Chapter 1: Tanvi

# Chapter 1: Tanvi

## The Garba Night

The bass from the DJ's speakers shook the ground under the pandal so hard that the marigold torans swayed like drunk aunties at a wedding. Navratri in Satara was not the polished, choreographed affair that Pune or Mumbai exported on Instagram reels — it was louder, sweatier, more personal, the kind of garba where the dandiya sticks were actual wood and left actual welts and the uncles in the corner played teen-patti between rounds while pretending to supervise.

I was seventeen. Standard 12. The year everything mattered and nothing made sense.

My lehenga was borrowed — Mansi-tai's, from two Navratris ago, the green one with the mirror-work border that caught the pandal lights and threw small stars on the faces of nearby dancers. The blouse was tight across the shoulders because Mansi-tai was narrower than me, and the dupatta kept sliding off because dupatta physics was a branch of science that no engineer had solved. I'd pinned it in three places. It slid from a fourth.

The Saraswati Colony pandal was the biggest in Satara — not officially, because the Shaniwar Peth pandal would dispute that claim with statistics and a strongly worded letter to the municipal corporation, but in the way that mattered: volume, density, the particular quality of collective joy that a thousand people producing in a confined space created a kind of heat that was distinct from the October heat and that smelled of jasmine and sweat and the kerosene from the food stalls on the perimeter.

I was dancing in the second ring, the ring where the serious dancers went — not the inner ring, which was reserved for the women who had been doing garba since before I was born and whose footwork was a curriculum I had not yet graduated from, and not the outer ring, which was where the boys stood pretending to dance while actually conducting surveillance of the girls in the second ring with the intensity of ISRO tracking a satellite.

My feet knew the steps. Three years of Navratri in this pandal had installed the pattern — step, clap, turn, step, clap, turn — into the muscle memory that operated below conscious thought, the body's autopilot that allowed the mind to wander while the feet maintained the rhythm.

My mind wandered to him.

Hrithik Patil.

The boy next door. Literally next door — the Patil house shared a compound wall with the Kulkarni house (my house, my mother's maiden name, the house I'd grown up in since we moved from Karad when I was six). The compound wall was painted blue on our side and white on theirs, and the mango tree that grew in the corner belonged to neither house and both houses, its branches extending over the wall like a diplomat refusing to choose sides.

Hrithik was in the outer ring. I knew this without looking, the way you know the location of a person whose gravitational field your body has been calibrated to detect since the age of six — the age when I had arrived in Satara in the back of Baba's Maruti 800 with a plastic bag of clothes and a Chhota Bheem water bottle and the absolute certainty of a child who has been uprooted and replanted that the new soil would be hostile.

The new soil had not been hostile. The new soil had contained Hrithik Patil — a boy with a mess of curly hair and the particular shade of brown skin that turned copper in the October sun, standing at the compound wall with a raw mango in one hand and a salt shaker in the other, offering both with the casual generosity of a seven-year-old who did not yet understand that generosity was a quality and who simply understood that the new girl looked like she could use a mango.

I had taken the mango. I had taken the salt. I had sat on the compound wall — the blue side — and eaten the mango with Hrithik Patil while our mothers talked across the wall about school admissions and auto fares and the particular challenges of raising children in a town that was not Pune but that had, they agreed, better air and cheaper onions.

That was eleven years ago. Eleven years of sharing a compound wall and a mango tree and the specific, accumulated intimacy of two people who had watched each other grow up — the intimacy that was different from friendship and different from romance and that occupied a territory between the two that had no name in Marathi or English or any language I knew, though I suspected that if any language had a word for it, it would be a long word, a word that contained within it the mango and the salt and the compound wall and the particular way Hrithik's voice had changed when he was fourteen, deepening over one summer from the voice of a boy to the voice of something else, and how the change had produced in me a response that was not in the Standard 9 biology syllabus.

