“Sonipat? How on Earth do you know about Sonipat?” Wanita texted.

Back in 2016, Dadi Ammi visited our new apartment. After dinner, we sat in the TV lounge, talking about the weather, studies, and family gossip. When the conversation came to a halt,  Baba took over. He told me to switch on the TV. “We’re going to visit Sonipat now.”  Dadi Ammi’s eyes glistened with excitement. That night, we roamed the streets of Sonipat. As we moved through Google Earth and those low-quality 30-minute YouTube vlogs, her eyes were locked on the TV. Mine were locked on her. She carried a constant smile throughout.

Dadi Ammi was only nine when she left Sonipat and migrated to Karachi. I doubt she remembered any of those streets, but perhaps there was a lingering sense of familiarity. I was glad she could walk down that memory lane before amnesia claimed her in later years.

“My dadi is from Sonipat,” I texted back Wanita.

India has twenty-eight states. Haryana is one of them. It has twenty-two districts. Sonipat is one of them. Out of all the 733 districts in India, I was talking to someone from Sonipat. None of us believes in coincidence to date. We labelled it an ‘Ittefuck’. Zuckerberg made it possible for two people, one sitting in Sonipat and the other in Karachi, to connect with each other.

*

My friends and I met Wanita and her friends online. On our virtual sleepovers, we would travel around the world on Chatroulette, a video chatting platform where one can match with strangers from different parts of the globe. We used to laugh over making goras sing ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’. We would debate with random atheists from Europe for hours, dance with drunk people on the other end of the screen or provide moral support to someone we matched with from Palestine. It was basically Omegle, but without the Indian uncles sitting in white torn banyaans.

Just like any other day at the office, last year, two nights before Eid in April, we matched with some strangers from India. The discussion started as completely banal and then escalated. Someone blew away aman ki aasha. But sanity intervened: Wanita stepped into the frame, tying her hair with confidence, her clenched fist a silent warning that we were about to get told off over videocall. Our argument woke her up. She wasn’t Smaug from Lord of the Rings, but she was about to spit fire. All five of us got scolded – three people in Karachi and two in her room. Trying to hold back laughter in a serious situation is something none of us was good at. Her lip twitched into a half smile and the next minute all six of us were laughing and back to cracking jokes.

Wanita and I connected over Instagram. The night passed and we all went back to our routines. In the third grade, I had rote-learned the quote, ‘first impression is the last impression’. However, this apparent first impression had a strong sense of familiarity.

Until a few years ago, I often attended Friday sermons. Imam Sahab once talked about alim-e-arwa, the belief that some souls have met each other before birth. These souls get along well in this world. I couldn’t help but think of Wanita. In the next few days, I would pick up my phone only to talk to her.

It was after a very long time that I had allowed someone to enter my life. I still remember when I was about to pass the fifth grade, living conditions in Karachi had gotten worse. Target killing, phone snatching, and the infamous bhaththa were a few words we would hear multiple times daily on the news. Baba got promoted to Regional Head Sales of Sindh in Mobilink and decided to shift to Hyderabad. Consequently, I had to leave my school and friends. That was my second heartbreak. The first one was finding out that Spiderman was fictional.

I had never imagined leaving my school friends back then. We used to meet every single day. I had never switched schools before. I was excited to travel to a whole new city, and that excitement didn’t make me think of anything else apart from looking forward to new beginnings. The night before starting at my new school, while packing my bag for the next morning, I realised that I wouldn’t be seeing Hussain, Abdul Samad, and Muneeb the next day. Memories came out in the form of tears. Post-tear relief felt like waking up from a deep sleep. The tears had wiped away the fog from my eyes, leaving the road ahead clear and unobstructed.

In ninth grade, my parents decided to put me in The City School Gulshan Campus after returning to Karachi. It was an all-boys campus, that too with teenage boys high on testosterone but low on ambitions. The faculty was good, and so were my grades. I made it to Karachi Grammar School for A levels. KGS was the biggest burger joint in Karachi. My friends in the neighbourhood used to taunt me for not going to parties despite being in KGS. It didn’t bother me because I didn’t want any of it. KGS felt like a stopover. A two-year journey cut short, with 1.5 years swallowed by COVID. I made the most out of both GCA and KGS during those years, but didn’t even miss going back there one day after graduating. I think I found the hack.

You won’t lose something until you possess it.

Mystical Imam Sahab had told us, “We were mere travellers in this world, and nothing is permanent.” Whenever the truth of how fleeting human connections are brushes against me, Baba reminds me how insignificant these worldly matters are, and that death is inevitable. I get annoyed by this, and he gets annoyed when I quote Jaun Elia:

“Maut to barhaq hai,
par marnay tak toh jeenay dou.”

I carried these words with me while travelling from Karachi to Lahore. LUMS was just another station where I had a slightly longer layover before I moved on to the next place. My best friends are still from my neighbourhood. They give me an illusion of permanency. No matter where I go, when I return home, they are always there.  As I navigated between these two worlds of LUMS and Karachi, Wanita became an unchanging factor. Familiar and permanent, like home.

On the longest day in the middle of June, Baba told us we’d be going to Ormara, an eight-hour-long drive through hills and desert to the beach. Ormara had been on everyone’s bucket list for a long time. I was excited until I got to know about the ‘no internet’ situation.  My mother was happy that all four of us would be with each other for the next thirty-six hours with no screens in sight. We were travelling to Balochistan, and I was sure that ‘no internet’ was a trick that Baba was pulling on us, so I didn’t bother telling Wanita that I would be away for a while. I did tell her about the beach and that signals could be an issue. I sent her a random sky picture –a quick update– before the signals went out. Wanita and I had a very strong connection, but was that connection Wi-Fi dependent only?

