ISSUE 50

Every woman I see is adjusting the pleats of her sari, straightening and scolding the stubborn, stiff fabric into submission. This transforms them immediately into girls, two decades younger than they are, girls in borrowed saris from the Saraswati pujas of their childhood, tasting the charm and vacuity of adult life. The men, who are watching this, as if it is the prologue of a play they have sponsored but over whose ending they have little control, pretend not to notice. But they do, in tiny instalments of looking that turn them immediately into boys, curious about these girls who didn’t turn out the way they had imagined twenty-five years ago.

Twenty-five years. The Class of 1991 Reunion on the banner.

Who’d have thought they’d survive ICSE and class twelve, college and university, fathers and bosses, spouses and themselves? But here they are, their bones and kidneys exactly as they should be – this thought passes through them like a religious revelation when they see Mrs Sanyal, the biology teacher. How kind life has been to them – they are all still alive.

Astha, transformed into a woman who has no physical resemblance to the girl everyone knew but ignored in school, turns the cell phone screen into a mirror, wipes the extra lipstick off the margins of her lips, makes a face not dissimilar to the one she reserves for her selfies, and asks in the tone of a scientist, ‘Achchha, we used to be told that girls age faster than boys. But look at the boys and look at us – they look like our uncles’.

We are secretly pleased, so no one protests, even though we often rail against ageism on Facebook. Some of us adjust our hair, others the pallus of our saris, and, almost in unison, wipe the oily sweat around our noses. The boys – they will be boys for the evening – have paunches, most of them don’t dye their hair, they have almost no taste in footwear; the Bengali boys wear kurtas, the kind they reserve for Durga Puja ashtami, the Marwari boys wear formal shirts, a few even jackets. They are related to the boys we knew in school – we can see the connection, but their new selves appear to have rejected the old. It is as if they do not want to remain children. I do not say this to anyone, but the thoughts keep surfacing all evening. I also notice that I’m ascribing my own thoughts to others, turning the ‘I’ to ‘we’.

It is not the boys, however, who hold our attention as much as Astha. Her transformation is stunning. A podgy girl with curly hair, neither good in studies nor extra-curricular work, she was almost invisible in school. Her skin is lighter now, and so marked is the difference that many of us behave like sniffer dogs, going close to her to check whether it’s makeup alone that is responsible – we return unsure, like pilgrims who cannot be sure whether they’ve seen god. Her face is slimmer, the jaw line taut, with the kind of determination that seems to say that it won’t move an inch from where it is now. The hair is straightened, its poky ends reaching the end of her blouse. We compare her with her Instagram photos – we are surprised that there’s hardly any difference between the two. That hair and skin can change everything about a person’s appearance seems like a beauty parlour truism until we see its truth first-hand. We feel defeated – we hate it that we are not as beautiful as our Facebook profile photos.

Purnima is the other one. Often mistaken for a boy because of her flat chest and arrogant face – not arrogance perhaps, but certainly indifference – she was known only for her smartness with numbers. Now her body has filled out, but not in the usual way thin human bodies fill out – it is like an apartment, once bare, that has been furnished overnight. It feels slightly artificial, though I cannot exactly say why. It might be its showiness that makes it look fake. Or, as I thought back to it later, when looking at the photos of the evening, I might have been jealous.

And yet strangely, the boys do not seem to notice either Purnima or Astha. They care only for those that they had cared for twenty-five years ago. They probably measure them against the old images – not just the changes in hair or girth – which they, being boys, most likely don’t notice at all – but their imaginings about the present lives of these girls they’d loved.

We say the same things to each other, the things we used to say twenty-five years ago. We use the words like glue – in fact both, a pair of scissors and glue, to cut out the intervening quarter century, to join that last day of our meeting with this one. The words, now decontextualised, are still light, as airy as adolescence – they take away the panic from our beings momentarily. We become our ultra-happy selves, almost unrecognisable, even to ourselves. We are slightly embarrassed at playing out this lie, pretending to be happier than we really are. We enquire about husbands and wives and children without really caring to listen or remember responses. We want to be asked about ours. We want the secrets of our success, so far known only to family and colleagues, to come to them without our telling, as if they are an aura that would be self-explanatory. We hug every person who approaches us – we’ve forgotten that we did not hug them when we were children, in school, that it’s a new thing, the culture of hugging. We grow aware of our lies – we’ve forgotten the names of a few of our classmates. When they walk towards us, smiling, ‘Do you remember me?’, as if a ‘Yes’ would water their vanity about their childhood, we lie and say ‘Yes’. Was that Bikash or Vishal? we ask each other as soon as they leave.

