I Never Did Find Out Who Pam Was

So this story starts on 18th June, 2025. This was the first time I was about to live away from home, in a hostel, and

I was super excited to explore my newly gained freedom. I was born and brought up in a city and in a household where lying about my whereabouts was the easiest way to hang out with my friends (especially post-sunset). Therefore, I was really looking forward to less planning and plotting, fewer elaborate excuses, and finally being able to roam the streets without my family knowing.

However, amongst all the excitement, I secretly hoped I wouldn’t be assigned a roommate. It wasn’t because I was difficult to live with. I’ve shared a room with my sister my entire life, but that’s different. She’s five years younger than me, which means I’ve spent most of my life shamelessly bullying her into giving me the charging socket first, banning the white light from existence whenever I was in the room, and convincing her that my side of the room deserved a little more territory than hers. (I promise I’m not actually a brat.)

But a stranger would have rights, opinions, and preferences. As someone whose brain has always functioned best with a little too much order, the prospect of sharing a room with a stranger felt less like an exciting college experience and more like the forceful introduction of a variable into an otherwise stable equation.

But don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those people who spend entire afternoons tucked away in the library with noise-cancelling headphones on, nor did I eat alone at the mess while staring out of the window pretending to enjoy my own company. I had friends. Quite a lot of them, actually. I was quick to find a group with six girls and four guys, which, yes, does sound slightly excessive now that I’ve written it down.

If you’ve watched enough coming-of-age films or survived enough semesters of undergrad yourself, you’re probably expecting this to become one of those stories where ten people slowly become two because someone dates someone, someone gossips about someone else, and by the third year, everybody pretends the others don’t exist. Thankfully, this isn’t that story.

So anyway, because of a technical error by the administration, my roommate allotment was delayed for months, and I accepted this administrative incompetence with remarkable gratitude. Every time someone asked if I was still alone, I’d nod very carefully, so I wouldn’t be on the radar of any fighting roommates ready to split and hoping the empty bed in my room would harbour one of them.

216 slowly became mine. The fairy lights went up, and photographs appeared on the walls. I had a tiny duck-shaped pot with a money plant growing out of its head and a small seashell dish that held my jewellery with a collection of little objects that served no practical purpose except convincing me that 216 was home.

But a couple of months later, as the exchange students returned, the hostel ran out of rooms, and Pragya, one of the six girls in my group, had to move into mine.

I was immediately convinced we were about to ruin a perfectly good friendship. Living together seemed like the fastest way to discover all the things that make another person impossible to hang out with. What if my compulsive need to keep things arranged irritated her? What if my aggressively early bedtime became a personal inconvenience? What if she wanted the lights on when I wanted them off? I just kept thinking of all the reasons why it would never work. I eulogised a perfectly good relationship and buried the very living and alive friendship even before she opened her suitcase.

Pragya, thankfully, had no such imagination.

It became perfectly normal for Pragya and me to end up on the same bed, talking about absolutely everything until neither of us could remember how the conversation had started. I’d always imagined myself as someone who preferred a respectful amount of personal space. I wasn’t particularly fond of hugs that lasted too long or people who leaned on my shoulder for no reason. And yet there we were, somehow folded into the same blanket, arguing about professors, families, childhood memories, whether cereal counted as dinner, until sleep interrupted whichever one of us had been speaking.

I had found so much comfort and care in her. She filled my days with endless gossip and laughter. When I told her that I had applied for an exchange program and would be leaving in January, returning three months later, she was so excited that I was finally getting to live my dream of backpacking through Europe. But almost instantly, she hugged me and started crying about how lonely she’d be without me, and how incomplete 216 would feel in my absence.

As someone who has never been particularly good at expressing emotions, I simply hugged her back, letting my silence do what my words never could, while I swallowed the tears gathering like a rising tide in my throat. I couldn’t quite comprehend that someone could miss me so deeply.

Now that we’re seniors, and still sharing a room in our second year, I often find myself thinking about how little time we have left. Soon, we’ll graduate, take up high-cortisol adult jobs in different cities, and our lives will move in different directions. I won’t come back after class to find Pragya perched on the edge of her bed, waiting impatiently to tell me everything that happened that day before I’ve even had the chance to put my bag down.

So here I am, writing this while she’s lying on her bed watching Lock Up and telling me what a character Pam is. I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about, and I don’t think I need to understand the plot to know how much I love to hear her ramble.

I don’t know how much of this I’ll remember when I’m in my fifties, but I hope I never forget that, for a little while, we were twenty-somethings who found our home in each other.