The rice had already started sticking slightly at the bottom by the time Ishaan said the bakery near the metro had become impossible after seven in the evening.
He placed a paper bag near the stove and opened the fridge without asking. He had been to the apartment enough times for that. The tetra-pack mango juice barely fit between a steel bowl and half a cucumber wrapped in newspaper.
“They’ve started acting like they invented puffs,” he said. “One paneer puff is suddenly seventy rupees because they put oregano on top.”
I asked if he still bought them anyway.
“Obviously.”
The puffs were warm enough to fog the inside of the paper bag. He took one out immediately and tore it open over the sink because the flakes kept falling.
“You made rice?”
“Yeah.”
“With what?”
“Egg curry.”
“That’s enough then.”
I cracked another egg into oil while he stood near the dining table reading the back of the juice carton like it contained legal evidence.
Outside, somebody downstairs was dragging plastic chairs across concrete. The sound came in bursts. Then stopped. Then came back louder.
Ishaan asked if the landlord had fixed the water motor.
“No.”
“He keeps saying next week?”
“Yeah.”
“He told the same thing to the tenants upstairs.”
I nodded.
The kitchen window was open just enough for cooking smell to leave slowly instead of immediately. Oil, onion, and boiled rice sat heavily in the room together. Ishaan had already finished one puff before I put plates out.
He asked if I’d read the new Spill the Tea piece about Noor yet. I told him I’d only skimmed it during lunch because somebody in the office kept calling my extension every four minutes for printer access.
“The emptiness one?”
“Yeah.”
He sat down finally.
“That series is becoming stressful,” he said. “Every person in it sounds employable and exhausted.”
I laughed once.
He pointed at the laptop near the water bottle.
“You still keep fifteen tabs open?”
“One of them is useful eventually.”
“The Alex one was bad.”
“Bad how?”
He thought for a second.
“Not badly written. Just… I didn’t like how normal it felt.”
I turned the flame lower under the curry.
The conversation drifted after that in the way familiar conversations do when nobody is trying to arrive anywhere specific. One person from college had moved to Bangalore and already started speaking about the city like he personally negotiated the weather there. Somebody else had become extremely interested in running marathons despite previously refusing stairs.
Ishaan ate another puff while talking.
Crumbs kept collecting near his wrist.
At some point Kabir entered the conversation without introduction.
Not intentionally. Just through logistics.
“I ran into Kabir near Khan Market last week,” Ishaan said. “He was taking somebody to that café with the terrible chairs.”
“The expensive one?”
“They all become expensive once lighting improves.”
I put the curry into a bowl.
“He still living in that apartment?”
“Which one?”
“The green kitchen one.”
Ishaan looked up immediately.
Then he frowned slightly.
“No. Wait.”
He rubbed his forehead once.
“I don’t actually think that was his apartment.”
The sentence sat there for a moment longer than either of us expected.
Then he laughed.
“I mean he stayed there,” he said. “Technically.”
I carried the bowls over to the table. He moved the juice aside to make space.
“What does technically mean?”
“I found out later it was an Airbnb.”
“For how long?”
“A week maybe? Maybe less.”
“But he posted from there for months.”
“Yeah.”
He said it casually enough that the conversation could still move away from it if it wanted to.
I served rice onto both plates.
The egg curry had become thicker than intended. Ishaan broke half an egg with the side of his spoon and kept speaking before swallowing.
“The funny part is nobody even asked him directly. We all just assumed it was his place because he kept hosting there.”
“You went there?”
“Twice.”
“How’d you find out?”
“Rohit mentioned it accidentally later.”
He shrugged.
“It’s not even serious. That’s the weird thing.”
The downstairs chairs scraped loudly again.
Ishaan waited for the sound to stop before continuing.
I got up to bring the cucumbers over.
Salt had already started dissolving into water at the bottom of the steel plate.
“He said the apartment belonged to a friend eventually,” Ishaan said. “Which maybe counts as clarification, I guess.”
“You think he wanted people to assume it was his?”
“I mean…” He looked down at the rice. “Why else post the same balcony six times?”
The curry was hotter than expected. He reached for juice immediately afterward.
For a while the conversation returned to easier things. Office cafeterias. Whether cafés had started designing interiors only for photographs. Somebody from college who now posted black-and-white film pictures of oranges and cigarettes as if he’d discovered sadness personally.
Ishaan laughed at most things normally.
But every few minutes he circled back toward Kabir without fully meaning to.
“He also told Naman he was consulting for a startup.”
“Isn’t he?”
“I thought he was doing freelance branding.”
“Aren’t those the same thing now?”
“That’s what he says.”
Ishaan smiled after saying it, though not at me.
More like at the table itself.
I noticed he had stopped eating halfway through the rice without seeming aware of it.
On the laptop screen beside us, another Spill the Tea tab was still open from earlier. The Anaya story. Ishaan glanced at it briefly and then away again.
“You know what the problem is?” he said.
“What?”
“He tells every version calmly.”
Ishaan pushed the rice around for a while before taking another bite.
“You remember that story he used to tell about his school?” he asked.
“The boarding school one?”
“See. That’s the thing. Even you know it.”
He smiled a little when he said it, but there was strain sitting underneath the smile now, something held too tightly to pass as casual for long.
“He told me once he hated that school because everybody there acted rich even when they weren’t. Then three months later he told somebody else his parents couldn’t afford to send him there after tenth, so he had to leave. Then later he said he never stayed in the hostel at all because he lived nearby.”
“Maybe all three are true.”
“Maybe.” He nodded immediately. “Exactly. Every version sounds possible.”
I handed him the bowl of curry again. He took more without looking up.
“That’s what’s making me feel strange about it now. Nothing sounds impossible. If he was lying badly, I think I’d actually feel better.”
The fan in the hall clicked once every rotation. It had been doing that for weeks. Ishaan noticed it halfway through another sentence and lost track of what he was saying.
“Do you ever get that thing where you suddenly can’t place when somebody told you something?” he asked. “Like the memory exists properly, but the person inside it keeps shifting slightly.”
I sat back down.
He continued before I answered.