We are waiting, like we have been, for the last twenty-five years. For what we do not know. For whatever it is, we do not mind waiting a little longer.

‘Where is Joydeep?’ I can’t recognise whose voice it is. It is the voice of a father. I look at them again, the boys huddled together in one corner of the hall, still as shy. It could be any of them. All of them are fathers. Everyone except Joydeep, for whom we are waiting.

Joydeep is coming from Goa. He’s the only bachelor in the group. We’ve romanticised his life for the last twenty-five years – he rejected all the props of modern living that define our lives: a good job that was offered to him, a wife, and consequently children, a house, a car, house help, and all such things that are like the wind in our hair, exaggerating the volume of our lives. No one’s seen him since 1991, the year we dispersed like seeds. That metaphor comes to me a few times in the evening – I wonder whether it is because this coming together of people who once belonged to the same tree but who, after dispersal, have taken root elsewhere, seems artificial, like a museum.

He phoned me once, though I can’t remember what we spoke about. We chatted online a few times – we felt close to each other then, and said things to each other that we might not have been able to had we been sitting face to face. He said how he’d felt the exhaustion of money when his first job letter arrived. ‘Even before you’d earned a penny?’ I’d asked. Yes, he said, it’d become a habit. He wanted to be free of habit. I teased him, warning him that a life without habit was also a habit. We went through a hazy sketch of his geographical locations, and through that we constructed his temperament, a mystery for most of us. He’d spent his twenties in Bhopal, transcribing medical prescriptions to earn a meagre income – he’d grown attached to the people who’d been affected by the Union Carbide leak in the winter of 1984. Twelve years later, when he went there, in 1996, he told me that he felt like he could see the whole cycle of life to death in the faces and bodies of the survivors. It wasn’t so much the philanthropic instinct to do them good as it was the magnetism of death – ‘they were dead bodies that had somehow been kept alive, as if life had chloroform built into it … I was stunned by life’s resilience,’ he’d written to me on Gtalk. He managed to release himself from being a voyeur of death, and he went to Goa. To a part where very few people lived – I can’t remember the name now – and where he learnt to swim by himself. He had no job. He spent all his time on the beach – sleeping under the sky, waking up and going for a swim, and gradually growing addicted to what he called the life of an orphan. A family adopted him, and he worked on their coconut farm. We didn’t know much else about him. He stopped sending photos of Goan windows, in disconnected colours, abruptly.

Now, after much coaxing by Arko and Santosh, and a phone call from Soma, the girl he’d loved at fifteen, he’d agreed to join the school reunion. He would be here any moment. And then we’d begin. Rajesh – Chhetri or Sharma, what was his surname? – was on his way from Darjeeling too; he’d been delayed by a bike rally protest in support of the resurgent Gorkhaland movement.

‘Why don’t you call him?’ I shout out to Jayanto, who’s standing at the farthest corner. I have, for long, imagined that he has everyone’s phone number in the world.

Jayanto is looking at his phone again. Joydeep will appear any moment. Does he still have the soft boyish curls that framed his face and gave it its permanently mischievous look?

‘Did you really have a crush on Gautam Sir?’ Maushumi asks me.

‘You didn’t?’ I reply. I know she did.

Everyone was still heady from the interaction with these teachers who must have been our age when they taught us, but now looked almost the same as they did then. More than the gifts that had been given to them – crystal bowls inscribed with their names and the name of our school – the thing which had entwined our lives with theirs had been the words I’d said for each of them. That had had a greater impact on them. This was what the boys and girls had been telling me, ever since the teachers had left. It pleased me, though I pretended that it was nothing – this was the difference between the girl I was twenty-five years ago and the person I had become. Adulthood had taught me modesty – I wish it hadn’t, it was as useless as shame.

