It began, as most unplanned things do, with good intentions and poor time management.
The plan had been simple. After their last class of the day .... Professor Deshpande's session on the concept of the unreliable narrator, which had once again run over by twenty minutes because nobody could bring themselves to stop him ... Vijay had mentioned, casually, that he needed to return "Me Before You" to the library.
He had finished it the previous night. All of it. In one sitting, with his phone torch under his blanket like a child reading past bedtime, while Aakash snored peacefully on the other side of the room.
He had not told Ishani this yet.
He was waiting for the right moment.
Ishani had said she also needed to go to the library .... she had a book on hold that Mrs. Kamat had messaged her about, and she wanted to check a reference for the essay that was due next week.
So they had gone together. Naturally, without discussion, the way they seemed to do most things now.
Sara had watched them leave side by side and said nothing. But she had the expression of someone saving something up for later, and Vijay had learned in the past few days that this expression from Sara was best not examined too closely.
The library at five in the evening was quieter than it was during the day ... most students had already left for hostels or the canteen or the small tea stall outside the college gates that did brisk business in the late afternoon. The light coming through the tall windows was the golden, tired light of a day that was winding down, long and warm and slightly drowsy.
Mrs. Kamat was at her desk when they arrived, reading something with the focused attention of someone who had spent forty years surrounded by books and had never once lost her appetite for them. She looked up when they came in.
"Miss Sharma. Your hold is at the desk." She looked at Vijay. "Mr. Malhotra. Returning something?"
"Me Before You," he said, setting the book on the counter.
Mrs. Kamat took it, checked it back in with practiced efficiency, and then looked at both of them over her glasses with the mild, unsurprised expression of someone who had seen many things in many years of library supervision.
"We close at six," she said. "Sharp."
"We won't be long," Ishani said.
Mrs. Kamat made a small sound that was not quite agreement and went back to her book.
They were long.
Not intentionally. It started reasonably enough .... Ishani picked up her hold book, a slim volume on narrative structures in postcolonial literature, and they drifted naturally toward the stacks to find the reference she needed. Vijay helped ... he had gotten better at the Dewey decimal system over the past few days, though he still occasionally handed books to Ishani for final placement with the expression of a student submitting homework he wasn't entirely confident about.
But then Vijay found a book on the shelf next to the one Ishani was looking for .... a collection of essays on the craft of fiction, thin and slightly battered, with a cover that looked like it had been loved very hard by many people. He pulled it out and read the back.
"Have you read this one?" he asked.
Ishani looked up from her notes. Looked at the book. "Yes. Third essay is the best one. It's about the difference between what a story says and what it means."
"Those are different things?"
"Always," she said. "Every story says something. Not every story means something."
He looked at her. "What does Me Before You mean?"
She put her pen down slowly.
"That love is not a solution," she said. "It is a ....companion. It walks beside you. But it cannot walk for you."
The library hummed softly around them. Somewhere a page turned. The evening light shifted slightly, going from gold to something warmer, something that was already preparing to become dusk.
Vijay sat down on the floor between the shelves ..... not at a reading table, just on the floor, his back against the bookshelf, his legs stretched out. It was an impulsive thing to do and slightly undignified and he didn't care even a little.
Ishani looked at him sitting on the floor. Looked at the reading tables six feet away. Then, with the expression of someone making a considered decision, she sat down across from him, her back against the opposite shelf, her notes on her lap.
"You finished it," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Last night," he said.
"And?"
"You were right," he said. "It's devastating. In the best possible way."
Something in her expression softened. "What was your favourite part?"
He had known she would ask. He had been thinking about the answer since two in the morning, lying in the dark with the book closed on his chest.
"There's a moment," he said, "near the end. After everything has already been decided. Will writes Louisa a letter." He paused. "He tells her to live boldly. To push herself. To not just settle for the life she's drifted into." Another pause. "He tells her that she made his world a better place. That knowing her was the best thing."
Ishani was very still.
"And I kept thinking," Vijay said slowly, "that this man ... who had decided to leave .. loved her more completely in that letter than most people manage in a lifetime of staying." He looked at the book spines across from him. "That's the part that stayed with me. That love can be complete even when it isn't permanent."
The silence that followed was the kind that happens when something true has been said and the air needs a moment to accommodate it.
"That's a better answer than I expected," Ishani said quietly.
"What did you expect?"
"Something about the boat scene," she said. "Most people say the boat scene."
"The boat scene is good," he said. "But the letter is better."
She nodded slowly. And then, so quietly he almost missed it:
"I think so too."
It was somewhere in the middle of this somewhere between the book discussion and Ishani going back to her notes and Vijay flipping through the essay collection ... that time did what time does when you are not paying attention to it.
It passed.
Quickly, and all at once, and without asking permission.
It was the lights that told them. The library lights ... which were on a timer, Mrs. Kamat having left at some point without either of them noticing ..... clicked off in sections, starting from the far end and moving toward them in slow, deliberate stages.
Vijay looked up.
Ishani looked up.
They looked at each other.
"What time is it?" Ishani said.
Vijay checked his phone.
Six forty-seven.
