He looked at her again. He couldn't help it. It was like finding out that the person next to you on the bus is reading your diary — impossible to simply ignore.
Up close, she was — and he was trying very hard to be objective about this, as if objectivity were remotely accessible to a nineteen-year-old boy sitting next to a beautiful girl — she was striking. Not in the conventional, immediately-catalogueable way that made you think words like pretty or cute. She was striking in the way that good architecture is striking: something about the proportions was correct in a way that took a moment to process, and once you processed it you couldn't stop noticing it.
Her hair was pulled back in a loose braid, dark and thick, with a few strands that had escaped around her face. Her skin was warm brown, darker at the temples from sun. There was a small mole at the corner of her left eye that his brain, for no reason he could defend in court, filed away as important information. Her expression was one of such complete and utter indifference to everything around her that it bordered on magnificent. The principal's speech, the clapping, the shuffling, the whispered conversations of two hundred nervous freshmen — none of it touched her. She simply sat, and listened to his song, and tapped her fingers, and existed in her own self-contained world with the serenity of someone who had not noticed that the rest of the world existed.
It should have been off-putting. It was, in a technical sense, rude — earbuds in during the principal's welcome address was not exactly the warm social engagement one might hope for from a classmate. He knew this. He registered it.
He was charmed anyway. Unreasonably. Completely.
He spent the next forty-five minutes of the welcome ceremony in a state that could best be described as quietly electrified. He laughed at the right moments (the vice principal made a joke about engineering that was not particularly funny but received obligatory chuckles). He clapped when everyone clapped. He filled out the small form that was passed down the rows asking for their name and branch and contact details. He did all of this with a portion of his brain that was functioning on autopilot, while the other, larger portion was occupied with the following questions, in no particular order: Was she a CSE student? Would he see her again? Should he say something? What would he even say — "I couldn't help noticing you're listening to my song"? Absolutely not. That was insane. That was the opening line of a person with no self-preservation instincts. What would be a normal thing to say? "The ceremony is pretty long, right?" Too bland. "Do you know what classroom we're supposed to go to after this?" Practical, but not — no. Maybe he should not say anything. Maybe he should simply exist in the awareness of this moment and let it be what it was: a strange and beautiful coincidence that had dropped into an otherwise ordinary Wednesday morning.
He said nothing.
The welcome ceremony ended with a speech from the student council president, a final round of applause, and the announcement that students were to proceed to their respective classrooms for the initial orientation. Aditya stood, gathered his bag, and turned to his left with the vague, half-formed intention of saying something — anything — to the girl who had been sitting there.
She was already gone.
He stood there for a second, blinking at the empty seat. She had moved with the quiet efficiency of someone who did not linger. No fuss. No delay. She was simply no longer there, dissolved into the crowd of students now filing out of the auditorium, and for a moment he had the absurd sensation of having imagined the whole thing.
Then he noticed that the seat still smelled faintly of jasmine, and he knew he had not imagined it.
He picked up his bag and walked out of the auditorium with the rest of them, doing a completely casual, totally non-obvious scan of the crowd that definitely did not involve craning his neck.
He did not see her.
The CSE classroom was on the second floor of Block B, a fact that Aditya discovered by following the general direction of the crowd and trusting that at least some of them were in the same department. The classroom was large by school standards — forty desks arranged in rows, a whiteboard at the front, two ceiling fans, and three windows that looked out onto the college courtyard where a jacaranda tree was shedding purple flowers with complete indifference to the academic year beginning beneath it.
Aditya found a desk in the third row, middle section — not too eager (front row), not too evasive (back row). A calculated position that he had refined over twelve years of Indian schooling. He set his bag down and looked around at the students filing in, still doing his casual, definitely non-obvious scanning.
"Hi Bro!"
The word arrived alongside a hand landing on his desk with a flat smack, and Aditya startled, nearly knocking over the water bottle he had just placed on the desk. He turned to find a boy approximately his height but twice his apparent energy, grinning at him with the unabashed openness of someone who had decided they were friends and was simply waiting for the formality to catch up.
"Sorry sorry, didn't mean to scare you," the boy said, immediately sliding into the desk right next to Aditya's as if he had always been planning to sit there. "I'm Vishwa. Vishwanath Subramaniam, but only my grandmother calls me that, so please don't. Third row, middle — good pick, I was going for the same spot. Mind if I sit here?"
He had already sat.
"Sure," said Aditya, who found himself smiling despite having been mildly assaulted. "Aditya. Aditya Rajan."
"CSE?"
"Yeah."
"Cut-off?"
"197."
Vishwa let out a low whistle. "Same. Almost. I got 195. My mother has not emotionally recovered." He said this with the fond, resigned affection of someone who had long since made peace with his mother's emotional state as a constant background feature of his life. "Where are you from?"
"Mylapore. You?"
"Trichy. First time away from home. You?"
"Also first time." Aditya paused. "Hostel?"
"Block C, Room 14. You?"
"Block C, Room 16."
Vishwa's grin widened to dimensions that seemed unlikely for a single human face. "Neighbours! This is fate, macha. Pure fate. I was literally praying this morning for the universe to give me at least one decent person to be friends with on the first day and here you are, third row middle, gift from the universe." He leaned over conspiratorially. "The boy in Room 14 with me seems nice enough but he went to sleep at nine last night and I think he might be a morning person, which is not compatible with my personality, so—"
Aditya laughed — actually laughed, the first real, unrehearsed laugh of the day. "Good to know my role in your social ecosystem."
"Essential. Vital. Load-bearing, even." Vishwa settled back in his chair with satisfaction and turned to survey the classroom with the proprietary air of someone making a quick assessment of new territory. "Okay. Initial observations. The guy at the back left corner is definitely the one who's going to ask the most questions in class. The girl in row two who already has her textbook out is going to be the class topper and we should befriend her strategically. The group at the back right are already laughing too loud which means they are either genuinely funny or deeply compensating, unclear which. What do you think?"
Aditya had been in the middle of his own scan, less sociological and more — specific. He had been checking, casually, whether a particular girl with a burgundy dupatta and wired earbuds had come into the room. She had not. He registered this with a feeling that was too small to be disappointment but was definitely something.
"I think you've done this before," he said.
"People-watching is a hobby," Vishwa said serenely. "My mother says I have too much to say about people I've never spoken to. I prefer to think of it as social analysis."
More students were filing in. Two girls sat in the row ahead of them — one in a bright yellow kurta who immediately turned around to introduce herself as Priya, from Coimbatore, very enthusiastic about everything; one in a quieter green top who said her name was Divya and smiled and did not volunteer anything further. A boy with enormous headphones around his neck — not earbuds, massive over-ear ones — took the seat behind Aditya and announced, unprompted, that his name was Karthik and that he was planning to minor in robotics.
Vishwa was in his element. He conducted introductions, remembered details, made connections, asked the exact right questions that made people feel immediately seen. Aditya participated, laughed at the right moments, contributed his own observations — he was not shy, exactly, not the kind of shy that shut you down. He was more the kind of person who needed a moment to warm up, who was better in one-on-one than in groups, who preferred listening to performing. He liked Vishwa immediately for the way he created space without demanding you fill it.
The classroom was nearly full when the door opened one final time and the class incharge walked in.