had only just begun to know her. Back then there was no light around her, no invisible sign asking me to look carefully, no instinct telling me to remember this person because one day I would sit down and try to reconstruct those first few weeks in painful detail. The ease with which “Nitish” could become a complaint, a question or a warning depending on how she said it. The angry emojis that appeared whenever I irritated her, which was often. Her dislike for paneer, her love for Maggie, and had the peculiar habit of beginning a question only to immediately take it back with a “nahi, chhodo.”

Our WhatsApp conversation began on 30 September at 10:11 at night. I know this now because WhatsApp remembers things that memory very conveniently throws away. My first message was simply, “Hii….” There was no intelligence in it, no poetry, no foreshadowing, nothing that would justify remembering it ten years later. I was helping her upload something. She sent me a picture of whatever she had written and I replied, “Itni achhi writing…” which, looking at it today, was probably my earliest attempt at being unnecessarily nice to her. She replied, “Good joke.” That was her. A compliment could rarely survive peacefully around her. She either laughed at it, doubted it, asked what work I wanted from her, or accused me of lying.

These are ridiculous things to remember about somebody after ten years, and perhaps that is exactly why I remember them. Love does not always preserve the important facts. Sometimes it preserves Kurkure and apple juice for dinner.

I obviously had no way of knowing then that this tiny exchange would become one of those strange archaeological pieces of a relationship — insignificant when it happened, precious only because of everything that happened after it. Had somebody told me that night that ten years later I would open that chat and stare at that ridiculous “Hii….” for longer than I had stared at many supposedly important things in life, I would have probably laughed.

For the first few days we spoke the way college students usually speak when friendship is still trying to decide what shape it wants to take. Exams made most of our decisions for us. I had Ethics and German; she had Maths and Physics. We asked each other how papers went, whether the questions were direct, how many marks the other might get, what was left to study, what could be printed, what should be carried into the exam. There are dozens of such messages. Most of them would make terrible love letters. “Khana khayi?” “Kya khayi?” “Kitne bje class hai?” “Tum kab soti ho?” “Maggie khayi?” “Marks nahi bataogi?”

If one were to remove everything that later became romantic and leave only the beginning, our story would look suspiciously like two people trying to supervise each other's food, sleep and academic survival. Perhaps that is why reading it after ten years feels so different from remembering it. Memory is vain; it preserves grand things. Chats preserve reality. They remind you that closeness is often built through things too small to qualify as memories. You do not suddenly begin caring for someone. You ask once whether they have eaten, and then one day you notice that you ask every day. You ask when their class ends. You notice when their tone changes. Their silence stops being empty. The smallest changes acquire meaning. Nobody tells you when this happens. There is no border to cross. You simply look back one day and realise that somebody who used to exist somewhere outside your life has quietly entered its routine.

The first conversation I cannot dismiss as ordinary happened on 11 October. We had already been talking for some time that night. The conversation moved everywhere, the way our conversations often did. It was Dussehra and she had classes from eight to six. We talked about travelling home, trains, birthdays, food, whether she would stay outside the hostel in second year, whether it would be safe, what a two-bedroom apartment might cost, whether there would be security. It was late. She asked when I slept. I told her around four. She asked when I woke up. Six-thirty, I said. “Bas ita kam sote ho,” she replied. I tried to explain that I simply didn't sleep much, that there was a reason behind it, then did what I was very good at doing back then — moved away from the subject before it became a subject. A few minutes later I told her she was lucky because she could sleep whenever she felt sleepy. She asked why I had said it like that. I tried to escape again. “Nothing..bye..” I wrote. She did not let me.

She kept asking what had happened. “Bolo na.” I told her I would tell her someday. She asked which day. I said I could not write all of it. Eventually the conversation wandered elsewhere, but she came back to it in a way I had not expected. She said she wanted to ask me something, then immediately said, “Ni chodo.” I insisted. She kept refusing. I kept insisting with the kind of irritating persistence that both of us would eventually become very familiar with. Finally she asked, “Tm kisi bat se pareshan rhte ho kya.” I remember reading that line now and feeling almost as exposed as I must have felt then. I asked her how she knew. “Bas lgta h dkh k,” she said. I asked why. “Pta ni. Lgta h. Bas.” And then she wrote, “Tum bht koshish krte ho hide krne k. Shayad.”

There are sentences that become important because of what is said, and then there are sentences that become important because of who noticed enough to say them. She did not know me properly. Yet somehow, she had looked at me long enough to notice the effort. Not the sadness itself, perhaps, but the effort of hiding it. I had spent two years becoming functional around grief. I could attend a class, talk, joke when required, answer questions, walk around campus and generally pass for somebody whose life was moving in a straight line. Most people are satisfied by appearances because appearances are convenient. She was not. She saw a contradiction somewhere — maybe in the way I spoke, maybe in the way I stayed alone, maybe in the way I looked when I thought nobody was paying attention. I still don't know. She herself said she didn't know. “Bas lagta h.” Sometimes that is the entirety of a connection before it becomes one. Somebody simply looks at you and feels that the visible version is incomplete, that you are incomplete. That night I told her why songs stayed with me, why nights were difficult, why I liked being alone, why studying could begin with a book and end somewhere completely different.

