The Things we Never Became
By
Prachi Gurjar
PART III
THE SUMMER OF DISAPPEARING
CHAPTER 13
CLOSED CURTAINS
It is worth saying, plainly, that not everything in those weeks moved toward healing in a straight line.
For every afternoon Anaya spent on the veranda shelling peas and asking her mother gentle questions about old wanting, there were other afternoons, quieter and less generous, when she simply pulled her curtains shut at noon and stayed in bed until the room had gone the particular grey of evening, not reading, not drawing, not doing anything at all except lying there with her phone face down beside her, letting the hours pass the way water passes a stone, without leaving much trace.
She did not entirely understand these days, even as she was living through them. They did not announce themselves. She would wake up on an ordinary morning, the same as any other, and somewhere between brushing her teeth and looking at the weather outside her window, a kind of weight would settle over her, heavy and grey and entirely without explanation, and once it had settled, there was very little she seemed able to do except wait for it to lift on its own schedule.
Her mother noticed, of course. Her mother noticed everything, though she had grown, in recent weeks, more careful about how she responded to what she noticed.
"You did not come down for breakfast," she said one such morning, standing in Anaya's doorway with the light from the hallway behind her, Anaya's own curtains still drawn against the daylight.
"I'm not hungry, Maa."
"You said that yesterday as well."
"I know."
Her mother did not push further that day. She simply left a plate of toast on the small table near the door, the way she had started doing on the harder mornings, food offered without insistence, available if wanted, easily ignored if not.
Anaya did not eat the toast until nearly four in the afternoon, by which point it had gone cold and slightly stiff, and she ate it anyway, sitting up in bed with the curtains still closed, chewing slowly, feeling almost nothing at all.
She tried, on the better days, to understand what these closed curtain days actually were. They did not feel like the sharp specific grief of the day the result came, the flat scooped out feeling she remembered from that first afternoon. They felt more like fog, something that blurred the edges of everything without any single cause she could point to and address. She was not thinking, particularly, about the exam on these days. She was not thinking, particularly, about anything. That itself seemed to be the problem, a kind of thinking so absent that even sadness required more energy than she currently had available.
She mentioned this once to Riya, in a late night message exchange that had become a small lifeline over recent weeks.
Some days I just don't want to be anywhere, including in my own room, she wrote. Like even my own bed feels like somewhere I'm trying to escape from but there's nowhere else to go.
Riya's reply came after a longer pause than usual. That sounds like more than just disappointment about the exam, she wrote. I'm not a doctor obviously, but that sounds like something you might want to actually talk to someone about. Not just me. An actual professional.
Anaya stared at the message for a long time before replying. I don't think it's that serious.
Maybe not, Riya wrote back. But you don't have to wait until it's serious to talk to someone. You can talk to someone just because some days feel heavier than you know what to do with. That's reason enough on its own.
Anaya did not respond to that message for several minutes, lying in the grey light of her curtained room, turning the suggestion over with a resistance she recognized but could not entirely name. There was a particular shame attached to the idea, inherited from somewhere she could not trace exactly, the sense that needing help with her own mind was a different category of failure from needing help with anything else, a private weakness rather than a normal human limit.
She did not act on Riya's suggestion that night. But she did not delete the message either, the way she had not deleted Ritu's old message of sympathy weeks earlier, and something about simply letting it sit there, unanswered but unrejected, felt like its own small kind of movement.
• • •
The closed curtain days did not happen every day. That was, she eventually noticed, an important detail. They came in clusters, two or three difficult days followed by a week or more of relative steadiness, the report card afternoon, the sketchbook discovery, the conversation about the trophy shelf, days where she felt something closer to curiosity than dread.
But the clusters scared her, when they came, precisely because of how completely they seemed to erase her own sense of progress. On a closed curtain day, the rooftop diary and the dancing in her room and the gentle conversations with her mother all felt like they belonged to a different person entirely, someone she could remember being but could not currently access, like a language she had once spoken fluently and had since, for reasons unclear, gone silent in.
It was during one of these clusters, nearly five weeks after the result, that her father finally said something direct about it, sitting on the edge of her bed one evening with the curtains still closed even though it was barely seven in the evening.
"Anaya," he said. "I am not going to pretend I understand exactly what this is. But I want you to know, your mother and I have been talking, and we think it might help to see someone. A counselor. Just to talk."
Anaya, lying with her back to him, felt the old resistance rise immediately. "I'm not crazy, Papa."
"Nobody said you were crazy," he said, his voice gentle but firm. "I am saying you have been through something difficult, three years of pressure ending in a result that did not come, and on top of that, all these family visits, all these questions, and now these days where you do not even want to leave your bed. This is not weakness, beta. This is a body and a mind that have been carrying something very heavy for a very long time, and sometimes carrying something heavy for long enough means you need help putting it down properly, the same way you would need a doctor if you had carried something heavy enough to hurt your back."
Anaya turned over slowly to look at him. In the dim light filtering through the curtains, his face looked older than she usually noticed, lined in ways she associated more with worry than with age, though she supposed by now the two had become difficult to separate.
"What if they tell me something is actually wrong with me," she said quietly. "What if it's not just disappointment. What if it's something bigger."
