“Hip-hip hooray! Three cheers for Debashish Goswami!”

Debashish woke up, groggy. Nikhilesh Bhargav poured a glass of cold water on him. His roommate, Vijay Mehta, pulled him up to a sitting position, and said, “Man, no one was able to sleep last night because we were so tense about the exam results, and you find out you’ve graduated first-class-first in bed? Not fair! We’ve got to celebrate this, man. There has to be a big party!” Shubho Rathore, Tapas Banerjee, Rajat Pandey: all his friends shouted joyfully at his good news.

Flustered, confused, and still sleepy, Debashish tried to gather himself. “Wait, just wait—what? What’s going on?”

Shouting and cheering, no one in the room let Debashish speak even a word. Vijay picked him up and lifted him in the air in happiness, and Debashish shook his dangling legs, asking to be let down.

In the middle of the commotion, someone screamed, “Someone please help! Is anyone around? Mishtu has locked himself up in the bathroom, and I think he’s done something.”

In seconds, the dup-daap dup-daaap sounds of hurried footsteps echoed through the hostel as everyone left Debashish’s room. Reddish water was streaming from under the bathroom door. Five boys broke down the door.

Mishtu. Mishtu Sanyal. Final year. English honors. Such a jovial young man, with a perpetually happy face, lying in a pool of water and blood. Water was gushing from the faucet. Deep wounds on the wrists. Debashish ran for the first-aid box. He pulled out a thick wad of cotton and wrapped it around Mishtu’s bleeding wrists. The bleeding didn’t stop; he must have cut an artery. In a barely audible voice, Mishtu said, “Let me die, let me die, please.”

“Shut up, you fool!” Vijay screamed. “Only fools do such things for performing badly on exams!”

Debashish and his friends picked up Mishtu, while Vijay continued. “You fool! You fool! Stupid fellow,” he added, in English.

“Shut up, Vijay,” Debashish said calmly. “There’s no point scolding him now. We must take him to the hospital.”

Sofi Abdulla suddenly appeared. A doctoral student, older than most, he’d lived in the hostel for three years. The others respected him and listened to him.

He had sprinted up the stairs. “Oh my god, what happened? Hurry! Hurry! Someone, please call a taxi!” Panicked, Debashish tried to help the others carry Mishtu downstairs, but Sofi pushed Debashish aside. “We need to inform his family,” Sofi shouted. “Does anyone have their contact?”

“There is no one in his family now.” Nikhilesh Bhargav, Mishtu’s roommate, said in a tepid tone.

“What do you mean?”

“His father is away for some conference, and his mom is busy. A social worker or something . . . a do-gooder, runs an NGO . . . highfalutin life. She went to Bangladesh a couple of days ago. Mishtu talked to her on the phone,” Nikhilesh gasped. They carried Mishtu down the building’s narrow staircase.

“What about siblings? Or relatives?” Sofi asked again.

“He’s an only child. He mostly keeps to himself, you know,” Nikhilesh said. “He’s been upset for the last few days. I don’t know why. But he tries to hide it—always puts on a happy face. And now the exam results must have pushed him off the cliff. Wait a minute, I know one of his uncles who may be able to—”

“The taxi is here!” someone screamed.

A few of the boys lifted Mishtu into the taxi and squeezed in with him, but Debashish stayed behind. He stood by the curbside for a long time, stunned. The warm blood that oozed out of Mishtu’s body had sent a chill through him, making him dizzy. Such a happy and cheerful young man begging to die! Let me die, please. He found it hard to believe even now.

“Now it is all in God’s hands,” Sailen Bharadwaj said. He held the locket with the picture of the holy man Satya Sai Baba that he always wore around his neck and pressed it to his forehead with reverence.

Would the power of Satya Sai Baba help Mishtu? Debashish wondered and started climbing to his room. This day had brought the biggest news of his life: his spectacular performance on the annual exams. He would be visiting home in Assam soon. Why did this unfortunate event have to spoil everything? He lost all his enthusiasm. He climbed the stairs slowly, careful not to step on the drying trail of blood.

***

Later, on campus, Debashish was drowning in congratulations. Everyone was showering him with good wishes, from juniors and seniors to his professors, happy for his success. He was thrilled, too, trying to contain his excitement. He had never felt such elation before. Still, every now and then, he was overcome by a certain restlessness, panic, or anxiety. Like a crab that slowly digs deeper into the mud, a few images and words kept returning and digging into his mind, shaking him to the core. Let me die, please. . . . The body of a young man lying in a pool of blood. The sound of water gushing from a bathroom faucet.

