Chapter 3: Nishita

# Chapter 3: Nishita

## The Boy

Aarav Mane was the kind of boy that Panchgani International School had built its reputation on.

He was a boarder — had been since Standard 6, when his parents, both doctors at Sassoon Hospital in Pune, had decided that the commute from Pune to their respective wards was consuming so many hours that their son was being raised by a procession of domestic helps rather than by them, and that a boarding school in the Western Ghats would provide both structure and the specific kind of independence that children of busy parents either develop early or never develop at all.

He was the school's star cricketer — opening batsman, left-handed, the kind of player who made batting look like a conversation rather than a confrontation. He had scored three centuries in the inter-school tournament last season, and his name was on the honours board in the sports pavilion, written in gold paint on dark wood, alongside the names of boys who had preceded him by decades and who were now doctors and lawyers and software engineers in Pune and Mumbai and Bangalore and the occasional one in New Jersey who sent donations to the Old Students' Association every December.

He was popular in the way that genuinely talented people in small communities were popular — not because he sought attention, but because attention sought him, and he handled it with a casualness that was either natural grace or practiced indifference. I could not tell which. Both possibilities were equally attractive and equally irritating.

I learned these things over the first week, because in a school of four hundred, information about anyone circulated with the speed and reliability of the morning newspaper. By Wednesday, I knew that Aarav's father was Dr. Sudhir Mane, orthopaedic surgeon. His mother was Dr. Vaishali Mane, paediatrician. He had a younger sister named Ruhi who was in Standard 8 and who was, according to Carmela D'Souza — a girl in my class who functioned as the school's unofficial information bureau — "exactly like Aarav but louder and with better hair."

Carmela became my first friend. This was not by my choice — I had intended to maintain a strategic distance from all social entanglements for at least a month, to observe before engaging, to understand the school's social architecture before placing myself within it. Carmela demolished this plan on Day Two by sitting next to me at lunch and announcing, with the confidence of a girl who had been managing social dynamics since kindergarten, "You're the transfer from Mumbai. I'm Carmela. You're going to need a friend and I'm available."

She was Goan Catholic — from Mapusa, her father a restaurateur who ran a beach shack in Calangute during season and a provisions store in Mapusa during off-season. She had the Goan facility with languages — switching between English, Hindi, Konkani, and Marathi with the fluency of someone who considered all four her mother tongue and did not understand why the rest of India found multilingualism remarkable. She was short, round, loud, and possessed the kind of warmth that you could feel from across a room, the human equivalent of a space heater.

"So," Carmela said on Wednesday, at our lunch table in the canteen — a table she had claimed and I had been absorbed into. "Aarav."

"What about him?"

"You've been assigned to him as your buddy. The entire school noticed. Opinions are divided."

"Divided how?"

"Some think it's the principal being strategic — new girl, good-looking guy, guaranteed social integration. Others think it's random. A third group, smaller but vocal, thinks Dr. Saldanha is trying to distract Aarav from the Purva situation."

"The Purva situation."

Carmela leaned in. The cafeteria noise covered the conversation — the clatter of steel plates, the scrape of benches, the particular acoustic chaos of four hundred teenagers eating rice and dal simultaneously. "Purva Kadam. Standard 12 B. She and Aarav were together for about five months last year. It ended badly. She's the jealous type — the kind who monitors his Instagram followers and sends messages to any girl who likes his photos."

"I'm not interested in Aarav."

"Okay. But you should know that Purva is interested in anyone who is near Aarav, regardless of that anyone's intentions. She's already noticed you."

"How do you know?"

"Because she looked at you during assembly this morning with the expression of a person calculating the structural load of a grudge."

I filed this information alongside the growing database of Panchgani International School's social dynamics. The school was a village — small enough that everyone knew everyone, intimate enough that relationships and their aftermaths were public events, and governed by the unwritten rules of any community where escape was not possible because the community was also your home.

Aarav, for his part, was an excellent buddy. He walked me through the campus — the science labs (recently renovated, funded by an alumnus in Hyderabad who had made money in pharma and felt guilty about it), the library (small but curated, with a section of Marathi literature that included Pu. La. Deshpande and V. S. Khandekar alongside the standard British and American canon), the sports facilities (a cricket ground with a proper pitch, maintained by a groundskeeper named Sadashiv who treated the square with the reverence of a priest tending a shrine). He introduced me to his friends — a group of five boys who played cricket, studied intermittently, and operated as a unit with the coordinated informality of a group that had been together since Standard 6 and had evolved its own shorthand.