"Then we will deal with whatever it is, together," he said simply. "But beta, not knowing does not protect you from whatever it might be. It only delays you from getting whatever help you might need. I would rather know, and help you carry it, than watch you disappear behind these curtains a little more each week and tell myself it will pass on its own."
Anaya did not answer immediately. She thought about the fog of the past weeks, the grey featureless quality of the bad days, the way even simple things like eating breakfast had begun to require a kind of effort that felt disproportionate to the task. She thought about Riya's message, still sitting unanswered in her phone. She thought about the particular exhaustion of pretending, even to herself, that everything happening inside her was simply ordinary disappointment, nothing more, when some quieter, more honest part of her suspected it might be something that deserved its own name.
"Okay," she said finally, the word coming out smaller than she intended. "Okay, Papa. I'll see someone."
Her father did not make a large gesture of relief or gratitude, which she appreciated, because a large gesture would have made the moment feel heavier than it already was. He simply nodded, patted her foot gently through the blanket, the same gesture her mother had made on the very first afternoon after the result, and said, "Good. I will ask Dr. Mehta tomorrow if she can recommend someone good, here in Shimla, so you do not even have to travel far."
He left the room quietly after that, and Anaya lay there for a while longer in the dim curtained light, feeling, for the first time in this particular cluster of difficult days, something that was not quite relief, but was perhaps its early cousin, a loosening at the edges of the fog, just enough to let a single thin line of evening light through the gap where the curtains did not quite meet.
She got up, eventually, and opened the curtains properly, letting the last of the day's light spill fully into the room, and she picked up her phone and typed a reply to Riya's message from days earlier.
I think I'm going to talk to someone, she wrote. Thank you for saying it instead of just being nice about it.
Riya's reply came quickly this time. That's the bravest thing you've done since the result came out. More than the exam ever was.
Anaya read the message twice, and found, to her own surprise, that she believed it.
CHAPTER 14
THE MISSED CALL
The first appointment with the counselor, a calm, soft spoken woman named Dr. Aarti Bose who worked out of a small clinic near Sanjauli, was scheduled for the following Tuesday, which meant Anaya had nearly a week to sit with her own decision and quietly second guess it.
She did not second guess it about the appointment itself. What she found herself avoiding, instead, almost as a kind of displacement, was her phone, and one missed call in particular that had been sitting in her call log for nearly three weeks now, a small red notification she had not yet found the courage to address.
It was from her best friend, Meher.
Meher and Anaya had known each other since they were six years old, two desks apart in the same primary school classroom, and across seventeen years of friendship they had built the particular kind of closeness that survives distance and silence and long gaps without contact, the kind of friendship that simply resumes, mid conversation almost, whenever the two of them happened to be in the same place again. Meher had moved to Bangalore for college and then for work, and the two of them spoke perhaps once every few weeks, sometimes less, but it had never mattered before, because whenever they did speak, it was as though no time had passed at all.
Meher had called the day after the result, and Anaya, in the fog of that first week, had let it ring out, telling herself she would call back once she felt more like herself. Then a day had passed, then a week, then two, and somewhere in there the call had stopped feeling like something she had simply missed and started feeling like something she did not know how to return, the silence itself becoming its own small wall, each day adding another brick.
She knew, rationally, that Meher would not be angry. Meher had never once, in seventeen years, been the kind of friend who kept score. But knowing this did not make picking up the phone feel any easier, because what Anaya was actually avoiding was not Meher's reaction but her own explanation, the long, complicated, still unfinished account of everything that had happened since the result, all of it harder to say out loud to someone who actually knew her well enough to ask real questions, rather than the easier, more distant sympathy of relatives who did not expect anything beyond a brief polite response.
She finally called on a Thursday evening, sitting on her rooftop with the blue diary beside her, mostly because she had run out of reasons not to.
Meher picked up on the second ring. "Oh my god. Anaya. Finally."
"I'm sorry," Anaya said immediately. "I should have called back weeks ago."
"I'm not even mad, I just want to know you're okay." There was a pause, and then, more gently, "Are you okay?"
Anaya looked out at the ridges, the familiar blue folding into blue, and found that the question, asked by this particular voice, after this particular silence, did not require the careful management she had been giving it for weeks with everyone else.
"Not really," she said. "Some days I am. Some days I really am not."
"Tell me everything," Meher said. "I have time. I am not going anywhere."
So Anaya told her. Not the polished version she had been giving relatives, the version with the right amount of resilience and the right amount of gracious acceptance. She told Meher about the morning of the result, the scooped out feeling, the messages from aunts that felt like condolences for a death. She told her about the rooftop trunk, the blue diary, the line about wanting to write a book. She told her about the sketchbook, about her father's old story about engineering college, about the empty fourth chair at the dinner table. She told her, finally, haltingly, about the closed curtain days, the grey fog that had no specific cause, the conversation with her father about seeing a counselor, the appointment scheduled for Tuesday.
Meher was quiet through most of it, the particular quality of quiet that comes from someone genuinely listening rather than simply waiting for their turn to speak, and when Anaya finally finished, there was a long pause on the line before Meher spoke again.