Something was different after that night, though neither of us would have been able to explain what. We became less careful. She learned that my family called me Nikku. I learned that one of her names. Naturally I began calling her Riya primarily because it annoyed her. She called me Bihari and then apologised because she thought I might have taken offence; I told her I had actually liked it. I told her I talked too much only around people I felt comfortable with. She stopped immediately at that word. “Tum mere sath comfortable ho??” she asked. I said I thought I was. “Tum hme abi dhng se jante b ni ho,” she replied. She was right, of course. I barely knew her. I knew some facts, some habits, a few expressions, what she said when irritated, perhaps the beginnings of what made her laugh. Yet familiarity and knowledge are not always born together. There are people you can know for years and still feel required to arrange yourself before meeting them. And then there are people you barely know around whom you accidentally become unarranged. I told her that she had been the one who came to me and asked why I always looked sad, that because of that I trusted her.

The next day, 14 October, we went out to Kelambakkam, in the bus. I remember the feeling more than the geometry of the day. The two of us walking somewhere beyond the familiarity of the campus, the afternoon stretching without either of us having much of a plan, and her walking a little ahead of me every now and then as if I was supposed to know where we were going. We had known each other for hardly a few days, which makes the ease of that afternoon almost embarrassing to think about now. There should have been some awkwardness between us. There should have been those small silences that exist between two people who are still trying to understand what they are allowed to say to each other. Instead, I seem to remember talking as if I had known her much longer, and she behaved with the complete lack of restraint that I would eventually become very familiar with.

At some point, while talking, I used a few abusive words for the shopkeeper probably where we had paani-puri. Just the kind of careless language one sometimes uses without thinking much about it. She got angry and started walking away from me. I remember following her, apologising. She would move ahead; I would catch up. I would tell her I was sorry; she would refuse to listen properly and start walking again. The more she walked away, the more seriously I began taking something that had probably seemed insignificant to me a few moments earlier. I had known this girl for almost no time at all, yet there I was somewhere in Kelambakkam, following her like an idiot because the possibility that she might remain angry with me had suddenly become unbearable.

There is something funny about remembering it now. We were not together. There was no relationship to damage, no promise I had broken, no right either of us had over the other's behaviour. Technically, she could have stayed angry and gone back to the hostel and my life should have continued exactly as it had before. Yet I remember feeling strangely desperate to make her smile again. I don't remember exactly how many times I apologised. Knowing myself then, probably far too many. I only remember that eventually she stopped running away from me, the anger dissolved somewhere along the road, and we went back to talking.

Perhaps that is why the happiness of that day has remained so vividly with me. It wasn't a perfect afternoon. It had annoyance in it. An argument. Me saying things I shouldn't have said. Her walking away. Me following her and apologising. And then laughter again. It felt unedited in a way our first few meetings had no right to feel. We weren't being particularly polite versions of ourselves anymore. She could get angry with me, I could irritate her, she could walk away, I could follow her, and somehow after all of it we could still sit somewhere and laugh as though none of it required explanation. Later that night, she told me the day had felt strange to her too. She said she had forgotten everything. She said it felt odd thinking about the way she had behaved with me because it did not feel like she had known me for only two days. “Hm vit me ane k bad phli bar kuch b kr re te jo man me aae bol re te,” she wrote. After coming to VIT, for the first time she had simply done whatever she felt like doing, said whatever came to her mind, performed her “faltu k nautanki.” Then she wrote, “Mtlb koi tension hi ni.”

I don't think either of us understood the weight of that sentence then. At twenty, I probably heard it as a compliment. Today I hear something else. There are people around whom happiness comes from excitement, and then there are rare people around whom happiness comes from the absence of effort. You don't have to become funnier, wiser, calmer or more interesting. There was nothing to perform. No reputation to protect, no carefully maintained version of ourselves to keep presenting. We had known each other almost no time, yet for a few hours both of us had somehow forgotten the work of being ourselves.

This is the same girl I asked her for the notebook just a few days back.

Perhaps that is the strange thing about beginnings — they almost never feel like beginnings while we are inside them. Had I known, maybe I would have looked around a little more carefully. I would have remembered where exactly she was sitting in that ECE class when I asked for the notebook, what she was wearing, whether she looked up immediately or took a second before handing it to me, what the classroom sounded like in the background, whether I said anything beyond what I needed. I would have remembered the exact ordinariness of it. But we never think of preserving a life while we are busy living it. We preserve sunsets, birthdays, journeys, photographs of places we may never visit again; nobody thinks of preserving the moment they borrow a notebook from someone who is still, at that point, almost a stranger.

Back then, there was no reason to.

It was just an ECE class.

I needed a notebook.

She happened to have one.

It was the fall of 2016.

And neither of us knew yet what had begun………..

[To be Continued…]