Before we continue Kavya's story, it is worth understanding how Rohan Mehra understood his own.
He would tell you, if you asked him in those college years, that he was a person of feeling. That he experienced things more intensely than ordinary people. That this was both a gift and a burden.
He had seen Kavya at a college cultural event in his second year — she was performing a small role in a play, standing slightly apart from the other performers, looking at the stage rather than the audience. Something about her stillness caught him. She was not performing even when she was performing. She was just — present, in herself, in a way that most people weren't.
He had introduced himself the following week.
She had been polite. Courteous in the way of someone raised to be courteous, the smile professional, the answers complete but not expansive. He had walked away thinking about her.
He came back.
She remained polite. This was, he told himself, simply how she was with everyone — guarded, private, requiring time. He was patient. He could be patient. He began appearing in places she frequented, not obtrusively, just — present. He thought of this as courtship. He thought of himself as the kind of person who pursued beauty with dedication, and she was beautiful in the particular way of quiet things.
He noticed her group of friends. He noticed the tall quiet boy who always seemed to be adjacent to her.
This bothered him in a way he couldn't initially name.
He told himself it was irrelevant. She had not encouraged this boy. She had not encouraged anyone — that was simply who she was. But the boy's presence began to lodge in him like a splinter, small and irritating, working its way deeper over weeks.
He had, he would tell you, only the best intentions in the beginning.
He believed this. This is the important and terrible thing about Rohan Mehra: he had believed himself, all the way through, right until the moment his beliefs were no longer able to accommodate the reality of what he had become.
The best intentions were real. They were also the least important thing about him.
What was more important — what he would not have told you, because he had not yet admitted it to himself — was that beneath the feeling and the patience and the devotion he'd constructed around her image was something older and colder and much less flattering. An inability to accept the word no. A deep, quiet certainty that the things he wanted were things he deserved. A rage, small and carefully controlled, that rose in him whenever the world arranged itself contrary to his expectations.
He had kept that part very well hidden.
Even from himself.