Check-in. Sunset. Barbecue.

I wrote pointers in my notes, knowing that I’d be yapping to her as soon as I got back on the highway. I was lying on the sun lounger just outside the hut on the patio, looking at the full moon. It was the only common thing between us under that alag aasmaan. It would always be. A full moon. I envied the sun and the moon. I pulled out my phone to capture the moment for myself. Ugly picture. One couldn’t tell if it was a full moon picture or a streetlight captured in the dark.

I woke up before the sunrise, captured all the images in my head, walked barefoot by the shore and had deep talks with Mumma. As soon as the sun came out, we rushed back; the beaches usually become hot after sunrise. It was time to get back. There was an eight-hour drive ahead of us and none of us wanted to delay it. We all wanted to get back home. Six hours later, as we approached the main highway, the internet connected and notifications flooded in. The buzz of my phone echoed in the quiet car. My brother hated the sound of my Redmi notifications; I ignored seventeen other messages in my inbox and opened my favourite chat.

Have you ever missed someone? Have you ever been missed by someone?

*

Our connection was instant. We bonded quickly over time, ignoring the obvious distance between us. The Laws of Physics failed as if we were in a South Indian movie. Though I had never felt empty before, the connection had filled some vacant space. We bonded over art. Movies became a bridge between this long distance. A movie that explores the complexities of life through the lens of two strangers caught in a time loop. Palm Springs was the first movie we watched together. We spent a lot of Saturday nights throughout the summers watching classics. Those classics spanned from Shree 420 of 1955 to Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met. I once slept through Baahubali, and she fell asleep binge-watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Saturdays and movies weren’t enough, so we began watching a Pakistani drama serial together. We would wait for Mondays and Tuesdays to arrive so we could watch it together.

We were always together. We would update each other with everything throughout the day. Sometimes I would feel closer to her than people with me in the same room. We talked day and night, noon and evenings. We would talk before sleeping and after waking up. My ‘good morning’ messages were replaced by ‘supraabhat’. As if the time we spent awake wasn’t enough, I even began to dream of her. My mother asked me about this girl: “Is she religious?”

“Well, technically yes, just not the same religion as ours.” I shrugged.

We didn’t have these types of conversations at home; maybe the dream was a glitch. I had learned a lot about the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and Wanita had enough knowledge of Islam that she’d pass O’ Level Islamiyat with a decent grade.

We exchanged a lot of words. Each word was a bridge between us as we completed each other’s thoughts. Our Hindi-Urdu classes were scheduled almost daily during summers. I wasn’t a sharp student, but I considered myself a skilful teacher. She won’t agree with the latter part. These classes got disrupted as soon as our universities resumed in September, but the learning didn’t go away. Another theory was that I wasn’t jhelable enough as a student and the teacher gave up, but I could write माज (Maaz) like a pro, and by then she could manage to write a few sentences in Urdu.

In August, I went to Adventureland. I conquered my fears in that amusement park, had the best time with my friends, and made memories. However, in the back of my mind, I was anticipating hearing both of us screaming at the top of our lungs while riding that rollercoaster. The what-ifs overpowered reality. It would have done no harm to anyone if we spun in that cyclone ride together. I wanted to share all of it with her, not just through mere words.

I confessed that same evening. She remained silent. She had no answer; neither did I. It was unusual. We had answers to everything, but this was new.

I reemphasised: “Dur hokar bhi saath hee hain hum.” She insisted on giving a reality check instead: “Saath hokar bhi dur hee hain hum.”

On Saturday, as part of our weekly ritual, we were supposed to watch The Lunchbox. A movie about an unlikely connection formed between two strangers and the quiet longing for a meaningful human connection, all set against the backdrop of everyday life. We didn’t watch it. Wanita was busy. On Tuesday, the season finale of our drama serial was waiting for us. We didn’t watch it. Wanita was busy. I watched it alone with 300 people in the same hall where the finale was being screened. The episode offered a perfect closure to the story, but it left me yearning for more. Over weeks, her messages grew shorter, peppered with hurried typos and half-finished thoughts. “I was busy,” she’d write, her usual enthusiasm was replaced with practiced politeness. I couldn’t pinpoint the first time I felt joy, sadness, or excitement in life. None of us can. However, I can claim without a doubt that this was the first time I felt ‘Énouement’.

*

I visited Dadi Ammi during winter break in my freshman year. “Itne dino baad kyun aaye ho?” she inquired. I reminded her that I had been living in Lahore. Next year, when I visited her, she mistook me for my brother. We had chai with her, and while leaving, she asked me to not leave without having chai. Last summer, when I visited her, she asked me whose son I was among her ten sons. I couldn’t blame her for this. This year she couldn’t recognise her own son. Unlike people, connections don’t die. It fades. I could see it fading away with Wanita as well, and we did what we could do best. We talked about it.

I opened my diary on the night of 24th October 2024 and titled the page, ‘Sonipat has Fallen’. Earlier that morning, I got educated by Wanita about how living two lives simultaneously was unhealthy and how whatever we had was not normal. Then, what I feared the most happened. Wanita fell in love. Though, with someone else. That afternoon, Mumma texted, “Innalahiwainailahi Raji’un,” and I wondered who had told her about Wanita. I had to wait for another message to learn that Dadi Ammi had passed away. I lost two people that day, or maybe one place. I’ve never visited Sonipat. I lost something I’d never possessed.