“Last month we were at dinner with Tanya and her boyfriend, and Kabir started talking about this branding campaign he’d apparently worked on for some luxury hotel chain. Very detailed story. Specific meetings, client problems, all that. Tanya was impressed because she works in marketing and she started asking proper questions. Not aggressively. Just normal questions. And he answered everything. Smoothly.”
“So?”
“So two weeks later I was with him somewhere else and he mentioned he’d never actually worked directly with hospitality clients because he finds that industry fake.”
I looked at him.
“He forgot?”
“That’s what I thought initially.”
“And now?”
Ishaan exhaled slowly through his nose.
“Now I think he adjusts stories depending on the room and then forgets where he used which version.”
He tore a piece of egg with his spoon.
“I keep trying to calculate whether this is normal human behavior and I’m overthinking it,” he said. “Because technically everybody edits themselves a little. You don’t tell your office friends the same stories you tell school friends. People exaggerate. People simplify things.”
“Yeah.”
“But with him it’s becoming difficult to locate the floor under it.”
He laughed once after saying that.
Too soon again.
“You know what the stupid part is? He’s actually pleasant to be around. That’s what makes this annoying.”
“How long have you known him now?”
“Five years? Maybe six.”
“That’s close enough to notice patterns.”
“Exactly. And now old conversations keep returning in the wrong order.”
He drank more juice directly from the glass this time instead of using the straw he’d originally put in.
“Like there was this phase where he kept saying his uncle owned restaurants in Dubai. Not bragging. It would just enter stories randomly. Then one night he got drunk enough to admit he’d never even been to Dubai. Which is fine. Who cares. But then why build the uncle?”
“The uncle?”
“Yeah. The restaurant uncle.”
I laughed despite myself.
“He had entire opinions attached to this fictional uncle. Import-export issues. Staffing problems. Olive oil quality.” Ishaan shook his head slowly. “Who invents supply chain frustrations for atmosphere?”
“That’s specific.”
“Exactly.”
For the first time that evening, he sounded genuinely irritated.
Irritated in the way people get when they discover paperwork errors after already filing everything away neatly in their heads.
He pointed his spoon toward me slightly.
“And the strange part is, if you confront him directly, he never fully denies anything. He just edits backward.”
“What does that mean?”
“He says things like, ‘No, I meant technically,’ or ‘That was during another phase,’ or ‘You probably misunderstood what I was saying.’ And because the original lie was never huge, suddenly you look unreasonable for remembering it carefully.”
I got up to bring more water from the kitchen.
Behind me he kept talking.
“Once he posted pictures from this coworking space for maybe four months straight. Industrial lights, exposed brick walls, expensive coffee machine, the whole startup aesthetic package. Everybody assumed he worked there permanently. Then later I found out it was just a day-pass place near his actual office.”
I came back with the bottle.
“He wanted people to think he worked there?”
“I don’t even know if he consciously wanted that.” Ishaan frowned. “That’s the part I can’t explain properly. It’s almost like he leaves suggestions lying around and lets people complete the fantasy themselves.”
He stopped there and looked briefly embarrassed by the word fantasy.
“I know how this sounds.”
“No, I get it.”
“Do you?” He leaned forward slightly, then caught himself and sat back again. “Because I genuinely can’t tell anymore whether Kabir is dishonest or just socially adaptive to a pathological level.”
“That sounds like something from LinkedIn.”
“That’s because LinkedIn has damaged everybody’s vocabulary.”
We both laughed at that one.
The tension loosened for maybe thirty seconds.
Then Ishaan said, “I started checking old photos last week.”
I looked at him.
“Not in a creepy way,” he said immediately. “Okay maybe slightly creepy. But things stopped matching suddenly. Different stories attached to the same trip. Different people cropped out depending on who he was talking to. A birthday dinner he described as spontaneous even though the decorations in the photo literally had his name printed on them.”
He rubbed his forehead again.
“And there are so many tiny things now. The apartment. The hotel campaign. The school stories. The restaurant uncle. He claimed he hated wine once because it tasted medicinal, then spent one entire evening explaining tannins to somebody he was flirting with. He said he’d grown up moving cities constantly, but then another time he talked about having the same barber since childhood. I don’t even care about the facts individually anymore. It’s just…” He stopped abruptly. “Do you want another egg before I finish everything?”
I passed him the bowl.
Neither of us spoke while he served himself.
“I think what’s bothering me is that I don’t know when he’s performing and when he’s tired enough to stop.”
Ishaan dropped half a cucumber slice back onto the plate after realizing he had already salted it once.
“It’s not even that he changes completely,” he said. “That would be easier to notice.”
The ceiling light above the table flickered once and steadied itself again. He watched it for a second before continuing.
“He keeps the outline the same. That’s what works. Same childhood. Same jobs. Same stories. Just adjusted slightly depending on who’s listening.”
“Adjusted how?”
He thought about it.
“If somebody’s rich, he sounds less impressed by money. If somebody’s creative, suddenly he almost went to film school. If somebody works out, he used to run. If somebody drinks wine, he knows vineyards. Nothing huge. Just enough so conversations move faster around him.”
I scraped curry from the smaller pan into my plate.
“He sounds observant.”
“He is observant,” Ishaan said quickly. “That’s the annoying part. He remembers details about people better than almost anyone I know.”
He sat back for the first time that evening.
“Like you’ll mention something once and three months later he’ll ask about it casually. Your mother’s surgery. Some exam your cousin was giving. Tiny things.”
“That’s rare.”
“Yeah.”
The word came out flat.
Outside, a scooter stopped near the building gate and somebody shouted up toward another apartment for keys. Neither of us looked outside.
Ishaan stared at the table while speaking again.
“I think that’s why nobody questions him. Because he pays attention properly. People trust attention.”
I didn’t answer.
“He came with me to buy shoes once,” he said suddenly. “I’d forgotten that until yesterday.”
“Why yesterday?”
“Because I saw the shoes.”
He laughed softly at himself.
“They’re ugly now. Completely finished. But I remembered that entire evening because of them.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. That’s the problem.”
He wiped curry from his thumb onto the side of his plate absentmindedly.
“We spent four hours walking around Select Citywalk because he said buying shoes online ruins standards. He talked to salespeople like he knew them personally. Told me which brands were overpriced. Made fun of one guy’s blazer for having fake stitching on the sleeves.”
