ALMOST
Chapter 1: THE ECONOMICS EXAM
The examination hall smelled of old wood and fresh anxiety — the particular blend of varnished teak and sweat-damp cotton that every Indian college produced during finals, a smell that lived in the sinuses and triggered the adrenal glands before the brain had time to identify it.
Adi walked in seventeen minutes late — not because he couldn't find the room, but because he'd been sitting in his car in the parking lot, finishing a cigarette and questioning every life choice that had brought a twenty-nine-year-old man back to a college examination hall. The security guard at the gate had looked at him with the particular suspicion reserved for men who looked too old to be students and too young to be professors. Adi had flashed his hall ticket without making eye contact, the way you flash an expired coupon and hope nobody checks the date.
The hall was cavernous. Built in the 1970s, probably, when Pune's colleges still had ambitions of architectural grandeur. High ceilings with fans that rotated at a speed suggesting they, too, had given up on life. Rows of wooden desks scarred with the carvings of a thousand bored students — initials, hearts, the occasional crude drawing that had survived decades of half-hearted scrubbing. The fluorescent lights buzzed with the particular frequency that made everything look slightly ill.
He found his seat — Row F, Seat 14 — and settled in with the quiet efficiency of a man who had taken enough exams in his life to know that the first five minutes were always wasted on administrative theatre. The invigilator was explaining rules that everyone already knew and nobody intended to follow. Don't look at your neighbour's paper. Don't use your phone. Don't breathe too loudly, probably.
Adi opened his question paper. Microeconomics. Supply and demand curves. Price elasticity. The kind of questions that made him wonder if economics had ever, in the history of human civilization, accurately predicted anything.
He picked up his pen. The plastic was warm from the hall's trapped heat, slightly sticky against his fingers.
And then he saw her.
Third row. Left side. Head down. Writing already — writing fast, like the questions were personal and she had opinions about every single one. Her pen moved across the answer sheet with a confidence that bordered on aggression. She hadn't looked up when he walked in. She hadn't looked up when the invigilator droned through his speech. She was in her own sealed universe, and the examination hall was merely the container.
He noticed the hair first. Dark, almost black, falling forward over her face in a curtain that she hadn't bothered to tie back. It kept slipping — every thirty seconds or so, it would slide forward, and she would push it back with her left hand without breaking the rhythm of her writing. The gesture was unconscious, automatic, the way you scratch an itch without registering you're doing it. Left hand up, fingers threading through the hair at her temple, sweeping it back behind her ear. Then back to writing. Thirty seconds later, repeat.
He watched her do it four times before he realized he'd been staring. His mouth had gone dry — the specific dryness of attention so total that the body forgets its own maintenance.
Focus,* he told himself. *Supply curves. Demand theory. You're twenty-nine years old. You've written three books. You've slept with women who would make this girl look like a child. Focus.
He wrote his name on the answer sheet. The date. The subject code. All the mechanical things that didn't require him to think, because the part of his brain responsible for thinking had apparently been requisitioned for the sole purpose of tracking the movement of a stranger's hand through her hair.
She was young. That was obvious even from six rows back — something in the way she sat, the straightness of her spine, the particular intensity of someone who still believed that exam scores determined the trajectory of a life. She was wearing a plain kurti — cotton, pale blue, the kind you buy in bulk from a street vendor near FC Road because they're comfortable and cheap and you're nineteen and comfort matters more than fashion. No jewellery. No makeup that he could see. No dupatta — it was draped over the back of her chair like an afterthought.
She was, by every objective metric Adi used to evaluate women (and he had metrics, refined over a decade of serial dating that had left him experienced, vaguely guilty, and deeply familiar with the topography of attraction), not his type. Too young. Too focused. Too contained. He liked women who took up space — who laughed loudly, who wore colours that announced their presence, who existed at you rather than beside you.
This girl existed beside herself. Self-contained to the point of being hermetically sealed. The kind of girl who sat in the front of examination halls not because she was eager but because the front was closer to the exit and she could leave faster.
And yet.
Something inside him — not his brain, not his body, something older and less rational, something that lived in the part of the chest where instinct sits before language catches up — said: Pay attention. This one matters.
He wrote three sentences about supply curves. They were wrong. He didn't care.
She pushed her hair back again. This time, when her hand came down, she paused. Rested her chin on her palm. Stared at the question paper with an expression that was equal parts concentration and contempt — as if the paper had personally offended her but she was going to answer it anyway, out of spite.