"I wish you had called me sooner," she said. "Not because you owed me an explanation. Just because carrying all of that alone for three weeks sounds exhausting, and I would have wanted to help carry some of it."
"I didn't know how to start," Anaya admitted. "Everyone else just wanted the short version. I think I forgot, for a while, that you'd actually want the long one."
"I always want the long one," Meher said. "That's sort of the whole point of us, isn't it." She paused. "I'm really glad about the counselor thing, by the way. I saw someone for almost a year after my breakup with Dhruv, you know that, right?"
"I knew you went through a hard time. I didn't know you saw someone about it."
"I don't usually mention it because people get weird," Meher said. "Like it means something is broken. It just meant I needed help figuring out how to carry something, the same way your dad said. It was honestly one of the best decisions I ever made for myself. I hope it helps you the way it helped me."
They talked for nearly two hours after that, the conversation drifting the way old friendships' conversations drift, from the heavy things to the ordinary things and back again, Meher describing a ridiculous incident at her office, Anaya describing the terrible dancing she had done alone in her room weeks earlier, both of them laughing in a way that felt, after weeks of careful guarded laughter around everyone else, like something close to relief.
Near the end of the call, Meher said something that stayed with Anaya long after they had hung up.
"You know what I keep thinking, listening to all of this," she said. "You've spent your whole life being the person other people could point to. The topper, the bright one, the one who was going somewhere. And now you're finding out who you are when nobody's pointing at you for anything. That's terrifying, I'm sure. But it's also kind of the first real chance you've had to actually meet yourself properly. I don't think that's a small thing, even if it doesn't feel like an achievement the way the exam would have."
Anaya sat with that for a long time after the call ended, the rooftop gone fully dark around her now, the lights of the town below scattered like fallen stars across the hillside.
She picked up the blue diary, and for the first time since finding it, she opened it to a blank page near the back, and she wrote, slowly, in handwriting that still felt unfamiliar after so many years of writing only notes and answers and exam responses.
I don't know who I am yet, without the exam attached to my name. But tonight, talking to Meher, I think I felt the edges of someone. Not finished. Just starting to be visible, like a photograph still developing.
She closed the diary and sat there a while longer under the cold, clear mountain sky, feeling, for the first time in weeks, something that was not quite happiness, but was real, and was entirely her own.
CHAPTER 15
JULY RAIN
The first session with Dr. Bose went differently than Anaya had expected, though she could not have said, beforehand, exactly what she had expected it to be.
She had imagined, vaguely, something clinical, a series of pointed questions designed to locate the precise mechanism of whatever was wrong with her, the way a doctor might press at different points on a body to find the source of pain. Instead Dr. Bose had simply asked her to talk, about anything, about whatever felt closest to the surface that day, and had listened with an attention so steady and unhurried that Anaya found herself, almost without deciding to, talking for nearly the entire fifty minutes.
She did not receive any diagnosis that first day, nothing dramatic, nothing with a name attached. Dr. Bose spoke instead about stress, about how three years of sustained pressure followed by a sudden loss of structure and identity could understandably produce periods of low mood, of fog, of difficulty finding motivation, and how this did not need to be permanent, and did not need to be faced alone.
"We will keep talking," Dr. Bose had said, at the end of that first session. "There is no race here, Anaya. You do not need to arrive anywhere by a particular date."
Anaya had almost laughed at that, the gentle irony of being told, for the first time in years, that a process in her life had no deadline attached to it.
• • •
It rained heavily the week after that first session, the particular relentless rain of the early monsoon that turned the narrow lanes of Shimla into shining rivers, the cedar trees outside her window bending and dripping under the steady weight of it.
Anaya found, to her own surprise, that she liked the rain this year in a way she had not allowed herself to like anything simple in a very long time. She sat at her window one afternoon, a cup of tea going cold beside her exactly the way it always seemed to these days, and watched the water slide down the glass in shifting silver lines, and felt something in her chest unclench slightly, the way it used to unclench when she was a child watching the same rain from the same window.
She remembered, suddenly and vividly, the line from her own old diary, the one about making up stories about people walking below with their umbrellas tilted against the wind. She looked down now at the lane below her window, where a woman was hurrying past with a bright yellow umbrella, a child trailing slightly behind her in a transparent raincoat, jumping deliberately into every puddle the woman tried to steer him around.
Without entirely deciding to, Anaya picked up a pen and the back of an old envelope, the same habit that had brought back her drawing weeks earlier, and began writing, not notes, not an essay outline, just a small loose description of the woman and the child below, inventing a story for them the way she used to as a girl, imagining the woman was rushing home to finish cooking before her husband returned from work, imagining the child secretly loved the rain more than any other weather because it was the only time his mother let him make a mess of his shoes without scolding him for it.
It was nothing, really. A few paragraphs of invented detail about two strangers she would never see again, written in the rough, unpolished sentences of someone who had not properly written anything just for the pleasure of it in many years. But when she finished, setting the pen down, she felt something settle in her that reminded her, distinctly, of the feeling she had gotten finishing her clumsy childhood drawing weeks earlier. Not pride, exactly. Something quieter. The simple satisfaction of having made a small thing exist that had not existed a few minutes before.
She mentioned this, almost shyly, in her next session with Dr. Bose.
