She was young — late twenties, maybe early thirties — with the crisp, no-nonsense energy of someone who had been a student in a classroom like this not so long ago and had strong opinions about how it should be run. She wore a dark blue saree with a small pattern, and she carried a manila folder under one arm and a coffee mug in the other hand with the confident air of someone who had decided caffeine was a professional requirement and was not apologising for it.
"Good morning," she said, setting her folder on the desk at the front. "I'm Meera Krishnamurthy. I'll be your class incharge and I also teach Data Structures, so you'll be seeing a lot of me. I'm going to keep this first session brief because you all look like you're processing enough already" — she paused, something flickering at the corner of her mouth that might have been a smile — "but there are a few things I want to go over before I let you breathe."
She talked efficiently and well. She outlined the semester structure — the courses they would be taking, the credit system, the internal assessment breakdown. She explained the attendance policy with the calm directness of someone who had watched too many students learn about it the hard way. She described the library system, the lab booking procedure, the anti-ragging committee, the student grievance portal. She was clear and specific and she made jokes at the right moments — small, dry ones that got quiet laughs rather than the performative enthusiasm of a teacher trying too hard.
Aditya was paying attention. He was also, in a separate, lower-priority thread of his consciousness, still thinking about the girl from the auditorium. He was constructing increasingly elaborate theories about who she was — maybe she was from a different branch, ECE or Mechanical. Maybe she had transferred her seat. Maybe she had been late to the ceremony by coincidence and did not even belong at Sri Venkateswara College, which would be a deeply anticlimactic resolution to the whole thing.
"Now," said Meera Krishnamurthy, opening her folder, "let's do attendance. This will give me a sense of who's here and it gives you a chance to hear your own name said out loud in case you've forgotten it in the chaos of the morning."
Light laughter from the class. She began.
"Abishek Raghavan."
"Present, ma'am."
"Aditya Rajan."
"Present."
"Ananya Krishnakumar."
"Present."
She moved through the list. Aditya listened without particular intent, noting which names were met with bright confident voices and which were quieter, which were met with laughter from the person's existing friends and which were solitary. The classroom was filling in around him in three dimensions — becoming people instead of just faces.
He was in the middle of these thoughts when Meera Krishnamurthy said: "Thara Suresh."
And from the back left corner of the classroom, a voice said: "Present, ma'am."
It was a clear voice. Steady, unhurried. The kind of voice that did not perform present — it simply stated it, as a fact.
Aditya turned.
The back left corner.
She was sitting at a desk in the back left corner, and he had no idea how he had missed her when the class filed in, except that she had apparently sat down during one of the moments when he was distracted by Vishwa's social analysis, and she had done it quietly enough that she had not registered in his peripheral vision. Her braid had acquired another escaped strand of hair. The earbuds were gone — tucked away somewhere — and she was sitting with her notebook open on the desk in front of her, a pen uncapped, her posture the exact same composed, self-contained stillness he had observed in the auditorium.
She had been here the whole time.
She was in his class.
Thara Suresh.
Aditya became aware that he was staring at the exact moment that the girl two seats to Thara's right — a small, bright-eyed girl in a pink kurta — reached over and grabbed Thara's arm and said something in a low, excited voice that made Thara turn toward her. And in turning, Thara Suresh did something that Aditya had not at all anticipated.
She smiled.
It was not a polite smile. Not the careful, closed-mouth curve that you gave strangers when maintaining basic social contract. It was a real one — the kind that started in the eyes before it reached the mouth, that changed the whole face, that made the person doing it look suddenly and completely different from who they had been a moment before. It was warm and immediate and it arrived like a door being thrown open to let in the afternoon sun.
Aditya blinked.
The girl in pink was whispering something. Thara's smile turned into a quiet laugh — a real one, head tilting slightly, hand coming up to cover her mouth in the way that people do when they're laughing at something that has caught them genuinely off-guard. Then she was whispering back, and the girl in pink was shaking her head, and they were having the kind of rapid, comfortable exchange that only happens between people who have known each other long enough to have a shorthand.
Old friends, Aditya thought. They must be from the same school.
He watched Thara for approximately three more seconds, which was two seconds longer than was strictly acceptable, and then he forced himself to look back at the front of the classroom where Meera Krishnamurthy was continuing the attendance.
"Vishwanath Subramaniam."
"Present! And please, just Vishwa." Beside him, Vishwa raised his hand with the confidence of someone making a formal amendment.
A beat. Meera looked up from her folder. "Noted," she said, and moved on, and Vishwa looked deeply satisfied.
"Smooth," Aditya told him, in a low voice.
"Always establish your name on day one," Vishwa said sagely. "My cousin told me. He said you spend four years correcting it otherwise."
Aditya huffed a quiet laugh and resolutely did not look at the back left corner.
He lasted approximately ninety seconds.
She was listening now — actually listening, he thought, not the detached non-presence of the auditorium but a more focused kind of attention, eyes on Meera at the front, pen in hand. But even listening, she had a quality of reserve about her, a slight remove that kept her somehow separate from the general low-level social performance happening around her. The students near her were introducing themselves, leaning across desks, exchanging phones for Instagram handles. She participated — she was not unfriendly, she responded when spoken to, she smiled when smiled at — but she did not initiate. She was present but not porous. In the room but not dissolved by it.
The cold girl from the auditorium was still in there, Aditya thought. She had just put her earbuds away.
He found this deeply interesting.
He also found that he had no idea what to do with the information.
She was in his class. That was extraordinary luck — or fate, Vishwa would probably say fate with great conviction. She was in his class and he knew her name and he had this bizarre, completely irrelevant, absolutely unmentionable piece of information that she had been listening to his music an hour ago in the auditorium. He had an In, technically. He had a conversation opener that was arguably one of the most interesting conversation openers in the history of first-day-of-college conversations.
He absolutely could not use it. The idea of walking up to her — or in this case sitting diagonally three rows away from her — and saying "Hey, I noticed you were listening to a song earlier and it was actually mine" made him feel a particular variety of embarrassed that his body was not equipped to survive. She would either not believe him, which would be humiliating, or believe him, which would somehow be worse. She would look at him with those calm, evaluating eyes and he would simply cease to function.
No. The song was not a conversation opener. The song was a private miracle that he was going to hold in his chest and not ruin by being weird about it.