What could be the reason behind Mishtu’s desperate plea to be allowed to die? Was it just because he didn’t do well on his examinations, or was it something else? Was it true that he had been depressed, and the exam results pushed him over the edge? Nikhilesh had said Mishtu was lonely. But that was hard to believe. Who would think that the young man who was always happy, always cracking jokes, teasing his friends in the hostel, always humming, carried a kingdom of loneliness in his heart? Who would believe that?

Debashish left the college building, walking slowly, leaving behind the groups of students. There were no classes today. He had a few errands to run but didn’t feel like doing anything. He couldn’t enjoy the celebratory atmosphere and greetings around his examination results. A short distance from the college campus was a large flowering shrub. He sat next to it, away from everyone’s gaze. People were also discussing Mishtu, asking why he’d tried to kill himself, and how bad his exam results were. He didn’t want to hear those questions. He didn’t want to answer them. Sitting under the tree, he started reading a book he had bought at the Delhi Book Fair a year before.

When he was home in Assam last time, after taking his exams, he had packed this book, too. But he hadn’t been able to finish it. The unnatural silence that always ruled his house was even more unbearable during this visit. For almost nineteen years, he had been familiar with this silence; it was expected, default. But during his vacation, suffocated and stalled by the unbearable silence of his house, he couldn’t read a thing. Instead, he listened to music at high volume. The radio, the cassette player, and the TV all had come into action, regardless of the time of day. Their house-help Boikuntho, his mother, and even his usually distant father were shocked by his behavior. But no one had said anything; they must have thought Delhi University and the city itself had transformed him.

Was Mishtu alive? Debashish panicked again.

In the private hostel where he lived with Sofi, Mishtu, and Nikhilesh, the other residents were primarily students from Delhi University, while a bunch of others were from Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi School of Economics, and Lal Bahadur Shashtri Institute of Management. Twelve students lived in that large property that people called “Singh Hostel” or “Hostel Number Sixteen.”

When he first arrived at this hostel, he thought he would live here temporarily until he found university housing. But because of Vijay, he changed his mind. Yes, it was because of Vijay he’d never left this place. Without Vijay, he couldn’t have finished his exams and done this well. He had aced twelfth grade: top marks in three subjects. After that, he decided to study economics at Delhi University. There was no one to help him with this decision. As usual, in a somber and serious tone, his distant father had said, “Decide what you want to study.  The money is already in your account.”

Money was not a problem. Still, he had no clue how to reach Delhi or apply to the university. His friend Prakash, who he had studied with in Cotton College in Guwahati, shared the address of a hostel he’d heard about from his sister, who lived in Delhi and had heard about it from her friend. House Number Sixteen, Singh Hostel—Colonel Gulchand Singh’s family residence, now mired in a legal dispute regarding the rightful heir after his death.

While the court cases dragged on, this three-story building had been an unofficial student residence of Delhi University for the last eight years. Admitted students often didn’t find a place in one of the official residence halls, so this disputed property served as a stopgap arrangement. Many students eventually found places in one of the many government-run university hostels and left Gulchand Singh’s disputed property. But many stayed even after they were allotted official university housing, among them Debashish, Sofi, Rajiv Saxena, Sajid, and several others. What kept them here? The unhindered freedom of Singh Hostel, the quaint atmosphere, and the strong friendships. And he was nineteen. And free. And away from home. His transition wasn’t that easy even though he was ready for life’s adventures. But Vijay Mehta became one of his closest friends. He protected Debashish from Chandan Purkayasha, an addict; from the cleaning lady Kanchan’s magnetic youth that attracted the men in the hostel; and from the mysterious women who met men in the hostel late at night, often brought by Kanchan. And Vijay? He had spoken to him frankly about those he had been curious about for most his life but had no one to ask or discuss with.

Vijay’s friendship had made him forget the loneliness of the last nineteen years. In Delhi, in his friends, in his life in Singh Hostel, he had found the escape route he had been searching for most of his life. A way to escape from his mother, who cried every other sentence, from the cream-colored reinforced concrete house that reminded him of a humongous corpse, from the ash-gray Ambassador Mark 2 car, and that house where no guests but only clients came looking for his abnormally somber, serious, silent father: Jnanendra Goswami. He had always found the atmosphere in his house confounding. Growing up, he had never seen his parents sitting together and conversing like regular husband and wife or even heading out of the house to visit other people. Even today, he didn’t know why there was such a massive disconnect between his parents.

