Page 48 of A Lab Rat’s Guide to Fated Love

Twenty Nine

In Search of Lost Time

Vir

T here’s a place that sells really good chai over there,” Vir said while loading their groceries into the car. “Would you like some before we leave?”

At Nori’s enthusiastic, “Yes, please,” he took her to the small shack by the cliff that they’d frequented many years ago.

The old man serving tea and snacks was still there.

Older, with a lot more white in his hair, but just the same.

And so was the panoramic view of the valley below and the cloud-covered, snowcapped mountains in the distance.

They took their seats on one of the rickety old benches nearby with their paper cups of hot milk-tea and coffee between them.

“This is so strange,” Nori whispered after a while.

“What is?”

“I haven’t been to this place in… probably a decade. Maybe longer. But that market wa s so familiar…” She paused.

A pit opened up in Vir’s stomach. He shouldn’t have brought her there. He was a fool .

“I knew where to turn for what,” Nori continued in a hushed tone. “I knew where we’d find the vegetable vendors and where the hardware store was going to be. Even this tea shack is familiar. And that tree. And this old bench.” Her fingers ran over the smooth grain in the wood.

“What do you mean?” Vir asked, hoping he was wrong. Hoping she wasn’t remembering things. She wasn’t supposed to remember.

Nori looked up, her eyes widening with excitement.

“I’ve never been to these places before.

That market… this tea shack… they weren’t here the last time I was here.

But I—was I with you the whole time? Four years ago, during your treatment?

Maybe I left Delhi and came here for a bit. That would make sense—”

“You were with me the whole time,” Vir blurted out. It wasn’t the entire truth. But not a lie either.

Nori didn’t say anything for a while. An odd heaviness bled into her mood the longer she sat sipping her tea in silence, her gaze focused on the view ahead.

Vir’s words hung in the air between them, thick, heavy, fragile, making him hate himself for speaking them.

And he considered offering her the truth.

Just tell her everything and let the chips fall where they might.

But if he didn’t—if he just stayed quiet—they’d be colleagues for a whole semester. And neighbors. Maybe even friends.

And he wouldn’t ask for anything more. Just as long as he got to stay by her side. Because the alternative was too unbearable to even think of. He couldn’t watch her remember everything and leave. Not again.

“Do you know about the Proust effect?” she spoke abruptly, pulling him out of his thoughts.

Vir nodded.

“Reliving memories through sensory stimuli,” Nori explained anyway.

“My therapist lent me this book one day, In Search of Lost Time .

The protagonist tastes a madeleine dipped in tea, and it triggers his mind to release long-forgotten memories from his childhood. Involuntary Memories , he called them.

“I didn’t remember all the Taekwondo lessons I’d taken during my…

lost years. But once I started learning again, my body already knew the moves.

I kn ow, Proustian memory isn’t exactly the same as muscle memory, but…

I’d say it’s similar. Our neurons store seemingly vague connections and patterns with sensory things like tastes, smells, textures, and sounds.

They form all these pathways and associations we don’t even realize.

So now I—I taste foods I don’t remember eating, smell new things, listen to music released in those years.

Hoping, maybe something will help me recall the time I’ve lost.

“I wonder if there are bad memories stored somewhere that would be better left forgotten. But what if there are good ones, too, that I—” She stopped to swipe her sleeve across her cheeks.

“I get this feeling sometimes, like I’ve forgotten something important.

Like I’m missing something crucial, and I have to remember. I have to. But I just can’t.”

There were good times, Nori. Vir stared at her. So many of them. But I wish you never remember the bad ones.

He looked away, wincing as the guilt dug its claws deeper into his gut.

No. He wasn’t going to tell her. He couldn’t. But he refused to lie to her again.

If she remembered on her own, he—he’d beg her to stay.

If she remembered… he hoped she never did.

Nori

N ori watched Vir in the rearview mirror as she drove away from his neighborhood.

He had his relatively small bag of groceries raised high above his head, while he walked past his landlord’s front yard, dodging the little bell-collared goat’s attempts to whack it off him the entire time.

With a laugh, Nori redirected her focus to the road in front of her.

She had so much left to prepare for her first lecture on Monday, and that meant instant ramen for dinner again.

She’d have to check for meal delivery services in the area if she didn’t want to survive on noodles and toasted bread for the next six months.

Unloading her groceries from the car a short while later, she came across a bag with a pair of clinking coffee jars inside, only one of which was hers. She’d obviously have to return the other to him. And soon. Or the poor guy wouldn’t survive.

The thought filled her with a giddy sense of relief, and a silly smirk appeared on her face, refusing to go away.

What was wrong with her?

She was acting like some infatuated teenager around a man she’d met only a day ago. A man who was clearly still pining over his first-love-slash-ex-girlfriend, too.

That cheesy pebble-giver.

If the woman had the audacity to gift him a pebble and attach all that meaning to it with the penguin story, why did she leave him then? And why didn’t she take the dumb rock with her when she did?

Stepping inside with her bags, Nori slammed the door with more force than necessary, and the heavy oak panel bounced off the frame and stood rattling on its hinges. She winced before closing it again, softer this time.

Turning the latch, she huffed loudly. She was done embarrassing herself.

Vir was a colleague, and maybe they could be friends again like they’d been years ago. But she had better things to do with her time than crush over a guy who was busy pining over someone else.

There was no way she was going to allow herself to have some silly one-sided thing for this man.

No way in hell.

