The Ganga was already rising when the three of them first walked into Banaras Hindu University as students. Late July. Heat sat on Hanuman Gali like a wet cloth. The air tasted of river, incense, and diesel. First-year BCom. Same faculty. Same mess. Same lane they had never really left.
They had grown up in three houses standing in a row off a quiet gali behind the main road. White walls, inner courtyards, first-floor balconies close enough that a voice carried without being raised. Upper middle class. Family businesses. Enough money that no one announced it, enough order that the houses always felt complete.
Keshav’s father dealt in textiles — wholesale in Chowk, a small factory on the edge of the city that smelled of dye and unfinished cloth. His mother, Kalpana, ran the house with a calm that made even busy evenings look arranged. His sister Sonam had turned eighteen in May; she was applying to a different faculty and still moved through the rooms as if she had always belonged in them.
Rohan’s family supplied namkeen, pickles, and packaged sweets across eastern Uttar Pradesh. His mother Kavita filled the house with talk and the smell of ghee. His sister Isha, eighteen and a half, had the quickest tongue in the gali and a habit of appearing on the stairs just when a conversation needed interrupting.
Kabir’s father held tile and construction contracts from Assi toward Sarnath. His mother Sunita was quieter, gold at her throat even at home, the sort of presence that settled a room. His sister Riya was eighteen, often on the balcony swing in the evenings, watching the lane as if it might change if she looked away.
The three boys had been inseparable since they were six. Cricket until the ball vanished into a courtyard. Stolen mangoes. Terrace talk after the last light in the gali went out. They knew one another’s houses the way other boys knew film songs — which stair creaked, which courtyard held the afternoon shade, which mother called which name first.
Admission had not been a miracle. It had been April forms, cut-off lists, a shared screen in an internet café near Hanuman Gali, and a walk home in which none of them shouted. BCom at BHU because it was near, because commerce was a language their fathers understood, because leaving Banaras had never been a real sentence in any of the three houses. When the names appeared, Rohan only said, “We’re in.” That was enough.
The first week was stone, slow fans, and the sudden size of campus. They took the same tempo in the morning, sat through the same lectures, learned which tree gave shade and which canteen tea was worth the wait. They were no longer schoolboys, but they still walked home in a line, past the same paan shop, the same turning, into three lighted courtyards that already knew their footsteps.
By the third week the university had begun to acquire other faces — classmates, a senior who lent notes, the ordinary noise of a new life. Home remained what it had always been: cloth and ledgers in one house, frying and accounts in the second, contracts and dust-maps in the third. Mothers asked about classes. Sisters asked whether college was as large as it looked from the gate. Fathers asked whether the boys understood that a degree was only the beginning of the business.
