The recurring character who was almost the main character, until he wasn’t.
Some loves don’t take center stage. They light it.
Some people enter your story as guest stars.
Others are series regulars from the pilot episode.
The Regular was cast before I even knew there was a show.
Our mothers practiced Rabindra Sangeet together every Tuesday evening. Which meant, every Tuesday evening, I was sentenced to three hours of forced friendship with a boy I actively disliked. He was eight months older, which he held over me like a tiny dictatorship. He had opinions about everything – the correct way to stack building blocks, why my coloring was substandard, how girls didn’t understand cricket.
I thought he was insufferable.
When our families moved to different cities, I felt relief. Finally, no more Tuesday tortures. No more being told I was “doing it wrong” by someone whose mother cut his hair with a bowl.
But Indian families don’t really move apart. They just relocate the drama.
He stayed in my peripheral vision; wedding cameos, vacation photos shared between our mothers, but at such a distance that I barely thought about him for years. Then high school came, and our paths crossed again. We discovered something powerful in common: we hated everything.
Our school systems. Our teachers. The music our classmates liked. The movies everyone said were “amazing.” Popular TV shows. People who thought they were deep because they listened to Indipop. The aunties who asked about our “plans.”
Shared disdain, it turns out, is a surprisingly strong foundation for friendship.
We’d write long mails dissecting terrible Bollywood movies and compete to come up with the most devastating critiques. We rated Bollywood movies on a scale of “mildly irritating” to “crimes against humanity.” We had inside jokes about people we’d never met but somehow both recognized as types we couldn’t stand.
But here’s the thing: I saw him as completely ungendered. He was just this disembodied voice of commentary, a fellow critic in the audience of life. It never occurred to me – or him, I think – that this could be anything more than mutual misanthropy.
Then, at eighteen, we ended up in the same city for college.
Different schools, but same geography. And suddenly, for the first time since those Tuesday music sessions, we were occupying the same physical space regularly.
That’s when I noticed he had… dimension.
When had his voice gotten deeper? When did he start reading books that weren’t assigned? When did he develop that dry, sideways smile when he was about to say something that would make me laugh?
When did I start looking forward to seeing him?
It was the most non-pressure relationship I’d ever had. Nobody shipped us. No aunties made meaningful eye contact when we sat together at family functions. Our mothers, who orchestrated every other aspect of our social lives, somehow never saw this as a romantic possibility.
Which meant, for once, I could just be friends with someone. Actually friends. Without scorecards or expectations or anyone calculating our compatibility in the background.
We moved from bonding over what we hated to discovering what we actually liked. Music that wasn’t terrible. Books that didn’t insult our intelligence. Movies that understood the difference between clever and trying-too-hard.
I developed what I can only call a crush.
Nothing dramatic. Just this low-level awareness that I’d rather spend time with him than with anyone else. That his opinion mattered more than it should. That I found myself crafting better stories to tell him, wanting to be funnier, sharper, more worth his attention.
But college ended. Life scattered us again. The crush faded the way college crushes do – not through heartbreak but through simple geography and the distraction of becoming adults.
I lost touch with him. Not intentionally, just… life.
Years later, in my mid-twenties, when my love life had become a full-time hobby of spectacular failure, he returned.
I was deep in the arranged marriage trenches by then, accumulating rejections like loyalty points. And somehow, he became the person I told these stories to. The one who could laugh with me instead of at me, who understood that the absurdity was the point.
He listened to the saga of The Singer who found me emotionally underqualified. The Nose Pin Incident. The Brother’s real estate pitch. The various disasters of arranged marriage meetings and introductions.
And instead of offering advice or pity, he just… got it. Got the comedy of it all. Made it bearable by making it funny.
“You realize,” he said after I told him about the boy who rejected me for not understanding “the soul of an artist,” “that you dodged having to pretend his demo CDs were good forever.”
