Krithika, my school best friend once gave me a gift I still carry in my heart. On one of my birthdays, when we were still in school, she calculated exactly how many years, months, days, hours, and minutes I had been by then. I remember her sitting so patiently beside me, doing every calculation by hand behind the notebook, fully focused. It felt less like math and more like love expressed in numbers. It's been many years since then. She now lives in another city, and life has quietly drifted into something unrecognizable from those days when we hid fiction books inside our textbooks, hearts racing, pretending to study while actually escaping into other worlds, praying the teacher wouldn't notice. And somewhere along the way, I’ve understood something I wish I had known earlier, life only gets weirder. And it is often the very things that happened in childhood that, years later, helps one find their way back to oneself again. Yet somewhere in between, we lose them, only to re...