Day six, around 4:30am in the morning, the eight of us finally called it a night. By then it was just the schedule. Dinner, games, a twenty-minute argument about the rules of a game, more games, the window going grey, somebody finally saying we should probably sleep.

I woke up six hours later, made my coffee, and I was excited for work.

?
Eight days, eight people: cards, one cruel riddle, mafia, chai, 4:30am, breakfast duty, cricket with a kid who was better than us, and now memes.

That sentence has no business being true. Six hours of sleep on a weekday used to be enough to make me unpleasant to everybody who emailed me. And I had gone up there in bad shape, which I say with some embarrassment, because nothing had actually happened to me. Things that did not deserve a fight were getting one. My replies to my family had gone clipped. My friends were getting the version of me that answers in one word. I could not tell you the cause even now. Burnout, maybe. A kind of general annoying-ness. Or plain exhaustion, which is the explanation people accept without follow-up questions.

eight people, with no history

Eight days in a farm villa in a village some distance above Dharamshala. I am not naming the village. There are a few places up there with no signboards and I would like them to stay that way. That is the noble framing. The honest one is that I like having things other people do not.

I knew exactly one person going in. Aman was my trip captain in Meghalaya last December, the same community trip with strangers format, and we stayed in touch after. He runs his own thing now, traveleleven.in. Everyone else was a stranger on day one.

Here is the part that gets left out of these stories. It did not click immediately. The first two or three days were formal. Polite questions about what everyone does for work. Passing the salt. Nobody making the kind of joke you can only make once you know what a person will forgive. Ask me on day two whether this was going to fix anything and I would have said: it is a nice villa.

Those formal days, looking back, were exactly what I needed. Whatever fog I had carried up the mountain had nothing to settle on. You cannot argue with someone you have not finished introducing yourself to.

post dinner to 4am, every single night

Then it broke open, and after that it was the same shape every night. Poker, blackjack, mafia, uno, deal, dumb charades, contact, and then the brainrot ones (once everybody was too far gone for anything serious). I was the default game master for the whole week, on the sturdy democratic principle that I happened to know most of the games. I got to play too, obviously (basically government).

One of those games is the reason I am grateful those eight people are non-violent. I would clap a few times, at no particular rhythm, and then ask: listen carefully, how many horses? Somebody would say four. Somebody would count the claps and say six, confidently, like they had cracked it. The clapping was a decoy. The answer was the number of letters in the question I had just asked. Nobody got it for twenty-five minutes. Two of them stopped playing out of protest and kept watching anyway, which is its own kind of surrender. When I finally told them, they looked at me the way you look at someone who has just admitted that they vote BJP.

Mafia does something polite conversation cannot. It is lying to strangers for sport. One night it came close to violence. All eight of us were present at breakfast the next morning, and I would like that on record. Nobody who plays mafia casually is playing casually. Everyone becomes a detective, a lawyer, and a criminal inside the same ten minutes, and the accusations get more sophisticated as the game goes on.

The kitchen was the other place it happened. Breakfast and evening snacks were the shared hours, all of us in there at once, sandwiches and poha and parathe and omelettes and pakore and chai at a volume nobody was tracking. In between, we worked. And I mean WORKED. Same meetings, same tasks, nothing moved to another day, laptop open in front of a view I had done nothing to deserve. Somewhere in there we played cricket with the villa owner’s son, who was better than all of us and knew it.

the theory: what I think explains it

I have a theory and it is only a theory. Everybody I know at home carries a file on me. Years of context, the old jokes, the reliable “you always do this,” the job title I show up wearing whether or not I mention it. That file is mostly a GOOD thing. It is also the reason a bad mood at home has so many places to attach itself.

For eight days I was unfiled. Nobody there had a prior version of me to compare this one against, so there was nothing to defend and no reputation being tracked. I suspect that did more than the mountains did. The treks were good. The cafes were extremely good. But I do not think a waterfall has ever once fixed my mood for a whole week.

I still get frustrated with work, with circumstances, with the people I live with. What changed is the recovery time. It used to sit on me for days. Now it burns off in an hour or two.

Here is what contact with a few of those eight people looks like today. A meme on Instagram every two days or so, a comment under a post. That is the entire relationship, and I am completely fine with it. Which surprised me, because I have the other kind too.

I am not the only one doing this. Half the people I know met their newest friends as complete strangers, on treks, at concerts, at parties where everyone is somebody’s plus-one. That closeness is real for exactly as long as the week lasts, and we file it as a lesser version of the real thing. I think it is a different genre. Those eight days were my first proper experience of it.

Friends of ten years. In each other’s houses three days a week. Messages about nothing, almost every day. For most of my life I would have said that is the form, and the villa thing was a nice week with nice people, filed under holiday.

I do not think that is right anymore. Those eight days had as much fun, as many stories, and as much repair in them as most months of my life do, and the people were the whole reason. Judging that by whether the group chat is still alive in September is a strange way to score it. Some of it is built to last and some of it is built to be dense, and only the first kind ever gets counted. We just never developed the vocabulary, so we keep grading one-week closeness on the ten-year scale and declaring it inadequate. We were not building toward something. There was no next phase where it becomes real. It already was.

There were goodbyes, and to be fair they were the good kind. Hugs that were not performative. Addresses exchanged that people actually saved. Promises about meeting again soon, made in good faith, some of which might even survive. And then everybody went home, and a few of the relationships settled into their meme-a-week shape. The rest went quiet. Smaller than the week. Not small.

One thing did follow me back. I cook now, or at least more than I used to, because at home there is my mother, a maid, and Swiggy standing between me and any need to learn. Up there it was me and a stove and eight people waiting for breakfast. Turns out I am a talented, talented chef. Nobody has confirmed this yet tho.