Chapter 4: Nishita

# Chapter 4: Nishita

## The Party

The party was Tejas's idea.

"Saturday night," he announced at the vada pav cart on Friday afternoon, distributing jaggery pieces from the latest consignment like a feudal lord distributing land grants. "My uncle's farmhouse on the Wai road. His family is in Pune for the weekend. The place is empty. The pool is clean. The sound system works."

"The last time you said the sound system worked," Nikhil observed, "we spent two hours listening to music through a single speaker that made everything sound like it was being performed inside a washing machine."

"That was February. I've fixed the speaker."

"You've fixed nothing in your life, Tejas. Your cricket kit has a hole in it from Standard 9."

"The hole is ventilation. It's a design feature."

The banter was familiar — the specific register of boys who had been friends long enough to insult each other as a form of affection. I had been in Panchgani for two weeks, and I had been absorbed into Aarav's group with the organic inevitability of someone who spent every lunch and every after-school hour with the same people. The absorption was not formal — nobody had announced my membership — but it was real. I sat at their table. I ate at their cart. I was, by the silent consensus of the group, in.

"You should come," Aarav said. To me. Casually. The invitation delivered with the lightness of someone offering a biscuit rather than asking a girl to attend a party at a farmhouse, which in the social vocabulary of Standard 12 was not a biscuit at all.

"My parents won't let me go out at night."

"It starts at seven. Ends by ten. Tejas's uncle has a strict curfew because the watchman reports to him."

"The watchman is seventy-three and deaf," Tejas clarified. "He reports nothing to nobody. But ten is still the limit because I'm not cleaning up after midnight."

I calculated. Seven to ten. A Saturday evening. The farmhouse was on the Wai road — fifteen minutes from the cottage by the Mahabaleshwar Road. I could tell Aai I was going to Carmela's for a study session, which was not entirely a lie because Carmela would be there and studying was, in the broadest interpretation of the word, a form of social learning.

The lie was small. The temptation was large. Two weeks in Panchgani had been two weeks of school, cottage, homework, the valley view, and conversations with parents who were polite to each other in the way that people are polite to strangers on a train — courteous, distant, each occupying their designated space, the armrest between them a demilitarised zone.

I wanted to be somewhere loud. I wanted to be somewhere that was not my parents' careful silence.

"Okay," I said.

---

The farmhouse was beautiful. Tejas's uncle was a retired colonel who had spent his pension on fourteen acres of land on the Wai road and a house that combined military precision with Marathi farmhouse aesthetics — stone walls, a red oxide veranda, a courtyard with a tulsi vrindavan, and a swimming pool that the colonel had installed because, according to Tejas, "Uncle believes that swimming is the only exercise that doesn't damage the knees, and the knees are the only body part worth preserving after fifty."

Twenty-three students had come. The school's social network had expanded the invitation from Tejas's core group to a wider circle — cricketers, their girlfriends, a few boarders who had obtained permission for "town leave" by claiming they were visiting the temple, and Carmela, who had arrived with a speaker that actually worked and a playlist that she had curated with the ruthless precision of a DJ who understood that the difference between a good party and a bad party was entirely a function of the first three songs.

The first three songs were excellent. Carmela's judgement was vindicated. The courtyard became a dance floor — the stone surface under bare feet, the tulsi vrindavan glowing with the diya that Tejas had lit because "Uncle will know if the tulsi diya wasn't lit, and Uncle knowing things is worse than the principal knowing things." The pool was illuminated by underwater lights that turned the water turquoise, and the farmhouse's veranda was the gathering point for conversations that were too quiet for the courtyard and too private for the pool.

I danced. For the first time since Vashi — since the last Saturday at Café Durga, when Zoya had played a Diljit Dosanjh song on her phone's speaker and we had danced between the tables while the waiter watched with the tolerant exasperation of a man who had seen everything — I danced. The music was loud. The night was cool — Panchgani in May, even at night, was fifteen degrees cooler than Mumbai, and the air had the clarity of altitude, the stars sharp and numerous above the farmhouse's low roof. I danced with Carmela, who danced the way she did everything — loudly, enthusiastically, with complete disregard for the opinions of anyone who was not also dancing.

Aarav was at the pool. He had swum — the efficient, lap-counting swim of a boy who treated exercise as a task rather than a pleasure — and was now sitting on the pool's edge, feet in the water, talking to Faizan about something that required hand gestures and the kind of intensity that meant it was either cricket strategy or something personal.

I walked over. Sat next to him. Put my feet in the water. The temperature was a shock — the pool was unheated, and the mountain water was cold enough to make my toes curl.

"Having fun?" he asked.

"More than I expected."