Maushumi didn’t reply. Smita did. ‘I toh did,’ she says, stating the obvious.

There is silence. It was as if we were considering whether our infatuation had been worth its energy. The man who’d just spoken to us was balding, his eyes looked tired, as if they’d been left exhausted by watching over generations of students. His t-shirt, broad blue bands on black, made him look anachronistic, a leftover. Was this really the man who’d made us jealous of each other?

‘What sari is this?’ asks Bandana. She is wearing a black chiffon with ostentatious silver zardozi work. I had invented an adjective – actually two – for it: dhinchak and Star-Plus-serial sari.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘I bought it online, from Byloom’.

There was a time when saris were identified by the name of the place they originated from. That had now been replaced by the names of brands. A few years ago, the domestic worker at my parents’ place had asked for a ‘boutique sari’, which my mother, still unused to the new world, had misheard as ‘bootti sari’, a sari with dots, not polka, but dots, a thousand or even an arbitrary number like fifty-two, expensive because of the effort that went into its weaving.

Bandana seems satisfied with my reply. ‘I’ve never bought anything online,’ she says, ‘I feel scared. What if they send my sari to someone else? And someone else’s comes to me?’ ‘You treat it as a gift then,’ I say, not meaning it.

I cannot hear her response – I don’t know if she responds at all – for Arup pulls me away. He does something that he didn’t do even when we were children on the playground – he pulls me by my hand and drags me to the corner of the terrace. Everyone seems to be emboldened by the occasion. This courage is so new, it is tinsel. ‘I will die in five years’ time,’ he tells me seriously. I pretend to laugh though I’m scared. Two of our classmates died before they reached their forties – Tanmoy from a drug overdose; I can’t remember the name of the other boy. How did he die?

‘It’s true,’ he clarifies.

I avoid looking at him. He moves, comes and stands right in front of me, so that it’s impossible for me to not look at his face.

‘It’s a time bomb. I could die right at this instant. I could…’

‘Live another hundred years,’ I butt in.

‘Not out?’ he asks, laughing.

Cricket. It was the glue that’d first brought us close. 1983. When Indian batsmen were falling ‘like pins’ (a simile we learnt together from The Statesman) to West Indian fast bowlers, we lay with our heads on our desks in Mrs Chakravarty’s class, obeying her ‘Put your heads on your desks … No talking’ instruction only partially, for we whispered the same anxieties to each other every day: ‘Do you think we’re all out already?’; ‘Innings defeat?’; ‘Follow on?’. Our shared hatred of Andy Roberts and Malcolm Marshall and Michael Holding and Joel Garner and Colin Croft brought us close. The West Indian bowlers had retired, Sunny Gavaskar’s skull cap was now a museum piece, the might of the West Indies cricket team now more a joke than memory – perhaps even an invention – but our friendship had survived. The shared hatred for the men was gone – there’d been nothing as strong to replace it. An iterant animosity leaked like pus from time to time: his arrogance, my indifference, other minor emotions without names.

‘Why do you fight with me? You’re not India and I’m not the West Indies. You’ve misunderstood me ever since you’ve known me … I am dying…’

He’d have continued had Pratim not joined us. ‘Have you seen my phone? Will you call me, please? I can’t remember where it is.’

My eyes move to Joy and Mini. I’m aware of – and embarrassed about – my suspicion about Mini. I look at her as one would at a person after sex-change. She’s now a Muslim, married to a powerful political leader in Bihar. Her son is taller than her – I’ve seen her Instagram photos. She’s wearing a green sari. Heavy gold jewellery; her hair, longer than everyone else’s, up in a basket-like bun; the nose pin, new to our eyes, unable to tame the remainder of her effervescent girlhood. She’s bare foot. My eyes search for her sandals – I imagine them gold, or at least gaudy. Corners, beneath tables and chairs – I don’t see them anywhere. Giving up this search, my eyes return to Mini. The shortest girl in class, the naughtiest, the funniest – the old adjectives still trail her. As does Joy – there he is, her slippers in his hand.