The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. A micro-expression — the ghost of amusement at something only she understood. It lasted less than a second. If he'd blinked, he would have missed it.
He didn't blink.
You're being insane,* the rational part of his brain announced. *You're a grown man watching a teenager take an exam like it's a nature documentary. Write your paper. Get your degree. Get out.
He wrote two more sentences. They were also wrong. The supply curve he drew looked like a question mark, which felt appropriate because his entire life had become one.
The exam ended at 1 PM. The hall erupted into the particular chaos of post-exam decompression — chairs scraping, voices rising, the collective exhale of two hundred people who had just spent three hours pretending to understand economic theory. Students clustered in the corridors, comparing answers, already calculating whether they'd passed or failed, already forgetting the content that had consumed them minutes ago.
Adi took his time. He capped his pen. Straightened his answer sheet. Watched.
She was already gone.
Not leaving — gone. As if she'd evaporated the moment the invigilator said "pens down." Her chair was empty, her desk bare. No bag, no water bottle, no trace. She'd packed up and vanished with the efficiency of someone who had practised disappearing.
He walked out into the corridor. Scanned the crowd. Two hundred faces, none of them hers. She'd been absorbed back into whatever life existed outside this examination hall — a life he knew nothing about, a name he didn't have, a person he'd spent three hours studying instead of studying economics.
She doesn't come to lectures, he realized. This wasn't a guess — it was a deduction. He'd been attending classes for two months. He knew every face in the room. Hers wasn't one of them. She appeared for exams, performed her obligations, and disappeared. A ghost with excellent handwriting and a habit of pushing her hair back every thirty seconds.
The December sun hit him as he walked out of the building — a slap of dry warmth after the hall's damp cool, the light so bright it narrowed his pupils to pinpoints. Pune in December — warm during the day, cool enough at night to pretend it was winter. The campus was emptying. Auto-rickshaws honked at the gate. A chai vendor was doing brisk business, surrounded by students who had just finished exams and needed caffeine the way soldiers need debriefing.
Adi stood on the steps and lit a cigarette.
He was twenty-nine years old. He'd come back to college because his life had reached the kind of dead end that only a radical detour could fix. Three self-published books that nobody had read. A string of relationships that had ended not with drama but with the quiet mutual recognition that neither person was willing to try harder. A freelance career that paid just enough to prevent starvation and not enough to prevent self-loathing. And now, FY B.Com, sitting in examination halls with teenagers, pretending that a commerce degree was the missing piece of whatever puzzle his life was supposed to be.
He exhaled smoke — the bitter warmth filling his throat, the nicotine hitting the receptors at the back of his brain like a key turning — and thought about the girl.
Not in any coherent way. Not as a plan or a fantasy or a decision. Just — the image of her. Head down, writing. Hair falling forward. The sweep of her hand. The micro-smile. The way she'd vanished without looking back, as if the examination hall was a place she visited reluctantly and left eagerly and never thought about in between.
Who are you?
The question wasn't romantic. It wasn't sexual. It wasn't even particularly interested. It was something more primal — a recognition that refused to be filed away under "stranger" and insisted on its own category.
He finished his cigarette. Ground it out under his shoe. Went home.
He didn't know her name.
Two months passed. She didn't appear.
Not in lectures. Not in the corridors. Not at the canteen where students gathered between classes to eat vada pav and gossip about professors. Not at the library, not at the notice board, not at any of the hundred incidental locations where college students crossed paths without meaning to.
She existed only in the examination hall, on that single December day, in the memory of a gesture that should have been forgettable and wasn't.
Adi went about his life. He attended lectures with the particular attentiveness of a man who had nothing better to do. He wrote — not the books he was supposed to be writing, but fragments, scenes, half-formed stories that kept circling back to the same image: a girl pushing her hair back in an examination hall. He recognized the obsession for what it was. He'd been obsessed before — with women, with ideas, with the particular brand of self-destruction that Pisces men mistake for passion. This felt different. Quieter. More patient. Like a seed that had been planted without his consent and was growing on its own schedule, indifferent to his opinions about it.
He searched for her in the class WhatsApp group. Scrolled through names he didn't recognize, faces that weren't hers, profile pictures of sunsets and movie quotes and the occasional selfie. The group had 200+ members. Most of them were strangers to him. He didn't even know what he was looking for — a name to attach to the face, a handle to grab onto, something that would make her less of a ghost and more of a person he could find.