"I started writing little things again," she said. "Nothing serious. Just descriptions, mostly. People I see from my window."
"How does it feel, when you do that," Dr. Bose asked.
Anaya considered the question carefully. "Quiet," she said finally. "Like the noise in my head gets a little quieter, just for those few minutes."
Dr. Bose nodded, making a small note, though Anaya had stopped finding the note taking intrusive by now, understanding it simply as part of how this particular kind of conversation worked. "That is worth paying attention to," Dr. Bose said. "Not because it needs to become anything large. Just because you are describing, very precisely, what it feels like to do something that genuinely belongs to you, rather than something assigned from outside. That distinction matters more than people usually realize."
Anaya thought about this for the rest of that rainy week, watching the water continue to slide down her window in long unbroken lines, and found herself returning, almost daily now, to the small habit of writing brief, unambitious descriptions of whatever she happened to notice. The particular blue grey of the clouds settling over the far ridge before a downpour. The sound her mother's bangles made moving rhythmically through kitchen tasks two floors below. A single sparrow that had taken to sheltering under the eave outside her window every afternoon around four, shaking water from its feathers with a small, businesslike efficiency that amused her more than she could properly explain.
None of it was meant for anyone else to read. None of it followed any structure she had been taught in school, no thesis, no supporting points, no carefully managed word count. It was simply noticing, put down on paper, for no reason beyond the noticing itself.
She did not know, yet, that this was the beginning of anything larger. She certainly did not think of it, during that rainy week, as the start of a novel, or even the start of a habit that would last beyond the monsoon. It felt, instead, like something far smaller and far more immediate, a kind of private weather of her own, moving quietly alongside the actual weather outside her window, both of them simply doing what weather does, arriving without much warning, and passing, eventually, the way all weather eventually passes, into something else.
CHAPTER 16
THE LIBRARY
It was Dr. Bose, in a roundabout way, who eventually sent her back to the library.
Not as a direct instruction, nothing so simple as that. She had asked, in one of their sessions, whether there had been any place, before the exam years had consumed most of Anaya's time, that had felt particularly her own, a place she had gone to simply because she liked being there, rather than because it served some larger purpose.
Anaya had thought about it for a long moment and then said, somewhat to her own surprise, "The library. The government one near the Ridge. I used to go there a lot when I was younger, before I started spending all my study time at the test series center instead."
"What did you like about it," Dr. Bose had asked.
"It was quiet in a different way than home is quiet," Anaya had said, trying to find the right words for something she had not properly examined in years. "At home, quiet always has a kind of waiting in it. Someone is going to ask you something, or you're going to have to explain something, even if nobody's talking right now. The library quiet didn't have that. Nobody there wanted anything from me. I could just exist among all those books, and nobody needed me to be anything in particular while I did it."
Dr. Bose had simply nodded at that, the way she often did, not offering advice so much as letting the observation sit in the room long enough that Anaya herself could decide what to do with it.
She decided, the following week, almost on impulse, to go back.
The library had not changed much in the years since she had last properly visited it, beyond the test series years when she had occasionally gone there out of habit rather than affection, treating it merely as a quieter version of her own study desk. It still occupied the same long colonial era building near the Ridge, its high windows letting in slanted columns of light that moved slowly across the wooden floor over the course of an afternoon, its shelves arranged in the same slightly illogical order that had always made the place feel less like an organized institution and more like a sprawling, half forgotten attic that happened to contain most of human thought.
She walked through the fiction section first, running her fingers along spines she half remembered from years ago, until she found, almost without looking for it specifically, a worn copy of a Sylvia Plath collection that included The Bell Jar, a book she remembered reading at sixteen with the particular fevered intensity teenagers bring to books that seem to be speaking directly and exclusively to them.
She pulled it from the shelf and sat down at one of the long wooden tables near the window, the same kind of table she had sat at countless times in her school years, and opened the book to a random page, not with any plan to read it through again, just curious what it would feel like to encounter it now, at twenty three, after everything that had happened.
She was perhaps twenty minutes into rereading, lost enough in the familiar rhythm of the prose that she did not immediately notice someone settling into the chair across the table from her, when a quiet voice said, "Sorry, is this seat taken? Every other table seems to have someone's bag claiming three chairs."
She looked up. A young man, perhaps her own age or a little older, stood holding a small stack of books against his chest, glasses slightly crooked on his nose, an expression of mild apologetic patience on his face, the particular expression of someone used to libraries being crowded and used to asking permission before sitting anywhere.
"No, go ahead," she said.
He sat down, arranging his books carefully in front of him, and Anaya, glancing briefly at the stack before returning to her own book, noticed the top one was a worn, heavily annotated copy of a Pablo Neruda poetry collection, the pages soft and slightly curled at the edges from what must have been years of repeated reading.
She did not think much of it at the time, returning her attention to her own page, and the two of them sat in companionable silence for nearly half an hour, each absorbed in their own reading, the slanted afternoon light moving slowly across the table between them.
It was only when she finally closed her book, having reached a natural pause in the chapter, that she noticed him watching her with a small, curious expression.
