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“You are the first girl to have ever rendered me speechless, Tina.”
Rahul leaps from the crumbled stone wall to her side. Next to him she imagines Anjali. Anjali takes his hand, and Anjali laughs with them.
But Anjali isn’t here.
“I should be honoured, then?” she hums, fingers curling instinctively around his, “The Great chatterbox: Rahul of St. Xavier’s.”
"Beware, for here comes Tina Malhotra, here to steal his voice!” He pantomimes an arrow to the heart, choking and falling back, “However will he recover?”
“You did recover, just then,” she bumps his hip, the edge of her mouth curling upwards, “You’re chattering right now.”
He clamps his mouth shut far too quick to have been a natural reflex. They walk aimlessly in silence, wind beating at them from all sides. The grass is overgrown and blows in mesmerising waves and the sky is in metamorphosis: a splattering of pale pink, blue, purple.
The Anjali of her mind takes off and runs, jacket blowing back with the force of the air, but she doesn’t let it deter her. The Anjali of her mind wears a red tracksuit and a white headband and a carefree grin that really shouldn’t be as endearing as it is. As it was.
The Anjali of her mind twirls with the wind and there is none of the dancer’s grace people say they see in Tina, but Anjali laughs.
The Anjali of her mind is always laughing.
It’s a shame, Tina thinks, that her last memory was of Anjali Sharma with a tear-streaked face. She would have liked to make her laugh once, just once.
But she only ever laughed at one person.
Rahul’s hand suddenly feels like it burns, and she lets go. She can feel the questioning look her shoots her, recoiling, silently asking if he’s done something to upset her. Tina shakes her head, and looks back toward the college.
“We shouldn’t be out here this far.”
“Tina?”
“Rahul.”
“Well,” he hops into step behind her as they head back. She can no longer see the evening sun, or Anjali, and that’s just as well. “All right then, Tina."