Twins? Nobody said there were twins.
But before that bomb could drop, there was breakfast to survive.
That morning, I had stepped into the elevator, still rubbing sleep from my eyes, and ended up standing awkwardly next to a girl in a loose kurta and jeans, who looked equally lost in the blinking numbers of the lift.
It was one of those textbook uncomfortable silences. Until she blurted out, "Weather's nice today, isn't it?"
"Yeah," I said, clutching the strap of my bag. "Little cooler than yesterday."
We both nodded like two serious meteorologists for a beat too long. Then she added, "At least it's not Delhi politics bad."
I couldn't help laughing. And just like that, the ice cracked.
"I'm Ritika," she said, smiling sheepishly.
"Varsha," I smiled back.
By the time we made it to the mess, we had graduated from politics to laughing over the miserable excuse for sambhar served on Sundays. It wasn't a soul-bonding kind of click — not yet — but it was something. A sliver of warmth in a place that still felt too new, too vast.
After breakfast, I returned to my room.
Still no sign of Madhavi.
I sat cross-legged on my bed, scrolling through old texts and unfinished playlists, swinging between hope and nervousness.
I needed this roommate thing to work.
Please let this not be another phase. Please let this be different.
And that's when the door swung open.
Two identical faces.
Two identical pairs of eyes at me.
Twins.
Nobody said there were twins.
For a second, it felt like the ground tilted.
I had spent the last few hours preparing myself to meet one new person—one new chapter. Not two.
Not a story already halfway written between two people who knew each other's silences.
The tall man with them, probably their father, noticed my hesitation first.
He stepped closer, clearing his throat with a no-nonsense energy.
"You are Varsha?" he asked, his voice strong but not unkind.
I straightened, suddenly nervous like I'd broken some rule I didn't know existed.
I nodded quickly, tucking a stray hair behind my ear.
"Yes, uncle. I'm Varsha."
There was a momentary pause where the world seemed to hold its breath—and then he smiled, nodding approvingly, as if checking me off a list.
I let out a breath I didn't even know I was holding.
"This is Madhavi," he said, placing a proud hand on the girl to the right, who smiled at me in the warmest way, like she was sunshine molded into a human.
"And this is Manavi, her sister."
She wore a sunflower-yellow top that made her seem like she'd walked straight out of an indie movie about sweet beginnings and sunsets on balconies.
Madhavi offered a sheepish smile.
"I... booked the window bed already. Hope you don't mind?"
Her voice was careful, almost guilty, and somehow it melted the tiny resentment I had tucked in my heart.
It wasn't an enemy I had gained—it was someone... human.
I found myself smiling back.
"It's okay. I'll adjust."
And just like that, the dam broke.
The room turned into a whirlwind:
Their father brought in a stack of bedsheets and a carton of toiletries.
Manavi, busy on a phone call, already started measuring how much sunlight fell on which side of the room.
Madhavi was kneeling on the floor, opening her suitcase, pulling out things like little pieces of home—cushions, books, a polaroid camera.
It was chaos, but the good kind.
The kind I hadn't realized my heart had been craving.
Then, a soft knock behind me.
I turned, and there stood Ritika, still awkwardly holding the key card she forgot to return after breakfast.
The conversation in the elevator this morning—about the sudden drizzle and how Delhi politics was nothing but drama—had been awkward, but not heavy.
Something about her had clicked.
Somewhere deep down, I wanted her to stay. Maybe today. Maybe longer.
"I brought someone," I said, stepping aside.
Ritika smiled and stepped in, a little wary.
Her gaze swept across the room—
And for a split second, it landed on Madhavi.
Longer than necessary.
Not just polite curiosity—something else.
Something searching.
Something soft.
I caught it.
A flicker of something that was too soon, too new, but there nonetheless.
"This is Ritika," I said lightly. "We met at breakfast."
Madhavi beamed and waved, the room lightening just by her smile.
"Nice to meet you!"
"Same," Ritika mumbled, her voice suddenly softer.
The air shifted, just slightly.
The room buzzed again with energy, with suitcases being dragged and pillows being fluffed and questions about where to keep the fairy lights.
Manavi argued with her dad about where the shoe rack should go.
