Thick Skin

“You are a bitch. Wow.”

She tears up the tiny piece of paper and dumps it into the trashcan. The door falls shut with a thud and I watch her walk to me as tears start rolling down her face. This is the fifth note that’s been slipped under her door this week. All I keep saying is, “I’m so sorry, *Riya—” but she keeps cutting me off to remind me it’s not my fault and there’s nothing I can do about it. She decides she wants to take a walk, but then changes her mind in a second because she does not want to “be forced to face any more people.” She considers taking a walk outside campus, but it’s 10 P.M. and empty roads in the middle of Sonipat.

“I wish we had an escape sometimes, you know? A bubble inside this bubble.”

Her roommate comes back, so we rush to my room instead. A makeshift escape, I suppose, because my roommate had gone back home for the weekend. Ashoka feels endless sometimes and so, so tiny some other times. The irony is, it feels endless when all you want is to know people and connect with them and it feels constricting the moment you want to be left alone. I listen to her vent about how difficult it is to avoid people at Ashoka and my mind lingers on how difficult it is to find people and keep them close.

It's a mutual friend’s birthday the next day, and both me and Riya find ourselves packed into his dorm room with about 20 others. We are all dancing and talking and for a moment, it’s all nice. Fifteen minutes later, we’re stumbling out of the room and I’m trying my best to calm Riya down from being on the verge of a panic attack. “…Forgive me if I don’t want to be in the same room as someone who has been slipping horrible notes under my door and slutshaming me constantly!” She tells me how disappointed she is that said person was even invited to the party and I don’t have the heart to tell her that none of the other people in that room really know any part of this side of the story— and in Ashoka, you can't afford to break off a friendship because of rumours.

25 acres is too small a space to contain all the ups and downs that college life and teenage emotions put you through. *Riddhi (UG25) shares two classes with her ex-girlfriend from high school and tells me, “How am I supposed to move on if I have to interact with her multiple times every day? I need some time just away from her!” She and her ex had been friends since 9^th grade, and dated for the last two years of high school until she walked in on her ex cheating. Riddhi thought she’d be fine— she was moving out for college anyway— only to land in the same university as her ex, and have classes together every semester so far. “It’s too much work, to have to pretend like I don’t hate her for doing what she did to me, to have to put up an act constantly. It would just be so convenient if I could just… not be in the same space as her. At least for a while.” It’s only fair that she doesn’t want to face someone who hurt her, every single day, but in Ashoka, that’s pretty much impossible.

“You have no idea how difficult it is to be introduced to someone and smile and pretend you weren’t making out with them like two weeks ago!” *Rohan tells me about how one of his friends tried to set him up with someone, not knowing that they were the person he was trying to avoid and get over. “I was just trying to get out of there. I wanted them to stop existing or I wanted to stop existing, I don’t even know. I wanted to crawl into my own skin.” His words hit me harder than I expected them to. It’s such a familiar feeling. I remember opening Spotify in the middle of a study session and looking at the Friends’ Activity, only to see my ex listening to our blend. I instantly shut my laptop and walked out to get some air— only to run into him ten seconds later. I too wanted him to stop existing. Or to stop existing myself. It is not easy to walk past someone as if you don’t know exactly which song is playing in their headphones right now, as if you didn’t get your first tattoos together, as if you didn’t get them addicted to the coffee flavour they’re holding right now, as if you didn’t know each other inside out not so long ago— especially when you never really had the chance to take time and space away from each other. Here in Ashoka, you just go from being the closest of friends having dinner together one night, to complete strangers who still happen to be partners on a course assignment the next day.

Too many people have the same or similar majors and minors— if you don’t have major-minor courses together, you have FCs together. If you don’t have FCs together, you might just find yourselves in the same club, society or ministry. You might just volunteer for the same fest or you might be having lunch at the same outlet. Your friend might be their friend too (and we are all mature people so we don’t try to dictate other people’s friendships), so you run into them at a party. Or your friend is dating one of their friends so now everything is somewhat awkwardly civil. So all you can do, the best you can do, is grow your skin thicker by the day.