It was 2022.
I was sitting in that exam hall with a heavy chest not because of the paper in front of me, but because of everything behind me. Past 4 years of school, of things unsaid, of her the first SHE of my life.
The 12th exam ended.
And just like that, a chapter closed.
That afternoon after exam, I had a responsibility some distant relatives daughters were coming, and I had to pick them up, take them around the city. Far far relatives. The kind you barely know but can’t say no to.
I wasn’t interested. Not even a little.
I sat on my friend’s bike, still carrying that strange emptiness that comes after a long wait finally ends, and said — “Come on, let’s head to that hotel up ahead. We have to pick up two relatives from there.”
My friends looked at me like I’d lost it.
“Yaar, Aaj exam khatam. Mehnat khatam. Padhai khatam.”
They weren’t wrong at that time. But I didn’t know then none of us did that some finish lines are actually starting points in disguise.
That it was the end, yes.
But the kind of end from where something else quietly begins.
We reached the hotel.
At the reception, both of them were sitting.
Now here’s the thing. I had seen the elder one before. Knew she was coming. But nobody had mentioned the younger one. Nobody had prepared me for her.
The elder sister was eight years older than me. A gap too wide to even think about. But the younger one just two years apart from me. Just two small years. And when I saw her for the first time.
I want to be careful here. Because what I felt wasn’t just about how she looked. Yes, her face had this rare kind of beauty the kind that isn’t loud, isn’t trying. Her features fell into place like they were carved slowly, thoughtfully. A soft precision. The best kind.
But it was the smile that did it.
She saw me a stranger, practically and she smiled. Not the polite, awkward smile you give to someone you’ve just met. No. It was calm. Like she already knew something. Like she wasn’t nervous at all, and somehow that made me more nervous.
I was still standing there, somewhere between a greeting and a thought I hadn’t finished yet —
And then a voice came from behind me.
“Anubhav, I’ll go with you. With them.”
My friend. Of course.
I turned, looked at him, and said what made complete sense in that moment —
“And that’s where our paths end, my friend.”
The ride from the hotel to home was quiet on the outside.
Sitting in that auto, I was somewhere else entirely. I was back in school. Back with her — Moto, the SHE. The one whose face I had just seen for the last time without knowing it was the last time. And now it was hitting me. Really hitting me.
I will never see her again after this.
जब कश्ती बिल्कुल सही-सलामत थी,
किनारे की चाहत किसे थी?
अब टूटी-फूटी इस कश्ती में,
किनारे की आरज़ू कौन करे?
The exams were over. School was over. And with it — her.
I didn’t try to stop it. A little water gathered in my eyes, quiet and stubborn. I let it stay.
What I didn’t know what I couldn’t have known was that someone in that same auto was watching me. Not casually, not out of boredom. Really watching. The way I used to watch people. Studying the silences. Reading the eyes. Trying to understand what’s going on inside someone who isn’t saying anything.
She was doing that to me.
A boy, last exam of 12th just done, sitting in an auto and crying. Softly. Without explanation.
And she noticed.
We reached home. For a while, silence held its ground. Then it broke — the way silences usually do slowly, without announcement. We started talking.
And her voice — God, her voice. It wasn’t performing anything. There was no careful choosing of words, no trying to seem interesting or impressive. No “we just met so let me show you my best side.”
Nothing like that.
She was just raw. Whatever came to her mind, came out of her mouth. No filter, no edit, no delay. Her expressions moved freely across her face like she’d never learned to hold them back, and maybe she never tried to.
I recognized something in that i know anyone same person like that.
And so I started talking too. Whatever came — I said it. Whatever the mind threw up — it came out. No performance. No impression management.
Then from somewhere in the background, a voice floated in —
“Yeh Anubhav bhi jo mann mein aaya bolne lagta hai. Seedha ache se baat kare toh kuch ho jaaye iska.”
I smiled.
Because honestly — same.
That same evening, we went out.
By then surprisingly, naturally we were already friends. Not the formal kind. The real kind. The kind that happens when two people realize they’re made of the same noise. Same habits. Same way of saying things. Same shameless honesty.
I took them to the ghats of Varanasi.
