Later, Alia would think about how everything had been orange and yellow like a premature Autumn, and she didn’t even know it. At the time.
She was turning 22 in one day. ‘The last year I can fit into a Taylor Swift song,’ she thought to herself. It wasn’t like Alia particularly liked Taylor Swift, but everyone she knew had been talking about her latest album, Lover. She had noticed the conversations on Twitter, which she had been mindlessly scrolling through, again. She was supposed to be working on her dissertation, not checking her phone for a text from…well, she’d rather not think about it.
Alia got up and stretched, vaguely noticing that her back was acting up again. She was too young for a persistent backache, she thought to herself, before the quiet voice in her head added, but too old to be homesick for so long.
She bit her lip, quietly grabbing her blue cup to rinse it in the kitchen. Before leaving her room, she checked to see if her phone was on loud. In case she got a text—the text. Halfway to the exit, she changed her mind and put her phone in her pocket. As she began rinsing the cup, she thought of all the ways she could spend the day. She should be working, she knew that. She thought about that often, things she should be doing. Then she’d watch someone else do it, and think to herself: did you think it up because I thought of that first?
Lately, everything seemed to have been slowing down, acquiring a heaviness that only August brings. Back home, Alia could tell August was coming based on the heaviness of the air, the constant knowledge of rain. She had a strange sense for it. You could lock her away in the room for a year, and she would still know August when it arrived. Her first experience of the world was in August, after all.
But in this wintry country, the usual indicators of August—the thick air that broke into angry rain, burning thunderstorms and darkness giving way to fierce droplets—were for nought. Yet something had been pressing against her, against her aching back, to the centre of her aching heart. She checked her phone again.
Exactly a year ago, he had sent her a soft toy that could transform into a travel pillow. For all the places you will go to, he said. He could have ordered it online, but he had gone to stores instead, to find the exact shade of blue she liked—the shade of blue of her cup. The first few days in this wintry country, she would sleep clinging to the travel pillow, to have something that reminded her of home. And him. Now, the pillow lay in her suitcase under the bed. She had been traveling the past few months, but it never struck her to carry the pillow.
It wasn’t that she didn’t think of him; it was that she thought too much of him. If you heard her heartbreak, you would think he had broken up with her, not the other way around. Like it hadn’t involved a phone call she didn’t want to make, as the first snow she had experienced glistened around her. Like it hadn’t involved sitting by the river on a purpling evening, realizing there were sights she would never share with him, never describe to him. Not because he wouldn’t listen, but because she no longer wanted to. That was when she knew it had to end.
Alia turned the tap, shaking droplets off her cup. To take her mind off things, she decided to cook. That, and she wasn’t sure her body could handle a third Tesco Meal Deal. As she waited for her pot to fill with water, she instinctively glanced at her phone. She checked herself just in time, smiling wryly, thinking she had finally become a meme: even water reminded her of him now.
For months after, she didn’t know how to answer the question the had been trailing her like a ghost: Why? What happened?
Over time, she tested different answers, with varying degrees of detail. ‘It didn’t feel right anymore’; ‘We’d outgrown each other. We’d known each since we were 18, it was bound to happen.’; ‘He just didn’t know how to communicate’; ‘Distance’. None of them felt right. She cut up the baby carrots, the knife against the cutting board a choreographed dance. She had always hated carrots. Yet away from home, she diced and then caramelized them, letting her soups and noodles turn slightly sweet. She knew they were good for her.
Her phone screen lit up. She dropped the knife and grabbed her phone. There his name was, next to a single ‘Yeah’. She bit her lip, an ugly taste filling the back of her throat. She put down the phone, gentler than she had picked it up, and stirred the water. Her eyes began prickling, as her fist tightened around the ladle. For three days now, he had been responding in monosyllables. For three days now, she didn’t know what had changed.
His last birthday was the first time she had ever cooked. Between the two of them, they barely had enough money to go on dates twice a week. Every few months, they’d save up, dreaming of spending one night together in a cheap hotel. They went to different colleges on opposite ends of Delhi, travelling two hours to meet each other. None of that had mattered. Late November, Alia whipped cream cheese with powdered sugar in a bowl, as kidney beans lay soaking in the water. For an hour, she carefully followed the recipe instructions; measuring, mixing and weighing ingredients, to make rajma chawal and a cheesecake. She had planned on surprising him the next day, scheming with friends. They would have an hour together, squeezed between the time he needed to study for an exam, and she wanted him to be smiling the entire time. He was.
And here she was, a year and a half later, crying.
