‘Yes,’ I replied. I was unable to understand why this was a matter of such fascination for her.

‘My mom cooks for us every day. She does all the household chores too. And my father, he has never stepped foot inside the kitchen. But my cousin who lives in Canada, he works as a cook in a restaurant there, although only God knows for how long he’ll keep this job,’ she said.

‘Oh! That’s why you have a positive perspective on immigrant life?’

‘Yes, I’m not very good at learning things from books, like Payal or you are. But I can say that I’ve learnt quite a few things from life.’

‘I think I can learn a lot of things from you too,’ I said.

And in that moment, I don’t know if it was because of her simplicity or her smile, but I fell in love. I suddenly wanted to continue talking to her and know more of her story. I wanted to find out why she was so quiet in class, what secrets she was hiding in her eyes, in her smile. But the more I tried speaking to her, the more I realized that she was a girl of very few words.

As the days went by after that lunch break chat, we started spending more time together. We liked each other’s company. We liked to talk and discuss things. But this cost me my other friendships. Vedant grew distant because he assumed that I was seeing Kiranjeet, even though I’d never said that. The truth was that Kiranjeet and I had not shared our feelings with each other yet. We hadn’t made any promises.

We would exchange notes in class. We would exchange letters after school. And we would make blank calls to each other’s home landline phones. We even had our own code for what the number of rings meant. Though Kiranjeet was far quieter than I liked, our secret language of communication made up for everything.

And then, many months later, came that afternoon which I can never forget. It was our annual sports day, and my football match had ended a little earlier. Kiranjeet and I were walking hand in hand on the school grounds while the rest of the school watched the matches that were still underway. We were near the parking lot when we found one of the school buses parked at the far end of the lot where nobody would come until it was time to drop the students back home.