It’d have been an odd sight on any day, but not today. Today it seems oddly appropriate – an unfinished childhood romance that may find some conclusion. The slippers are a prop in this penultimate act.

Joy behaves exactly like as he did twenty-five years ago – tentatively. Then he wasn’t sure whether he was imagining himself as an adult when he was actually a child. Now he isn’t sure whether he’s behaving like a child when he is actually an adult. His curls are still the same. They frame his face and give it a sense of permanent happiness.

Mini defies our expectation and behaves in exactly the same manner that she did twenty-five years ago. Freedom from rules is her drug. At school she was trying to escape her military father’s regimen, now she’s on a three-day holiday from her Muslim husband’s regime. All of this might be untrue, but that is how we like to see her.

Though none of us can later remember the exact moment when this happened, Joy and Mini – as if abetted by our expectation of them – disappear. We look for them, half-heartedly, half-guessing where they might be, making jokes amongst ourselves about rooms in the hotel. When it’s time for dinner, we ask about them slightly more urgently. But we let it go. They need each other more than food.

Pravin Chhetri, who once sat beside me in a tin-and-wire caged cycle rickshaw, looks at me and smiles. He is now an important politician, a leader as they say, in the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha. Poverty, even middleclass poverty, is a great anaesthetic. Politics, originating from the differences of our privileges, did not matter to us. The Nepali hairdressers called me ‘Bangali bhoot’ every time I went to get a haircut with oiled hair. The teachers said ‘Nepali’ when a Nepali student failed in class, as if that was explanation enough. That town is now gone. Today, in spite of his boyish face and pink lips, I see only a Nepali leader – even excavating a memory of the boy who shared the long ‘S’ shaped biscuit-like bread with me is difficult. There’s a curfew-like situation in Darjeeling. The Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is camped in Darjeeling, trying to excavate tourists and salvage the name of her party. The locals, as they are labelled everywhere now, are protesting the imposition of Bangla as a compulsory language in schools. Pravin, while refusing paneer pakora and choosing a fish finger from the platter that the waiters are carrying and coaxing on us, says just one line, ‘It’s like asking Navin to have this fish pakora’. Navin, who is refusing drinks with the trained determination of Rahul Dravid letting a ball outside the off stump go past unattended, looks in Pravin’s direction. He doesn’t know his religious vegetarianism is a metaphor. It didn’t matter in school – he showed his gate-pass to Hablu-da at lunch break and went home to Church Road for lunch. ‘What did you eat?’ the boys asked him when he reached the end – the solution – of a mathematics problem even before the teacher had finished it on the blackboard.

I think Pravin is angry, but I’m reminded of our old Nepali cook’s words: We Nepalis are like aluminium utensils – we get heated soon, we cool down soon too. We can’t be angry for a long period of time.

Prapti is still sitting alone. She has the look of an orphan – she had in school, she has now. As if that’s her rebellion – she won’t belong to anyone. In reality though it’s just the opposite – she wants to belong to her mother. Her mother is dying. I heard it in school twenty-five years ago, and I hear the same itch in her voice now. Our mothers have been moving towards death too, I want to tell her, but Ashish is nearby. His mother is in Bombay – with his sister. He’ll join her on Wednesday, in time for her last chemo.

Kamlesh, his shirt looking as permanently ironed as it did when he was in school, comes and stands in front of me as I check my phone for a message. Why do you live in Pradhan Nagar? he asks. Only the wealthy Sikkimese and Nepalis live there.

I think back to a time in school – no one asked then, ‘Why do you live in Hyderpara? It’s a place for Bangladeshi refugees.’

Kamlesh looks the same as before. Nothing has changed in him. Only the town has grown and stretched in such a way that it seems that when he thinks back to its original shape, he can see its stretch marks. Does he interpret them as lines of division? ‘Punjabi-para is the best. It’s exactly like what it was before,’ he says, speaking of his neighbourhood; Punjabi-para, exactly what it was before: home to some of the wealthiest Marwaris in the town, now perhaps wealthier.