The garba's tempo increased. The DJ was building toward the climax — the Dholida remix that every garba DJ in Maharashtra played at 10:30 PM because it was the law, not a written law but the unwritten law that governed Navratri the way unwritten laws governed everything in India, by consensus and tradition and the threat of aunty disapproval.

I turned in the second ring. The mirrors on the lehenga caught the lights. The pandal was a galaxy of reflected colour — reds and greens and golds, the lehengas and chaniya cholis and the occasional brave boy in a kediyu, all of it spinning in the concentric rings of the garba like a solar system whose sun was the murti of Ambamata at the centre, garlanded with marigolds and lit by the warm glow of oil lamps that the electric lights had not yet replaced.

I turned, and I saw him.

Hrithik was not in the outer ring. He was at the edge of the pandal, leaning against a steel pole with a paper cup of kokam sharbat in one hand, watching the dancers with the expression of a boy who wanted to dance and who would not dance and who was aware that the distance between wanting and doing was the width of his own shyness, a width that he had not been able to cross in seventeen years and that he would not cross tonight.

He was wearing the white kurta. The one his mother had bought for Ganpati that he wore to every occasion because Hrithik Patil owned one good kurta the way he owned one good pair of formal shoes — not from poverty (the Patils were comfortable, Patil-kaka ran the Patil Hardware store on Mangalwar Peth, the store that had been in the family for three generations and that sold everything from nails to water pumps) but from the particular indifference to clothing that some boys possessed and that their mothers fought with the persistence of a woman whose son would not, she had decided, attend garba in a faded T-shirt.

The white kurta looked good on him. This was an observation I made with the clinical detachment of a girl who had been observing Hrithik Patil's appearance for six years and who had developed, in that time, an internal catalogue of his expressions, his postures, his clothing, and the particular way his curly hair fell across his forehead when the humidity was above sixty percent, which in October was always.

He saw me looking. The kokam sharbat paused halfway to his mouth.

I looked away. The garba's rhythm carried me forward — step, clap, turn — and the turn took me away from him and into the second ring's orbit, the rotation that would bring me back to his line of sight in approximately thirty seconds, during which time I would decide whether to wave or smile or pretend I had not been looking, the three options that my seventeen-year-old brain's romance committee — a committee that had been in session since Standard 9 and that had produced no actionable recommendations — would debate with the urgency of a parliament in crisis.

Thirty seconds. The ring turned. I came back around.

He was gone. The steel pole was empty. The kokam sharbat cup was on the ground.

My stomach did the thing. The specific thing — the drop, the small plummet, the sensation of a floor that had been solid becoming briefly transparent, allowing a glimpse of the void beneath. The thing that happened every time Hrithik Patil moved toward me and then moved away, the oscillation that had been the defining pattern of our relationship for six years: approach, retreat, approach, retreat, the tide of a boy who could not decide and a girl who would not decide for him.

The garba continued. The Dholida remix reached its peak. A thousand people stamped and clapped and turned in the pandal's concentric rings, and the marigold torans swayed, and the oil lamps flickered, and Ambamata watched from the centre with the serene expression of a goddess who had seen ten thousand Navratris and who knew that the garba always ended but the longing did not.

I danced. The mirrors caught the light. The dupatta slid from the fourth pin.

And somewhere in the crowd, Hrithik Patil was walking away from the thing he wanted, as he always did, with the particular talent for retreat that he had perfected over seventeen years and that I had spent eleven years trying to decode.

The dandiya round started. A woman twice my age cracked her stick against mine with the enthusiasm of a person who had been waiting all year for this specific violence. The wood stung my palm. The pain was sharp and clean and real — realer than the garba, realer than the crowd, realer than the void that Hrithik's absence had opened in my stomach.

The pain was useful. Pain was always useful. It was the body's way of saying: you are here, you are alive, you are in a pandal in Satara in October and the boy next door has walked away again and your palm is red and the dandiya aunt is coming back for a second round.

I raised my stick. The aunt swung. The crack echoed.

Navratri continued.