"Six forty-seven," he said.
A pause.
"The library closed at six," Ishani said.
"It did," he agreed.
Another pause. Longer.
"Mrs. Kamat left without checking if anyone was still inside," Ishani said, in the tone of someone cataloguing facts in order to avoid reacting to them.
"She did say sharp,"Vijay offered.
"She did," Ishani agreed. "She was not wrong."
They both stood up. Vijay tried the main library door. It was locked ..... not dramatically locked, not the click of a deadbolt, just the simple, firm resistance of a door that had been shut and was not planning to open from the inside without a key.
He tried it once more, just to be certain.
Still locked.
He turned back to Ishani.
She was standing in the middle of the library with her bag on her shoulder and her notes under her arm and the expression of someone who prided herself enormously on being prepared and organised and was currently experiencing the particular discomfort of a situation that was entirely outside her control.
He tried very hard not to smile.
He did not entirely succeed.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm not doing anything," he said.
"You're smiling."
"I'm not."
"Vijay."
"Ishani."
She looked at him for one long, exasperated moment. And then ... helplessly, against what was clearly her better judgment ... the corner of her mouth moved.
"There has to be another exit," she said, collecting herself. "Fire regulations require at least two exits in a building this size."
"That's very practical," he said.
"I'm a very practical person," she said, already walking toward the back of the library.
There was, in fact, another exit a fire door at the far end of the building, behind the periodicals section, which opened outward with a firm push and a sound like an exhale.
They pushed it open and stepped out.
Into the rain.
It had started sometime in the past hour while they were sitting on the library floor between the bookshelves, talking about love letters and permanence ....and it had settled into the particular kind of rain that isn't dramatic but is entirely committed. Steady and warm and showing no signs of stopping, the kind of Pune monsoon rain that arrives like a houseguest who has decided to stay for dinner and possibly the night.
The small overhang above the fire door gave them approximately two feet of dry space.
They stood under it, side by side, and looked at the rain.
The college was empty. The courtyard was shining and silver with it, the peepal tree dark and swaying, the lights along the pathway making small golden halos in the wet air. Somewhere across the campus a door banged in the wind. Everything smelled like wet earth and rain and the particular freshness that only exists in the first deep breath after the sky opens.
"Our hostels are on the other side of campus," Vijay said.
"Yes," Ishani said.
"That's approximately a seven minute walk."
"Eight," she said. "I timed it in June."
"Of course you did." He looked at the rain. "We'll be completely soaked."
"Yes."
"So we wait."
"So we wait," she agreed.
They stood under the overhang in the warm rain-smell of the evening, close enough that their shoulders were almost touching in the narrow dry space, and said nothing for a moment.
It was not an uncomfortable silence. It was the silence of two people who had gotten, over the past five days, surprisingly good at being quiet together.
It was Vijay who spoke first.
Not about the rain, or the locked library, or the fact that dinner at the hostel mess would be over in forty minutes. He spoke because the evening felt like the kind of evening that asked for honesty, and because Ishani had, over the past few days, given him small careful pieces of herself .... her favourite book, her favourite scene, the summer she spent in a school library, seven years of friendship with Sara .....and he felt, standing here in the rain-smell with the college empty around them, that it was his turn.
"Can I tell you something?" he said.
She looked at him sideways. "You're going to tell me something regardless of what I say."
"Probably," he admitted. "But I wanted to ask."
"Tell me," she said.
He looked at the rain for a moment. Organizing it. Finding the shape of it.
"I almost didn't come to college," he said.
She was quiet. Listening.
"Not this college specifically," he said. "Any college. After Class Twelve I had this idea .... I wanted to just read. For a year. Just stay in Bhopal and read everything I hadn't had time to read and figure out what I actually thought about things before someone started telling me what to think."
"What changed your mind?"
"My father," he said. And then, after a pause: "He died. In February. Just before my board exams."
The rain fell steadily. Ishani said nothing, but he felt her attention shift ..... become more careful, more present.
"He was ... he was the one who taught me to read," Vijay said. "Not literally. I mean he taught me to love it. He had this shelf in our house, floor to ceiling, and every weekend he would pick a book and read out loud after dinner. Just read. Whatever he was reading. And I would sit on the floor next to his chair and listen, even when I was too young to understand most of it.
"He used to say that a person who reads is never entirely alone. Because every book is a person ...the person who wrote it, who felt something so strongly they had to put it into words. And when you read it you are in conversation with them, across whatever distance of time or place.
"After he died I didn't read anything for two months. I couldn't. Every book felt like .... like a reminder of what I'd lost.
"And then one night I couldn't sleep and I picked up the first book I could find and I read until morning. And somewhere in the middle of it I felt ... I felt him. Not in a supernatural way. Just in the way that when you love something the way someone taught you to love it, they are always a little bit present in that love.
"So I decided to come to college. To study literature. Because it felt like the thing he would have wanted me to do. And because I think ... I think I needed to be somewhere that took books seriously. That took the idea that stories matter .... seriously."
He stopped.
The rain filled the silence ... soft and constant and not unkind.