“Did he know what he was talking about?”
“I honestly still can’t tell.”
That made both of us laugh again, though Ishaan stopped first.
“He carried himself like somebody who’d grown up around expensive things. Not flashy. Comfortable. Like all those stores were normal to him.” He paused. “Then six months later he mentioned he’d never owned more than two pairs of shoes at once growing up.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Both things can exist together.” He looked frustrated immediately after saying it. “See what I mean? Every time I think I’ve caught him in something, there’s still enough space left for explanation.”
I started gathering the empty plates near the sink.
He got up automatically to help and then stood there holding two spoons while I rinsed dishes.
“For a while I thought maybe he was just insecure,” he said. “But insecure people usually overcompensate in obvious directions. More money. More success. Better connections. Kabir lies sideways.”
“Sideways?”
“He edits texture.”
The sentence sat oddly between us.
He noticed it too.
“That sounded insane.”
“A little.”
He smiled briefly.
“What I mean is…” He searched for it with his hands now, fingers opening and closing slightly in the air. “Okay. Imagine two people telling the same story about going to Goa. One says they stayed near the beach and drank too much. Kabir tells the exact same story but suddenly there’s a friend who works in music licensing, and this tiny bar nobody knows about, and some old Portuguese house they ended up at because somebody’s cousin knew the owner. The story becomes socially smoother somehow.”
“You think those details are fake?”
“I think some of them are borrowed.”
“Borrowed from where?”
“Other people. Other conversations. Instagram maybe. I don’t know.”
He placed the spoons down and immediately picked them up again because they were still wet.
“The weirdest part is watching it happen live once you notice it,” he said. “Like last week we met this girl at a birthday thing. Architect. Within twenty minutes Kabir had suddenly remembered that phase where he was obsessed with brutalist buildings.”
“Was he?”
“He texted me during college asking if brutalism was a skincare brand.”
I laughed hard enough that he finally did too, properly this time.
But the laughter disappeared quickly.
“He looked completely sincere while talking to her,” Ishaan said. “That’s what’s disturbing. There’s never a visible moment where he decides to lie.”
I rinsed the last plate and left it near the stove to dry.
“Maybe he just wants people to like him.”
“Everybody wants that.”
“Some people work harder for it.”
Then he shook his head.
“No. This feels different.”
“How?”
Ishaan pulled his chair back and sat down again slowly.
“When normal people exaggerate, you can usually see the original version underneath somewhere. With Kabir…” He stopped.
The downstairs gate slammed shut.
“With him what?”
“I don’t know where the real version begins anymore.”
Ishaan reached for another cucumber slice without looking at the plate and accidentally picked up two together. He ate both anyway.
Then, after a long silence, he said:
“The stupid thing is I still know he’d show up if my car broke down at two in the morning.”
“There was this one night after Aman’s birthday,” Ishaan said, pushing his plate away a little because he had eaten too quickly. “Not the recent one. The one at that restaurant in Green Park where the speakers kept making that cracking sound.”
“I remember the photos.”
“Exactly. Everybody left early because Aman’s girlfriend started crying in the parking lot over something stupid involving cigarettes, I think. I stayed back because my cab price had surged to some criminal amount and Kabir stayed too.”
He paused while I carried the rice cooker to the counter.
“The staff had started cleaning around us already. Chairs upside down on tables. That smell restaurants get after closing. Cleaning liquid and old oil together.” He rubbed his thumb against the edge of the spoon absentmindedly. “One waiter dropped an entire tray of glasses near the kitchen entrance. Not dramatically. Just tired. You could tell he was waiting to get shouted at.”
“And?”
“Kabir immediately got up and started helping him clean. Properly helping. Picking up glass pieces, carrying crates, arguing with the manager because apparently the guy had already worked a double shift.” Ishaan looked down at the tablecloth for a moment. “Nobody important was there anymore. No girls to impress. No audience. Aman himself had gone downstairs.”
I sat down again.
“He stayed almost forty minutes after everybody left,” Ishaan continued. “Then he dropped me home because my cab still wasn’t affordable and spent the entire drive making fun of people who suddenly become emotional after tequila.”
“That sounds normal.”
“Exactly.”
He said it softly, almost irritated by the word.
“That’s what keeps interrupting everything else.”
The room had grown warmer from the cooking. Ishaan rolled his sleeves once, then immediately rolled one back down because they weren’t even.
“I can’t place him properly anymore,” he said. “That’s the actual issue. If somebody lies consistently and they’re otherwise selfish or cruel, your brain sorts it out quickly. Fine. This person performs. This person manipulates. Done.”
“But Kabir doesn’t fit that cleanly.”
“No.” He gave a short laugh. “Kabir remembers birthdays better than people’s siblings do. He once spent two hours helping me rewrite my CV because he said my formatting looked defeated.”
“That sounds like something he’d say.”
“Yeah. And he was right, unfortunately.”
I smiled.
“He notices things,” Ishaan continued. “Like proper things. Not fake observant-person things. You’ll mention your mother has a knee problem once and three months later he’ll ask whether she’s still avoiding stairs. Who does that casually?”
“People who listen.”
“Exactly. So then what am I supposed to do with all the other stuff?”
I started peeling an orange slowly because the conversation had stopped moving unless one of us touched something.
“He introduced me to somebody using my own story last month,” Ishaan said suddenly.
I looked up.
“At that house party in Gurgaon. The architect’s place with the blue bathroom.”
“The one where somebody spilled beer on the speaker?”
“Yeah.” He pointed once. “See, you remember real details. That’s healthy.”
“You’re avoiding the point.”
“I know.”
He took a breath and tried again.
“There was this startup guy there. One of those men who wear expensive sneakers with formal trousers and keep saying things like ‘scale’ while holding drinks incorrectly. Kabir was talking to him when I joined them. Halfway through the conversation, Kabir starts telling this story about getting stranded in Jaipur during college because of a transport strike.”
“That happened to you.”
“Exactly.”
He leaned back slightly now, eyes fixed somewhere near the kitchen instead of on me.