O n Monday morning, Nori sat waiting in her car for Vir to step out of his apartment.

“Vir!” She waved towards him, grinning as his pace quickened when he noticed her there. “Get in.”

She was just being a friendly neighbor-slash-colleague, picking another colleague on her way to work. It was totally normal, acceptable, colleague behavior. Plus, she was helping the environment by car-pooling. She didn’t see any problem with that.

“What are you doing here?” Vir asked, buckling his seatbelt .

“You forgot your coffee in my bag.” She shrugged. “And your place is on the way to work, so… you don’t mind, do you?”

“Not in the slightest, no.”

Vir beamed, and Nori averted her gaze to stare straight ahead, hoping her face didn’t betray the melting contents of her ribcage.

Maybe looking at him while driving wasn’t such a good idea. She drove the remaining five minutes to the university with her eyes strictly on the road. While also mentally revising notes for her upcoming lecture, so she didn’t have space to think about things she had no business thinking about.

A fter dismissing her last class before lunch, Nori paced in circles by her desk, negotiating with herself.

She wasn’t looking for an excuse to go find Vir again. Absolutely not. But wasn’t it ridiculously normal for colleagues to have lunch together? More so, if they were also friends? And she was friends with Vir, wasn’t she? She just didn’t remember it.

He did, though. He remembered.

Yes. He remembered, and he still hadn’t made any effort to contact her in all these years. Not once. Maybe he didn’t really want to be friends with her. Maybe he’d only been friends with her because he’d needed her to keep him alive back then. And he didn’t need her anymore.

Right. Of course. With an angry huff, Nori gathered her things before stomping out of the lecture hall, only to walk headfirst into Vir’s chest. “Argh!”

His arms flung out to catch her as she recoiled from the impact. “Are you okay?”

His concerned, dark eyes scanned hers, and—there it was, the elusive hint of brown up close. Fanning them were the most gorgeous mascara-commercial lashes she’d ever witnessed on anyone , let alone a man. Oh, the wonders of science.

“Nori?”

She swore internally, stepping away from him while hoping the heat in her face didn’t betray the garbage churning inside her brain. Then something occurred to her.

“So, you do want to be friends,” she blurted out .

Vir’s classes took place in the psychology department two blocks away. He couldn’t have simply been passing by. If he was standing outside her classroom, that could only mean he’d been waiting for her there. And that could only mean—

“I do.” He looked unsure.

“Then why didn’t you contact me all these years?”

“I—I—” he stuttered. “I didn’t have your new number. And I didn’t think you remembered me, so… I didn’t want to bother you while you recovered. Sorry.”

Oh. That… did make sense… when he worded it like that.

Her phone had been crushed in the accident, and she’d had no use of her Indian number afterwards to bother getting a replacement sim. He was right. She wouldn’t have recognized him even if he’d gotten in touch with her back then. If anything, him reaching out would’ve made things worse for her.

“As long as we’re on the same page,” she said, ignoring the guilt poking at her for being mad at him, even though it had only been inside her head. “That we’re friends,” she emphasized.

“We’re friends.” Vir’s mouth twitched before spreading into a grin that threatened to liquify the contents of her ribcage again.

Friends. She smiled nervously.

And from that point on, Nori quickly fell into her new routine. A routine that matched with her friend and colleague, Vir’s. And thereby, a routine that was best shared with her friend and colleague, Vir.

And so, every morning, she’d pick him up on the way to work. Between lectures, they’d have lunch together. And afterwards, she’d drop him home. More often than not, she’d stop by to meet Billie and give her all the chin scratches that her majesty demanded.

But that was all that was. It wasn’t like Nori was developing feelings for Vir. They were just friends. Nothing more.

However, if she had to be honest, at times she did suspect that maybe he had feelings for her . But then, the very next moment, he’d do something to convince her otherwise .

“I’ve been thinking about keeping a dream journal,” Vir told her one afternoon while they sat across from each other at the cafeteria. “Only problem is, I can’t remember my dreams lately. They used to be quite vivid before—”

While listening to him talk, she leaned over her bowl of noodles, and a stray curl swung loose across her face. Before she could swipe it away, Vir casually reached for the lock and tucked it behind her ear without a single break in his speech. As if it was something he was used to doing often.

Heat seeped into Nori’s cheeks. And a heartbeat later, Vir’s eyes widened with realization.

“I wasn’t thinking—out of habit—” He fumbled for words. “I’m sorry!”

“Don’t worry about it,” she replied in a flat tone, stabbing her fork into the noodles. “You were saying about the journal?”

Another time, while they were walking to her car together after work, her knuckles accidentally brushed against Vir’s, and before she could move her hand away, his soft, slender fingers closed around hers.

Her lips hadn’t even finished curving into a smile when he dropped her hand like it was a rotten, week-old rat carcass.

“Sorry, I—” he began, shifting an arm’s length away from her for good measure.

“Out of habit?” She kept her face blank while her insides twisted into knots, her eyes stinging from the blatant rejection.

She knew she’d fallen into a dumb one-sided thing with him. And she hated it.

Once she drove off after dropping him at his place, the hot moisture blurring her vision rolled freely down her cheeks. She swore loudly, swiping her sleeve across her face as she pulled into her driveway.

“Vir Varma, if you pull crap like that one more time, I will choke-slam you faster than you can say the words sorry or habit again.”

He clearly didn’t want her. There was no reason for him to know how badly she wanted him.

Because Nori might have fallen, but she still had her pride.