Kiss in the Staffroom

The staff room at Delhi Public School, Sector 45, smelled like old coffee and chalk dust. That specific smell never leaves a school. Not the fancy ones with air conditioning and smart boards. Not the ones where parents pay three lakh a year and still complain about the toilet paper. I'm twenty-two, I teach history to eighth graders, and I've been working here for exactly seven months. Aiman's been here two years longer. She teaches English to the tenth graders, and she's twenty-four.

The first time I noticed her, it wasn't her face. It was her voice. She was yelling at a boy in the corridor outside my classroom. Not yelling exactly. That low, controlled tone teachers use when they're two seconds from losing it but know the principal is watching from the CCTV camera near the water cooler.

"Arjun, I've told you three times this week. Three. Times. The answer sheet doesn't write itself."

I was standing at my door, coffee in hand, watching. She had her dupatta tucked into her waistband, which meant she was serious. Her hair was in a loose braid that had mostly given up. When she turned, she caught me looking. I should've looked away. I didn't.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing. Good morning."

"It's two in the afternoon."

"Good afternoon, then."

She stared at me for a second, like she was deciding something, then walked off with Arjun dragging behind her. That was October. By November, we were sharing lesson plans. By December, I knew her chai order. By January, I was in trouble.

Not the kind of trouble you'd think. I mean, I was in trouble because I couldn't stop thinking about the way she laughed. Head thrown back, one hand on the wall for support, like the joke had physically knocked her over. The sound of it stayed with me through staff meetings and parent-teacher conferences and the long bus ride home. I'd be sitting in my one-room flat in Malviya Nagar, eating Maggi, and suddenly hear it in my head. Clear as anything.

Here's the thing about working in a school. You see each other all day. Every day. There's no escape. Morning assembly, she'd be standing three rows ahead of me. Lunch break, she'd be in the staff room, grading papers with a red pen between her teeth. Evening, she'd be rushing out to catch her bus, and I'd watch her go, and then I'd sit in my classroom for another hour, pretending to work.

I didn't plan anything. I want that on record. I'm not one of those guys with a strategy. I just started finding reasons to be where she was.

"Need help with the annual day script?" I asked in February. The annual day is a huge deal at DPS. Every teacher has to help. I hate annual day. I hate the rehearsals, the costumes, the parents who show up with DSLR cameras and opinions.

"I've got it," she said.

"I can handle the backstage stuff. Cue cards, props, whatever."

She looked up from her laptop. "Why?"

"Because I'm a helpful person."

"You're not."

"I could be."

That almost got a smile. Almost. She went back to typing, and I stood there like an idiot, and then she said, "Fine. But if you mess up, I'm telling Sharma sir you volunteered."

Sharma sir is our vice principal. He's fifty-eight, has a mustache that looks like it's been glued on as a joke, and genuinely believes students should be caned for talking during assembly. The man has never smiled in his life. I'm convinced he was born in a government office and has been filing paperwork ever since.

"Deal," I said.

The rehearsals started the next week. Three hours after school, in the auditorium. Dusty seats, bad lighting, kids who couldn't remember their lines. Aiman sat in the front row with her laptop and a cup of chai that had gone cold two hours ago. I ran around backstage, fixing props, yelling at the light guy, trying to keep the younger kids from killing each other with fake swords. Every twenty minutes or so, I'd look out and catch her eye. She'd shake her head at something. I'd shrug. It became a thing.

One night, after everyone had left, we were the last two in the auditorium. She was packing up her bag. I was stacking chairs.

"You know," she said, not looking at me, "you're not as useless as I thought."

"High praise."

"Don't get used to it."

I carried a stack of chairs to the corner. When I came back, she was standing by the stage, looking at the empty seats. The auditorium lights were half off, and the shadows made the place feel bigger than it was.

"My first annual day here," she said, "I cried in the bathroom."

"Why?"

"Because I thought I was going to get fired. I messed up the seating chart. Parents were screaming at me. Sharma sir called me into his office and I thought, this is it, I'm going back to Bareilly."

"Bareilly?"

"Don't make that face. Bareilly's fine."

"I'm not making a face."

"You're making a face."

I wasn't. I was looking at her. She had this way of standing with her weight on one hip, arms crossed, like she was always slightly annoyed but also slightly amused. That night, she looked tired. The kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep.

"Anyway," she said, "I didn't get fired. And now I'm here, yelling at kids about answer sheets."

"You're good at it."

"At yelling?"

"At teaching."

She looked at me then. Really looked. The auditorium was quiet enough that I could hear the ceiling fan creaking overhead. I remember thinking, this is a moment. This is one of those moments you read about in books, where something shifts and you don't know what it means yet but you know it means something.

Then she picked up her bag and said, "Lock up when you're done."

And she left.

I stood there for a long time. The fan kept creaking. The chairs were stacked. The stage was empty. I locked up and went home and lay in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the traffic outside, thinking about the way she'd said my name earlier that evening. Just once. In passing. Like it was nothing.

It wasn't nothing.

I want to tell you that something happened after that. Something dramatic. A confession, a kiss, a moment where everything changed. But life doesn't work like that. Life works like this: you show up every day, and you pretend you're not thinking about her, and she pretends she's not thinking about you, and the two of you circle each other like planets that haven't figured out gravity yet.

The annual day came and went. It was a disaster, obviously. One of the kids forgot his lines, another one tripped over a prop, and Sharma sir gave a speech that lasted twenty minutes longer than it should have. But Aiman and I ended up behind the stage afterward, in the dark, surrounded by cardboard trees and fake flowers, and she was laughing. That head-thrown-back laugh. And I was standing close enough to smell her perfume, something floral and faint, and I thought, if I don't do something now, I never will.

I didn't do anything.

She stopped laughing and looked at me. "What?"

"Nothing."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it's always nothing."

She tilted her head. The light from the corridor caught the side of her face. I could see the small mole near her jaw, the one I'd noticed weeks ago and tried not to think about.

"It's not nothing," she said.

And then she walked away. Again.

I stood there in the dark, surrounded by cardboard trees, and I realized something. She knew. She knew exactly what I was feeling. She'd known for a while. And she hadn't run. She'd just walked away slowly, which is a different thing entirely.

That was the night I decided I was going to tell her. Not the next day. Not that week. But soon. Because the thing about school is, the year ends. People leave. And I wasn't going to let her leave without knowing.

I didn't know then that she had her own reasons for walking away slowly. I didn't know about her family, or the thing she'd left behind in Bareilly, or the reason she always looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. I didn't know that she'd been watching me too, waiting for me to say something, getting more and more convinced that I never would.

But that's the thing about beginnings. You don't know anything yet. You just know something's starting.