When Tanvi was seventeen years old, she fell in love. It was a mundane moment, really, one that would hardly be written about in a romance novel . You see, in movies and sitcoms, when one falls in love, it is usually accompanied by some slow motion camera work and a changing of colours, maybe even soundtrack in the background, No such thing happened for Tanvi though. She saw the boy in her school bus, sitting right at the very back. This was a space reserved for seniors, ones in their final year of school.

School buses, on their way back, are usually a hub bub of activity. Children laugh, shout, sing, get bullied. It is a world within a world, one that is insulated from the vagaries of teachers, homework and generally making tahir way about the real world.

For reasons entirely her own, she decided to follow the boy home. Let us now, dear reader, shift perspective. Imagine then, a camera that moves from focusing on our heroine, to the other introduced character of the story.

The boy was 18, bald and tall, not attractive in the conventional sense of the term. His mother was Bhutanese, his father was Bangladeshi, and the boy had grown up under a very religious influence . He stayed in one of those areas of the city which seemed to be a perpetual state of construction. Tanvi followed him all the way to his house and hid behind a tree as his pressed the doorbell and entered his house.

From then on, the boy seemed to occupy her thoughts. She walked home thinking about him, went to bed dreaming about him , and woke the next day with a delirious fever chanting his name .

There was not much that could be done from then on, as her fever grew progressively worse. She could not go to school without the help of an attendant, and eventually stopped going altogether. From a straight A student, her grades suffered and slipped . She took to spending her waking moments disconnected from the world. Drawing and painting, everything from landscapes to portraits, she brought her vivid imagination and delirious dreaming to life on the canvas. And always, everywhere, there seemed to be the boy. And one day, one of her paintings showed two people coming to her door. One looked Bhutanese, the other Bangladeshi.