“And for maybe twenty seconds, he tells it entirely in first person. What he ate, where he slept, how hot the station was. Very smooth. Very natural.” Ishaan rubbed his forehead once. “Then suddenly he switches and goes, ‘Actually this happened to a friend of mine.’ Just like that. Mid-sentence.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. We ordered fries afterwards.”
I laughed despite myself.
“No, but that’s genuinely how these situations keep ending,” he said. “There’s never enough damage in a single moment to justify reacting properly. You just keep absorbing tiny corrections forever.”
He reached for another orange slice.
“I spent two full days afterward trying to decide whether he’d accidentally absorbed my story into his own memory somehow, or whether he noticed me standing there and corrected himself because he knew I’d catch it.” He shook his head slowly. “And both explanations somehow feel believable.”
“I think that’s the exhausting part,” he said. “Nothing collapses completely. Everything just shifts two inches to the left.”
I kept rinsing the plate for longer than necessary because the conversation had reached that point where answering too quickly would sound like taking a position.
Behind me, Ishaan shifted in his chair and said, “You know what’s strange? If this had happened with almost anyone else from college, I would’ve stopped meeting them and moved on with my life. People do that all the time. Somebody becomes exhausting, or dishonest, or embarrassing in some manageable adult way, and eventually the group chat goes silent around them.”
I turned the tap off and came back to the table.
“But with Kabir, it never becomes manageable enough to classify,” he continued. “Every time I think I’ve settled on what kind of person he is, he does something that ruins the conclusion.”
“Maybe you’re trying too hard to make him consistent.”
“That’s the problem though. Friendship kind of depends on consistency.” He looked up at me. “Not perfection. Just continuity. You need to feel like the person sitting across from you today is connected somehow to the person you spoke to six months ago.”
Ishaan rested both elbows on the table and rubbed his eyes.
“There was this period last year when he kept talking about buying property,” he said. “Not bragging exactly. More like… positioning himself near the idea of it. He’d mention brokers casually. Talk about investment timing. Once he spent twenty minutes explaining why everybody our age should stop renting emotionally.”
“That sounds like something he rehearsed in front of a mirror.”
He laughed properly at that.
“Yes. Exactly. It sounded borrowed from some finance podcast hosted by divorced men.”
I smiled.
“But then three months later I found out he’d been late on rent for almost half the year.” Ishaan shook his head slowly. “And again, being broke isn’t the issue. Everybody we know is one medical emergency away from becoming spiritual. What unsettled me was the performance around it. Why construct this version of yourself who gives real-estate advice when your electricity bill is overdue?”
“Did you ask him?”
“No.” He looked genuinely surprised by the idea. “How do you even ask that without sounding insane?”
“You could’ve said you were confused.”
“Yeah, but confused by what exactly? That’s where it slips away every time.” He leaned back and looked toward the kitchen. “If somebody tells one huge lie, confrontation makes sense. There’s an event. A shape. But Kabir operates in adjustments. Tiny edits. Better angles.”
“Do you remember that old photo he used everywhere for years?” he asked suddenly. “The one in the white shirt on some balcony?”
“The black-and-white picture?”
“Yeah. Everybody thought that balcony belonged to his apartment. He let people think that for almost a year. Then one night he casually mentioned it was an Airbnb he’d rented during his birthday week because he wanted to ‘reset his energy.’”
I laughed before I could stop myself.
“Exactly,” Ishaan said, pointing at me immediately. “That’s the reaction every single thing produces. You laugh first because the scale is so ridiculous compared to the effort involved.”
“But it stayed with you.”
“Yeah.”
“It stayed because after that, old memories started behaving differently in my head.” He looked down at the table again. “I started remembering conversations and wondering which details had been placed there intentionally. Like when he used to say he’d grown up around diplomats because of family connections. Or when he suddenly knew obscure wines around certain people. Or that phase where he implied he’d dated someone from a famous family without technically saying it.”
I sat back down slowly.
“The strange thing is none of these lies even improve his life materially,” Ishaan continued. “He’s still stressed about money. Still switching jobs. Still borrowing jackets before weddings. Nothing actually changes.” He frowned slightly. “So sometimes I think maybe he just likes the feeling of entering rooms already edited.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It sounds lonely to me now,” he admitted after a pause. “At first I thought it was confidence. You know, one of those people who can talk to anyone and adapt easily. But the longer I’ve known him, the more it feels like he’s constantly adjusting himself half an inch depending on who’s in front of him.”
He looked embarrassed immediately after saying it, like he’d crossed into a level of honesty he hadn’t planned on reaching tonight.
“And the stupid thing is,” he continued more softly, “I think I helped him do it.”
“How?”
“By rewarding it.” He gave a small shrug. “Everybody did. Conversations became smoother around him. Dinners got less awkward. He always knew what story to tell, what opinion to have, how to make people feel included quickly. You stop questioning somebody when they improve the social atmosphere.”
I thought about Kabir then, not as a clear person but as accumulated moments. Somebody laughing too easily at expensive restaurants. Somebody remembering names correctly. Somebody borrowing certainty from the room around him.
Ishaan watched my face for a second and said, “See? Even now you’re trying to organize him.”
“I’m trying to picture him properly.”
“That’s exactly what stopped working for me.” He smiled, though there wasn’t much humor left in it now. “Every version sounds convincing while you’re inside it.”
He got up finally and carried his own plate to the sink before I could reach for it.
“That’s another thing he does,” Ishaan said over the sound of running water. “He notices domestic details immediately. Who cooked. Who cleaned last time. Which couples are irritated with each other before they admit it publicly. He walks into a room and starts arranging himself around people within minutes.”
“You make it sound strategic.”
“I don’t think it starts strategically.” He dried his hands on the towel hanging near the fridge. “That’s what’s confusing me now. I genuinely think he believes most versions of himself while he’s saying them.”
I opened the fridge to put the leftover curry away.
Ishaan stood near the dining table looking at the empty juice carton.
“There was this evening at his place,” he said, then corrected himself with a quick glance toward me. “Sorry. Not his place.”
I didn’t interrupt.