Madhavi and Ritika struck up a conversation about something.
And me?
I just stood there for a moment, breathing it all in.
This.
This messy, noisy, colorful life.
These strangers, who were slowly becoming threads in my new tapestry.
I smiled to myself, a little broken, a little whole.
Maybe this wasn't going to be the disaster I had feared.
Maybe, just maybe... it was the beginning of a different kind of chaos.
The kind you end up calling home.
Their father tugged the zipper of the last bag closed with a grunt, exchanging quiet looks with his wife that only long years of marriage could translate.
Madhavi and Manavi leaned into him, clinging for a second longer than necessary. Aunty patted my shoulder with a mother's tenderness she didn't owe me but offered anyway — maybe out of courtesy, maybe out of genuine kindness. I didn't know anymore how to tell the difference. Madhavi's father gave a nod, proud but weighed down. Her mother — who looked too much like every woman who has ever tried to hold her world together — smiled at me the way strangers smile at lost children. Soft. Cautious.
"Now you girls live like sisters, okay?" she said, smiling that polished, hopeful smile adults always reserved for endings they didn't want to admit were endings.
"And Varsha, beta, call us if you need anything. Anything at all."
I nodded automatically, the way you nod when you don't know if your voice will betray you.
My own parents had said something similar when they left — bright, hopeful lies designed to make letting go easier for them, not for me.
The door closed behind them with a soft click that sounded much too final. It wasn't loud.
It wasn't dramatic.
Silence unfurled in the room, slow and heavy like monsoon clouds that refused to break into rain.
Madhavi stood near her half-finished bed, holding a sunflower-printed top against herself as if deciding where to hang it.
Ritika tapped absentmindedly on her phone, legs dangling off my bed like she belonged there.
Manavi's laughter echoed faintly from somewhere down the corridor — a fading tether to the childhood I'd never lived with them.
I sat on my own bed, hands folded uselessly in my lap, watching it all happen.
This was supposed to be the beginning.
This was supposed to be the first stitch in a quilt of memories I would wrap myself in someday.
I had lost people before.
Good people.
Friends who promised to stay.
Friends who called me 'family' until it got inconvenient, until I became too much, or not enough.
I should have felt grateful. I should have felt lucky to have a room filled with laughter and future stories waiting to be written.
Instead, I sat there wondering when this too would break.
It was quiet — heartbreakingly quiet — the kind of quiet that settles in your bones and whispers, they're gone, and you're alone again.
I sat still.
The air pressed heavy against my skin, thick with a hundred things nobody was saying yet.
But deep inside, where the old wounds lived, I could already feel the ending.
I knew the pattern too well.
First, the shared secrets, the midnight snacks, the stupid inside jokes.
Then, the cracks.
The misunderstandings no one bothered to clear up.
The whispered 'she's too much' when they thought I wasn't listening.
The cold silences that grew like vines around my throat.
Live like sisters.
It sounded beautiful, didn't it?
Like something real.
And sitting there, knees tucked to my chest, I realized it already:
Some things sound sweet in parting, but taste like ash when you're left holding them.
Some words are meant to soothe the speaker, not the listener.
Why did it already feel so... fake?
...
The first day wasn't supposed to be this chaotic.
Our bags were packed, our ID cards clipped on like badges of honor, and our faces still wore the anxious excitement of newcomers.
Of course, in true dramatic fashion, we ended up running late.
Madhavi, Ritika, and I sprinted across the corridor, clutching our files and water bottles, weaving through crowds of freshers who looked just as lost as we felt.
Or maybe that's exactly what college life meant — running in late, gasping for air, clutching bags like refugees.
We finally skidded into the lecture hall — breathless, hair everywhere, clutching our pens like weapons.
The instructor gave us a look. But mercifully, he just waved us in without a word.
"Front row?" Madhavi hissed.
"Death row," I corrected grimly.
Front benches.
The place you usually reserved for nerds, people-pleasers, and people with no shame.
Apparently, today we were all three.
We spent the next hour scribbling notes that would never see the light of day again.
The session dragged on.
The "Foundation Course" they called it — big words for what was basically an introduction to being a responsible, dignified, forever-tired doctor someday.