Tejas Bhosle — wicketkeeper, from Satara, the son of a sugarcane farmer who had prospered enough to send his boy to boarding school and who visited every second Sunday with a car boot full of jaggery that Tejas distributed through the dormitory like a confectionery cartel.

Faizan Shaikh — fast bowler, from Kolhapur, lean and tall, with the quiet intensity of a boy who communicated primarily through cricket and who, off the field, deployed words with the economy of a telegram.

Nikhil Patwardhan — all-rounder, from Pune, the group's designated comedian, whose talent for mimicry — he could reproduce any teacher's voice, any politician's speech, any Bollywood dialogue — was both his social currency and his primary defence mechanism.

Sameer Irani — the studious one, bespectacled, from a Parsi family in Pune that had been sending children to Panchgani schools since the 1950s. He was the group's conscience, the one who reminded them about deadlines and consequences, the structural engineer of the social group.

And Aarav. The centre. The one around whom the others arranged themselves not because he demanded it but because his gravity was natural — the gravity of a person who was good at things and relaxed about being good at things and who treated his friends with the specific loyalty that boarding school produced: the loyalty of people who had shared dormitory rooms and midnight conversations and the particular vulnerability of children living away from home.

By Friday, I had settled into a rhythm. Morning drop-off by Aai (Baba had started at the Panchgani branch and was unavailable for morning duties, which Aai treated as both an inconvenience and a relief). Classes until 3 PM. The walk to the school gate, where Dhondu's vada pav cart waited with the reliability of a fixed star, the charcoal brazier smoking, the batter sizzling, the green chutney in its steel container looking like something that should be regulated by the Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration but that tasted like the distilled essence of everything good about street food.

Aarav was right about the vada pav. It was extraordinary. The exterior crunch was audible — you could hear it across the street, the specific frequency of perfectly fried batter yielding to teeth. The interior was soft, the potato filling spiced with hing and haldi and the faintest hint of garam masala, and the chutney — Dhondu's green chutney, the stuff of legend, made with fresh coriander and green chilli and garlic and a secret ingredient that he refused to disclose and that the school's students had been trying to identify for years — cut through the richness with a heat that started at the front of the tongue and travelled backward in a slow wave.

"Told you," Aarav said, watching me eat my first Dhondu vada pav with the satisfaction of a man who had made a promise and delivered.

"This is—" I couldn't speak. The vada pav was in my mouth and the chutney was doing things to my palate that I had not experienced outside Mumbai, and the fact that this was happening in a hill station four hundred kilometres from the sea was either a miracle or a confirmation that the universe contained more justice than I had recently believed.

"I know," he said.

"How does he—"

"Nobody knows. Dhondu won't tell. Sameer once tried to bribe him with a bottle of Old Monk from the boarders' contraband stash. Dhondu laughed, accepted the Old Monk, and did not reveal the recipe."

I finished the vada pav. Wiped my hands on the paper napkin. Looked at Aarav, who was eating his own with the comfortable rhythm of a boy who had done this every afternoon for six years and who still, after six years, ate each one as if it were the first.

"You were right," I said.

"About the vada pav?"

"About the vada pav. And about the school being strict but fair. And about Mrs. Ghoshal being military."

"Was I right about anything else?"

"You said I'd like it here."

"Do you?"

I looked at the school — the stone buildings, the eucalyptus-lined road, the valley below, the mango tree outside my classroom window that was the cousin of the mango tree outside my bedroom window. I looked at the vada pav cart and Dhondu with his charcoal brazier and the students in their uniforms crowding around him like devotees at a temple. I looked at Aarav, who was looking at me with the expression of someone who had asked a question and was genuinely interested in the answer.

"I don't hate it," I said.

He smiled. The first full smile I had seen from him — not the half-smile or the smirk or the casual grin, but the real one, the one that changed his face from handsome to something else, something that I did not have a word for at seventeen but that I would later recognise as the specific beauty of a person who was happy because someone else was happy.

"That's a start," he said.

It was.