He hadn't planned to say all of that. He had planned to say something much shorter, much more manageable. But the evening had asked for honesty and he had given it, and now it was out there in the warm rain air between them, real and slightly exposed, and he waited.
Ishani was quiet for a long moment.
When she spoke, her voice was careful. Not in a practiced way ... in the way of someone who understands that some things deserve to be received with care.
"What was the first book?" she asked. "The one you picked up that night."
He looked at her.
Of all the things she could have asked. Of all the responses she could have given.
She had asked about the book.
Because she understood .... she understood exactly ..... that the book was the important part. That the book was where the answer lived.
"To Kill a Mockingbird," he said.
She nodded once. Slowly. Like something had been confirmed.
"Your father had good taste," she said quietly.
And somehow ....in the simplest possible way, with the fewest possible words .... she had said exactly the right thing. Not I'm sorry for your loss, not that must have been so hard, not any of the phrases that were kind but also somehow created distance. Just .... your father had good taste. An acknowledgment of who he was. A recognition of him as a person, not just as a loss.
Vijay felt something loosen in his chest that he hadn't known was tight.
"He did," he said.
They stood in the rain for a while after that .... not talking, not needing to. The campus was quiet and silver and empty around them, and the rain fell in its steady unhurried way, and somewhere in the peepal tree a bird made one small sound and then was quiet again.
At some point Ishani's hand shifted .... just slightly, just a small movement .... and her fingers were close to his. Not touching. Just close. The way proximity becomes a kind of language when words have already said everything they can.
Vijay did not move his hand away.
Neither did she.
The rain eased after twenty minutes .... not stopped, but softened into something light and navigable.
"We should go," Ishani said.
"We should," he agreed.
Neither of them moved for another moment.
Then Vijay picked up his bag and Ishani tucked her notes more securely under her arm and they stepped out from under the overhang into the light rain, walking across the shining courtyard toward the hostels on the other side of campus.
They walked close together ..... not touching, but close. The rain was soft on their faces and the campus lights made everything glow and the wet pathway reflected the sky in long silver strips.
They didn't talk much. But once, near the peepal tree, Ishani looked up at the sky with an expression that was open and quiet and completely unguarded ... the expression she only had when she thought no one was watching.
Vijay was watching.
He always was.
At the fork in the path where the boys' hostel and girls' hostel diverged, they stopped.
"Dinner will be over," Ishani said.
"Probably," he agreed. "There might be leftovers."
"The dal is always left over," she said. "Nobody eats the dal."
"I eat the dal."
She looked at him. "Of course you do."
He smiled. She shook her head .....but her eyes were warm.
She started to turn toward the girls' hostel path. Then stopped.
"Vijay," she said.
"Hm."
She was quiet for a moment. The light rain fell softly around them. She was looking at the pathway, not at him, and there was something in her expression that was working something out .... something she was deciding whether to say.
"Thank you," she said finally. "For telling me. About your father."
He looked at her.
"You didn't ask any of the wrong questions," he said.
She met his eyes. "I know which questions matter," she said quietly.
And then she turned and walked toward the girls' hostel her dupatta slightly damp from the rain, her steps as unhurried as always, her figure growing smaller in the soft evening light until she turned the corner and was gone.
Vijay stood at the fork in the path for a long moment.
The rain had almost stopped now. Just the lightest mist of it remaining, more feeling than fact. The campus was still and silver and quiet around him.
He thought about a shelf of books floor to ceiling. About reading until morning. About love being a companion, not a solution. About fingers almost touching in the warm rain-smell of an empty college evening.
He thought about a girl who knew which questions mattered.
He walked back to his hostel slowly. Taking his time. The wet pathway shining under his feet, the Pune night settling around him like something warm and permanent.
In his room, Aakash was eating instant noodles and watching something on his phone and didn't look up when Vijay came in.
Vijay sat on his bed. Opened his notebook.
Wrote:
She asked about the book. Not about the grief. About the book.
Because she understood that the book was where the answer lived. That the book was where he lived.
I have never felt so completely understood by someone who has known me for five days.
I think about what he used to say ..... that a person who reads is never entirely alone. Because every book is a person.
I think she is like that. I think knowing her is like reading something that was written specifically for you ... something that feels, page by page, like coming home.
I think I am in a great deal of trouble.
I think I am the happiest I have been in a very long time.
He closed the notebook.
Outside, the rain had stopped completely. The Pune night was washed clean and quiet, smelling of wet earth and fresh air and the particular sweetness that only exists after a storm has passed and the world has been made new again.
Vijay lay back on his bed and looked at the ceiling.
Smiled.
Softly. Completely. In the dark.
Like someone who has just read the first chapter of something and already knows ....with the quiet certainty of a reader who has learned to trust good writing ....that this is going to be the kind of story that changes you.
That this is going to be the kind of story worth reading slowly.
All the way to the end.
đź“ť Author's Note
Dear Reader,
He told her about his father tonight.
And she asked about the book.
Not about the grief. Not about the loss. About the book because she understood that the book was where the love lived. Where the man lived.
This is what it looks like when two readers find each other. When two people who under.
Thank you for reading my page đź’— đź’—