Before we leave the city: A love story
I had already started leaving Delhi before I knew how to say goodbye to it.
The room I rented near North Campus looked like a place someone had paused midway through living. Half the books were stacked on the floor, their spines facing the wall as if they were ashamed of being read too slowly. My suitcase lay open near the bed, swallowing shirts in no particular order.
Outside, the city carried on. Auto horns layered over one another. A pressure cooker whistled somewhere below. Someone argued on the phone in the lane, switching languages mid-sentence like emotion required translation.
Delhi didn't care that I was leaving.
It never does.
That was something I had learned early, how the city teaches you intimacy without attachment. You live inside it long enough to believe it knows you, and then one day you realize it has already moved on.
I was leaving after graduation. Delhi University had a way of convincing you that everything important would happen within its red-brick boundaries, and an equally efficient way of pushing you out once it was done with you. I had a job offer waiting in another city, one that people congratulated me for.
I said thank you and tried to sound like someone whose life was beginning, not ending.
That afternoon, I went out for coffee because there was nothing else left to do. When your life is in boxes, you look for small rituals to prove you still exist.
I walked to Tom Uncle's, the one tucked behind Patel Chest, mostly out of habit. It was crowded with students who still had time , time to waste, to flirt, to argue about attendance and professors. I stood in line, scrolling aimlessly, pretending I wasn't listening to the conversations around me.
That's when I noticed her.
I didn't think this is important. I didn't think anything dramatic at all. I just noticed the way she smiled when she finally gave up arguing about soy milk and said regular was fine.
I would understand later how misleading beginnings can be.
How easily they disguise endings.
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