Between Monsoons…

The first time Arjun saw Mira, she was arguing with the canteen manager over the price of an egg roll.

“It was twelve rupees yesterday.”

“It is fifteen today.”

“Inflation doesn’t happen overnight.”

“It does in this canteen.”

He laughed. She turned around.

“You find economic injustice amusing?”

“I find your confidence amusing.”

She smiled despite herself. That was August, 2005, under the rain-soaked corridors of Presidency College, Kolkata.

Friendship arrived quietly.

Coffee House debates that lasted longer than lectures. Dog-eared copies of Neruda and Sunil Gangopadhyay exchanged without ceremony. Tram rides to College Street. Durga Puja pandal hopping. Evenings on the Prinsep Ghat steps where they spoke about futures as though life always kept its promises.

People assumed they were in love. They insisted they were not. Neither was entirely sure. Life, as it often does, scattered them.

Arjun joined an advertising agency in Bombay.

Mira stayed back in Kolkata to teach literature. Phone calls became emails.bEmails became festival greetings. And then silence. Not because affection had ended. Only because adulthood had learnt the cruel art of taking up all available space.

Seven years later, Arjun returned to Kolkata for a campaign shoot. Outside Oxford Bookstore on Park Street he heard someone say,

“You still buy books you’ll never read?”

He turned.

Some smiles never grow old. They spent the evening walking from Park Street to Victoria Memorial as though the missing years were merely traffic. This time, they did not pretend. Perhaps because they were older. Perhaps because loneliness often disguises itself as clarity.

Within months they became lovers.

There were dinners at Peter Cat. Long drives to Diamond Harbour. Weekend flights between Kolkata and Bombay. They tried to compress years of absence into borrowed weekends.

Love, they realised, demanded answers. Friendship had never asked questions. She wanted certainty. He wanted possibility. She dreamt of one city. He belonged to two. Neither was wrong. Yet both kept losing.

One evening, over green tea that had long gone cold, she simply asked,

“Are we trying to preserve what we have… or become what everyone thinks we should be?”

Neither answered. Their silence did.

The breakup contained no betrayal. No raised voices. No dramatic departures. Just two people mourning something neither could name. And then they disappeared from each other’s lives once more.

Another six years passed. Parents aged. Careers slowed.

Dreams became quieter. The city too had changed. The yellow Ambassador taxis had almost vanished. The trams survived mostly through nostalgia. College Street still smelled of old paper. Some things refused to surrender.

One winter afternoon, Arjun was attending a book launch at the Kolkata Book Fair. He heard a familiar laugh. Some recognitions bypass memory and travel straight to the heart.

Mira.

Grey beginning to touch her hair. Reading glasses hanging from her neck. The same impossible laugh. They embraced. Not awkwardly. Simply like two people returning home after a very long journey. That evening they walked beside the Hooghly. They felt no need to revisit old wounds. Time had already edited them kindly.

“I used to think losing you was my greatest heartbreak,” Arjun said.

“And?”

“I think losing my best friend hurt much more.”

She nodded in agreement.

“I kept trying to replace you.”

“Were you successful?”

She smiled.

“You don’t replace old cities.”

After that they met often. Sometimes for breakfast. Sometimes for movies. Sometimes only for silence. She attended his mother’s funeral. He helped pack her father’s books after he passed away. Neither counted favours. Friends never do.

People continued asking.

“So… are you two back together?”

Mira would laugh.  “We’re something much rarer.”

One July evening they found themselves once again at Prinsep Ghat. The rain had just stopped. The river carried the colour of old memories. Arjun looked across the water.

“We were terrible boyfriend and girlfriend.”

 “We expected too much.”

“But we were extraordinary friends.”

She slipped her hand into his. Not with the urgency of lovers. But with the warmth and certainty of companions. “You know,” she said softly, “love keeps asking for definitions.”

“And friendship?”

“It simply stays.”

The lights came on across the Vidyasagar Setu. A tram bell rang faintly somewhere beyond the city. Kolkata, as always, continued carrying people who had left each other and somehow found their way back.

Not every love story ends in marriage. Not every ending is a failure. Sometimes, after eighteen years of becoming strangers and lovers and strangers again, two people discover that friendship had been the truest form of love all along.

And that some relationships become infinite only after we stop trying to name them.

Copyright (c) Pratik Majumdar, 2026. Any article, story, write-up cannot be reproduced in its entirety or in part, without permission. URL links can be used