When S left, I cried a little. But when I think about it I begin to see that it was only one of the many things I did after she left.
She started leaving many months before I cried about her leaving. Maybe it was when she told me that she landed the scholarship to the US. I was coalescing from my own little trip to the netherworld fueled by a handful of pills when I got her email. I didn’t feel much, really. I was happy that she got the scholarship, but my affectations had assumed a straight line by then—probably the medications and side-effects of suicide. After a few months, back in campus, I did not venture out much and had stopped resisting the parties my professors threw. I stayed indoors for days on end only getting out to eat at the dining hall, and I skipped even those short trips at times. When I met S after a few weeks when a senior of ours came visiting, she gave me an earful. She told me that I am an adult now and should act like one—I think what she meant was that I should probably get my shit together.
When we were writing our reports for the annual seminar all of us hold in the months of August and September, both of us found ourselves stuck. Her friend was visiting because the friend’s “brain wasn’t braining.” It was raining in Mumbai and there was no place to sit when we went for our usual chai-biscoot breaks. Her friend had an umbrella, white dots on pink fabric. I liked the umbrella and told her I’d get a similar one because I liked color and the polka dot pattern. We—S and I—decided we would be accountability partners and push ourselves to finish the seminar report before she and my supervisor left on their respective fellowships. She told me the student wellness person employed by the college we were at suggested the idea of accountability partner. S told the wellness centre woman that she knew only one person who was working during the time—Me—and that she wasn’t sure I was even responsible for myself. When she told me about this conversation, I wanted to do this partner thingy because I thought I’d get my work done, and it was fun to work with her. I think it paid off: we held our seminars on the 9th of August and 10th of August, right on schedule. She was down with fever but managed to finish everything.
Well, after she left, I think I lost my sense of time a little bit. Sure, I was pulling all-nighters and watching arthouse movies and thinking about sad things, but the day she left—I think it was the day after—I felt completely out of place and out of time. I walked to the cafe they had opened in the campus and drank a coffee and ate a slice of cheesecake—which S and I used to eat when we went there. I called her when I started from the department and talked to her sitting by one of those round tables the cafe had set up. After I hung up, I ordered the cheescake and coffee. It was August 15th and they had stenciled out a coffee-powder ‘76’ on the foam in my cup. I thought it felt crisp—the edges were quite neat and the powder had evenly filled the rather thick numbers.