three roommates

Rhea moved in first. She was recommended by a friend of a friend and her main quality, according to that recommendation, was that she "kept to herself." This turned out to be wildly inaccurate. She kept to the kitchen. She was always in the kitchen. Not cooking, mostly — sitting on the counter eating cheese directly from the block, listening to podcasts on her phone without earphones. True crime, mostly. We learned a great deal about unsolved murders over the course of that year. Deepika came second. She was a PhD student and worked from 10pm to 4am, so her schedule intersected with ours mostly at breakfast, when she had dinner and we had eggs. She was interested in medieval water systems, which I know now more about than I ever expected to. Once, at 11pm, she came out of her room looking frantic and said "do you know anything about Mughal irrigation" and I said no, sorry, and she looked at me with what I can only describe as compassionate disappointment and went back in. Manjiri was the third. She arrived in November with four suitcases and a very specific system for organizing the refrigerator, which she explained to us within the first two hours using a diagram on the back of an envelope. There were zones. The zones had rules. The zone rules turned out to be mostly fine, actually — more efficient than our previous chaos. We lived together for twenty-two months. Rhea left for Bengaluru with her podcast and her cheese. Deepika finished her thesis and got a fellowship somewhere cold. Manjiri and I still live together. We no longer explain the refrigerator system to new visitors; we just look at them expectantly until they get it. Sometimes I think about the specific thing that happens when three strangers move into a flat. How you're just people who happen to pay rent in the same place, and then slowly, through the sharing of space and cheese and midnight conversations about dead people and irrigation, you become something harder to name.