"You expected not to have fun?"

"I expected to stand in a corner and judge everyone. It's what I do at parties."

"That's what you did in Mumbai?"

"In Mumbai, I had friends to stand in corners with. Here I'm a solo corner-stander."

He smiled. The real one. "You're not standing in a corner. You're sitting by a pool. With me."

"Is that different?"

"It's different if you want it to be."

The sentence sat between us the way sentences sit between two people who are aware that the sentence means more than its words — the water lapping at our feet, the music from the courtyard muffled by distance, the stars doing their thing above us, indifferent and eternal and not at all helpful.

"Aarav—"

"You don't have to say anything. I just wanted you to know that I'm glad you came. Not to the party. To Panchgani."

The honesty was disarming. Aarav Mane did not do declarations or speeches or the performative romanticism that boys in films deployed. He did this — the direct statement, the simple sentence, the truth delivered without packaging.

"I'm glad I came too," I said. "To the party. The Panchgani verdict is still pending."

He laughed. The sound carried across the pool, mixing with the music and the cricket-talk and the splash of someone doing a cannonball into the deep end.

We sat by the pool until 9:30. We talked about nothing important — cricket (he was preparing for the state selection trials), my old school (I described Café Durga and Zoya and Isha with a nostalgia that surprised me), his parents (they visited every third weekend, bringing Pune bakery biscuits and the specific guilt of parents who had outsourced their child's daily life to an institution), my parents (I said "they're adjusting" and he heard what I meant and did not push).

At 9:45, Carmela found me. "We need to leave. My driver is outside and he reports to my father with the regularity of a German train."

I stood. Aarav stood. The pool water dripped from our feet onto the stone.

"See you Monday," he said.

"See you Monday."

I walked to Carmela's car — her father's Scorpio, driven by a man named Babu who had the stoic patience of someone who had been driving teenagers to and from social events for a decade and who expressed his opinions about their behaviour exclusively through the adjustment of the rearview mirror.

In the car, Carmela turned to me. "So."

"So what?"

"Aarav."

"What about him?"

"You were sitting with him for two hours. By a pool. Under stars. With your feet in the water."

"We were talking."

"Nishi. Two hours. Pool. Stars. Feet in water. Talking. That is not a conversation. That is the first act of a Marathi serial."

"It's not—"

"I'm not judging. I'm observing. And what I'm observing is that the transfer girl from Mumbai has been in Panchgani for two weeks and has already found the one boy in this school who is worth finding."

I looked out the window. The Wai road was dark — the farmhouse receding behind us, its lights shrinking to a point and then disappearing as Babu navigated the curves with the cautious expertise of a hill-station driver.

I did not argue with Carmela. I did not confirm. I sat in the back seat of the Scorpio and felt the residual cold of the pool water on my feet and the residual warmth of a conversation that had been, as Carmela accurately observed, more than a conversation.

I was home by 10:15. Aai was reading in the living room. She looked up when I came in, assessed my face — mothers could read faces the way seismologists read tremors, detecting disturbances that were invisible to the untrained eye — and decided that whatever she saw was not cause for alarm.

"How was Carmela's?" she asked.

"Good. We studied."

"You studied."

"Yes."

"Your hair is wet."

I touched my hair. The pool. I had dipped my head backward while sitting on the edge, a gesture I hadn't noticed making, a gesture that had left evidence.

"Carmela has a — she has a balcony. It was raining."

The lie was terrible. The lie was the kind of lie that a seventeen-year-old produces under pressure — thin, implausible, constructed in real time with materials that were clearly inadequate. My mother looked at me the way she looked at students who submitted homework that was obviously copied: with the particular sadness of someone who was disappointed not by the deception but by its quality.

"Good night, Nishi."

"Good night, Aai."

I went to my room. Closed the door. Sat on the bed. Looked at the mango tree through the window, its leaves silver in the moonlight.

My phone buzzed. A message from Aarav.

Home safe?

Home safe.

Good. Monday. Dhondu's. Usual time.

Usual time.

I put the phone on the charger. Lay back on the bed. Stared at the ceiling.

The ceiling in Vashi had a water stain in the shape of Australia. This ceiling was clean — white, smooth, unblemished. A ceiling that carried no history, no marks, no evidence of the life lived beneath it.

I was going to make marks on this ceiling. I was going to live a life here that left evidence.

I did not know that the evidence would be used against me.

But on that Saturday night, with the pool water drying in my hair and the memory of a boy's voice saying I'm glad you came, I did not know anything except that Panchgani was becoming, against my will and against my plan and against the stubborn architecture of my resentment, a place that I did not hate.

And not hating was, as Aarav had said, a start.