**Winner 2024 Amby Awards**
Fiza has everything planned-medical school, a respectable future, and an engagement she never wanted. Determined to escape a loveless match, she creates a checklist to find the perfect husband her father will approve of.
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The second year of medical college brought with it community medicine. Our batch was assigned to a village a few hours from Bangalore, and we'd be staying at a local Ashram for a whole month.
The batches were organized alphabetically. I had the look on her face when the lists went up. Fiza and I were in the same batch but all of her friends from the hostel were assigned elsewhere. That familiar, anxious shadow passed over her features. I knew that look. I knew how she struggled with small talk, how she could feel utterly alone in a crowd of acquaintances.
Right then I decided that my priority for this entire trip would be her. I wouldn't let her feel excluded.
Every morning, we headed out into the community, went door to door collecting data on health issues, reviewed medications with elderly patients and conducted physical exams.
When we visited the 'Anganwadi' centers, my heart would do this funny little squeeze watching her with the children. She would kneel down to their level, talking softly as she checked their growth charts, her seriousness melting away into a warm smile that could calm the most fearful toddler before a vaccination.
But the best part was the free time. The world fell away on the trails of Kailasagiri Hills. We would hike for hours, her hand in mine, not because it was romantic, but because the paths were steep and it felt natural. We would breathe in the clean, sharp mountain air and just marvel at the world sprawling out beneath us. With her, I felt completely whole.
One evening, as the sun began to dip below the horizon, painting everything in liquid gold, we were on one of those trails. The light caught her just right, and she turned to me, a thoughtful look on her face.
"We are really yellow now," she observed, completely serious.
I burst out laughing. Only Fiza would color-code the sunset, and by extension, our relationship in that moment. It was so perfectly her.
But as my laughter faded, I wondered, not for the first time, if she ever felt the same intense, aching longing for me that I felt for her whenever we were alone like this. My past—the meaningless encounters, the drugs, the casual sex—felt like it belonged to another person, a stranger from a distant, empty life. The thought of being that intimate with anyone else now felt... wrong. Impossible.
I looked at Fiza, her profile outlined in gold. Would I ever be able to love someone else the way I loved her?
Finally, the night had settled in. The village sky was a deep velvet blanket pierced by a million glittering stars. Our whole batch had gathered under the ancient, sprawling arms of a hundred-year-old banyan tree.
I had my guitar with me and I carelessly strummed a few chords on it. Fiza sat cross-legged on the ground, her face tilted up towards the stars, and in that moment, she looked utterly ethereal. The comment she'd made earlier about the "yellow" sunset played in my mind.
