Summer was settling in — thick and oppressive, pressing down on the school like a heavy curtain. The air buzzed with exams, sweaty palms, and the clatter of last-minute revisions. Even the gulmohar tree had begun to shed its fiery crown, scattering dry petals across the bench where Tushar and Amrita once sat, side by side, like punctuation marks in the same sentence.
But now, there was a silence between them — a strange, stiff kind of silence that hadn't been there before.
It had started small. A missed lunch break. A half-smile instead of a full one. Tushar would turn around in class and find Amrita looking out the window. She still waved when they passed each other in the corridor, but it felt practiced. Hollow.
He didn't understand what had gone wrong.
Then, one afternoon, he found out.
Two boys from Amrita's class were talking near the canteen, voices low but maliciously clear.
"She tells everyone they're just friends," one said. "But I saw her notebook. She wrote his name with hearts around it."
"Typical. She's obsessed with him. Poor guy doesn't even know."
Tushar felt his stomach turn. He walked away, ears burning, heart pounding. He didn't believe it. Or maybe he didn't want to believe it. He kept thinking of that day under the gulmohar, when they had shared their notebooks. Was it something he missed? Something he misunderstood?
He couldn't bring himself to ask her. So instead, he stopped waiting outside her classroom. He stopped sitting at the bench. He stopped replying to her notes.
Amrita noticed.
A week passed before she cornered him by the cycle shed, her eyes blazing.
"You've been avoiding me."
"I've just been busy," he said flatly, not meeting her gaze.
She folded her arms. "You heard something, didn't you?"
He hesitated.
"Let me guess," she continued. "Something about hearts in my journal? Something whispered by cowards too afraid to say it to my face?"
He looked up, startled.
"I didn't write those hearts for you, Tushar," she said, her voice breaking. "They were part of a poem — about how people see friendship and twist it into something else. I never thought you would believe them."
Tushar swallowed hard. Shame crawled up his spine.
"I didn't want to believe it," he murmured. "But I guess… I started wondering if maybe I was just too naive."
"You weren't naive," she said. "You were just scared. Of what people might say. Of being misunderstood. Of needing a friend too much."
A long silence stretched between them.
Finally, Amrita spoke again, softer this time. "Do you remember the first day we sat together on the bus?"
He nodded.
"You didn't ask me why I cried. You didn't demand answers. You just sat there. That's what friendship is, Tushar — it's not needing explanations all the time. It's believing in the person, not the gossip."
His eyes stung.
"I'm sorry," he said.
She gave a sad smile. "I know."
They didn't hug. They didn't fall into a dramatic reconciliation. They simply stood there, two people with a crack between them — but also with the quiet strength to mend it.
Later that evening, Tushar returned to the gulmohar tree. The bench was dusty, and a few red petals clung to the edge. He sat down and reached under the roots where they had buried the pebbles months ago.
He dug gently and pulled them out — her smooth blue one, his rough golden-brown.
He wiped them clean and placed them on the bench.
The next day, when Amrita arrived, she saw the stones waiting.
She sat beside him again.
And though they didn't speak at first, the silence wasn't cold anymore. It was healing.
Moral: Even the strongest friendships can bend under pressure — but real ones always find their way back, not by erasing the past, but by facing it