"Sorry," he said, looking slightly embarrassed at being caught. "I just noticed what you're reading. The Bell Jar is not exactly common reading material for people who come to this particular library. Most people here are doing exam preparation or research for some assignment. It's nice to see someone reading just because."
"How do you know I'm not preparing for something," Anaya said, a small defensive reflex she immediately regretted, though it came out lighter than she intended, almost playful.
He smiled slightly. "Fair point. Are you?"
"No," she admitted. "Just reading because. For the first time in a long time, actually."
"That sounds like a story," he said, and then, seeming to catch himself, added quickly, "Sorry, I don't mean to pry. I just talk to books more naturally than I talk to people, and sometimes that spills over into talking to people about books, which I realize is a strange way to introduce yourself to a stranger in a library."
Anaya found herself smiling properly now, the first easy, unguarded smile she had given a stranger in weeks. "It's a fine way to introduce yourself," she said. "Better than most ways people have tried recently, honestly."
"That's a low bar to clear, or a high compliment, I genuinely can't tell which," he said, and there was something in the dry, self deprecating delivery that made her laugh, a small surprised sound that seemed to startle them both slightly in the library's careful quiet.
"I'm Anaya," she said.
"Vihaan," he said. "I should probably let you get back to Plath. She doesn't appreciate being interrupted, from what I remember of that book."
"No," Anaya agreed, "she really doesn't." She glanced at the Neruda collection still sitting on top of his stack. "What's your excuse for being here? You don't strike me as exam preparation either."
"Research, technically," he said. "I'm finishing a thesis on translation theory, specifically how much gets lost moving poetry between languages. Neruda is one of my case studies. Though if I'm honest, I think I just keep finding excuses to reread him and calling it academic work."
"That sounds like a very pleasant kind of dishonesty," Anaya said.
"The best kind, really," he agreed.
They talked for a while longer after that, quietly, careful not to disturb the library's general hush, the conversation moving easily between books they had both read and books they meant to read and the particular, specific pleasure of finding an old library copy with someone else's pencil notes still faintly visible in the margins, the strange intimacy of encountering a stranger's thoughts pressed into the same pages you were currently reading.
Neither of them mentioned, that first afternoon, anything about exams, results, or failures. It was, Anaya realized walking home later through the cooling evening air, possibly the longest conversation she had held with anyone in months that had not, at some point, circled back to the UPSC result, to what she planned to do next, to the careful management of other people's expectations.
It had simply been about books. About nothing, and about everything, the way the best library conversations always seemed to be.
She found herself, without quite admitting it to herself yet, already looking forward to going back.
CHAPTER 17
A BOY READING NERUDA
She went back to the library three days later, telling herself it was for the quiet, and telling herself this with the particular firmness people use when they are not entirely convinced by their own explanation.
Vihaan was there again, at the same long table near the window, a different stack of books in front of him this time, though the worn Neruda collection sat on top once more, as if it had simply taken up permanent residence there regardless of whatever else accompanied it that day.
"You're back," he said, looking up as she approached, and there was something in the way he said it, simple and unguarded, that made the words land more warmly than the sentence alone would suggest.
"So are you," she said, settling into the chair across from him, the same chair as before, as though some unspoken agreement had already formed about where each of them belonged at this particular table.
"I am here most days," he admitted. "It is quieter than the university library, and the chai stall outside does something to ginger that I have not found replicated anywhere else in this town."
"High praise for a chai stall."
"Entirely earned praise," he said. "Would you like to find out? I am due for a break in about twenty minutes, if you are not in the middle of something."
She was not, in fact, in the middle of anything beyond the loose, unstructured reading she had been doing since rediscovering the library, and so twenty minutes later they found themselves sitting on a low stone wall outside the chai stall he had mentioned, two steaming cups between them, the evening crowd of the Ridge moving past in its usual unhurried way, college students and tourists and old men out for their evening walk, all of them threading past each other in the particular choreography of a small hill town that had been doing this exact evening ritual for longer than anyone currently walking it had been alive.
"So," Vihaan said, wrapping both hands around his cup. "Last time we talked entirely about books and managed to avoid every normal getting to know you question. What do you do, Anaya, when you are not reading Plath out of spite toward exam preparation?"
She laughed slightly at how close to the truth that was, though she had not told him anything about the exam. "It's complicated," she said.
"Most good answers are," he said. "I have time, if you want to make it complicated."
She considered, for a moment, giving him the short version, the one she had been giving relatives and acquaintances for weeks now, the practiced, deflecting non answer. But something about the easy quality of their two conversations so far, the lack of any visible expectation in his face, made her want to try the longer version instead, just to see how it felt to say it to someone who had no prior investment in how her story was supposed to end.
"I spent three years preparing for the civil services exam," she said. "UPSC. I did not clear it. The result came a couple months ago, and I have been sort of figuring out who I am without that particular plan attached to my life ever since."
Vihaan did not respond immediately, which she appreciated, because it meant he was actually considering what she had said rather than reaching for the nearest comforting cliché.
"That sounds like it would take a while to figure out," he said finally. "Three years is a long time to build a life around one outcome. I imagine the figuring out doesn't happen quickly just because the outcome didn't arrive."
"No," she agreed. "It really doesn't."