There were talks about ethics, basic medical knowledge, the sacred duties of healing, a very long presentation on professional behavior... and lots of blah blah in between.
I doodled absentmindedly in the margins of my notebook, smiling whenever Madhavi cracked a whispered joke about how we might turn into zombies by the end of the month.
Despite the boredom, it felt fun in a weird, heart-thudding kind of way — like standing at the edge of something huge.
Midway through a lecture on "Maintaining Medical Decorum," Madhavi poked me and jerked her chin toward a boy slouched across the room.
"That's Shamit," she whispered.
"We were classmates in Cleveland High. Can you believe it? Small world."
I squinted at him.
Messy hair, crooked smile, half-asleep posture.
He looked harmless enough, tapping his pen like it was a machine gun.
"You sure he's alive?" I whispered back.
Madhavi snorted into her notebook.
After lunch, the Foundation Course split into different sessions.
Madhavi and Ritika were dragged into ethics module, I was assigned Basic Life-Saving Skills — CPR and emergency responses.
CPR practice. Lucky me.
When I entered the lab room, my fate greeted me in the form of a slightly cracked dummy and an instructor who looked like he regretted every life decision that led him here.
I was adjusting my kurta when someone called out politely,
"Ma'am."
I turned — and a tall boy, looking mildly embarrassed.
He thought I was the instructor.
Maybe it was the kurta. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn't busy throwing a paper plane across the room like some of the others.
He stood up, wiped imaginary dust from his sleeves, and — I kid you not — gave me a full formal greeting bow.
"Good afternoon ma'am."
I stared.
Was he serious?
Before I could decide whether to laugh or walk out, he added, "You looked like a teacher when you walked in. I almost stood up to say roll number."
Shamit was there, somehow managing to look even more dead inside than before.
"You again," I said dryly, raising an eyebrow at Shamit and nearly ignoring the boy.
"Yeah," he said without missing a beat. "Unfortunately, still alive."
The boy laughed.
It was an easy, slightly dorky laugh that made me smile in spite of myself.
"I'm a student, genius," I said, rolling my eyes at him.
"Right," he said, looking both relieved and a little mortified.
"I'm Atharv. This is my roommate, Shamit."
"Varsha."
The instructor barged in before we could roast each other more, launching into a speech about the "sacred art" of CPR.
(Which, to be honest, mostly looked like beating the life out of a plastic dummy.)
Still, sitting there, next to these two complete idiots — it didn't feel so bad.
Maybe I could survive here after all.
By the end of the CPR session, half the class looked like they had just fought a war — and lost.
Including Atharv, who was still panting dramatically beside me.
"Are you okay?" I asked, smirking as I wiped my hands with a tissue.
"Never... been more humiliated... in my life," he gasped, collapsing onto the floor like a Bollywood heroine dying of heartbreak.
"You were literally supposed to compress the chest, not wrestle it to death," I said, watching as the poor mannequin lay there, completely abused.
"At least he tried," Shamit said dully, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
"I broke two ribs on my dummy. Heard a loud crack."
I stared at him.
"You're supposed to simulate saving lives, not commit murder, Shamit."
He shrugged. "What can I say? I'm a natural disaster."
Atharv laughed weakly, still lying on the ground like a tragic Shakespeare character.
The instructor was busy fixing the wreckage of our practice dummies, shooting us dirty looks.
We decided to quietly exit before we got assigned to "how not to get sued" workshops.
Outside, the evening sun was beginning to fade into a lazy gold.
It was that moment — messy hair, sweaty faces, laughter ringing in the air — that made everything feel… real.
"Not a bad first day," Atharv said, nudging my shoulder with his lightly.
"Yeah," I replied, surprising myself. "Not bad at all."
Shamit pulled out his phone and started tapping furiously.
"What are you doing?" Atharv asked suspiciously.
"Googling if mannequins have rights," he said without looking up.
I barked out a laugh.
Yup.
These idiots were trouble, Atharv and Shamit arguing over whose CPR technique was worse —
I felt something loosen inside me.
Something tight and cold and scared.
And it let out a small, relieved breath.
But someone was waiting for me. Uttam was waiting for me.