“It was during that Airbnb phase. He’d invited six or seven people over. Music low, candles everywhere like he was being sponsored by Pinterest. At one point somebody asked where he’d bought the dining table from.” Ishaan smiled despite himself. “And Kabir immediately launched into this whole story about finding it in a market in Pondicherry while travelling alone after a breakup.”
“Was that fake too?”
“I found the exact table on Urban Ladder two weeks later.”
“That’s bleak.”
“See, but even then he wasn’t lying cleanly.” Ishaan sat back down. “Because he had gone to Pondicherry after a breakup once. I remember the photos. He just attached the table to the trip afterward because it sounded better together.”
I looked at him for a moment.
“You sound less angry than tired.”
“That’s because anger needs certainty.” He rested his palms flat against the table. “If somebody steals from you, cheats on you, humiliates you publicly, your reaction arrives properly. This thing just keeps dissolving every time I try to hold it still.”
The kitchen smelled faintly sweet now from the orange peels left open near the plates.
“I think I noticed it fully for the first time around New Year’s,” he continued. “We were at this rooftop party in Defence Colony. Somebody asked Kabir how he knew so many people there, and he said he’d gone to school with the host’s cousin in Dehradun.”
“You checked later?”
“I didn’t need to. An hour later he introduced the same person to somebody else and said they’d met through startup networking.”
“And nobody caught it?”
He looked at me carefully before answering.
“That’s when I started wondering if people catch these things all the time and simply decide they’re socially inconvenient to mention.”
The question stayed between us longer than either of us spoke afterward.
I leaned back in my chair.
“You think everyone’s pretending not to notice?”
“I think maybe everybody enjoys the performance a little.” He rubbed the back of his neck slowly. “Kabir makes ordinary situations feel arranged properly. Restaurants become stories. Random people become characters. Even bad nights somehow leave behind good photographs.”
“That still doesn’t explain why it bothers you this much.”
“I know.” He nodded immediately. “I’ve been trying to figure that out too.”
He looked toward the kitchen counter where the paper bag from the bakery had collapsed inward on itself.
“I think part of it is embarrassment,” he admitted. “Not because he lied. Because I never noticed. Some of these stories I repeated to other people confidently. I introduced him to my cousins once as someone who’d worked on luxury hotel campaigns.” He laughed at himself. “Imagine finding out you’ve been doing unpaid PR for a person accidentally.”
“That’s human.”
“Maybe. But it also makes me question what exactly I liked about him in the first place.”
The sentence came out more vulnerable than anything he had said all evening, and he seemed aware of it immediately afterward.
“I don’t mean I only liked him because of the stories,” he clarified quickly. “That would make me sound shallow.”
“You’re trying very hard not to sound cruel tonight.”
“Because I don’t think he’s cruel.” Ishaan sat down again more slowly this time. “That’s what keeps interrupting the narrative every time I almost settle on one.”
He looked tired suddenly. Not physically. More like someone who had been mentally carrying too many incompatible versions of the same memory.
“You know what the worst part is?” he asked.
“What?”
“I still look forward to seeing him.”
I looked at him for a second after he said it because it was the first sentence all evening that sounded uncomplicated.
Just true.
Ishaan noticed my expression immediately and gave a short laugh.
“See? That reaction is exactly why I avoided saying that part earlier.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes everything else sound less serious.”
“It doesn’t.”
“It does a little.” He rubbed both hands together slowly. “If I genuinely thought he was dangerous or malicious, this would become easier. Instead I keep ending up in situations where he’s still the person making sure everyone got home safely.”
The building lights outside dimmed briefly and returned. Neither of us moved.
“He called me at three in the morning once because he thought I sounded strange over text,” Ishaan continued. “I hadn’t even said anything dramatic. I’d just replied with one-word answers for a few hours because work was horrible that week.”
“And he noticed.”
“Yeah. He stayed on the call until I fell asleep.” Ishaan shook his head once. “How am I supposed to fit that person beside someone who casually invents a restaurant-owning uncle for conversational texture?”
I laughed before stopping myself.
“No seriously,” he said. “That’s what this keeps doing to my brain. One memory cancels another memory before either fully settles.”
I got up to clear the orange peels finally.
Behind me, Ishaan continued speaking like he was no longer trying to organize the story for me and had started talking mostly to himself.
“There was this awful phase around August where I became hyperaware every time he started telling a story in public.” He looked embarrassed saying it. “I’d actually sit there waiting to see which details changed depending on the audience.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It was horrible.” He smiled faintly. “Especially because sometimes nothing changed at all and then I’d feel guilty afterward for watching him like that.”
I threw the peels into the bin and came back.
“But then there were nights where he’d contradict himself within hours.” Ishaan leaned forward again. “Once at dinner he told somebody he’d stopped talking to his father years ago because they had a terrible relationship. Same night, maybe forty minutes later, he’s showing another person old WhatsApp voice notes from his dad joking about cricket.”
“Did anyone react?”
“No. Because both conversations happened in separate corners of the room.” He looked down at his hands. “That’s another thing. His life only fully breaks if you combine all the versions together.”
The sentence sat heavily between us.
“And maybe nobody’s supposed to combine them,” he added after a moment.
I didn’t answer.
He looked toward the kitchen again.
“You know what finally pushed me into talking about this tonight?” he asked.
“What?”
“I met someone last week who knows him from a completely different part of his life.”
“And?”
“She described him like he was an entirely different person.”
He waited a second before continuing.
“She said Kabir used to pretend he hated parties. Said he was difficult to reach, always talking about wanting to move somewhere remote and write.” Ishaan smiled weakly. “I almost laughed in her face. This is the same man who once organized a birthday dinner with individual name cards because he thought seating affects energy.”
“That’s specific.”
“Exactly.” He pointed at me immediately. “Everything with him is weirdly specific. That’s why it works.”
I sat back slowly.
“What did she say after that?”
“She showed me old pictures.” His expression changed slightly then, not dramatic but unsettled in a more permanent way. “And for the first time I realized he’d probably been doing this long before any of us met him.”
“He looked different in the photos,” Ishaan continued. “Not physically. Just... flatter somehow. Less arranged.” He searched for the word carefully this time. “Like someone before branding.”
I couldn’t help laughing at that.
