The Boy Who Was Warm in the Room

Rudra was warm.

He was warm in the corridor. He was warm at the gate. When Simran came into a room he looked up and said her name as if the day had just got better. Every single time, for two years.

He remembered things. He remembered that her Nani was ill in February, and asked in March. He remembered that she hated the fish they did on Thursdays. He would push his own plate over. He did not have to do that.

In Class 7 they sat at the same table in the canteen. The long one by the second window, where the bench is a bit low, so everybody eats slightly hunched over their plates. Bags on the floor. Water bottles down the middle of the table like a fence.

In October, Rudra got a dog.

He was completely, embarrassingly happy about this dog. It was a small brown thing with one ear that would not stand up. It had been under a car near his building. Now it lived on a folded towel in his kitchen and was called Biskoot.

He showed everybody the photos. He showed them twice. Biskoot on the towel. Biskoot with a shoe. Biskoot asleep in a cardboard box with all four feet in the air.

On a Tuesday in November he leaned across the table with his phone held out flat. He wanted to show her the one where Biskoot had got into the laundry basket.

She took the phone. It was warm, and it had a crack across one corner of the glass.

The photo was not open. What was open was a chat. The photo was somewhere underneath it. It took him about two seconds to notice, and reach over, and swipe up.

Two seconds is not very long. It is long enough to read four lines.

Her name was in it. Twice.

She did not read all of it. She read the top part, and one line under her name. Then the screen changed, and there was Biskoot in the laundry basket with a sock on his head.

“He does this every day,” said Rudra. “Every single day.”

“He’s brilliant,” said Simran, and gave the phone back.

She did not say anything. She did not ask him about it, not that day or any day after. She did not tell anybody. Telling somebody would have made it into a thing with sides and a middle, and she did not want a thing with sides.

She never got the phone again. She was not going to ask for it.

So she does not know exactly what it said. She knows the shape of it. She knows it was about her, and that it was not warm. Three people had put the little laughing face under it. She could see them at the edge of the screen.

For about a week she kept checking his face. At the gate. In the corridor. Across the table, over the plates and the bottles. She was waiting to catch the join.

There is no join. He is not pretending in the room. When he says her name and looks pleased, he is pleased. That is as far as she ever got with it.

She thought about it a great deal in December, in bed, with the fan going. She has thought about it much less since.

She still says hi. Properly, out loud, with her face doing the right thing. He is not a monster. School is four more years long. Being cold to somebody in a corridor is a whole job, and she does not want it.

She just stopped sitting down.

Tray, plate, bottle, bag. Short table, not long table.

The long table by the second window is still where Rudra eats. Simran eats at the end of the short table now, near the counter. She sits with a girl called Preeti. Preeti is quiet, and enormous fun once she starts. Two others come and go.

Every day at about ten past twelve she comes out of the queue with her tray in both hands. She goes past the end of the long table.

Rudra half turns and says her name, the way the day has just got better.

“Hi,” says Simran, warmly, and means it, and keeps walking.