The placement week posters went up on the notice board like taunts.
Infosys, TCS, Capgemini, Deloitte.
Logos everywhere — bold, confident, unapologetic.
Underneath them hung a smaller sheet, the student project evaluation schedule.
At the bottom of that list, printed neatly, were the words:
Evaluation Committee: Dr. Ishaan Dev, Visiting Research Fellow.
Pranathi stopped reading for a second.
Then snorted under her breath. "Of course."
Ritesh peered over her shoulder. "Oh, look, your boyfriend's back to grade us."
Neha swatted him with a folder. "Don't start."
"I'm serious! Every time she meets him, something dramatic happens. Next thing you know, she'll be running a startup with him."
Pranathi rolled her eyes. "Please. He probably doesn't even remember my name."
But she wasn't sure she believed that herself.
The classroom buzzed like a beehive that morning.
The fluorescent tube lights flickered; someone was playing a Bollywood remix too loud on their phone; a nervous boy rehearsed his self-introduction in front of a fan.
It smelled like damp notebooks and ambition.
Pranathi sat with her friends near the back row, a half-open packet of chips between them.
Sreeja was pretending to study while sneaking glances at her phone.
Neha was fixing her eyeliner using her tablet's black screen.
"I heard Dev sir's marking is strict," Sreeja said, crunching a chip. "He gave the previous batch lower grades than the HOD expected."
Ritesh leaned back. "Good. Finally, someone who takes things seriously."
Pranathi frowned. "Says the guy who submitted an empty report last semester."
"Empty by design," he said proudly. "It was minimalist."
Neha groaned. "You're all hopeless. I'm moving to Canada."
"On whose visa?"
"God's mercy."
The group laughed. For a moment, it felt like the world outside — jobs, debts, responsibilities — didn't exist.
Then the classroom door opened.
Ishaan walked in, clipboard in hand, flanked by two faculty coordinators.
He looked the same: crisp white shirt, no-nonsense expression, calm as code.
The room fell silent.
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.
"Good morning. I'll be reviewing your project proposals today. Keep your summaries brief and relevant."
He glanced around once, scanning the rows like he was mapping their confidence.
When his eyes passed over her, he didn't pause — just nodded politely, as he did to everyone.
Still, her stomach tightened.
She told herself it was the chips.
When her turn came, she walked to the desk, clutching her report like a peace treaty.
He gestured for her to sit.
"Project title?"
"Pattern recognition in partial data clustering," she said, voice steady.
He skimmed the first page, eyes darting like a scanner.
"Your concept is sound," he said finally. "But you've skipped baseline comparison. Without that, your results have no reference."
"I was planning to add that later," she said quickly.
He nodded, still reading. "Planning isn't implementing, Miss Rao."
The sentence hit like a cold slap — not cruel, just clean.
"I didn't mean—" she started, but he handed the paper back.
"Your logic is good. Execution weak. Refine it and resubmit."
That was all.
No anger. No smile. No small talk.
He moved on to the next student.
Pranathi sat frozen for a moment before walking back to her seat, heat rising in her ears.
Ritesh whispered, "Ouch. That was brutal."
"Shut up," she muttered, staring at the floor.
But deep inside, the words replayed like a bug she couldn't fix:
Execution weak.
That evening, her phone buzzed with another message from home.
It was her father this time.
Need to send your brother's second-semester fee by next week. Can you manage?
She typed Yes before she even thought about it.
Then sat back, staring at the screen until it went dark.
She wanted to scream, No, I can't.
She wanted to say, I'm still trying to stand up for myself.
But responsibility wasn't something you argued with.
You just carried it, quietly, until it started carrying you.
Neha popped into her room later with a packet of Maggi noodles.
"Dinner?"
"I'm not hungry," Pranathi said.
"You said that yesterday."
"I'll eat later."
Neha eyed her. "You only eat when we're around."
Pranathi shrugged. "Food tastes better when it's loud."
"Then I'll make noise," Neha said, laughing.
But when she left, Pranathi didn't boil the noodles.
She just lay on the bed, scrolling mindlessly, the ache of hunger oddly comforting — like a familiar background sound she didn't want to mute.
At 11 p.m., her mail notification pinged.
A new message: Project Review Notes – Batch 2025.
She opened it absent-mindedly.
Her eyes froze halfway down the page.
There it was — her project, with Ishaan's comments copied directly to the HOD.
Concept strong, execution weak. Lacks comparison model.
She stared at the screen until the words blurred.
He hadn't said anything wrong. It was the truth.
But reading it there, in that formal tone, felt like being dissected in public.
She closed the laptop slowly, jaw tight.
So that's how it was.
The man who preached about fragility and ethics couldn't even say good work without adding a footnote.
The next morning, she passed him in the corridor.
He was speaking to another faculty member, gesturing toward a diagram on the wall.
When he turned and saw her, he gave a polite nod.
She looked straight ahead and walked past.
Her heart pounded all the way down the corridor, but she didn't look back.
That was the first time she had ignored him.
