Yakshni

                                                                                              ~ I ~

                                                                              The Last Evening

There is a particular quality to the last evening of a semester — a lightness that borders on recklessness, a feeling that the ordinary rules of things have loosened just slightly, like a rope that has been untied at one end and is still being held at the other. Exams are done. Home is a night's sleep away. The world, for once, belongs entirely to the young.

In Room 14 of the college hostel, three friends sat among the wreckage of a semester — open suitcases, textbooks stacked for donation, half-eaten packets of biscuits, empty water bottles. The ceiling fan turned lazily above them, pushing the warm evening air in slow circles.

Arjun sat on the edge of his bed, tapping his phone. Rohan was cross-legged on the floor, sorting through a pile of clothes with the half-hearted efficiency of someone who knows the clothes will simply be stuffed into a bag regardless. And Harsh — Harsh was standing at the window, looking out at the trees beyond the hostel wall, where the sky was beginning to turn the colour of a ripe mango.

"We can't just leave," Harsh said, without turning around. "We've been here an entire semester and we haven't once gone up that hill."

The hill in question was visible from almost anywhere in the college — a long, forested slope rising behind the campus, its crest marked by a small temple that caught the morning sun and threw it back in a brief, golden flash. Students talked about it constantly and visited it rarely, in the way of all things that are close and therefore indefinitely postponable.

"Our bags are packed," Rohan said, without much conviction.

"Our bags are packed," Arjun agreed, also without much conviction.

A moment of silence passed between them. Outside, a crow called from a branch. The fan turned.

"We leave first thing tomorrow morning," Harsh said, turning from the window. His eyes had that brightness they got when he had already decided something and was merely waiting for the others to catch up. "We go tonight. Just to the top, just to see the view. We're back before midnight."

Arjun and Rohan looked at each other.

Then they called home.

* * *

The answers, as they had half expected, were no. Their parents were predictable in this way — they had spent a semester worrying at a distance, and the news that their sons intended to climb a forested hill in the dark, on the last night before coming home, did not land well. There were the usual arguments: it is late, it is unsafe, just come home tomorrow, the hill will still be there.

"The hill will always be there," Harsh said, after hanging up and tossing his phone onto his mattress. "But we won't be students here anymore after tonight. This is it." He spread his hands. "Last chance."

There is a logic to being twenty that is entirely its own, and it convinces the mind with a completeness that no other logic can match. By the time the sun had dropped another hand's width toward the horizon, all three of them had changed into their going-out clothes, pocketed their phones, and were walking toward the college gate.

The guard at the gate was old and sleepy and had, by this point in the academic year, stopped caring very much about a great number of things. They nodded to him. He nodded back. They were through.

                                                                                                        ~ II ~