"For what it's worth," he said, "I don't think not clearing an exam tells you very much about a person, except that they were brave enough to try something difficult enough to fail at. The people who never attempt anything that could actually fail rarely have interesting things to say about themselves later."
She looked at him properly then, this stranger with his slightly crooked glasses and his worn poetry collection, and felt something unclench in her chest that she had not fully realized was clenched, the particular relief of being seen, even briefly, as something other than a result that had not arrived.
"What about you," she asked. "What's your complicated answer?"
He smiled slightly, looking down at his tea. "I'm doing a PhD in comparative literature, focused on translation theory, which I mentioned partially. The complicated part is that my family, my father especially, thinks this is an elaborate, expensive way of avoiding getting a real job. He runs a small transport business here in Shimla, three buses that run routes up toward Kufri and Naldehra, and he genuinely cannot understand why a son of his would spend years reading poetry in different languages instead of learning the business, which he has offered to hand over to me more times than I can count."
"Do you want to take it over? The business?"
"No," he said simply. "And that no has cost me a fair amount, the way I imagine your three years cost you a fair amount in a different shape. He doesn't say much about it directly, my father, but I can feel the disappointment whenever I visit home. The quiet kind. The kind that doesn't argue, just sits in the room with you at dinner."
Anaya thought of the empty fourth chair at her own dinner table, the silence that held its own particular weight, and found herself nodding before she had consciously decided to.
"I know that kind of quiet," she said.
"I thought you might," he said, glancing at her with something that felt less like curiosity now and more like recognition, two people who had each, in their own separate ways, learned the specific weather pattern of disappointing a parent who loved them anyway, imperfectly, the way most parents seemed to manage love and disappointment simultaneously without ever quite resolving the contradiction.
They sat there longer than either of them had probably planned, the tea going cold in their hands, the evening crowd thinning slowly as the light began to fail behind the ridges, and Anaya found, walking home later through the gathering dark, that she had told this near stranger more honest details about her actual situation in one evening than she had told most of her own relatives across two full months.
It was not, she told herself again, anything in particular. Just a pleasant conversation with someone who happened to also love books, who happened to also be quietly disappointing a parent in his own complicated way, who happened, for reasons she did not examine too closely, to make the weight in her chest feel, for an hour at least, considerably lighter than it had felt in a very long time.
She mentioned him briefly to Meher that night, almost as an afterthought at the end of a longer conversation about other things.
"Wait, go back," Meher said immediately. "Who is this boy with the poetry and the crooked glasses?"
"He's not a boy, he's doing a PhD."
"That's not what I asked."
"He's just someone I've talked to at the library a couple times," Anaya said, aware even as she said it that her own voice carried more warmth than the sentence strictly required.
"Uh huh," Meher said, in the particular tone of someone who has decided not to push the point yet, but fully intends to revisit it later. "Well. Keep reading at the library, then. Purely for the literature, obviously."
"Obviously," Anaya said, and found herself smiling at her phone in a way she had not smiled in quite some time, for reasons that had, for once, nothing at all to do with exams, results, or the careful management of anyone else's expectations.
CHAPTER 18
CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN SHELVES
Over the following weeks, the library visits became a quiet, reliable rhythm in Anaya's days, the kind of habit that forms not through any deliberate decision but through simple, repeated gravity, the way water finds the same path down a hillside again and again until the path itself becomes a stream.
She did not tell her parents much about Vihaan, not because there was anything to hide exactly, but because the friendship still felt new and unformed enough that naming it out loud, to anyone beyond Meher, felt like it might press it into a shape before it had finished deciding what shape it wanted to take.
What she could not deny, even to herself, was how much she had begun to look forward to these afternoons. There was something steadying about the particular quality of their conversations, conducted in low voices between library shelves or over cooling cups of ginger chai, conversations that moved easily between the books they were reading and the larger, harder questions sitting underneath both their lives, without either of them needing to perform anything for the other.
"Can I ask you something," she said one afternoon, several weeks into their acquaintance, as they sat at their usual table, the library quiet enough that she kept her voice low without quite needing to.
"You can ask me anything," Vihaan said. "I reserve the right to give an evasive answer, but you can ask."
"Do you ever worry that you picked the wrong thing? The poetry, the thesis. That maybe if you'd taken over your father's buses, you would have been happier, even if it wasn't what you originally wanted?"
He considered this with the same unhurried seriousness he seemed to bring to most questions, turning his cup slowly between his hands. "I worry about it sometimes," he admitted. "Usually late at night, usually after a difficult conversation with my father. But then I remember a specific feeling, the feeling I get reading a poem in its original language and then reading three different translations of the same poem, and noticing exactly where each translator made a choice, where they sacrificed sound for meaning or meaning for sound, and I think, no version of running three buses to Kufri would ever give me that particular feeling. I would be comfortable, probably. I would make my father happy, certainly. But I do not think I would feel like myself in the specific way I feel like myself doing this."
"How do you know the difference," Anaya asked. "Between comfortable and actually yourself."
