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hope you are okay?” I waited for another thirty minutes outside her college for her reply before leaving.

    It was past eight when I reached home. I went straight to my room and locked myself up.
    “I’m waiting for your reply” I messaged her, but there was no reply again and I was going paranoid. I spent next two hours fretting about what might have happened to her. I had called Neha, Shashank, Raghu and anyone who could have any info on her. No one did.
    It was at 11.45 p.m. when I got a message that read: “I have a boyfriend. I’m sorry I should have told you sooner. Hope your paper was good.”
    She didn’t know it was my birthday, yet she had given me a gift. And that’s how my nineteenth birthday came to an end.

W inters in Mumbai can get chilly. Not as painful as Delhi or Pune, but cold enough to prompt Mumbaikars to pull out the warm clothes who otherwise are happy sweating all year. Eighteen years in Mumbai, and I had forgotten what real winter chill felt like. So even in the not so boastful low temperature of fourteen degrees, I cuddled under the quilt. The noise of my phone whirring on the side table woke me up. It was 7 a.m., It was a message from her.
    “Open your door…”
    It took me a while to pull myself out of the bed. I sauntered into the living room, my eyes half open, still trying to acclimatize with the awake world. I opened the door. There was a small box neatly gift-wrapped in white shiny paper, pink hearts of different sizes, and tied with a blue ribbon. Inside the box I found a four-inch long soft toy wearing a light blue t-shirt on which was written ‘Binny Rabbit’. Under it was a letter which read.
    On this day, when god chose to send you to this planet, I ask him to bless you with love, happiness and infinite reasons to smile. I hope in all these years you’ve realised that your smile makes a lot of hearts skip a beat.
    Love, Aditi
    The gift and the letter thing was a little too mushy for a thirty-year-old me, but I have to agree it brought a smile on my face. Me smiling had become a rare phenomenon. I had strictly reserved smiling for professional purposes.
    After my return from LA, I had changed my number so it was going to be a quiet birthday. No calls, no messages and no expectations. I made myself a mug of coffee and sat at the window. The window had instantly become my favourite place when I first walked in; it was so spacious that even an ogre could stretch himself to take a nap. The view from the window was amazing. The yellowish light of the rising sun dispersed in the morning haze spread over the sea. I could see gently swaying small fishing boats docked at the makeshift pier, small huts with hanging fishing nets on the roof lining the shore, people jogging on the sea front, and children waiting for their school buses. Sipping on the coffee, I looked around the house. It resembled the storeroom of a shopping mall stacked with boxes stickered uniformly. The reality of living alone began to sink in.
    I began to unpack the boxes. Curtains, bedsheets, clothes, utensils, more clothes, the microwave, buckets, and toiletries began to jump out. The house now resembled one raided by the income tax department. I opened the last box, and stared at it. It contained memorabilia of the seven years of my relationship with Hrida. I took the box and came back to the window. Going through the gifts we had given each other was like reading the synopsis of the life we had spent together. The photo album she made me on one of our anniversaries had a compilation our snaps with her comments. From an uncountable number of soft toys we had gifted to each other; dozens of love letters she had written; bus, train, and movie tickets of the special days we spent together; and hundreds of Polaroid snaps taken at parties, pubs, picnics, college festivals, and birthdays. There were music CDs she had made to cheer me up or for the dance parties we organised, a string of my guitar that she broke trying