He didn’t have the answers to many more whys. Why? Why couldn’t he be like Rajiv and greet people by slapping their backs with a warm “hey”? Why did he hesitate to do that? Why couldn’t he pick up a piece of chalk and throw it at the neck of a girl in class during high school like Ratul from Sibsagar? No, he couldn’t even be like his friend Tridib, who, when walking by the field, kicked a wayward football toward the middle of the playground with a panache that sent a ripple of joy through the players and onlookers. Like his classmate Zakir, he never could guess which girl was wearing double-striped padded bras and whose panty line became sharply defined just before she sat on the classroom bench. He couldn’t observe those girls and describe them with juicy, exaggerated details to the other boys in off-period addas between classes. Why? Why couldn’t he shout his heart out for the team he supported while watching a cricket match? Was it because he was an old soul? Youth had forgotten to caress him. As if to be deprived of the playfulness of youth was his fate!

That was high school. But did that change when he was in Cotton College? He still remembered how his friends walked around with pocket novels that they shared with each other. During conversations, suddenly, one of the boys would use a word from those books with their erotic covers that meant so much to everyone present but nothing to him; they would burst into laughter, and he would remain there, confused, silent—the odd one out. One day, he flipped through one of those books: it had photos that turned his face and ears hot. But he could never read one. Not that he didn’t want to, but there was a hesitation that pushed him away from those secret, popular books. Once, when he was home on vacation, he had jaundice. He lost weight and returned with deep dark circles under his eyes. On the first day of college, Monjeet saw him and smiled meaningfully. “Are you being a bad boy? Don’t read those pocket novels too much! You will lose your health.” Monjeet had then used a word he didn’t know, and later, he rushed to the library to search for its meaning in the dictionary. And in fact, that was his habit: to note the words he found scrawled in the boy’s toilets and search for their meaning. He didn’t have a friend to ask what those words meant. The Assamese saying that the one with many friends has none suited him ideally. He had many friends, but to pour his heart out to, he had no one.

“Ei, why are you sitting here all alone? Are you worried I might ask you for a treat to celebrate your success?” Krishna Rameshwari discovered him sitting by the shrub with that book in hand.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

Krishna slowly rolled up her shirt sleeves. “Why wouldn’t I be able to find you? I was looking for you. I know your habits well.”

He laughed. He dog-eared a page and shut the book.

“Did you tell your parents about your final results?” she asked.

Debashish only then realized that he had not informed his family. What had happened with Mishtu that morning had kept him sad and preoccupied, even though his performance in the exams was big news for him. Last night, Mishtu had told them not to worry about result day. He’d called it useless and said that they would be better off spending the night merry-making. Then he had started to play a beat on the wooden table and burst into a Hindi film number. Debashish was stunned by Mishtu’s actions the following day—that same Mishtu who a few hours earlier had mimicked Hindi film actors from Shammi Kapoor to Shah Rukh Khan, garnering laughter and applause.

“Deba, I asked you something,” Krishna said. “You have to abandon this habit of having dialogues with yourself when you are with other people. You don’t want to be so introverted that everyone will just give up and leave you alone.”

Debashish was ashamed by what she said. Trying to normalize his emotions and stress, he asked, “Sorry, what were you saying? Oh yes, home. Actually, in the hostel today something terrible—”

“I know,” she said. “Vijay called me from the hospital asking if I knew anyone who knew AB Negative blood donors. Rare blood type, but he found someone eventually,” Krishna said, finishing what Debashish was about to share.

“Someone so cheerful as Mishtu is also rare. So full of life.”  

Krishna nodded. “So, when are you going to Assam?”

“The day after tomorrow. I have my tickets. I’ll be back before classes next year.”

Krishna stared at his face for a little while. Suddenly, she said, “I have never seen Assam. I always look at it on the map. I would love to visit your hometown with you. Will you take me?”

Debashish didn’t reply. He became absent-minded again, and after a while, he said, with no enthusiasm, “Surely, why not?”

This was where he couldn’t be like other people, who would have replied cheerfully, “Of course! You have to visit Assam.” It was because he thought about his father: too serious, too distant, too silent; his mother, who seemed to suffer from chronic melancholia; the massive house enveloped in silence; and attempting to make that odd environment normal and fun, Boikuntho, cracking jokes at his own expense, like a clown. All of that came to his mind when a friend wanted to visit him, and it made him want to throw up. He couldn’t take Krishna to his house, but perhaps to his uncle’s house for a few days. She would like his lovely aunt, who doted on him.

“Deba, I have work to do. Let’s meet later?” Krishna started to tie the laces of her running shoes. She slung her bag on her shoulder and walked toward the college administration’s office in long, brisk steps.

Did she mind? He thought for a second, but then remembered: Krishna wasn’t like most other people, and that’s why they were friends. She felt more like one of his buddies. Her presence didn’t make him shy or self-conscious, the way he felt around other girls. Maybe that’s because she was also not like the other girls—many boys confided in her and secretly discussed many private problems with her as if she were one of them.

Debashish saw Rajiv Saxena running toward him.

“We have to go!” he screamed. “Mishtu didn’t make it!”