By - Vish Damodare
"The best thing about being a writer is that reality is only a suggestion.
I can twist time, bend fate, and place people where life never allowed them to be.
Even if I can’t have her in my arms, I can have her in my words —
and here, in these pages, she is mine, forever."
"Mohabbat sirf paane ka naam nahi hoti… kabhi kabhi khud se zyada kisi aur ke liye jeena padta hai."
That line had never meant anything to me. Until the day I saw her.
It was 27th October 2023, and the college auditorium was chaos wrapped in laughter. Groups of students were rushing around — adjusting lights, testing microphones, shouting instructions at each other. The annual cultural fest was in full swing, and I was in the middle of it, guitar case in hand, pretending to care about the soundcheck.
Then I saw her.
She was sitting in a quiet corner of the practice room, away from the noise, a notebook in her lap. She wore a green kurti, simple silver earrings, and her hair fell loosely over her shoulders. She was writing something — maybe a poem, maybe just class notes — but her eyes… her eyes looked like they had already seen more of the world than the rest of us ever would.
The sunlight from the window caught the side of her face, and for a second, it felt like time paused just for me.
"Uske chehre pe ek muskaan thi, jaise dhoop ke baad narmi se baras jaaye koi pehli baarish."
I didn’t know her name then. But something about her made me want to.
A group of my friends barged in, loud as always, dragging me into a conversation about our band’s performance. I laughed at their jokes, nodded at their plans, but in truth… my mind stayed in that corner with her.
Later, I found out her name was Hritika.
She was from Bihar — the land of ancient stories and river songs, where mornings smell of chai from roadside stalls and evenings carry the sound of laughter from every courtyard. She had dreams too big for the small lanes she grew up in. One day, she told someone she wanted to open her own café in the mountains.
"Main ek café kholungi… jahan log sirf coffee peene na aaye, par apne sare dukh dard bhool kar jaye ."
The way she said it, you could almost see the mountains in her eyes.
And me? I was a little bit of everything, but nothing fully — a singer, a writer, a dreamer, a mess. I was the guy who could make a crowd cheer on stage but would forget how to speak when faced with the one person who mattered.