"I'm not sure I always do," he said honestly. "But I think comfortable usually feels like relief, like you've successfully avoided a difficult conversation. Being yourself usually feels a little more like this." He gestured vaguely at the stack of books, the quiet library around them, the slanted afternoon light. "Slightly inconvenient. A little expensive, sometimes literally. But also like something would actually be missing if you stopped doing it, not just disappointing, but actually missing, the way a room feels different with a piece of furniture removed even if you can't immediately say why."
Anaya thought about this for a long moment, turning it over the way she had been turning over so many things lately, the diary, the sketchbook, the trophy shelf, all of it circling the same question from different angles.
"I think I spent three years being comfortable, in your sense," she said slowly. "Not comfortable in the easy way. Comfortable in the sense that everyone around me approved, everyone understood the plan, nobody had to ask hard questions about what I actually wanted because the exam answered the question for them in advance."
"And now?"
"Now I don't know what the equivalent of your poetry feeling is for me. I had it once, I think, when I was much younger. Writing stories nobody asked me to write. I'm trying to find my way back to whatever that actually was."
Vihaan nodded slowly, not offering advice, simply absorbing what she had said the way he seemed to absorb most things, with a kind of patient attention that Anaya had come to associate, over these past weeks, specifically with him.
"For what it's worth," he said, "you talk about books differently than most people I know. Not performing knowledge, the way some literature students do, myself included on a bad day. You talk about them like you're trying to figure out how they were built, what the writer was actually doing underneath the sentences. That's not a small thing. Most readers stop at whether they liked it or not."
"I never thought about it that way."
"Maybe you should," he said simply, and returned to his own book, leaving the comment to settle between them without further pressure, the particular gift of someone who says something important and then has the grace not to keep circling back to it.
• • •
It was on one of these afternoons, several weeks later, that Vihaan mentioned, almost in passing, that he wrote occasionally himself, not poetry, he clarified quickly, he had no illusions about his own talent in that direction, but small critical essays about translation and language that he sometimes submitted to academic journals, with mixed and largely unremarkable success.
"Mostly rejections," he said, with the same easy self deprecation he brought to most things about himself. "I have a small, proud collection of rejection emails. I used to take them personally. Now I mostly just appreciate the ones who bother explaining why, instead of the form rejections that feel like being unmatched on an app."
"Does it bother you? The rejections?"
"Sometimes," he admitted. "Less than it used to. I think the first one nearly ended the whole project for me. I remember reading it and thinking, well, that settles it, I am clearly not meant to write anything anyone wants to read. But then I kept writing anyway, mostly out of stubbornness, and somewhere in there the rejections stopped feeling like a verdict on whether I should continue and started feeling more like, I don't know, weather. Something that happens to writers, rather than something that happens specifically and uniquely to me because I am secretly without talent."
"That sounds like a useful way to think about it," Anaya said, filing the thought away carefully, sensing even as he said it that she might need it herself, sooner than she currently expected.
"It took me a while to get there," he said. "I'm not always successful at believing it, even now. But it helps, on the bad days, to remember that nearly everyone whose work I admire collected a stack of rejections before anyone agreed to read them properly. The rejection is not usually the end of the story. It is just an early, uncomfortable chapter in it."
Anaya looked at him for a long moment, this quietly persistent person who kept reading Neruda in three languages and kept submitting essays that mostly came back rejected and kept disappointing his father in his own gentle, determined way, and felt something that was not quite romantic, not yet, but was adjacent to it, a warmth that had less to do with attraction in the obvious sense and more to do with the simple, rare comfort of being near someone who had already mapped a path through territory she herself was only beginning to enter.
"Thank you," she said. "For all of this. The conversations. I don't think I realized how much I needed someone who didn't already have an opinion about who I'm supposed to become."
"I have opinions," he said, smiling slightly. "I just try to keep them to myself until someone asks. It seems like the polite way to do friendship, generally."
"Is that what this is," she asked, the question slipping out a little more directly than she had intended. "Friendship?"
He considered this with the same careful seriousness he brought to her other questions, and for a moment the library's quiet seemed to stretch a little longer than usual around their table. "I think it's whatever we decide it is," he said finally. "I am in no particular hurry to decide today. Are you?"
"No," she said, and found, saying it, that she meant it completely. "I'm not in a hurry for anything right now, actually. For the first time in years."
"Then let's not be," he said, and returned to his book, and Anaya returned to hers, the slanted afternoon light moving slowly across the table between them, both of them perfectly content, for now, to simply let the question sit there, unanswered, between the shelves.
CHAPTER 19
THE POETRY SECTION
The library's poetry section occupied a narrow, slightly neglected aisle near the back of the building, tucked between a wall of dusty encyclopedias nobody seemed to consult anymore and a window that looked out over the library's small, overgrown back garden, and it was here, on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, that Vihaan first read something aloud to her.
"I want to try something," he said, pulling the worn Neruda collection from where it had taken up its usual residence in his stack. "Tell me if this feels like an imposition and I will stop immediately."
"Try it," she said, curious despite herself.
He read a few lines, slowly, in careful Spanish first, the unfamiliar syllables rolling out with an ease that told her he had read this particular passage many times before, and then, after a small pause, in English, a translation that she understood, from their earlier conversations, was likely his own rather than the published one, an attempt to capture something the official translation had, in his opinion, lost.