“I know, it sounds terrible,” he said quickly. “But that’s genuinely what it felt like. Like he slowly learned which versions of himself people responded to best and kept refining from there.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know if he remembers the earlier versions either.”
He said it softly enough that I almost missed it.
Then, after a pause:
“And I think that scares me more than the lying.”
Ishaan stood up halfway through saying it, as if movement might reduce the weight of the thought once it entered the room.
Instead, he wandered into the kitchen, opened the fridge, stared at the shelves without touching anything, and closed it again.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” he asked from there.
“What?”
“How tiring it must be.”
The sentence surprised me more than anything else he’d said all evening.
He came back carrying nothing and sat down again.
“Not morally tiring,” he clarified. “Just physically. Logistically. Imagine remembering twenty slightly different versions of yourself all the time.”
“You think he remembers them consciously?”
“I don’t know anymore.” He rubbed his palms against his jeans slowly. “At first I thought he was manipulating people very deliberately. Then I thought maybe he was insecure. Now I honestly think he enters conversations and becomes whoever keeps the interaction moving smoothly.”
“That still sounds deliberate.”
“Does it?” He looked at me carefully. “You know how some people automatically change accents depending on who they’re talking to?”
“Yeah.”
“I think Kabir does that with identity.”
The thing about Ishaan was that once he reached a thought honestly, he didn’t decorate it afterward. He circled it a little, maybe. Softened the edges. But he didn’t perform certainty. That was probably why this whole situation had unsettled him so deeply. He moved through friendships assuming continuity existed underneath people even when their moods changed.
Kabir, apparently, did not.
“There was this horrible moment last week,” Ishaan said, looking at the table instead of me now. “I was with him and two people from his office. One of them mentioned some expensive restaurant in Bombay, and Kabir immediately started talking about the chef like they’d met personally.”
“And had they?”
“I checked later because I’ve become a suspicious loser apparently.” He smiled without humor. “The chef had done one public event Kabir attended three years ago.”
“That’s not exactly meeting.”
“Exactly. But he says these things with such calm proportions. That’s what keeps working. If he exaggerated bigger, people would notice. He stays within believable distance of everything.”
I thought about that for a moment.
“He wants proximity to certain kinds of lives.”
Ishaan looked up quickly.
“Yes.” He said it almost with relief. “That’s exactly it.”
He leaned forward again, elbows on the table.
“And once I noticed that, I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere. He never claims the center directly. He just positions himself close enough to absorb some of the atmosphere.” Ishaan paused. “A rich cousin. A founder friend. A temporary apartment presented slightly ambiguously. A project he ‘consulted on.’”
“And people complete the picture themselves.”
“Because everybody wants coherent characters,” he said. “We meet someone twice and immediately start building a stable version of them in our heads.”
The paper bag from the bakery had tipped sideways now, grease darkening the bottom in uneven circles.
Ishaan looked exhausted suddenly, not from talking but from having carried observation too long without saying it aloud.
“I think I’m angry at myself too,” he admitted. “Because if I’m honest, I liked introducing him to people.”
“Why?”
“He was easy socially. You know those people who can enter almost any room and lower the awkwardness within ten minutes?” Ishaan smiled faintly. “Birthdays became better once he arrived. Dinners became louder. Nobody sat checking exits mentally.”
“That matters.”
“Yeah. It does.”
Then he said, almost reluctantly, “And I think part of me enjoyed being near somebody who always seemed slightly more assembled than everybody else.”
There it was finally.
Just the relief of proximity to certainty.
Ishaan noticed I hadn’t interrupted and continued more slowly now.
“You know what the worst memory is?” he asked.
“What?”
“The first time we became close.”
His expression changed before he even explained it. Softer somehow. More embarrassed.
“It was after this terrible New Year’s party years ago. Everybody had left except us because rain started suddenly and cabs disappeared.” He smiled a little at the memory despite himself. “We ended up sitting under one of those ugly plastic restaurant awnings at four in the morning eating cold fries.”
“And?”
“He talked for hours that night. Properly talked. About feeling behind everyone else financially. About pretending to understand wine menus during work dinners. About being scared people would eventually notice he didn’t come from the kind of background they assumed.”
Ishaan stopped there.
The silence afterward felt different from the earlier ones. Less analytical. More personal.
“That sounds honest.”
“It did.” He nodded slowly. “At the time, it actually made me trust him more because it felt unusually unguarded.”
“And now you think even that was constructed?”
“That’s what I can’t figure out.”
His voice dropped lower then, almost careful.
“Because either he was telling the truth that night and everything afterward slowly became performance...” He paused. “Or he knew exactly what kind of honesty would make people attached to him.”
Neither of us spoke for a while after that.
The question sat there untouched between the plates and the empty glasses and the remains of dinner, too uncomfortable to examine directly.
“I still don’t know which possibility is worse.”
I started stacking the plates again mostly because the table looked too exposed with everything left there untouched.
Ishaan watched me for a moment before speaking.
“You know the strange thing?” he said. “If this conversation happened a year ago, I would’ve defended him much more aggressively.”
“You’re still defending him.”
“I know.” He smiled tiredly. “But earlier I would’ve turned this entire thing into a joke by now. I would’ve said everybody exaggerates, everybody performs socially, nobody is fully authentic all the time. Which is still true, probably.”
“But?”
“But now I keep remembering moments that felt real to me specifically.”
The word specifically mattered there.
He noticed that I noticed.
“That sounds self-centered when I say it out loud,” he admitted. “Like I’m upset because I thought I had access to some private, original version of him.”
“You probably did think that.”
“Yeah.” He looked down at the table again. “I think most close friendships secretly depend on that illusion.”
I carried the plates into the kitchen and could hear him continue speaking behind me, his voice slightly louder now so it would reach through the running tap.
“There’s always a point in friendship where you stop believing the public version is the whole person. You start thinking, okay, this is who they are with everyone else, but I know the actual structure underneath.”
I rinsed the curry bowl carefully because oil had settled thickly around the edges.
“With Kabir,” Ishaan continued, “I can’t tell whether the private version was also curated for me.”
I came back and sat down again.
He leaned back in the chair, stretching one leg out slightly under the table.
“Do you remember that café near SDA where he used to know everybody?” he asked.
