The Reunion Nobody Organized
We kept saying next year until the years stopped saying it back.
The last time all six of us were in one room, we were arguing about who would pay for the pizza, and none of us knew it was the last time.
That is the thing about last times.
They never announce themselves. They dress up as ordinary Tuesdays, let you leave without ceremony, and only reveal what they were years later, when you are standing in a parking lot at someone's engagement trying to remember when exactly everyone stopped showing up.
We were the bench crowd in college. There was an actual bench, third one past the library, under a gulmohar tree that dropped red flowers on our heads every April like cheap confetti. Tariq claimed it in first year by carving a wobbly star into the armrest with a compass, and for four years that bench was our parliament, our cafeteria, our confession booth.
Ismat did impressions of the economics professor that were so accurate they felt like theft. Bobby lent everyone money and never wrote any of it down. Rhea and I fought about books the way other people fight about cricket. And Manav, quiet Manav, mostly listened, and once said that the five of us talking was his favorite radio station.
Graduation day, we made the promise everyone makes. Every year, we said. Same bench if we can manage it, some restaurant if we cannot. Non negotiable. We stacked our hands like a sports movie. Someone took a photo. I still have it. Six sunburnt faces absolutely certain of themselves.
The first year, we actually did it. Eleven people counting spouses and one confused cousin, a long table, three hours of the old jokes. The second year we were four, because Tariq had moved to Toronto and Ismat had a newborn. The third year the group chat lit up in October. Next month? Next month became December... December became, let's just do it properly in the new year.
Then the chat went quiet... in that particular way chats do, where nobody leaves and nobody speaks, a room full of open doors and no people.
I want to be clear that no one fought. That would almost have been better. A fight is at least a plot. What we had was scheduling. It was, this month is crazy... It was, after Diwali for sure. It was seven years of forwarded festival greetings, birthday messages shrinking from paragraphs to happy bday to a thumbs up on someone else's happy bday.
We did not lose each other in one day. We lost each other fifteen minutes at a time, in the gaps between messages we meant to send.
The reunion, when it finally happened, was organized by no one.
It was organized, if anything, by a hospital in Pune, where Bobby's heart went wrong at forty one years old. Bobby, who lent everyone money. Bobby, who once cycled eleven kilometres at night because Rhea's hostel warden had confiscated her books before an exam and he thought that was an injustice worth pedaling for.
He survived.
I want to say that immediately, because for nineteen hours we did not know if he would... and I am not able to write the other version even as a hypothetical.
But the news moved through our dead group chat like a current through a wire everyone assumed had been cut.
Tariq called me from Toronto at what must have been three in his morning. Ismat booked a flight before she booked a hotel. Rhea and I, who had not spoken beyond memes in four years, sat together in a hospital corridor that smelled of phenyl and burnt filter coffee, holding hands like children at a fire drill.
When they let us in, two at a time, Bobby looked at the four of us crowding the doorway against all visiting rules and said, in a voice sanded down by tubes, so this is what it takes.
Nobody laughed. Everybody laughed. Both of those happened.
We stayed three days. In the waiting room, between updates, the old radio station came back on. Ismat did the economics professor and he was somehow still funny, twenty years after any of us had heard the original. We discovered Tariq had been divorced for two years and had told none of us, not out of secrecy, he said, but because there was no longer a natural sentence in which to say it. That broke me a little. Grief you can share is heavy. Grief with no address is heavier.
Manav did not come.
Manav had died six years earlier, a road accident we had all learned about through a forwarded message, and mourned separately, in five different cities, each of us privately deciding not to be the one to reopen the chat with something so heavy. I found out later that all five of us had typed messages that week and deleted them.
Five drafts... zero sends. Our favorite listener, and when it mattered we said nothing on air.
On the last evening, with Bobby stable and bossing the nurses, the four of us drove to the old campus. Security let us in when Rhea shamelessly invoked the alumni fund. The gulmohar tree was bigger. The bench was still there, repainted a municipal green, Tariq's carved star surviving under four coats of paint like a fossil. It was autumn, or the version of autumn our city gets, and the bench sat there empty in the brown light, patient as furniture always is, as if it had been expecting us the whole time and was too polite to say so.
We sat. We said nothing for a while, and it was the good kind of nothing.
Then we did something unglamorous and administrative: we took out our phones, right there on the bench, and put a date in four calendars. Not next year. Next month. Rhea, who writes now, said anniversaries are how you lose people, because a year is long enough to become a stranger in. She had just published something on a site called Writory about exactly this, about memory being a muscle and not a museum, and she made us all read it on the spot like the bossy first bencher she has always been. I ended up staying on that site till two in the morning, wandering through poems about loneliness that described my last seven years with upsetting accuracy, written by strangers I will never meet.
I even wrote something myself, eventually, a clumsy paragraph about Manav and the five deleted drafts, and posted it on a community wall for writers because saying it to strangers turned out to be the rehearsal I needed for saying it to my friends.
We have met four times since. Twice on video, twice in person. Attendance is imperfect. The jokes have grey hair. It is not what it was, and I have stopped grading it against what it was, because that comparison is just another way of postponing people.
Here is what I know now. Friendship does not die of anything dramatic. It dies of next year. And the cure is embarrassingly small: be the one who sends the unsent message, name the date, book the table for more people than will probably come.
Somewhere on an old campus there is a bench with a star carved into it, sitting empty under a red flowering tree.
It does not have to stay empty. That part was always up to us.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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