Chapter 5: Small Towns, Big Dreams

I met Arjun in high school. He shouldn’t have come to our small city, but after a family upheaval, he had to move in with my Dadaji.

Our town was the kind where everyone knew your family’s gotra, and one scandal made the rounds faster than WhatsApp forwards. Arjun stuck out like a sore thumb.

Back then, he was wild and rebellious. Not long after the semester started, he was among the first to be publicly criticised. Others would at least pretend to be sorry when they got in trouble. But even standing before the whole school, he looked careless and unfazed.

I remembered the morning assembly, the principal’s booming voice, and Arjun’s defiant stare. The school bell clanged, and a group of boys played cricket with a broken bat near the cycle stand. The teachers shook their heads; the girls whispered, fascinated.

I didn’t like people like that, and I didn’t want to get involved.

I kept my head down, clutching my textbooks as if they could shield me from trouble.

But when he was falsely accused, I couldn’t help but stand up for him. From that day on, he started following me—from school to my house, never leaving until I went upstairs.

He would walk a few steps behind, whistling a tune, pretending not to notice me. My neighbours watched, curious, as if expecting a scene from a film.

“If it weren’t for me, you would’ve been retaliated against already. Good students shouldn’t get involved in this stuff.”

He told me this, voice full of mock seriousness, but I knew he meant it. He saw himself as my protector, even when I didn’t ask for it.

He didn’t care—fighting, being framed, misunderstood, punished—none of it mattered to him. But when my dad’s fist, after hitting my mum, was about to come down on me, he rushed over and knocked him down with a kick.

That night is etched in my memory—the shouting, my mother’s tears, Arjun’s wild courage. In that moment, everything changed.

My mum screamed, held up my dad, glared at me, and cursed me. Arjun froze. The next second, he pulled me and ran.

We sprinted through the narrow lanes, the sound of her curses chasing us. I tasted salt—tears, sweat, or both, I couldn’t tell.

He cooked me Maggi noodles. Overcooked, mushy, too much masala—salty. The vegetables were still raw. It was the worst bowl of noodles I’d ever had, but I finished even the soup.

We ate in silence, sitting cross-legged on the floor. The taste didn’t matter; it was the gesture that counted. Sometimes, love is just sharing a bad meal with someone who cares.

In our turbulent youth, two lonely souls, we kept each other warm and pushed each other forward.

We watched pirated DVDs, laughed at silly jokes, and made promises we didn’t know how to keep. For a while, the world faded away.

But everyone was against us. The school opposed early romance. Arjun’s family looked down on me. “I’ve seen plenty of social climbers, but never someone so young.”

My mum, red-eyed with anger, slapped me and called me a disgrace. Arjun was forcibly taken away, and I became a pariah at school.

The rumours spread like wildfire—classmates whispering, teachers tut-tutting. I stopped eating lunch in the canteen, afraid of the stares.

But he ran away, bringing all his Diwali money, injuring his leg in the process. He said, “Let’s run away together.”

His ankle was swollen, but his spirit was unbreakable. He grinned, pulling out a bundle of notes tied with a red thread, the kind used for rakhi—his escape fund.

I hugged him, resting my head against his. “One year. We’ll get into the same university. Then no one can stop us. Just one year.”

For the first time, I believed in a future that was ours and ours alone.