Between Roles: A Bengaluru Story About Not Having to Choose One Side

The group chat had achieved main-character status somewhere between message two hundred and message four hundred, the Coorg Weekend!! thread ballooning through Friday afternoon with GIFs, corrected departure times, and at least three people insisting they would “figure out cars later” — which was the group’s collective way of admitting nobody had figured out anything. Rohan Iyer watched it from his desk in HSR Layout, half a Figma file open in the other window, and did what he always did when the noise got too loud: he made a list.

It was a Friday like most of his Fridays — a product review pushed to Monday, a landlord’s WhatsApp about the water tanker that would or would not arrive before the weekend, a two-bedroom flat he shared with a colleague who was almost never home. Bengaluru had been good to him in the specific, slightly lonely way it was good to everyone who arrived from somewhere else: full of people, full of plans, and organised entirely around the assumption that you would build your own family out of whoever happened to be in the group chat that year.

By six he had pinned a single message to the top of the thread — seven people, two cars, one homestay, seven a.m. sharp — with an actual shared document underneath it, columns and everything, names set against luggage space and petrol contributions. The group went quiet in the specific way a room goes quiet when someone finally says the thing everyone was waiting to hear. Someone sent a thumbs-up. Someone else, predictably, was Ananya.

“Wow,” she wrote to the group, “didn’t know we had a project manager on this trip.” And then, a minute later, just to him: “I mean that as a compliment. Mostly.”

He had met Ananya Menon twice before this, both times at their mutual friend Priyanka’s flat in Koramangala, both times for under an hour, so what he actually knew of her amounted to: data scientist at a fintech firm nobody outside Bengaluru had heard of, laughs loudly at her own jokes, orders extra chutney without asking anyone else at the table, entirely unbothered by things that would have made him rehearse a sentence for ten minutes first. What she knew of him amounted to whatever thirty seconds of small talk reveals about a product designer who is careful with his opinions right up until he suddenly isn’t.

The part of himself Rohan had never said out loud to anyone in that group — not even to Priyanka, who knew most of his other secrets — was that he had spent the better part of his twenties quietly irritated by every quiz, every listicle, every friend-of-a-friend’s confident opinion insisting that a person was fundamentally one thing. He would read “signs you are a natural dominant” and recognise himself completely. He would read “signs you are actually submissive” in the very same week and recognise himself just as completely, and conclude, each time, that something in him failed to add up. Decisive people got decisive answers, he had decided somewhere along the way. He got two contradictory results and a faint, persistent sense of being incomplete.

✦

Two Wednesdays before the trip, he and Ananya had ended up at the same co-working café near her office in Bellandur — his idea, nominally about splitting an Ola, actually about wanting an excuse — and talked for ninety minutes about nothing that mattered and everything that did. She told him about growing up in Kochi and moving to Bengaluru at twenty-two for a job her parents had not fully understood. Her mother still called on Sunday evenings to ask, in the same gentle, relentless way, whether there was anyone worth mentioning yet, and Ananya had gotten so practised at deflecting the question that she sometimes forgot to notice how much she wanted, eventually, to actually answer it. He told her, in the roundabout way he told most things, that he had left Chennai for the same reasons half the group had left wherever they were from: because a city with no family in it lets you find out who you are without an audience.

It was the kind of friendship that develops fast in a city built from people who all arrived alone. Bengaluru traffic gave them forty-minute phone calls neither of them had asked for; the Outer Ring Road’s particular cruelty at six in the evening turned into a running joke that outlasted the joke it started as. He noticed, without deciding to notice it, that he was more himself around her than around almost anyone else in the group — freer to say when he wanted to decide something, and just as freer, oddly, to say that he didn’t. He mentioned this to no one, least of all Ananya, filing it under the same category as the quizzes: interesting, unresolved, and probably better left alone.

✦

Coorg was where the document met its limits. The homestay had double-booked itself into a plumbing disaster by the time they arrived; two of the seven had missed the early train from Bengaluru and were somewhere near Mysuru arguing about whether to turn back; and the rain that had been forecast as “light showers” arrived instead as a wall of water somewhere past Kushalnagar that reduced the ghat road to a crawl. Rohan, who had been so composed organising the theoretical version of this weekend, found himself standing under the awning of a shuttered petrol pump making four phone calls at once and solving none of them.

It was Ananya who took the phone out of his hand — not unkindly, just efficiently, the way you would take scissors from someone about to hurt himself — and said, “Okay. Sit down for one second.” She rang the homestay owner herself and established, inside ninety seconds, that a second property fifteen minutes further could take all seven of them. She texted the two stragglers a single line — get off at the next station, we’re coming, don’t argue — and then looked at Rohan, who had, without quite noticing it happen, already sat down on the step exactly where she’d told him to.