On the stairs are Maiti and Maiti, two unlikely men brought together as friends by their proximity in the class attendance register. They’ve spent the last quarter of a century behaving like classmates – their shyness and awkwardness manifesting as stupidity, particularly in front of the girls. Sujan, the shorter Maiti, is staring at Smita, who’s climbing the stairs. I remember his words about her to me, he repeated them whenever he was drunk: ‘I wanted to propose to her on the day school re-opened after the summer vacation. But something happened during the summer vacation. She’d grown a foot taller than me. I’d remained at the same height’. Prem, the other Maiti, is losing his hair. No, he’s lost all of it. The few that have remained, he’s shaved. He calls himself ‘Baldy’ – he thinks he’s trying to make us laugh but I, all-knowing but without the gift of self-knowledge, can hear it, the voice of an orphan who’s lost something precious. I’ve seen something similar in the mirror reflections of my face after midnight.

I know that Anindya is here, but I can’t see him now. I’ve heard that he teaches art in a village school, somewhere near Belakoba. I’ve also heard that his marriage is collapsing. Rongili, the girl he used to love is here, I think, but he doesn’t speak to her. He chokes when he speaks, he tries hard to make it look like a temporary ailment, like a sore throat. Just a little while ago, he discovered that his wife was having an affair; he had carried her phone with him by mistake. I wouldn’t have known any of this had one of the Maitis not come and whispered it to us.

‘It’s Bloomsday today,’ I say to Jaya, though I don’t know why. We were also together in college, wading through books in the manner of someone putting coins into a machine that would give us a ticket showing both our weight and a one-sentence moral life prediction. I don’t think those machines exist anymore.

‘Why?’ she asks.

I turn to look at her, and it is as if I’ve never seen her. Her job, where she has to copy, or mimic, Japanese art for her clients has changed her – she looks like a Japanese woman. Or is it because she is wearing a kimono? ‘Why? I don’t know why … I mean I just realised that it’s the 16th of June…’

‘Oh. I thought you were implying that we were here to make a pilgrimage of everything that constituted our lives, like people do on Bloomsday.’

I smile, not knowing how to respond. She is right – the class reunion has not been very different from a pilgrimage.

The ‘below average’ students continue to behave like quiet strugglers, as unsure of whether it was a wise decision for them to join this reunion party as it was for their parents to send them to school. Tanmoy – there were two Tanmoys once, one of them is gone, a martyr to teenage curiosity about drugs; he will always remain a teenager in our memory, preserved by death – is one of them. Money, sudden and unexpected for a schoolteacher’s son, has given him an air of importance and immediacy – whatever comes out of his mouth seems possible; and quasi-urgent. He hasn’t grown taller – the power of money has accumulated in his middle. When he fights off the teasing and playful taunts about his wealth, he declares, ‘I am middleclass’. There’s nothing in his behaviour to prove that he believes in the lie.

I am without a group, not having kept in touch with most of them. I move from one cluster of friends to another – I realise that I interrupt their conversation, but I give in to my neediness: it’s not company I seek, it’s just that I have a feeling that solitariness makes me look serious. I don’t want to look serious. That is my anti-aging tool. I observe people as if I am addicted to seeing. It’s not because I’m a writer or actor. Spending my days in front of a computer has turned me into this – I see people as a cursor moving to the right, sometimes backspacing, moving up or down. I see them for who they are – alone, like the cursor, the ‘I’. Who were the people my classmates had married? From the faces and gait of these people I knew as children, who have suddenly turned adults, I try to imagine their spouses.
I am interested in the shape of a marriage when one partner is absent – the absence could be physical, it could also be emotional, for one doesn’t consciously feel married all the time; it could be due to the death of a partner, one in which the marriage survives, nevertheless. I look at Rajesh who lost his wife, not to death but to another woman. I expect his face to look empty, like a burgled house. He is the last person to take to the dance floor. Mini and I are unable to join the dancers. Our minds, more than our bodies, prevent us from dancing.

And that is how it starts – the search for Mini.

It wasn’t my intention at all. All I said was that I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t dancing, that Mini wasn’t either.