There is something about the ghats that understands people better than people understand themselves. The old steps, worn soft by a thousand years of feet and prayers and heartbreaks, hold every kind of human quietly the grieving, the celebrating, the confused, the falling. The Ganga doesn’t ask what brought you here. She just moves. And somehow, standing there, even the things you can’t say out loud find a way to float.
Maybe that’s why love or whatever comes just before it always feels bigger near water.
We walked. We talked. And somewhere between the evening aarti smoke and the sound of the river, we started roasting each other.
She took shots. I took shots. Nobody held back. Nobody got offended.
Pehli baar for the first time I was friend with a girl. Actually friends. The way I am with my boys.
Now I know how that sounds to some of you. “What’s the big deal” ?
But if you know the society I grew up in and you will, soon enough, because it deserves its own name: the Parasite Society — you’d understand. In that world, a boy and a girl being friends is never just friendship. It becomes a headline. A rumour. A problem.
“Girlfriend hai kya?” “Kya chal raha hai unke beech?” “Log kya kahenge?” “Gandi nazar se dekhenge.”
All of this was already loading in my head like a slow, stupid download.
And then.
Something touched my hand.
Casually. Easily. Like it was the most normal thing in the world.
She had grabbed my hand.
“Yaar, road cross karne mein dikkat hoti hai mujhe,” she said. Simple. Unbothered. And I i i i was jjj…….u.uuuuu…sssstttttt stopped.
Not my feet. My thoughts.
Is this allowed? Will someone say something? Will someone look? Will someone come and ……………………………..
Then I looked at the road. The people. The evening.
Nobody cared. No one was watching. No one was judging. No lightning came down. No aunty appeared from a corner.
It was just a hand. Holding another hand. On a busy road. In a city that was too old and too tired to make it into a scandal.
I let the thoughts go.
And I held on.
We came back. Ate food. Talked a little more.
And then the night passed the way nights do after good days. Quietly. Without asking permission.
Next morning, their train was back home.
Her elder sister wasn’t feeling too well — nothing serious, just enough to slow the morning down a little. So i went to the station together to drop them off. The train was late. So we sat.
And in that waiting she started talking. About me. My life. My things. Asking. Digging. The way only someone genuinely curious does.
And I listened to her.
But I also listened to everything else.
Gaadi number 14012 platform number 4 par aa rahi hai ;
Are taaza tarbooz lelo, taaza tarbooz ;
Mummy aap woh wala shoes kaise bhool gayi aaakhir ;
A child crying three benches away ;
The heavy horn of a train PoooooooOOOOo………
The shuffle of luggage
In all of that noise her voice found me. Clearly. Easily. Like it belonged in the frequency only I was tuned to.
We talked the way real friends talk. No language rules. No filter. Hindi, English, nonsense whatever came, came. She laughed with her whole face. Put her hand on my shoulder like it was the most casual thing. I roasted her. She didn’t flinch she came back harder.
And somewhere in that conversation I noticed something.
I wasn’t thinking of her as a girl.
Not in the way society teaches you to with distance, with hesitation, with all those invisible walls. She was just a friend. My friend. No gender attached to it. Just a person I could say anything to and know it would land safely.
Then the announcement came. Her train.
She got up. Gathered herself. And before leaving.
That smile again.
The same one from the reception. Calm. Unhurried. Like she had all the time in the world even when she didn’t.
She left.
And I waited for the sadness. The heaviness. The thing that usually comes when someone good walks away. But it didn’t come. What came instead was something warmer. Something sitting quietly in the chest like a small, steady light.
A good feeling. Her smile — now living on my face.
A little while later a notification — “We reached home.”
Simple. Two words. But it felt like a full stop that was actually a comma.
Because we had exchanged numbers.
Life went back to its usual shape. My days, my struggle, my attempt to become something better than what I’d been. The long, unglamorous work of self-improvement. Waking up. Trying. Failing a little. Trying again.
And in between all of that we talked. Not desperately. Not obsessively. Just naturally. The way water finds its level.
She’d reply when she could. I’d reply when I could. No scorekeeping. No “you took three hours to reply so now I’ll take four.” No manufactured distance. No performance of being busy.
Just respect. For each other’s time. For each other’s life outside the conversation.
She’d send a photo sometimes “that i have being here today” and I’d look at it. Actually look. Not nervously save it, not nervously delete it, not hide it like evidence of something shameful.
Because why would I?