She could not have explained, afterward, exactly why the moment affected her the way it did. Perhaps it was simply the rare experience of being read to, something that had not happened to her since childhood, since her mother used to read aloud from storybooks before bed, a practice that had quietly ended sometime in her school years without either of them noticing the last time it happened. Perhaps it was the specific attentiveness in his voice, the way he seemed to be tasting each word as he said it, testing whether it carried the right weight.
Whatever the reason, she found herself unexpectedly moved, sitting there in the narrow poetry aisle with afternoon light falling through the dusty window, and when he finished and looked up at her, slightly self conscious, asking, "Too much? I sometimes forget that not everyone wants poetry recited at them in a library on a Tuesday," she found she had to clear her throat before answering.
"No," she said. "It wasn't too much. I think I forgot poetry could do that. Make you feel something specific, in your actual body, not just understand an idea about feeling."
"That's sort of the whole argument of my thesis, actually," he said, looking pleased in a way that made her smile. "That something gets carried across languages that isn't really about the literal words at all. The official translation of that poem is more accurate, technically. Word for word, it's probably closer to what Neruda actually wrote. But I don't think it carries the same weight, and I've spent embarrassingly large parts of three years trying to understand exactly why."
"Read me something else," she said, surprising herself with how easily the request came out.
He did, several more passages over the following hour, moving between Spanish originals and his own halting English attempts, occasionally stopping mid poem to point out a specific word choice he was still unsatisfied with, asking her opinion as though her opinion, untrained in either Spanish or formal poetics, actually mattered to the question.
"You're asking the wrong person," she said at one point, laughing slightly. "I don't know anything about translation theory."
"I'm not asking the translation theorist," he said. "I'm asking the person who notices things. You told me, weeks ago, that you'd started writing little descriptions again, things you noticed from your window. That's exactly the instinct I need here, somebody who can tell me whether a line actually sounds like something a person would feel, rather than something a person would write to sound clever."
She had not told him much detail about the small habit of writing she had picked up since the rainy week, the brief unambitious descriptions of strangers and sparrows and shifting cloud colors, but apparently she had mentioned it in passing at some point, and apparently he had remembered, which struck her now, sitting in the narrow poetry aisle, as its own small significant thing, being remembered accurately by someone who was not family, who had no particular obligation to keep track of the small details of her life.
"Can I ask you something else," she said, after he had finished reading another passage.
"Always."
"Why poetry? Out of everything you could have studied. Why this specific, mostly unprofitable obsession?"
He was quiet for a moment, considering the question with his usual care. "My mother used to write poetry," he said finally. "Not professionally. Just for herself, in a notebook she kept hidden in her cupboard, which I only discovered after she died, when I was sixteen. I found maybe forty poems in there, none of them ever shown to anyone, not even my father. Most of them were about ordinary things, the view from our kitchen window, a particular argument she'd had with her own mother years before I was born, the specific quality of light on the day I was born." He paused. "I think I started studying poetry, originally, because I wanted to understand what she had been doing in that notebook, all those years, writing things she never intended anyone to read. I wanted to understand what that private act actually was. I'm not sure I've fully figured it out, even now, but the studying itself became its own thing, separate from the original reason, the way these things often do."
Anaya sat with this for a long moment, the narrow aisle quiet around them, the afternoon light continuing its slow movement across the dusty floor.
"I'm sorry about your mother," she said finally.
"It was a long time ago," he said, in the particular tone of someone who has made a careful, ongoing peace with an old grief, not erased but settled, manageable now in a way it had perhaps not been manageable at sixteen. "But thank you. And I think, in a strange way, finding that notebook is part of why I find your story so interesting, the diary on the rooftop, the wanting to write a book at fourteen. My mother had exactly that kind of wanting too, and she never let anyone see it while she was alive. I think I am perhaps a little invested in seeing you do something different with yours."
Anaya looked at him properly then, this person who carried his own private grief quietly alongside his careful attention to other people's unfinished sentences, and felt something settle firmly into place that she did not try to name out loud, not yet, content for now simply to notice it, the way she had been practicing noticing things these past weeks, without rushing to decide what the noticing meant.
"I think," she said slowly, "I might actually want to write something. Properly. Not just small descriptions on the backs of envelopes."
"What kind of something?"
"I don't know yet," she admitted. "But I keep thinking about my own diary, the line about wanting to write a book. I think I want to find out what happens if I actually try to keep that promise, twelve years late."
Vihaan smiled, closing the Neruda collection gently, the worn spine settling shut with the particular soft sound of a book that has been opened many hundreds of times. "Then you should," he said. "And if you want, when you have something written, even something small, even something terrible, you can read it to me, the way I've been reading to you. I promise to be honest, and I promise the honesty will come wrapped in enough kindness that it doesn't feel like the inter school essay competition all over again."
"You remember that?"
"I remember most things you tell me," he said simply, and the sentence landed between them with a quiet weight that neither of them rushed to address, both of them simply sitting there a while longer in the narrow, dusty poetry aisle, the afternoon light beginning its slow retreat toward evening, two people who had each, in their own way, been quietly waiting for someone to take their private wanting seriously, finding, perhaps, that they had found exactly that in each other, without either of them having gone looking for it on purpose.