“The one with terrible coffee and expensive lamps?”
“Yeah. He practically lived there for six months. Staff knew his order. People waved at him constantly. He’d walk in and somehow immediately become part of three different conversations.”
“That sounds like him.”
“It really did.” Ishaan laughed softly. “I used to think he was just unusually social. Then later one of the baristas told me Kabir had spent his entire first month there learning everybody’s names before he started acting familiar.”
“That’s not necessarily fake.”
“No. It’s actually kind of smart.” He paused. “But who studies a room that carefully before entering it?”
The question lingered longer than he probably intended.
Ishaan rubbed his jaw once.
“I’ve started replaying old evenings differently now,” he admitted. “Not because I think every single thing was false. Honestly, I think that would almost be comforting at this point. At least then there’d be a clean answer.”
“But there isn’t.”
“No.” He smiled faintly. “There’s just this growing feeling that Kabir was always editing in real time while the rest of us were improvising badly.”
The sentence hung there for a second.
Then he laughed at himself.
“That sounded more dramatic than I meant it to.”
“It sounded accurate.”
He looked at me carefully after that, almost suspiciously.
“You’ve met people like this too, haven’t you?”
“A few.”
“And?”
I took longer answering than he expected.
“I think some people become fluent in being liked before they become comfortable being known.”
He stayed very still after I said that.
Just still in the way people become when a sentence lands too close to something they were already circling internally.
After a while he said, “That sounds exhausting to maintain.”
“It probably becomes automatic eventually.”
“Yeah.”
He stared at the folded paper bag from the bakery again.
“I keep wondering whether Kabir ever notices himself doing it halfway through conversations,” he said. “Like whether there’s a moment where he hears a version leaving his mouth and thinks, this isn’t fully true, but it works better socially, so fine.”
“Or maybe he believes it while saying it.”
“That possibility scares me more.”
“Why?”
“Because then how do you even confront someone like that?” Ishaan asked. “What do you point at? Memory? Tone? Atmosphere?” He shook his head slowly. “You can’t sit another adult down and say, ‘I think your personality has continuity issues.’”
I laughed despite myself.
“No seriously,” he said. “Imagine how insane that sounds outside this apartment.”
“It sounds a little insane inside it too.”
That made him laugh properly for the first time in a while.
The sound lingered briefly before fading.
Then he looked at me again and asked:
“If somebody keeps changing slightly depending on who loves them, at what point do you stop calling it adaptation?”
I didn’t answer immediately, and this time the silence between us did not feel thoughtful or heavy. It felt ordinary. The kind that arrives late in the evening when both people are tired of hearing themselves talk but not quite ready for the other person to leave.
Ishaan leaned down to tie his shoelace even though it wasn’t untied.
“You know what happened yesterday?” he asked.
“What?”
“I almost brought this up to him.”
That got my attention more than anything else had all night.
“What stopped you?”
“We were at that small bar near Civil Lines with the terrible yellow lights. Just the two of us. He’d had a bad week at work, or at least I think it was work.” Ishaan smiled faintly at his own uncertainty. “No stories. No performance. Just tired.”
He looked toward the kitchen for a moment before continuing.
“At one point he asked me if I thought people got more dishonest with age or just better at editing themselves.” Ishaan let out a short breath through his nose. “And for about five seconds I genuinely thought he was about to tell me something real.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No. His phone rang, he took the call outside, came back laughing about something completely unrelated, and the moment disappeared.” He shrugged. “Then we spent the rest of the evening discussing whether Delhi has run out of good places to eat.”
I started wiping the table slowly.
“He paid the bill before I noticed,” Ishaan added. “Then he sent me home in a cab because it had started raining.”
Neither of us spoke after that.
The apartment had settled into that post-dinner stillness where every object suddenly looked more temporary than it had an hour earlier. Empty glasses. Half-folded towel near the sink. The bakery bag softening from oil stains.
“I think that’s why I’m still going to meet him next week,” Ishaan said finally.
“You already decided?”
“I think so.”
He didn’t sound proud of it. He didn’t sound ashamed either.
“I kept trying to turn this into some clear moral situation in my head,” he continued. “But most friendships aren’t clean enough for that. People lie. People perform. People become different around different crowds. Maybe Kabir just drifted too far into it.”
“Or maybe this is who he is.”
“Maybe.” Ishaan nodded slowly. “But even that feels incomplete somehow.”
He stood up then and carried the empty juice carton to the bin.
“At some point tonight I realized I’m not even angry about the lies themselves anymore,” he said. “I’m angry because I can’t tell which memories I’m allowed to keep in their original shape.”
The sentence stayed with me after he said it.
Not because it sounded profound. It didn’t.
It sounded tired.
Ishaan picked up his wallet from the table and slid it into his pocket.
“Anyway,” he said, lighter now, almost embarrassed by the length of the conversation, “if he starts claiming he trained under Italian chefs next month, I’m leaving the country.”
“That seems extreme.”
“I need boundaries.”
I laughed.
He smiled back, though only briefly.
At the door he stopped to put his shoes on properly this time. One lace had twisted into a knot and he spent longer with it than necessary.
Then, without looking up, he asked:
“If you notice someone changing their story for long enough, do you eventually become responsible for pretending not to notice?”
I didn’t answer before he opened the door.
A few seconds later I heard him walking down the stairs, slower than usual, like he was still listening for something behind him.
I stayed near the door for a while after he left, not because the question required thinking about, but because the apartment still felt occupied by the shape of the conversation. Ishaan had a way of doing that. Even after leaving, he carried a certain unfinished momentum with him, as though the discussion might continue from the staircase or the street below if somebody opened the door quickly enough.
The sink still held one spoon I had missed while cleaning.
I washed it slowly and set it near the stove to dry.
Then I noticed Ishaan’s lighter beside the folded napkins.
A cheap blue one with scratches near the top.
I picked it up and almost called him immediately before realizing he would probably come back upstairs once he reached the gate and checked his pockets.
He always checked his pockets twice.
Outside, somebody in another building had started playing old Hindi songs loudly enough for only the chorus to travel between apartments. A pressure cooker whistled somewhere. Two dogs barked once and stopped.
I sat back down at the table.