She wasn’t a secret. She wasn’t something wrong. She wasn’t a lie I needed to bury. She was my friend and I was done living in a world where a friendship needed to be hidden just because it existed between a boy and a girl. So I kept the photos. I kept the chats. Right there. Openly. Unbothered.
Meanwhile I was in my self-improvement era.
And if anyone tells you that self-improvement is a glorious, motivational journey they’re selling something. The truth is: it’s boring. It’s slow. It’s lonely in a way that’s hard to explain. You’re changing, but no one around you can see it yet. You’re doing the work in silence, in rooms, in your own head.
But she was there. Not fixing anything. Not cheering from the sidelines with a flag. Just there. In the way a warm light in a window is there when you’re walking home in the dark.
Because of her, the loneliness of that process had a crack in it.
And light was coming through.
But here’s the thing about my life.
When everything starts feeling a little too smooth when the days start tasting a little too good something in your gut whispers: how is everything going this good. Something’s definitely about to go wrong…..
And then The Law of Attraction works. Not always for the good things. Sometimes it calls the chaos too.
And the chaos came.
I blocked her.
Wait.
Let me say that again slowly because even I owe it that much honesty.
I blocked her.
Not because she did anything. Not because something went wrong between us. Not because of a fight, a misunderstanding, a betrayal. Because someone from the Parasite Society saw my phone. And on that phone a message. One single message. A word so ordinary, so harmless, so human that it shouldn’t even be a story.
Hello.
Just hello.
And what that person did with that one word the story they built around it, the way they carried it, shaped it, presented it to the world I have to say, genuinely, with my whole chest A round of applause. Really. Standing ovation.
Because it takes a special kind of talent to turn a hello into a scandal.
I panicked.
What will they say? What if they call her? What if someone checks my phone? What if it becomes something — bigger, louder, uglier than it ever was? So I did what fear told me to do.
I blocked her. Deleted her number. Closed the door and walked away from it. And I’ve thought about that moment a hundred times since then.
Was I doing anything wrong?
The messages I remember them. I could stake anything on what was in those chats. Nothing bad. Nothing hidden. Nothing that needed to be ashamed of.
And yet.
I ask myself if it was a male friend’s number on that phone, what would I have done?
I wouldn’t have panicked. I wouldn’t have deleted anything. I wouldn’t have blocked anyone.
But I didn’t give her that. I gave her silence instead. And a block. And no explanation.
I went back to my life.
And told myself the story was over.
It wasn’t.
I was sitting one day, cleaning out my block list. No strategy, no plan — just scrolling through numbers with no names attached, unblocking them one by one without knowing who was who.
I didn’t know I had unblocked her. Six months passed.
And then 21st August, 2024. A message. “Happy Birthday Anubhav.”
I knew that number. Even without a name saved. Even after all that time. It was her. Panic again. The old familiar kind.
What do I say? How do I explain? Where do I even begin — the block, the silence, the disappearing without a word?
My mind was already drafting apologies, excuses, explanations And she ? She was calm.
Like she’d rehearsed being okay with it. Or maybe she’d genuinely made peace with it somewhere along the way. She just wanted me to enjoy my birthday. That’s all she came to say.
But then slowly she told me. That she had wanted to text. Had wanted to call. Had looked for me. Because maybe just maybe no one had ever been a real male friend to her before. And her own past, her own experiences, hadn’t been kind either. She had searched for me in that silence.
And I had been the silence.
I still haven’t told her. Even now — as I write this, as I narrate this story she doesn’t know why I blocked her that first time.
Yes — the first time. Because there are more things to come.
वैसा नहीं रहा
बातें होती थीं अभी भी, पर उतनी नहीं।
फ़ोटो आते थे अभी भी, पर चेहरों के नहीं — जगहों के।
न कोई शिकायत थी, न कोई सफ़ाई।
बस जो था, वो थोड़ा कम हो गया।
सब ठीक था।
पर “ठीक” और “पहले जैसा”
एक नहीं होता।
और यही सबसे अजीब बात है
सब अच्छा और ठीक था
पर वैसा न रहा अब ||
Written by : Anubhav Singh
Life had picked up pace.
College was full really full. Projects, cinema studies, opportunities knocking one after another. I was building something. Slowly, clumsily, but building. And then came the competition.
