Kavya had a theory about people.
She believed that most of them moved through the world like they were late for something — loud, rushed, taking up more space than they needed. She had decided early on that she wasn't going to be that kind of person. She would be quiet. She would be careful. She would take up only as much space as was truly hers.
This philosophy made her excellent company for exactly the kind of people who paid attention, and invisible to everyone else.
College suited her in some ways. She liked the library at 7am before it filled up, liked the canteen in the lull between lunch and evening when the plastic chairs squeaked less and the ceiling fans moved slower. She had four friends — genuinely four, not the casual-acquaintance kind that inflated numbers at birthday dinners. Priya, who laughed too loudly and apologised for it. Sahil, who remembered everyone's birthdays without writing them down. Disha, who had a habit of finishing other people's sentences correctly. And Rehan.
Rehan she hadn't expected.
He was part of their group the way weather was part of a landscape — he'd always been there, it seemed, before she'd thought to notice him. Tall, quiet in a different way than her, the kind of quiet that came from having nothing to prove rather than everything to hide. He had friends outside their circle too, the kind who played cricket on the back fields and stayed out until midnight, but he kept returning to their corner table in the canteen like it was a home base.
She noticed things about him the way she noticed things about everything — carefully, from a slight distance.
He took his coffee black. He read the last page of books before the first, which offended her deeply when she found out. He had a habit of arriving places a few minutes early, like her, and spending those minutes watching the room settle rather than looking at his phone. Once, during a college fest when the crowds pushed everyone into uncomfortable proximity, she felt him shift slightly to her left, not touching her, just — placing himself between her and the crush of bodies moving past. He never mentioned it. She was almost certain he hadn't thought about it.
Almost.
The problem with noticing things carefully was that eventually the things you noticed started to add up into something that had a shape.
She did not want to name the shape.
She went home every evening to a house that smelled of incense and unspoken things. Her mother, Sunita, moved through their flat with a kind of practiced distance — present enough to be a parent, absent enough to never quite be a mother. She fed Kavya, made sure her fees were paid, attended parent-teacher meetings when required. She did not ask how Kavya's day was. She did not save her the last roti. When Kavya got a distinction in her second year, Sunita said good and went back to her television programme.
Kavya's father had been different. Warm in the way that compensates for cold. He had died of a heart attack three years before college, suddenly, on a Wednesday afternoon in October, and Kavya had lost the only person in that house who looked at her like she belonged there.
She did not know why her mother looked at her the way she did. Like something misplaced. Like a problem that had never been solved.
She had stopped trying to understand it around the age of fourteen. Some things, she had learned, you simply lived with.
College was where she breathed.