Where’s Mini? Where’s Mini? In no time it had turned into a chorus. A few girls – suddenly restored into women again – walk towards the toilets. Suddenly energised by an absence, they become active citizens, like they must have been when trying to get their children admitted to good schools and colleges. Mini, absent Mini, has displaced them from their positions.

I am perhaps the only one who is still sitting. It is not because I don’t like Mini – I probably do, perhaps even more than those in the search squads. But I don’t know where to look. Also, Mini is not a rat that we need to look for her in this manner. No, she’s not in the toilet, says Lopa, always sober, always inexhaustibly nice. From her face it seems that Mini is a student in her class. Reba rushes in from a thin door with ‘Exit’ written above it. She looks like she’s just woken up after taking the ICSE exams – her spine is like that of a reed of grass, nothing will affect it, such is its resilience. Some of the boys have been calling her ‘Size Zero’; the girls have been asking her for this ‘recipe’ – ‘I am happy, that’s all,’ she says smiling. I realise that I had never heard her speak in class. I look at her face again. We become what we look at: my face has perhaps started resembling the food I cook for my family; Reba’s is of someone who has looked at herself with joy and admiration in the mirror.

Here she is now, racing in through the Exit door: ‘She’s not there either…’

I can’t guess what the ‘there’ might be. I am admiring her, thinking of how beauty that outlasts youth gives a kind of confidence that very few know.

Other troops return without news. I don’t feel nervous. I am certain Mini will be somewhere – she’s been safe without us for twenty-five years, how can she not continue to be safe?

Suddenly, the boy whose name I can’t remember, the one who owns a plant nursery in Deshbandhu Para, asks, ‘Where’s Joy?’

Joy? Joy? The sound of the chorus changes in a moment.

I feel shy, I pretend that I haven’t heard. They are both married after all, only not to each other. How idiotic this boy – this plant nursery boy – is to suggest whatever it is that he’s trying to suggest. Suddenly the atmosphere in the hall has changed. Forty people – could be more, could be less – no longer seem nervous. The disappearance of a girl caused anxiety. But the disappearance of both has lightened the atmosphere – they are laughing, making jokes about incidents from twenty-five years ago, how the two of them would run away after tuitions, how Mini’s father had once pulled her by her plaits and dragged her into the bus, how someone found them in ‘awkward positions’ on a river bank near Sukna, how they had been separated forcefully, and how this class ‘reunion’ was actually a gift for them….

‘Let me call Joy,’ says Bikash. His phone looks heavier than War and Peace. ‘Switched off.’ Some of them laugh, some look at each other.

‘I’ll try Mini’s number.’ It’s Ankur, the youngest among us. Even the unnecessary kilos haven’t been able to take away the boyishness from his face. ‘It’s going blank,’ he reports.

We eat dinner, we play games, the old ones, antakshari first, then something resembling musical chairs, we laugh at jokes even when they are not really funny, and, in between all of this, someone or the other tries calling them.

Pari, the tallest girl in class, grows impatient. ‘Where is she staying?’

Ankur mentions the name of a hotel I’ve never heard of. How little we know of the hotels in our hometown. The boys begin looking for the hotel’s phone number. The receptionist has answered the phone. We shout in relief and glee, as if we were speaking to Mini herself. She will send someone to check whether Mini’s in the room, we will have to wait.

We wait.

Partho is trying to call Joy’s wife. She is a lawyer, she is a lawyer – many around us repeat this like a chant as Partho waits for her to pick up the phone. She doesn’t.

‘I hope everything is okay,’ I say. I am superstitious – I can’t give words to my fears.

The receptionist has called back. Mini’s room is locked. No one answered the calling bell.

It has somehow turned nine o’clock. It does every evening, I know, but I’ve not seen time being broken into chocolate-slab like units today, as I do on other days. This is what makes it different – we, who met in school, between 9 am and 4 pm, have never met in the evening. The time of day decides not only what we eat, but also who we meet. I feel this now – in what suddenly feels like an evening class. It is hard to escape from the day – we couldn’t when we were in school. But the night might allow easier exits – is this why two of our classmates have run away? Where can they go when they want to bunk school?