The first silent rebellion.
The first tiny, invisible crack in what neither of them yet realized would become a fracture.
And the fault line didn't roar or tremble.
It just sat there, quiet, waiting.
The next few days blurred into sleepless cycles of compiling, revising, and pretending not to care.
Her inbox overflowed with reminders from the department, but her teammates' replies stayed the same:
"Sorry, busy with CAT prep."
"Can you handle the final model?"
"You explain better than I; you submit it."
Teamwork, she thought bitterly, meant one person worked, and three shared the credits.
When she glanced at the college WhatsApp group, half of them were discussing cricket scores, half comparing LinkedIn posts that began with "Thrilled to share..."
She slammed the phone facedown.
"Thrilled to share nothing," she muttered. "Thrilled to survive."
That afternoon, she climbed the narrow stairs to her project mentor's cabin, clutching her report like evidence.
The corridor was deserted except for the hum of old tube lights.
Inside, the mentor looked up from her phone, smiled vaguely, and said,
"Come later, beta. Little busy."
"It'll take only five minutes, ma'am."
"Later, later. I have a meeting."
That was the fifth later this month.
Pranathi stepped out before her frustration could spill.
She leaned against the wall, eyes closed.
If effort had a sound, it would be silence — the kind that followed after every "come later."
Back in the lab, she opened her document and stared at the abstract.
A hundred revisions and still not enough.
She had written the entire model alone:
The algorithms, the diagrams, the validation — everything.
Even her mentor's name on the paper felt like a borrowed signature.
And Ishaan had called it weak execution.
The words looped again, sour in her chest.
He hadn't even asked how long it took, how many times she'd been turned away, how much of this was her and her alone.
No one in the entire department had even attempted a clustering model on partial datasets.
The rest were recycling last year's CNN projects with new names.
Her work, if published, could put their college on the map — maybe even win them research recognition.
And yet the one person she thought would understand dismissed it like an unfinished assignment.
She threw her pen down. It rolled off the desk and hit the floor.
"Perfect," she muttered. "Even gravity's mocking me now."
By evening, she was still in the lab.
Most of the lights were off, the hall filled with that hollow hum of computers left running.
A half-empty chips packet sat beside her keyboard.
She typed furiously, trying to prove something she couldn't name.
When the lab door clicked open, she didn't look up.
"Still here?" Ishaan's voice. Calm. Too calm.
"Working," she said, eyes on the screen.
He walked closer, set a file on the table. "The final reviews are due next week. If you need feedback, I can—"
"No, thank you," she cut in.
He paused. "All right."
Silence stretched.
She could feel him watching her screen.
"Your architecture's promising," he said quietly. "But it'll bottleneck if you—"
She turned. "Please don't."
His brows drew together. "Don't what?"
"Don't correct me every time. I've spent weeks fixing code, handling a team that doesn't exist, begging mentors for five minutes of attention.
You appear for ten seconds and decide my execution is weak?"
He blinked, taken aback. "That wasn't criticism; it was advice."
"Same thing when you're exhausted."
He didn't reply. The hum of the CPU filled the pause.
Finally, he said, "You're overworking yourself."
"I'm surviving," she said sharply.
He studied her face for a moment — the pale skin, the faint shadows under her eyes.
Then, softly: "At least eat something that's not chips."
She clenched her jaw. "I'm fine."
And she was—if fine meant shaking hands, spinning head, and a hunger that felt more emotional than physical.
He exhaled, stepped back. "All right. Good night, Pranathi."
She didn't answer.
He left quietly, closing the door behind him.
Only when the latch clicked did she whisper to the empty room,
"You could've just said I did well."
That night, she returned to her hostel late.
Neha was asleep, the light from her phone flashing across the wall.
Pranathi opened her cupboard, found the unopened Maggi packet Neha had left for her.
She stared at it for a full minute, then shoved it back and shut the door.
Her body was tired, but her mind was louder.
Every word from the day replayed in echoes: weak... advice... overworking... eat something...
She lay down without changing, eyes burning, chest tight with an ache she couldn't name.
It wasn't love.
It wasn't hate.
It was the heavy, humiliating feeling of wanting to be seen — and realising you were only being observed.
The next morning, she arrived late to class.
The moment she sat, the HOD entered with Ishaan.
"Good news," the HOD announced. "Our department will nominate one paper from the final year for national review. The shortlisted project will represent us."
Murmurs filled the room.
Pranathi's heart raced. This is it.
Then the HOD continued, "The evaluation will be based on faculty recommendations. Dr Dev will help finalise the nomination."
Her stomach dropped.
Of course. Him again.
When the bell rang, students surrounded Ishaan with questions.
She packed silently and walked out before he even looked her way.
By the time she reached the hostel, she was shaking — from hunger, anger, maybe both.
She texted her father: Will manage the fee by next week. Promise.
Then switched off the phone and stared at the ceiling.
The world outside called it dedication.
She called it survival.
And somewhere between those two words, admiration curdled into resentment.
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