Every good love story includes a Holi celebration.

But personally, I never felt the festival was romantic in any conventional sense. It’s loud, anarchic and someone always gets colour in their mouth. The thandai is spiked by someone who doesn’t announce it. The white clothes you wore, ironically, are destroyed within four minutes. Someone’s playlist is terrible. Someone’s playlist is perfect. It doesn’t matter. But maybe that’s the point.

Holi felt better that year.

The festivities happened on the college lawn, which had been transformed overnight into something between a fever dream and a Bollywood set that had run out of budget but not enthusiasm. There was colour everywhere – powder smeared on the walls, footprints of pink and green tracking across the concrete, clouds of dry gulal drifting through the air like slow, festive smoke. Some guy from the third floor had dragged a JBL speaker the size of a small refrigerator down four flights of stairs purely for this moment, and it was playing “Genda Phool” at a volume that suggested he felt the song had never been heard at its true potential before.

Buckets of water arced through the air with no warning. Someone had knocked thandai over the DJ’s laptop. The DJ didn’t even flinch. He just wiped the screen with his sleeve and kept going.

We were 21. High on bhang, new love and the particular invincibility of a morning when nothing is required of you except to be present.

I spotted Tara from across the lawn.

She was in the middle of a cluster of people – white kurta soaked through, face smeared pink and orange from forehead to chin, hair flying in all directions like she’d given it full permission to do whatever it wanted. She was dancing. Not the self-conscious kind, where a part of you is watching yourself from outside but the real kind, eyes half-closed, shoulders moving before the rest of you. The kind that only happens when you’ve stopped caring what it looks like and are only concerned about how it feels.

Tara was chaos. She was colour. She was the loudest, most alive thing in a very loud and (otherwise) meh place.

And she was mine.

That last thought arrived quietly, underneath everything else, settling inside my chest with the confidence of something that had always been true and was only now being acknowledged.

I don’t know how long I stood there before she found me – because as always, she did find me, with some internal radar she’d never admit to having. She turned, looked directly at me across twenty metres of crowd, colour and noise, and smiled.

She started walking over, picking up a fistful of dry pink gulal from a tray on her way without breaking stride.

Stopping in front of me, she looked at my face – still mostly uncoloured, still watching her with the expression I was apparently incapable of hiding around her.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“You’re glowing,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “I’ve literally not washed my face in four hours. I look like a Holi rangoli gone wrong.”

“You look like a glitch in the matrix.” She stared at me for a second. Then she cupped my face in both hands – her palms leaving instant streaks of pink and orange across my jaw, my cheeks, my forehead – leaned in and kissed me.

Right there. In the middle of everything.

Colours, music and the noise of 200 people celebrating around us, and she just kissed me like none of it required any announcement, like it was the most obvious next thing. It was messy, tasting like gulal and something sweet, and it carried in it all the reckless energy that builds up when two people have been circling something for long enough and finally, finally stop pretending they aren’t.

Somewhere in the crowd, someone had their phone out.

We didn’t know that until later.

The reel went up that evening. By midnight, it had 50,000 views. By the next morning, two million.

I found out the way I found out most things about Tara’s online life – through the lens of someone else’s notification. Karan texted me a screenshot at 8 am with no caption, just three fire emojis. Then another screenshot. Then a link. Then a voice note that was just him laughing for 11 seconds.

The video was 42 seconds long. Someone had caught the whole thing – Tara walking through the crowd, the gulal, the pause, the kiss – and edited it to a slowed-down version of the song that had been playing. The colours moved like watercolour in the rain. We looked, objectively, like two people in a film neither of us had auditioned for.

It ended up on meme pages. Wedding planning accounts. A Facebook group called Desi Couple Goals that I didn’t know existed and now cannot unknow. Friends from other cities texted screenshots: “Bro, you’re TRENDING??” People from school I hadn’t spoken to in three years suddenly had opinions about my love life.

Tara posted it on her grid that evening. No long caption. No hashtags. Just: *Thank God my parents are stuck on Facebook. *

I laughed when I read it. Genuinely, out loud. But underneath it, something else was happening – something quieter and more awake than I’d felt in a long time. Like the universe had taken a photograph of us and was holding it up: *Look. This is real. You made something real. *

I don’t think I’d ever been more certain of anything.

The weeks that followed felt like sunshine and static, running together at the edges.

We were, suddenly, a unit. Not just to ourselves but to everyone around us – tagged in each other’s stories, mentioned together in group chats, treated as a fixed point in the social geography of our college batch. Skincare brands slid into Tara’s DMs offering couple hampers.

Someone from a podcast asked if we’d do a segment on keeping the spark alive, which we declined, mostly because neither of us could say the phrase keeping the spark alive without laughing. The comments on the Holi reel were a whole ecosystem – half sweet, half unhinged, entirely more invested in our relationship than most people we knew personally.

Tara found it funny. She’d read the more dramatic ones aloud in a theatrical voice while eating chips. I’d pretend to be irritated and keep listening.

I didn’t mind being known as Tara’s boyfriend. I want to be clear about that. Some people would find that diminishing – to be the second name in someone else’s story. I wasn’t one of them. I was proud of it. Proud of her. Proud of the fact that this person – who had two lakh strangers paying attention to her life – had looked across a crowded lawn and kissed me.

That felt sweet.

But love is not a montage, even when it feels like one.

Time moved the way it does when you’re twentyone and in your final year, and the world outside college starts sending its first formal notices. It sprinted where it should have lingered and dragged exactly when you needed it to move.

Exams arrived, brutal and indifferent. Road trips happened in the gaps – hurried, loud, three people crammed into a car meant for two, music too loud to talk over, which was sometimes the point. Deadlines. Assignments. The particular background hum of final year anxiety that nobody fully admits to because admitting it makes it real.

I started interning at a fintech start-up in Connaught Place – three days a week, writing copy for products I only half understood, sitting in glass-walled offices that smelled like ambition and air conditioning. Tara landed a summer collaboration with an influencer agency, which meant she went from creating content in her hostel room to creating it on location, in studios, under ring lights, with teams. She started early and finished late. Some nights she’d call me from the cab home, voice hoarse, still somehow buzzing with the energy of someone who had found the thing they were built for.

We were busy. Separately, simultaneously, constantly.

But we always found our way back. That was the thing about us that season: no matter how scattered the week got, we’d land back in each other’s orbit by the end of it. Dizzy and exhausted, we’d still sit somewhere – her room, my room, the dhaba by the gate, a bench outside the library – and just decompress into each other.

It was ordinary, all of it. And it was the best thing I’d ever had.

Excerpted with permission from Days with My Red-Flag Girlfriend, Kajol Aikat, Penguin India.

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