By Anonymous
I had ironed my dupatta the night before.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. I had stood in the kitchen late at night, pressing the iron slowly over the fabric, making sure there were no creases. My mother watched me from the doorway without saying anything. She knew better than to say anything.
I was in my second year. Computer science. I had chosen it because of something that happened when I was twelve, my cousin showed me how a few lines of text could make a box appear on a screen, and something in me had shifted then, quietly, the way a door opens. By the time I was old enough to sit an entrance exam, I knew this was the thing I was going to do with my life. I used to imagine it practically, not dreamily. I would picture myself debugging code at a desk, frustrated over something small, solving it. I wanted even the hard parts.
I had an assignment due. Data structures. I had been working on it for three days, and I was close, I knew I was close, and I wanted to get to the lab early, before it filled up, so I could finish and submit it properly.
I left while the morning was still cold.
My younger brother offered to walk with me, and I said no, I wanted to go alone. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe it was just a habit by then, the walk. Twenty minutes I had made so many times that my feet knew the turns before I decided them. The shopkeeper rolling up his shutter. The sound of it, metal on metal. The same child who always seemed to be sitting on the same step.
When I turned the corner and the university gate came into view, I saw the crowd before I understood what it was. Girls. Dozens of them, standing outside. Some had bags. Some were holding notebooks. Nobody was going through the gate.
I slowed down.
I think some part of me knew immediately. But I kept walking. I came and stood at the edge of the group, and a girl near me turned, looked at my face, and then looked away. Her eyes were dry. She had probably been there longer, had already moved through the part I was still in.
There was a sign. I read it. I read it again.
I don’t want to describe what happened inside me because I’m not sure I have the right words, and I don’t want to use the wrong ones. I’ll say this: it was not like something breaking. It was more like a sound being switched off. A frequency you didn’t know you were hearing until the room went silent.
I stood there for a while. Around me, some girls were crying. Some were on the phone. Some were just standing, looking at the gate, as if waiting for it to change its mind. I understood that feeling.
At some point, I became aware that I was still gripping my bag strap, and I loosened my hand.
I thought about the assignment. I don’t know why that’s what came to me, maybe because it was the most concrete thing, the thing I had been holding in my head all morning. Three days of work. I was close. The thought arrived and then just sat there, not going anywhere.
I walked home.
I didn’t decide on a route. My feet just moved, and eventually I was at my own door.
My mother was in the kitchen. She turned around when she heard me come in, looked at me, at my bag still on my shoulder, at the dupatta I had ironed so carefully, and she understood. She didn’t ask. She turned back to the stove.
I went to my room, sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the wall.
After a while, I took out my notebook, the one with the assignment, the half-finished code written in the margins the way I always did when I was working something out. My handwriting was small and quick. I had drawn a little diagram of the tree structure I was trying to implement. An arrow pointing to a node I hadn’t solved yet.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I closed the notebook and put it on the desk.
I still have it. Sometimes I open it and see the diagram, the unfinished arrow, and I close it again. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. Maybe I just can’t bring myself to finish it somewhere other than there. Or maybe I can’t bring myself to leave it unfinished.
I haven’t decided yet. That feels important somehow, that I haven’t decided.