He asked around. Casually. The way you ask about someone you're not interested in, which is to say: too casually, in a voice pitched slightly too high, with a studied indifference that fools nobody.
"Who's the girl who only comes for exams? Short? Pale blue kurti? Sits in the third row?"
Nobody knew. Or nobody cared enough to remember. She was a phantom — present in the attendance records, absent from the social fabric of the class. A name on a list that nobody had bothered to match to a face.
Until one evening, scrolling through the WhatsApp group for the third time that week, he found it.
Not her face — she didn't have a profile picture. Just a phone number and a name.
Siya Kapoor.
He stared at the name for a long time. Siya. Four letters. Two syllables. The kind of name that sat quietly in the mouth, neither grand nor diminutive. A Capricorn name, though he didn't know that yet. A name that gave nothing away.
His thumb hovered over the number. The contact page stared back at him — empty, impersonal, a phone number that could belong to anyone. He could call. He could text. He could do what he always did when he wanted something: pursue it with the full, overwhelming, slightly unhinged intensity of a man who had never learned that restraint was an option.
Or he could do nothing. He could file her away under "the girl from the exam" and move on. He was twenty-nine. She was — what? Nineteen? Twenty? Young enough that the decade between them felt less like a number and more like a climate zone. He lived in the country of been there, done that. She lived in the country of everything is still ahead. The border between those countries was not meant to be crossed casually.
He put his phone down.
He picked it up.
He put it down again.
This went on for three days.
February 15th. 8:37 PM.
He was sitting on his bed. Phone in hand. Heart doing something that hearts shouldn't do over a text message — racing, actually racing, the way it used to when he was sixteen and this kind of thing still felt new. He was twenty-nine. He'd texted hundreds of women. He'd opened conversations with strangers in bars, at parties, in bookshops, on trains. He was good at this. He was practised at this.
His fingers were shaking. He could feel his own pulse in the pads of his thumbs, pressing against the phone screen, the glass warm from his grip.
He'd rehearsed the opening. Discarded a dozen versions. The clever ones felt try-hard. The casual ones felt fake. The honest ones — I've been thinking about you since December and I don't even know why — felt like grounds for a restraining order.
In the end, he typed the most ordinary sentence in the history of human communication:
Is this Siya?
He stared at the words. They looked pathetic. Five words that contained none of what he actually wanted to say and all of what he was brave enough to type.
He hit send.
The blue ticks appeared. She'd read it. Immediately. Which meant she was on her phone. Which meant—
Her reply came in four seconds.
Yes.
One word. No punctuation. No emoji. No follow-up question. Just: Yes. A confirmation of identity and nothing more. The conversational equivalent of a locked door with a peephole — she'd confirmed she was on the other side, but she hadn't opened anything.
Adi exhaled. He hadn't realized he'd been holding his breath.
He typed: Hey Hi
She typed: Who's this?
Two words. Practical. Efficient. Not rude, not warm. The exact response of someone who receives texts from unknown numbers and deals with them the way one deals with minor administrative tasks — promptly, without emotion, with the implicit understanding that this would be resolved quickly and she could get back to whatever she was actually doing.
He stared at her response. Who's this? The most reasonable question in the world. The most devastating question in the world. Because the honest answer was: I'm the man who watched you push your hair back for three hours in an examination hall and hasn't been able to stop thinking about it since. And the answer he could actually give was:
Adi. Adi Mehra. FY B.Com. Same class.
He hit send. Then added, because he was a Pisces and Pisces men are constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone:
We had the Economics exam together. December.
The blue ticks appeared. A pause. Longer this time — five seconds, ten, fifteen. He watched the screen with the intensity of a man reading his own medical results.
Okay, she wrote.
One word. Again. This girl communicated in morse code — short, efficient, every word earned rather than given freely. Okay could mean anything: I remember you. I don't remember you. I acknowledge your existence. Please stop texting me.
He chose to hear: Go on.
His fingers were still shaking. But something had shifted. The door wasn't open, exactly. But the peephole was clear. She was on the other side. She'd said Yes. She'd said Okay.
In the vocabulary of a girl who gave nothing away, that was practically an invitation.
Adi smiled. It was the smile of a man who had just started something he couldn't stop — and knew it, and didn't care, and wouldn't have chosen differently even if he could.
He began to type.
End of Chapter 1
© 2025 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to read and share with attribution.