Our college wanted me to represent them. Coding. In the city. It was the kind of thing that should have felt exciting and it did, mostly. But the day before a competition does something strange to a person. It tightens everything. Every string pulled taut.
The day before the competition, she texted.
And I need to tell you something about me.
“I’m a little strange. I keep my whole life balanced on a single string every part of it, lined up carefully. And if that string shakes even a little everything on it shakes too.”
She was telling me something.
She was telling me something.
I know that now.
But that night my own strings were shaking. The competition, the pressure, the noise in my head I wasn’t steady enough to hear what she was actually saying underneath those words.
Sometimes that happens.
Someone stands in front of you maybe scared, maybe sinking, maybe in a place darker than they’re letting on and they reach out in the only way they know how. Not always directly. Not always clearly.
And sometimes the person on the other side without meaning to, without knowing says the wrong thing. Says it sharply. I was somewhere in my own storm and I threw words not carefully, not gently and they hit her.
In a way I’m not proud of.
And then.
Again.
I blocked her.
Not with understanding. Not with an apology first. Not with even a moment of wait, what did I just do. Just blocked. The same door. Shut again. Harder this time.
Two times now.
Same person. Same silence.
And then 2025 came.
But if you’re reading this you already know what 2025 brought. You’ve read that story. The Title story. So I won’t go back there.
What I’ll tell you is this By the time I reached out to her again, I was different. Steadier. The kind of stable that only comes after you’ve been genuinely unstable for a while and survived it anyway. I contacted her.
But she — She had changed too.
Not in a bad way. In the way a person changes when they’ve had to protect themselves. When they’ve learned through experience, through people, through me that keeping a wall up is sometimes the only way to keep standing.
She had built one.
Quiet. Strong. Invisible to anyone who didn’t know what to look for. But I could feel it immediately. A boy she had believed in. Trusted. Shared herself with. Had broken her. Twice. Without explanation. Without warning. Without even the basic courtesy of a goodbye.
That boy was me.
And yet she let me back in.
We talked.
I told her everything. The night before the competition. The strings. The fear. All of it laid out, finally, honestly, with nothing hidden and nothing dressed up to look better than it was. She listened.
And then we just talked. For three hours. Maybe more.
But there was something in her voice that day.
I noticed it and I didn’t want to notice it. A quietness that wasn’t peace it was something else. Something like a person who has already made their decisions and is now just saying goodbye to the things they’re leaving behind.
And then she said the things I will carry for a long time —
“Anubhav I wish someone would notice you the way you notice people.”
“You came at a time I can’t even describe. You were my first real friend. And maybe my last.”
“Anubhav I’m going somewhere different now. A more different Parasite Society.”
A pause.
“Anubhav. I’m getting married. In 2026.”
Beep.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The call cut.
I was standing outside my house. On the road. Walking and then not walking. Just stopped.
Frozen in the middle of everything and nothing. The street around me kept moving but I had stepped outside of time for a moment. And in that moment every scene played back. The hotel reception. The smile. The auto and the tears. The ghats. The hand on the road. The station sounds. The birthday message. The 3 hour call. Her voice.
Her voice. And my eyes…..
The first time I saw her, I was crying. And now, again. Full circle. Without planning it.
Then a voice came from behind me.
My friend. “Hey what about those hotel relatives of yours?”
I stood there for a second.
And then I said —
एक लड़की कभी दोस्त नहीं बनी थी,
जब वो दोस्त बनी तो पूछे नहीं थे
कि तुम्हारी जात क्या,
तुम्हारा धर्म क्या,
तुम्हारा देह क्या।
पूछे नहीं थे कि तुम्हें
पसंद क्या है,
देखे नहीं थे कि वो खूबसूरत है या नहीं,
पूछे नहीं थे कि तुम क्या बात करोगी, क्या नहीं।
बस
अगली बार जब दोस्त बनाना, तो अगली बार
पूछकर बनाना ||
Written by : Anubhav Singh
Thank you for reading and coming this far.
I have tried to write two poems of my own. Honestly, I had the words but I couldn’t sync them, couldn’t make them feel right. So I spent time reading, understanding, absorbing the work of others and after all of that, these two poems came out.
I hope they reached you the way they were meant to.
And one small secret before I go —
On Medium, where I write, a single person can give up to 50 claps.
You know what to do so clap it and yes share it.
So that’s all for this time.
Thank you.
