Chapter 1 — How Pacts Are Made

The power went out — which it did in Rishikesh at this hour, reliably, a daily negotiation between the town and the grid — and the café went dim."The bit with Velutha," he said.She looked up.He was looking at her book. "You made a noise," he said. "Like someone had hit you somewhere soft. It's always the bit with Velutha."She looked at the page she was on. He was correct."Have you read it?" she said."Three times." He said it without apology, which she appreciated. Men who apologized for reading fiction as if it required defense were not men she wanted to talk to. "It hits differently every time depending on what year you're in."The power came back. The café resumed its noise.They talked for four hours.She told him later — much later — that she had known within twenty minutes. Not known in the romantic-comedy way, the thunderbolt way. Known in the quiet way of someone who has spent a long time in their own company and recognizes, occasionally, a specific quality in another person's company. The quality of ease. Of not having to perform.He said he'd known in the first sentence.She said that was statistically implausible.He said she had a very low estimation of his instincts.They spent the next three days in each other's almost constant company — walking the ghats at dawn, eating momos on the bridge, sitting on the rocks above the river while the October light did its nameless thing. Riya, with the generosity of a newly engaged woman who wanted everyone to experience what she was experiencing, retreated cheerfully to the guesthouse terrace and her phone and left them to it.On the last night, they sat on the steps of a ghat with the river in front of them, both going to different cities the next morning."I don't want to do the thing," Aanya said."What thing?""The thing where we exchange numbers and say we'll stay in touch and mean it completely but life happens and six months later we are — acquaintances who like each other's Instagram posts."He was quiet for a moment. The river did its river thing."What do you want to do instead?" he said.She had been thinking about this. She had been thinking about it since the afternoon, when the knowledge that tomorrow was coming had settled on her like a specific weather."I want to make a pact," she said. "Something old-fashioned and ridiculous and absolute."He turned to look at her. She could feel his attention — he had a quality of attention, when he was listening, that was like a room getting warmer."Five years," she said. "If we're both single in five years, we come back here. Same café, same table. October fourteenth." She paused. "No keeping in touch before that. No Instagram, no messages, no checking on each other. Total clean break, so we can each have our actual lives without this—" She gestured at the river, at the light, at the general enormity of the last three days. "Hanging over everything."He looked at the river."That's very dramatic," he said."Yes," she said."And extremely impractical.""Yes.""Five years is a long time." He paused. "What if one of us forgets?"She looked at him. "Are you going to forget?"He looked at her."No," he said."Neither am I," she said.They shook hands on it, which was the formal version, and then he laughed — a real laugh, surprised — and she laughed too, and the river went on below them and the October light was doing the thing it did when it was almost gone, turning everything it touched into a memory.They said goodbye at the guesthouse gate.She took the night bus to Delhi.She did not cry.She saved that for Varanasi, six months later, on a trip for work, when she walked past a ghat at sunset and the light was the same and she understood for the first time how expensive the pact had been.