“You good?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, and meant it in a way that surprised him — a loosening somewhere under his sternum, as though a hand he hadn’t known was clenched had finally been allowed to open. He had spent the last hour holding seven people’s Saturday in his head at once, and for one stretch of a wet Karnataka road, none of it was his problem anymore. He didn’t examine the feeling too closely. He filed it away, the way you file something you aren’t ready to look at directly, and got back in the car when she told him it was time to go.

The rest of the drive to the second homestay, Ananya took calls the way he usually did — brisk, unbothered, entirely unfazed by the two stragglers arguing about whose fault the missed train had been. Rohan watched her from the passenger seat with the specific, slightly disoriented attention of a person watching a mirror do something the actual mirror never did, and found he did not mind the reversal even slightly, which was, in its own quiet way, the most confusing part of the whole afternoon.

✦

By the time they reached the second homestay — smaller, damper, magnificently better than the flooded original — the group had already turned the whole afternoon into a running joke. “Rohan’s the boss until things go wrong, then Ananya’s the boss,” Priyanka announced over dinner, to general agreement, and someone else added that they trusted Ananya’s phone calls more than Rohan’s spreadsheet, and everyone laughed, Rohan included, because it was true and because it didn’t sting the way he had expected being laughed at to sting.

What he didn’t say, later that night on the veranda with the smell of wet coffee plants coming up off the hillside, was that he had liked both halves of the day almost equally — the hour of being the one seven people looked to, and the hour after when he had been glad, genuinely glad, to stop. He said a version of it to Ananya instead, once the others had gone in.

“Does it bother you,” he asked, “that you basically ran the last two hours of today?”

“No,” she said, not looking up from peeling the label off her beer bottle. “Should it?”

“I don’t know. Some of the guys in the group think —”

“Some of the guys think there’s a rule,” she said, “that says whoever’s loudest at brunch has to also be the one in charge everywhere else. I never signed that rule.” She glanced at him sideways. “You looked relieved, by the way. At the petrol pump. Just so you know I noticed.”

He didn’t have an answer for that yet, so he said nothing, and for once the not-answering felt like the honest response rather than the evasive one.

✦

The month after Coorg fell into a rhythm neither of them announced out loud. Coffee near her office on Wednesdays, because it sat roughly between HSR and Bellandur; the specific closeness of two people from different cities, both living away from their families, both fluent in the unspoken agreement that Bengaluru friendships end up doing the work that hometown friendships would otherwise do. She teased him about his shared documents. He teased her about being unable to order food without narrating the decision out loud, a habit she defended as “thinking, just audibly.”

Then, on a Tuesday night he would later be a little embarrassed about, he took another one of those quizzes. Not the same one — a newer, glossier one a colleague had shared in a team channel, twenty-two questions and a clean results page — and this time the answer came back unambiguous: Dominant, 84 percent. Something in him seized on the certainty of it the way a thirsty person seizes on water. Here, finally, was a number. Here, finally, was permission to stop being the person who didn’t add up.

For the better part of a week he tried the number on like a jacket that didn’t quite fit but that he was determined to break in. He answered questions more decisively in stand-up meetings than the questions warranted, cutting off a junior designer mid-suggestion to say we’ll go with mine in a tone he did not recognise as his own even as he used it, and spent the rest of that meeting privately unsettled by how easy it had been to sound certain about something he was not, in fact, certain about at all. He picked the restaurant without asking. When Ananya suggested splitting a plate two ways over dinner, he told her, half-joking, half not, that he would decide what they were both having, and watched her face do something complicated before she said, lightly, “sure, go ahead,” in a voice that was noticeably not hers.

Priyanka noticed it first, the way Priyanka noticed most things about the group before anyone else did. “You’ve gone weirdly bossy this week,” she said, over a work call that had nothing to do with any of it. “Good bossy or worrying bossy, I can’t tell yet.” Rohan laughed it off at the time and thought about the sentence for three days afterward, which was, in retrospect, the first sign that some part of him already knew the answer.

✦

It came to a head ten days later, on her building’s terrace, during one of Bengaluru’s sudden evening downpours that neither of them bothered to run from. They ducked under the covered section by the water tank instead, close enough that their shoulders touched, close enough that conversation had to drop to something quieter than the rain.

“Can I say something and you not get weird about it,” Ananya said.

“That’s a terrifying way to start a sentence, but go on.”

“You’ve been doing a bit. This week. The restaurant thing, the plate thing.” She wasn’t smiling now. “It’s not that I mind you being decisive — I like it, actually, a lot of the time. It’s that this version doesn’t feel like you deciding. It feels like you performing a percentage.”

He wanted to argue and found, when he opened his mouth, that he had no material for it. “There was a quiz,” he admitted, which sounded exactly as absurd out loud as he had feared it would.

