September dissolved into October and the war between them became something the campus watched with the invested attention usually reserved for cricket matches.

Arnav's attempts at making Khushi's university life difficult were creative, if nothing else. A study group she had organized got mysteriously double-booked with a senior seminar. A reference book she needed from the library went missing from the shelf for two weeks straight, despite the catalog insisting it was there. A campus food vendor who usually saved her a particular meal deal stopped doing so with a shrug and a vague explanation about "management changes."

Each time, Khushi adapted.

She found another study room. She ordered the book from the city library through interlibrary loan. She discovered a different food vendor two buildings over who made better food at the same price and gave him her regular business instead.

She did not, at any point, complain to a professor, a dean, or anyone in authority. She didn't give him the satisfaction of looking like she was struggling.

But she wasn't unaffected. There were evenings when she sat in her tiny room in the girls' hostel and did the math of everything she was managing — her coursework, her tutoring job, her father's next medical appointment in November, the scholarship GPA requirement that left no room for even a single bad grade — and felt the weight of it like something physical pressing on her chest.

She always woke up early anyway. She always had a plan. But there were fewer hours for sleep now, and the tiredness was beginning to show in ways she couldn't entirely control.

Their confrontations became a campus institution.

It started with a debate in their shared Business Ethics lecture — the class they had the misfortune of being enrolled in together. Professor Ghosh had asked the class to discuss corporate social responsibility versus profit maximization, expecting the usual polite division of opinion.

Instead, Arnav had made a clean, clinical argument for profit primacy. Well-structured, well-cited, clearly not his first time making it.

Khushi had waited until he finished. Then she had raised her hand and dismantled it, point by point, using examples from three industries and quoting two economists he'd cited back at him with the parts he'd omitted.

The class had gone so quiet the air conditioning was audible.

Arnav had looked at her across the lecture hall — not with anger, exactly, but with that particular sharp attention she was becoming familiar with — and then he had simply adjusted his argument and come back at her. Harder. More precise.

They had gone six rounds before Professor Ghosh had intervened with clear reluctance, because it was, objectively, the best class discussion he'd had in years.

"You know," Rohan said afterward, walking with her across the courtyard, "you're literally the only person in the university who argues back at him. Not just argues — wins sometimes."

"I don't do it to win," Khushi said. "I do it because someone has to say the other thing."

"Yeah, but you still win. It's making him insane."

Khushi adjusted her bag strap. "Good."

Rohan gave her a sideways look. "You sure you're not enjoying this a little bit?"

A pause.

"A very little bit," she admitted. "Extremely little. Practically imperceptible."

Rohan laughed. First real laugh she'd heard from him since orientation. It suited him.

— ✦ —

The incident in the cafeteria happened on a Wednesday in mid-October.

Khushi had been working on an economics assignment at her usual corner table, textbooks spread around a cup of tea that had gone cold two hours ago. She was tired. She'd gotten four hours of sleep the night before and had tutoring that evening, which meant she'd be running on fumes by the time she got back to her room.

She hadn't eaten anything since morning. She had fourteen rupees in her wallet and dinner was still four hours away.

Arnav arrived at the cafeteria with his usual group — Karan, a girl named Lavanya who seemed to be attached to Arnav in a way that had never been officially defined, and two others whose names Khushi had never bothered to learn. They took the center table, naturally. The whole room rearranged itself slightly, the way it always did when he walked in.

He spotted her immediately. She kept her eyes on her textbook.

She heard him pull out a chair. Heard his tray set down. Heard Lavanya say something in a low voice and then laugh.

Then Lavanya's voice, not low anymore: "Oh, is that the scholarship girl? The one who thinks she belongs here?"

Khushi's pen did not stop moving.

"She's cute, in a trying-too-hard way," Lavanya continued. "The dupatta is a choice."

A few people nearby looked up. Khushi kept writing.

"Lavanya." Arnav's voice, flat.

A pause. Then Lavanya's voice, slightly deflated: "What?"

"Drop it."

Silence at his table.

Khushi looked up from her notebook then, for just a moment, and found Arnav's eyes already on her. He looked away first.

She went back to her assignment.

She didn't know what to do with that — with him shutting Lavanya down. It didn't fit the narrative she'd built around him, and she didn't like things that didn't fit narratives. She filed it away under "unexplained" and forced herself to focus on demand curves.

— ✦ —

When Arnav walked past her table on his way out twenty minutes later, he stopped.

She looked up.

He looked at her for a moment. Then at her cold tea, her stack of books, the dark circles under her eyes she hadn't managed to conceal.

"You haven't eaten," he said.

It wasn't a question. It was the tone he used to state facts he found mildly inconvenient.

"Incredibly observant," Khushi said.

Something crossed his face — a flash of something she didn't entirely catch. Then he set a food token down on her table. The kind that came with the premium meal plan. No explanation, no expression.

He walked out.

Khushi stared at the token for a long moment.

Don't read into it, she told herself. It's a token, not an apology. It means nothing.

She put it in her pocket.

She also, because she was very hungry and had tutoring at six, used it.

And she told herself it meant nothing every single time she thought about it for the rest of the evening.