Phone calls from home have started coming – husbands and children are asking about the return home. ‘Ei toh …’ a phrasal sound that holds in it the urgency of ‘right now’ fill the air. We want to leave but can’t. I can sense a skin of irritation forming, I’ve overheard someone whisper ‘We are no longer schoolchildren, why did Mini and Joy forget that?’

It seems that they are giving up on the search. ‘There are no tigers here … If they want, they will return to where they must return.’

The smell of alcohol fills the space near the lift and stairs, where we are accumulating before we disperse. For a moment I feel like we are water inside a reservoir which will soon have to go to different taps.

Mini comes out of the lift.

I’m not sure what our sounds exactly mean – shock or relief. I can’t remember whether any sound came out of me. I think I heard someone sneeze.

‘Where were you?’ The same question in various languages.

‘Arrey,’ says Mini, becoming the schoolgirl again, ‘I went downstairs to say bye to Joy. He said he had to meet a client – the man was waiting for him near Panitanki More. Then…’

‘Then?’

‘Then…’ Mini breaks into laughter, her old childlike laughter that irritated our teachers. It has a similar effect on her classmates now. For once Mini starts laughing, she struggles to stop. It might be a physiological problem. I cannot forget how she continued laughing when our Bengali teacher hit her with a stick. Asha ma’am, angered by what must have sounded like audacious laughter, kept hitting her harder, on her legs, her back, her shoulders, her arms, asking her to open her palms so that she could hit Mini there. And Mini kept laughing, even as tears ran from her eyes. And now she can’t tell us what happened after she said bye to Joy.

‘Then?’; ‘Uff, tell us what happened …’; ‘We were so worried about you …’; ‘Yes, we were so worried about you that we stopped dancing’; ‘Where’s Joy?’

Mini perhaps doesn’t hear any of this. She is trying to stop laughing. Her long hair, tied into a bun when the reunion party began, has come undone. There are sweat patches on her blouse, her forehead looks moist, her neck too – long strands of hair stick to both.

‘Mini,’ I say, not knowing what else to say. I feel like she has become my daughter. I might have been crying.

She stops laughing and says, ‘I got into the lift and pressed 3’.

‘Three? We are on the fifth floor!’

‘How would I know? Have I come to this hotel before that I would know? I live in Darbhanga now!’

‘Then?’

‘It was dark and everyone was dancing. Most people were drunk – at least that is how they were dancing. I started dancing as well. The rubber band in my hair opened – or burst – and I tried to look for it. But it was so dark. Every time I tried to grope for it with my hands, someone stamped on them with their feet. I saw Ravi – I mean, I saw someone like Ravi, I pulled him by his hand and said that I was thirsty, ‘Where’s the water?’ The music was so loud that he couldn’t hear me. He started dancing again. Everyone was dancing. I, who have never danced in my life, had to dance as well. What terrible music – Tuney breakup kar liya, what kind of song is that?!’

‘Then, then?’ ‘Phir?’

‘Then suddenly someone switched on the lights…’

‘God!’; ‘And?’

‘They didn’t notice me at first of course. But I was scared – who were these people? Had dancing and drinking turned my friends into these people who now looked like strangers? Or had I drunk a few glasses … I don’t drink in Darbhanga, believe me.’

‘Phir kya huya?’

‘They noticed me only when I started crying. I told them that I was lost, I had come for my class reunion. One of them said, ‘I think there’s another reunion happening on the 5th floor.’ I think he was the one who guided me to the lift and sent me here, to be returned to all of you …’

I don’t know why none of us said anything in response. I don’t think anyone disbelieved Mini, but it is possible that we felt attacked – attacked by a story, even if it was a ‘true story’.

Much later, a few questions were asked: which school were they from, which batch, what were they eating, why did Joy leave without telling anyone except her.

I can’t remember whether Mini answered any of the questions. What I do remember is her conclusion: ‘Getting into someone else’s reunion by mistake, I realised that all school reunions are the same – we don’t meet friends, we actually meet strangers, turned so by time. I also realised that someone will inevitably leave the reunion party early – that is the person who realises this first, before the rest, that they are not among friends but strangers’.