In the evenings the three of them still climbed to a terrace with cold bottles and the river somewhere beyond the roofs. Banaras did not change for first-year students. It only waited to see what they would become inside it.
That was the opening of their new life: three houses, one college, one city that already knew their names, and a first year that had just begun to open.
The struggle did not start at the university gate. It started in April, when the board exams were done and the three houses filled with a different kind of quiet.
Forms covered dining tables. Cut-off lists were read aloud and then read again. Keshav sat under the tube-light with columns of preferences while his father spoke of consignments and a buyer who wanted finer cloth. Kalpana moved through the room with the unhurried certainty of someone who had run a house for twenty years. Sonam had her own forms for another faculty and asked practical questions — last date, photocopy, who would stand in which queue.
Rohan’s house smelled of frying and calculation. Kavita said he would get in, of course he would, look at his marks. Isha recited numbers from the newspaper and then made him check her own application because she did not trust her handwriting when she was impatient. In the third house Kabir’s father treated admission like a tender: documents in a file, dates circled, a man from the office ready to stand in line if the boy’s time was better spent at the site. Sunita said little. Riya asked, from the balcony, whether BHU would feel like a different city or only a larger version of the same one.
They applied together. Same course. Same first preference. BCom at Banaras Hindu University because it was near, because commerce was a language their fathers already spoke, because leaving the gali had never been a sentence anyone finished. The waiting was longer than the filling of forms. Days measured in rumours, in someone else’s result, in the slow ceiling fan above a shared monitor at an internet café near Hanuman Gali.
When the list finally opened they did not shout. Three heads bent over one screen. Names. Roll numbers. Faculty. Rohan sat back first.
“We’re in.”
They walked home in a line, past the paan shop, past the turning they could have walked blind. Only when the three houses came into view did the fact become real. That night the meals were better. Fathers asked about fee dates and prospectus. Mothers asked about the first day. Sisters asked whether the campus was as wide as people said. The boys answered what they could. The rest they did not yet know.
Getting in was one struggle. Arriving was another.
The first morning they took the same tempo toward the gate as if the university might close if they came separately. BHU opened around them like a second Banaras — long roads, old trees, buildings that had already watched a hundred batches pass. Commerce block. Crowded corridors. A notice board thick before their names had even dried on an identity card. For an hour they looked like what they were: three boys from one gali, bags on one shoulder, trying not to show that the scale of the place had surprised them.
