And sixteen-year-old Sanjay forgot how language worked.
Raja noticed immediately.
He leaned sideways.
“Close your mouth.”
Sanjay shut it.
Vivek, sitting behind them, whispered, “Finished.”
“What?”
“You.”
Raja nodded solemnly.
“Completely finished.”
Sanjay kicked both of them beneath the bench.
For the rest of that school year, Ritika became the centre of an imaginary romance of which she was mostly unaware.
Sanjay volunteered to collect notebooks when hers was among them.
He suddenly became interested in school competitions she attended.
He once spent forty minutes rewriting a two-line birthday message because Raja told him his handwriting looked desperate.
Nothing happened between them.
That was the innocence of it.
Everything felt enormous precisely because almost nothing occurred.
A glance across a classroom could sustain him for three days.
A five-minute conversation could be replayed for weeks.
When she borrowed his pen before an examination, he kept the pen afterward as though it belonged in a museum.
Years later, Sanjay would laugh at that boy.
Privately, though, he missed him.
That boy could still believe desire and destiny were the same thing.
Back in the hotel room, Raja was laughing so hard he nearly spilled his drink.
“The pen!”
Sanjay pointed at him.
“You swore never to mention the pen.”
“I made no such promise.”
Vivek wiped his eyes.
“You kept it for two years.”
“Eighteen months.”
“Ah,” Raja said. “Much healthier.”
Sanjay threw a peanut at him.
“What about you two?”
Raja immediately stopped laughing.
Vivek smiled.
“We’re reaching dangerous territory.”
“Exactly,” Sanjay said. “Tonight nobody escapes.”
That became the rule.
No pretending.
No heroic editing.
They would tell the truth about the people they had loved, almost loved, imagined loving, or spent years unsuccessfully forgetting.
And so their lives began travelling backward.
Vivek’s first serious crush came in Class 12.
Her name was Shreya.
He had never told her.
He had hardly told them.
Raja had discovered it because Vivek, usually indifferent to school functions, volunteered three afternoons in a row for preparations for the farewell programme.
Shreya was on the organizing committee.
“That wasn’t why,” Vivek protested now.
“It was absolutely why,” Raja said.
Vivek surrendered.
“Fine.”
“What happened to her?”
“Married.”
“Ouch.”
“Two children.”
“Bigger ouch.”
Vivek laughed.
“There’s no ouch. I barely knew her.”
But Sanjay noticed the softness in his friend’s expression.
Some memories did not hurt.
They simply refused to disappear.
Raja’s story had always been different.
At school he had been the confident one.
Or at least he had performed confidence better than the others.
His father Ajit was strict, his mother Pallavi protective, and Sonam had spent most of childhood following her brother everywhere until Raja began bribing her with chocolate to leave him alone when his friends visited.
Raja flirted first.
Got rejected first.
Got slapped first too, though technically that had been because he pulled a girl’s notebook away while teasing her.
“You deserved that,” Vivek said.
