How Seven People Became One Group

I did not get Electrical Engineering. At IIT Kanpur the process was sequential: starting from rank one, each student chose from whatever departments still had seats. By the time my number came up, EE was full. At eighteen, that felt like a verdict on the rest of your life. It turned out to be nothing of the sort — the branch you ended up in decided almost nothing that mattered, and least of all the people you would still be ringing fifty years later.

Metallurgy was what was left at my rank. I was not alone in that. SK — Sanjiv Kumar, my roommate — chose Mechanical from what was left when his turn came. Somewhere in his first year he discovered he was actually a physicist and spent the next four reading Feynman and Dirac while the rest of us muddled through our actual degrees. He became a physicist in the end. Some people simply are what they are regardless of what a rank allows.

In 1975 we were assigned to Hall 3 at IIT Kanpur. Random rooms, random neighbours. But in 1976 — the second year — we were allowed to choose. And we chose each other. That matters. The corridor on the third floor of Wing 3 became ours deliberately.

The sequence, from the corner of the wing: Ajay and GP. Then SK and me. Then Rohit and BV. Then Dinesh at the far end. The Columbums had known of each other before any of this — the school was a long cord. Ajay and GP were additions: Ajay through Dhaula Kuan in Delhi, where he and Dinesh had grown up in the same service-family world; GP through accident, the last two without chairs when the music stopped. Manoj Shanker joined us later — year three or four — drifting over from his own circle. By the time he arrived he simply was always there. That is how the best arrivals happen.

Most of us had gone to St Columba’s School in Delhi. Columbums, as we sometimes called ourselves — affectionately, mostly. That was the invisible cord. You did not need to explain certain things to a Columbum. You did not need to explain the particular loneliness of arriving at IIT from Delhi, or why you still hummed certain songs walking up staircases.

The mess food was just that — a mess. Aggressively bad in ways that required engineering. Ajay ate it with complete equanimity — same grey daal, same brown subzi, same expression of mild satisfaction, every single day. We decided he had simply disconnected the relevant circuits and was operating on pure caloric logic. The rest of us found our way to the Red Rose when we could — not as often as we should have.

The corridor at night was dim. One side open to the quad below — a breeze came through, Indian summer, no air conditioning, never any question of air conditioning. Rooms on the other side, green painted doors padlocked during the day when we were in class. In the evenings most came open. Ajay kept his shut against the mosquitoes.

You could hear music. Not loud — just present. Someone had built an amp. Building your own amp from components was a rite of passage and GP Nayyar was the expert. The Audio Club was his domain. But the playback was a cheap cassette deck at best. Jethro Tull. Pink Floyd. Deep Purple. It was 1976 in India and that was what you heard if you were lucky enough to hear anything at all. I somehow missed Queen entirely in those years. I regret that still.

The ritual that held us together was the birthday coke. When it was your birthday, you took the gang to the <em>paan</em> shop. You bought everyone a coke. That was the extent of it — a coke, not a meal, not a party. We were that poor and it felt like more than enough. Rohit had a standing joke he deployed every single time without variation or apology: “What’s better than a coke?” And the corridor would erupt — every time, as though it were the first.

After the em>paan/em> shop we would walk. Around campus, past the departments, through the dark. Rollicking over something silly. Is your fridge running? Then go run after it. Nobody laughed harder than the person who had heard it most.

Vinayak Eswaran — Dinesh’s first-year roommate, the one who had pulled Ajay in — drifted away around the same time Manoj arrived. Made other friends. I do not know if the two things were connected. They may have been.

Rohit and I were close. Then in year four something shifted. It felt dramatic at the time, though I could not name what had happened. My theory — and it remains only a theory — is that there was a girl involved. Someone he thought I was interested in. I was not. But that does not explain the decades since, the times I have been in Delhi and reached out and found a reason waiting on the other side. Some distances, once opened, simply stay. Or maybe it was just me!

SK disappeared to the UK after IIT. Became a physicist as he always intended. For years nobody knew quite where he was. Then one day he let himself be found. He lives in East Sussex now. He has never explained the gap and none of us have asked. He is still reclusive. When I reach out he is warm. I would like to think we are still the friends we were in that room — him reading Dirac, me studying metallurgy, both of us pretending we were exactly where we were supposed to be.

GP resisted WhatsApp for years. The group functioned around his absence — news of him came through Ajay, occasionally through Manoj who saw him in Delhi. He was always there in the conversation, never in the chat. Then one day he relented. He joined. He was the same GP.

We are spread across three countries now. India, the UK, the United States. Seven people who chose to live on the same corridor in 1976 and have now been friends for nearly fifty years. Nobody planned that either. There was just a dim corridor, a breeze from the quad, green doors, and someone’s standing joke about a coke.

We relied on dad jokes before we were dads. We were ahead of our time.