I Learned of His Death From a Group Chat
Between a meme and a good morning message, my world folded.
The news arrived between a meme about Mondays and a GIF of a dancing sunflower that said GOOD MORNING BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE.
Our group chat was called Hostel C Survivors, which had been funny for eleven years and stopped being funny at 7:42 on a Tuesday morning. I was standing in my kitchen waiting for the chai to boil, scrolling with one thumb, when Aman's message came in.
"guys. call me when you see this. it's about rohan."
And because Rohan was the one who once got locked out of his own engagement party, because Rohan was the one who replied to every serious message with a photo of a confused cat, I typed back, "what did he do now ЁЯШВ"
The chai boiled over while Aman was typing. I watched the little dots appear and disappear, appear and disappear... three times, like a man learning that the words do not exist.
"He passed away last night. Accident on the highway. I am at his house now."
My joke sat right above it. It sits there still.
The chat scrolls on, the chat always scrolls on, but that laughing emoji of mine is up there forever, timestamped one minute before my world folded in half like a receipt.
There is no manual for finding out someone died online. Nobody teaches you what to do with your hands.
I remember switching off the stove with tremendous care, as though the burnt chai were the emergency. I remember sitting down on the kitchen floor, which I have never done before or since, and reading the message maybe forty times, waiting for it to correct itself.
Then came the strangest hour of my life: watching grief happen in real time, in a group of fourteen people, through a screen.
Someone sent the folded hands emoji. Someone sent "WHAT." Someone, God help him, sent "RIP bro" and then deleted it and then sent it again, because what else was there. Nikhil called me and neither of us said anything for a full minute, two grown men listening to each other breathe across six hundred kilometers. Priyanka left the group and rejoined it twenty minutes later with no explanation, and everybody understood completely.
We had a hundred ways to reach each other and not one way to hold each other.
That is what I kept thinking through the funeral, which most of us attended as a shaky video call because the flights did not exist and the visas did not either. Rohan's father held the phone up and panned it slowly across the room so that we could say goodbye, fourteen faces in little rectangles, our friend a body on the floor draped in white, and the wifi stuttering at exactly the wrong moment, freezing on his face.
I logged off and understood that a chapter of my life had ended inside an app.
But that is not the part of this story I actually need to tell you. The part I need to tell you is about Dev.
Dev had left Hostel C Survivors four years earlier, after a fight with Rohan that started over eleven thousand rupees and ended over pride.
The rest of us stayed neutral in the useless way friends do, which is to say we stayed silent. Dev blocked half of us. Rohan never mentioned him again, except once, drunk at Nikhil's wedding, when he pointed at an empty chair at our table and said, "Dev would have hated this song," and then changed the subject with both hands.
On the third day, in the group, someone asked: "has anyone told dev?"
Nobody had... Nobody could. He had blocked our numbers, and the only reachable route left was a message request on some app he barely used, a little grey envelope of catastrophe that could sit unread for weeks and then detonate while he stood in a supermarket queue.
I thought about my laughing emoji, one minute before the fold. I thought about how the worst news of my life had been delivered to me by a phone at the same volume as a food delivery update, wedged between a meme and a sunflower.
I took a half day from work and rode the train two hours to Dev's city with no plan and an address that was four years old.
He opened the door holding a spatula. He looked at my face for about two seconds... Then he said, "Who," not even as a question, and I said, "Rohan," and the spatula did not fall dramatically the way it would in a film. He just set it down very slowly on the shoe rack, where it stayed for the whole visit, and neither of us ever mentioned it.
We sat at his kitchen table until it got dark. Somewhere in that darkness Dev took out his phone, opened his notes app, and slid it across to me. There was a draft in it dated three years back. An apology to Rohan. Four paragraphs, carefully written, the eleven thousand rupees mentioned exactly once. Never sent.
"I kept editing it," Dev said. "I wanted it to be perfect."
He looked at me the way you look at someone when you are handing them the heaviest thing you own.
"It was perfect the whole time," I said. "It just needed sending."
Months later, when the group chat had gone quiet in the way a house goes quiet, I did something I still cannot fully explain. I wrote what happened, the emoji, the sunflower, the spatula on the shoe rack, and I shaped it into a poem, badly at first, then less badly. I posted it on a community wall for poets, where strangers who owed me nothing read it and said the words that my oldest friends and I could not say to each other. One woman commented that she had learned about her sister the same way, mid-scroll, on a bus. There are apparently thousands of us, a whole quiet nation of people who found out mid-scroll.
Writing it taught me the difference between talking about grief and talking around it. Around it, you say he is in a better place. About it, you say the chai burnt and I sat on the kitchen floor.
The group chat is still alive... if that is the word. On his birthday every year someone posts an old photo of Rohan wearing sunglasses indoors, and for one day the chat becomes a campfire, everyone throwing in a story like a stick of wood, the time he did this, the time he did that, our whole shared memory of him crackling until midnight. Dev rejoined last year. His first message was a photo of a confused cat. Nobody said welcome back. Nobody had to.
Sometimes, late at night, I scroll all the way up to Rohan's last message. It is from the evening before, completely unremarkable... which is exactly why it destroys me. Nikhil had asked if he was coming to the reunion in December.
"ok boss, tomorrow pakka. will book tickets tomorrow."
Tomorrow is still pending.
It will be pending forever, a little unkept promise floating in a chat named after a hostel that has since been demolished.
I turned my notifications for the group back on last year. I had muted them in the bad months, because every buzz felt like 7:42 on a Tuesday. But silence turned out to be worse than fear.
Now, when the phone lights up in the dark and it is one of them, one of us, sending something stupid at midnight, I read it right away.
You never know which message is the last one. So I have started treating all of them like they might be.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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