Kabir had become strangely visible in the room by now despite never entering it. Not as a full person exactly. More as accumulated gestures. Somebody remembering birthdays. Somebody adjusting stories mid-conversation. Somebody helping waiters clean broken glass while borrowing other people’s lives for texture.
The uncomfortable part was that none of these versions erased the others.
That was what Ishaan had been trying to say all evening without saying directly.
Not that Kabir was fake.
Not that the friendship had been false.
Just that consistency had started slipping out of reach.
My phone buzzed once on the table.
A message from Ishaan.
Found the lighter situation devastating. Coming back up.
I laughed before I could stop myself.
A minute later there was a knock.
He came in already shaking his head.
“This is humiliating,” he said. “I left my lighter, my wallet check took too long downstairs, and now the security guard thinks I forgot something emotionally significant.”
“He’s invested now.”
“He looked at me with concern.”
I handed him the lighter.
Instead of leaving immediately, Ishaan sat back down again automatically, like his body had not fully accepted the evening was over.
“You know what I remembered downstairs?” he asked.
“What?”
“The first lie I definitely caught.”
There was no excitement in the sentence. No reveal waiting behind it. Just recognition arriving late.
“When was it?”
“Very early,” he said. “Before I even knew him properly.”
He leaned back in the chair and looked toward the kitchen.
“We were having coffee after work with a few people from the office. Somebody asked what music he listened to and Kabir started talking very confidently about this old Pakistani band.” Ishaan smiled faintly. “He went on for ten minutes. Favorite album. Lyrics. Concert videos. Very convincing.”
“And?”
“Two weeks later I was in his car and that same band came on through shuffle.” Ishaan paused. “He asked me who they were.”
I stared at him.
“Exactly,” he said. “And even then I remember thinking maybe he’d forgotten the name temporarily. I made excuses instantly.”
“Because you liked him.”
“Because he made social life easier,” Ishaan corrected gently. “There’s a difference.”
He sat there for a moment after saying that, like he was testing whether he still believed it himself.
Then he laughed softly.
“Actually no. That’s not fully true either.”
The honesty in that sentence changed something slightly.
“I did like him,” he admitted. “Not in some intense way. But enough that I preferred coherence over suspicion for a long time.”
Neither of us spoke after that.
The songs outside had changed now. Somebody was playing music loudly while washing dishes, the volume rising and falling depending on where they moved inside their apartment.
Ishaan turned the lighter over in his hand.
“I think Kabir started as a normal person who exaggerated occasionally,” he said. “Then people responded well to certain versions of him, and eventually he stopped separating performance from personality.” He rubbed his thumb against the metal wheel of the lighter. “Maybe everybody does that a little. Maybe he just got too good at it.”
“You still meeting him next weekend?”
“Yeah.”
The answer came immediately.
“Where?”
“He wants to try some new rooftop place in Gurgaon.” Ishaan smiled without much amusement. “Apparently he knows the owner.”
I looked at him.
“What?”
“You don’t believe that one either.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You made a face.”
“I made a normal face.”
He laughed again.
Then the laughter faded and he stayed looking at the lighter in his hands.
“I don’t even know what I’d want from him now,” he admitted. “An apology would feel strange because none of the lies were large enough. A confession would feel theatrical. And if he suddenly became completely honest tomorrow, I genuinely don’t know whether I’d trust that version either.”
That, finally, sounded like the real exhaustion underneath everything else.
The permanent recalculation afterward.
Ishaan stood up slowly.
“This time I’m actually leaving,” he said.
At the door he checked his pockets again automatically and found the lighter still there.
“Good,” he said. “I can’t come upstairs three times. That starts looking emotional.”
“You’ve already crossed that line.”
“Fair.”
He opened the door, then stopped for a second without turning around.
“You know what the worst part is?” he asked.
I waited.
“If he told me tomorrow that none of it was intentional, I’d probably believe him too.”
Then he left.
I heard him speaking briefly to the security guard downstairs a few minutes later, both of them laughing about something I couldn’t make out clearly.
After that, the building settled back into its usual sounds.
Water running through pipes.
A scooter starting unsuccessfully twice before finally catching.
Somebody dragging grocery bags up the stairs one floor below.
On the table, one orange segment still remained near Ishaan’s glass, drying slightly at the edges because neither of us had noticed it earlier.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why do people exaggerate parts of their lives in friendships?
Sometimes exaggeration begins as social adjustment rather than deliberate deception. People notice which versions of themselves receive attention, admiration, or easier conversation, and they slowly keep feeding those versions. The difficult part is that small edits rarely feel serious while they are happening.
2. Why are small lies sometimes more unsettling than big lies?
Big lies usually force decisions. Small lies stay movable. They attach themselves to ordinary memories, which means people keep questioning their reactions instead of confronting the situation directly. The uncertainty lasts longer than the lie itself.
3. Can someone care about people genuinely while still performing parts of their identity?
Yes, and that contradiction is what makes relationships like this emotionally confusing. A person can remember birthdays, show up during difficult moments, and still reshape details about themselves constantly. Human behavior does not always organize itself neatly into honest people and dishonest people.
4. Why do socially charismatic people often escape scrutiny?
Because they improve social environments. Conversations flow more easily around them, awkwardness reduces, people feel included quickly. Most groups unconsciously reward those qualities long before they begin questioning accuracy or consistency.
5. Why is uncertainty harder to move on from than direct betrayal?
Direct betrayal gives emotional clarity. Uncertainty keeps reopening itself. People replay conversations, reinterpret memories, and keep testing old moments against new information. The relationship continues internally even when nothing new is happening externally.
About Spill the Tea
Spill the Tea is an ongoing literary fiction series exploring emotional imbalances through intimate conversations set in ordinary spaces. Each story focuses on one unresolved discomfort carried into kitchens, balconies, dining tables, and late evening conversations where people reveal themselves indirectly. The series follows the emotional lives people continue performing even in front of those who know them well.
About the Author
Tushar Mangl writes contemporary literary fiction exploring relationships, emotional contradiction, identity, and modern loneliness through grounded, conversational storytelling. His work often focuses on the tension between how people live publicly and what remains unsaid in private spaces.
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