“Rohan.” She said his name like a full sentence. “You’ve spent years being annoyed that nobody would let you be two things. Why would you spend this week trying to become one thing on purpose, because a website told you to?”

He looked out at the rain instead of at her, because it was easier. “Because two things sounds like I can’t commit to either. Because ‘it depends’ sounds like the answer someone gives when they don’t actually know themselves.”

“It depends is the only honest answer most people ever give,” she said. “I’m not less real because I don’t have a fixed number. I lead when I know more than the room. I follow when I don’t, or when I’m tired, or when someone I trust asks clearly enough that following is easy. That’s not indecision. That’s just paying attention.” She paused, and something in her tone changed, became more careful. “But since we’re doing the honest conversation — I want to say something else, and I need you to actually hear it, not just agree so the terrace feels less awkward.”

“Okay.”

“The other day you said something like, since we both switch, anything goes. You said it like a joke, but I want it on the record that it’s wrong, and it’s the kind of wrong that gets people hurt if nobody corrects it early.” She turned to face him properly. “Switching doesn’t mean the rules disappear. It means they have to be checked more often, not less, because neither of us can assume which version of the other person showed up today. Anything goes is what people say when they don’t want to ask. I always want to be asked.”

The rain had thinned to something almost gentle by the time he answered. “Then ask me something,” he said. “Right now. See what happens.”

She considered him for a moment, unhurried, the way she considered most things. “Okay. Tonight — do you want to decide where we eat, or do you want me to?”

It was such a small question that it took him a second to feel the size of it. Nobody had ever asked him that plainly before, without assuming the answer, without needing him to already know which version was the real one. “You,” he said, and the relief of saying it was almost identical to the relief he’d felt at the petrol pump, except this time he let himself notice it happening. “Tonight, you decide.”

She studied him for a moment longer than the question needed, the rain still ticking off the water tank behind them, and something in her expression softened into a kind of frank approval that he felt all the way down his spine. “Good answer,” she said, quietly enough that it was almost lost under the rain. “I like you a great deal more when you’re telling me the truth than when you’re telling me a percentage.”

✦

They talked properly after that, once the rain had stopped and they’d moved to the dry side of the terrace, in the unglamorous, necessary way that mattered more than either of them had expected. He told her about the years of contradictory quizzes and the private theory he’d built out of them, that he simply lacked whatever consistency other people seemed to have as standard equipment. She told him she had stopped taking those quizzes at twenty-four, not because she had found the correct answer but because she had stopped believing the question was shaped correctly in the first place.

“Think about this week versus Coorg,” she said. “At the petrol pump I knew more than you did about what needed to happen next, so I led and you were relieved to let me. Right now, on your actual home turf, deciding dinner — that’s nothing. You could lead that blindfolded. Context isn’t a cop-out, Rohan. It’s information. Who’s tired, who knows the terrain, who needs to be carried today and who’s carrying tomorrow. A fixed label would tell us less about each other, not more.”

Over the following weeks they built, without ever formally naming it, something that functioned like a small piece of shared infrastructure: a phrase — just tell me, said lightly — that either of them could use when they genuinely didn’t know whether they wanted to decide or be told something. A second phrase, not tonight, that ended anything without either person having to explain themselves further. It wasn’t romantic in the postcard sense. It was two adults building the smallest possible system so that neither of them would have to keep guessing.

It was tested, gently, within the fortnight — a Wednesday when Ananya’s father called with news about a relative’s illness, and she went quiet in a way Rohan had learned to read correctly by then. He didn’t ask her what she wanted. He simply said, “I’m ordering food, I’m picking the film, you don’t have to make one decision tonight,” and watched something in her shoulders let go the exact way his had let go at the petrol pump months earlier. Neither of them mentioned the symmetry out loud. It didn’t need saying.

✦

The Sunday after, back at Priyanka’s for the group’s usual dosa breakfast, someone brought up Coorg again — the flood story fully mythologised by now into “the time Rohan panicked and Ananya saved everyone” — and everyone laughed, Rohan loudest of all, because he had finally stopped needing the story to mean anything about which of them was the real one.

Walking to the metro together afterwards, Ananya stopped at the junction and said, without preamble, “I actually don’t know where good filter coffee is around here. You choose.” And he did — turned left with a certainty that had nothing to do with any quiz result and everything to do with the fact that, for once, being asked to decide felt like being trusted rather than tested. Neither of them mentioned that an hour earlier, ordering the auto outside Priyanka’s building, it had been the other way round. It wasn’t a contradiction. It was just Tuesday, and then it was Sunday, and they were finding out, one ordinary handoff at a time, that it never had to be one or the other. Somewhere behind them, the group chat had already moved on to arguing about the next trip, and for once Rohan let someone else make the document.