He helped me take my arranged marriage profile photos. The ones that 99% of prospects would reject with “thanks but no thanks.” While he adjusted the lighting and told me I looked good, I was so convinced of my own undesirability that I dismissed his reassurance entirely.
“You’re just being nice,” I said.
“I’m literally never just nice,” he replied.
I didn’t believe him.
I still have that photo somewhere. And despite the spectacular 1% acceptance rate it fetched, I think I look good in it. Intelligent, in control, a slight smile like being caught mid-laughter. Someone once told me that when someone takes a photograph of you, it’s the way they see you. Maybe he saw that in me – that version of myself I couldn’t see at the time.
Looking back, I think there might have been a window there. A moment when he looked at me differently, when his commentary on my disasters came with something that felt like… investment.
But I was too busy feeling sorry for myself to notice. Too focused on the strangers who didn’t want me to see the friend who might.
A few years later, exhausted by the parade of unsuitable men, I began to harbor the idea again. That maybe he was the answer. Maybe the person who’d seen me at my most ridiculous and stayed around anyway was the person I should be with.
It started small – noticing that I saved the good stories for him, that his laugh at my disasters felt more important than sympathy from anyone else. That I found myself wondering what he thought about my life choices, not just my dating catastrophes. But I never allowed myself to feel this notion fully. There’s something both compelling and suspicious about someone who sees you and seems to like you anyway. After years of rejection, genuine interest feels almost… wrong. Like you’re missing some obvious red flag.
And after months of wrestling with this idea, just as I was starting to think “wait, maybe…” the tables turned.
Now he was the one with dating stories. Real ones, with women who seemed to have their lives figured out. And unlike my disasters, his prospects seemed… suitable. Accomplished. Put-together. The kind of women who probably had never Googled “how to respond to arranged marriage rejection” or needed coaching on small talk.
I found myself in the reverse position – listening to him describe someone’s “really interesting career in sustainable architecture” or “great sense of humor” while thinking, but do they know you think Rajinikanth movies are performance art? Do they get your references? Have they seen you be kind in the specific way you’re kind?
I was relegated to supporting character status. The friend who listened. The one who offered encouraging commentary on his romantic prospects while dying a little inside.
And that was it.
No dramatic confrontation. No missed-connection moment. No declaration that came too late.
Just the slow realization that our timing had always been wrong. When I saw him as furniture, he was furniture. When I had a crush, he was oblivious. When he might have been interested, I was too deep in my own rejection spiral to notice. When I finally realized he might be the answer, he’d moved on to his own story.
He stopped being a regular character in my show. Not through any conscious decision, just through the natural drift of adult life. Different cities again. Different priorities. Different seasons. The Rabindra Sangeet sessions that had thrown us together as children were long over – our mothers now more likely to share WhatsApp forwards than spend Tuesday evenings in practice.
I thought losing him would be devastating.
But everybody moves on.
The show continued without him. Other characters got promoted to regular status. New storylines developed.
Sometimes I catch myself looking for him in group photos from weddings we both should have attended. Wondering if he ever thinks about those college years, or the profile photo session, or that brief window when we might have been something other than what we were.
But mostly, I don’t.
He was the longest-running character in my romantic non-story. The person who was there for all the almost-beginnings and definite endings. Who saw me at my most ridiculous and somehow made it feel acceptable to be ridiculous.
And maybe that was enough.
Maybe some people aren’t meant to be the love story. Maybe they’re meant to be the constant – the one who makes all the other stories survivable by finding them funny.
The Regular played his part perfectly. He was there when I needed someone to be there, absent when the story required his absence.
Some loves burn like stars. Others are more like stage lighting – you don’t notice them until they’re gone, and then you realize they made everything else visible.
He was the light I wrote all my other disasters by. And when the show moved on without him, I kept writing.
This is part of How I Did Not Meet Your Father, a recurring series in which I mine my non-existent love life for content, gently, and with context.
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