By Krish Gupta

Delhi never really asks if you want to stay. It just lets you in for a while.

Most of us arrive with a suitcase, a few folders, and the quiet hope that three or four years will be enough. We take a room in a PG in Rohini sec-16, or a flat shared with others in some colony whose name we still mispronounce. The landlord smiles, takes the deposit, explains the rules, and reminds us that the agreement is only for eleven months. Even the walls seem to know we are temporary. We unpack our clothes, arrange our books, find a place for everything, and slowly begin constructing a life in a room that was never really ours.

In the beginning, everything feels new. The metro rides, the societies, the nescafe & amul, the canteen samosas and dosa, the long walks back after evening classes, the crowded roads, the unfamiliar neighbourhoods and the constant feeling that there is something else to discover. We learn which metro station is closest to college (rithala or sector 18), which route saves ten minutes, where to eat when the wallet is almost empty, and which shopkeeper has already started recognizing us. We tell ourselves this is home now. But home has a different weight. Home is the place where your mother keeps your old school bag without asking. Here, every cupboard is borrowed. Every chair belongs to someone else. Even the fan above your bed makes a sound that is not yours.

Then, without realizing it, the borrowed place starts becoming familiar.

The metro stops being a journey and becomes transportation. The roads stop being confusing and become shortcuts. The campus stops being a new place and becomes somewhere you know almost instinctively. You know which classroom is where, where to sit between lectures, where the canteen gets crowded, which corner of the campus is quieter, and how long it actually takes to get back to your room. You stop checking maps. You stop noticing the distance. Delhi becomes smaller, not because the city has changed, but because you have finally learned how to move through it.

College becomes a similar kind of routine. The first year feels enormous. There are lectures, assignments, case competitions, presentations, societies, examinations and endless conversations about internships and careers. Some days seem impossibly long, while entire weeks disappear without leaving much behind. You make plans for the next semester because there is always a next semester. You tell yourself you will become more serious later, apply for that internship next time, learn that skill during the holidays, and figure out your career once you have a little more time.

And there always seems to be more time. That is perhaps the biggest illusion of first year.

Three years feels like a lifetime when you are standing at the beginning of it. You think there will always be another opportunity, another examination, another competition, another evening in the canteen, another metro ride home. Even mistakes feel temporary because there is enough time to correct them. You can afford to postpone decisions because graduation is still somewhere far away, almost belonging to another version of you.

Then the second year arrives.

It does not announce itself. One semester simply ends and another begins. Seniors graduate, juniors arrive, familiar faces disappear and new ones take their places. The people who once looked impossibly experienced suddenly become the ones answering questions from first years. The college begins to feel less like an institution you attend and more like a place you belong to.

That is when something quiet happens. You stop thinking about the fact that you are temporary. You simply become comfortable.

The rented room fills with your things. Books accumulate on the desk. Clothes occupy the cupboard. The walls begin carrying traces of your routine. You know the city well enough to complain about it. You know exactly which evenings are good enough to walk without checking the time. You return home after college without thinking about the route because the route has become part of you.

Delhi starts feeling like home. And then, suddenly, two years have passed. Now there are only two semesters left. The number feels almost absurd.

Two semesters.

Three years once sounded like an enormous amount of time. Now two semesters feel like something that could disappear between one summer and the next. The same campus is still there, the same classrooms are still being used, the same canteen is still crowded, and Delhi outside is still moving at the same impossible speed. Nothing has changed, yet everything suddenly feels different.

You start noticing things you never noticed before. The college gate you have walked through hundreds of times begins to look like something you will eventually have to leave behind. The classroom is no longer simply a classroom. Somewhere in your mind, it has become the place where you will have your last few lectures. 

The strange thing about endings is that they rarely announce themselves.

There is no announcement before your last ordinary lunch in the canteen. No notification before the final time you walk through the corridor. No warning before the last evening you return to your room after college and throw your bag on bed. The moment looks completely ordinary while it is happening. Only later do you realize that you had already lived through something for the last time.

Perhaps that is why the final year feels different. Time stops feeling like something you have and starts feeling like something you are losing.

Two semesters become months. Months become weeks. Suddenly internships, placements, examinations, higher studies and career plans do not belong to some distant future anymore. They are sitting on the calendar, getting closer. The question is no longer simply what you want to do. It becomes how much can still be done before these three years disappear.

Ambition grows differently when there is a deadline attached to it. You want to achieve more because you know there is less time. A better internship, a stronger CGPA, another competition, another project, another skill, another opportunity. You begin measuring decisions against the time they consume. Is this worth another week? Should this be done now or later? How much can realistically fit into the remaining semesters?

But somewhere beneath all that ambition is another realization. You came to Delhi to build your future, and while you were busy doing that, your present quietly became the past.

The ordinary days you barely noticed are now the ones you remember most clearly. The random conversations between classes around politics, sports, current affairs, etc. The walk back after an exhausting day. The evenings when nothing particularly important happened. The nights spent worrying about something that eventually turned out not to matter.

At the time, none of it seemed important. Life rarely tells us which moments deserve to be remembered. Often it is only when they are about to disappear that we finally look at them properly

Now the ending is visible again.

The room that once felt unfamiliar has become so familiar that leaving it feels strange. You know exactly where everything is. You know the sounds outside at different hours. You know which corner gets the evening light. 

A rented room can hold some of the most important years of a person’s life. A three year degree can change the direction of a career. A city that was never meant to be permanent can become the place where someone discovers what they want, what they are capable of, and perhaps what they do not want at all.

The same thing happens with Delhi itself.

At first, it is the city we leave home for. Then it becomes the city we return to. Eventually, when we go back home for vacations, we sometimes find ourselves missing Delhi. The chaos we once hated becomes familiar. The noise outside the room becomes strangely comforting. We realize that somewhere along the way, the city stopped being somewhere we lived temporarily and became somewhere we had actually lived.

But Delhi never promised that it would stay. It simply allowed us to become part of it for a while.

That is what makes a city like this so interesting. It is permanent enough to outlive every student who passes through it, yet temporary enough to give each student the feeling that these years belong uniquely to them. Every batch arrives thinking its experience is different. Every batch eventually leaves. The city remains, absorbing one generation after another.

Sometimes I walk around the campus in the evening and see first year students moving through the same corridors we once entered with the same uncertainty. They are discovering the college, learning the city, finding their routines and slowly becoming comfortable. They have three years ahead of them, and I know exactly how long three years can feel when you are standing at the beginning.

I also know how quickly they disappear.

There is something almost unsettling about watching another batch begin while your own is preparing to end. It makes time visible. You see your past walking around in front of you, unaware that the same corridors that seem permanent now will one day become memories.

Perhaps that is the quiet lesson Delhi teaches.

Nothing is fully ours, not the room, not the years, not the college, and not even the version of ourselves that walks these corridors today. Everything is temporary. Yet while it lasts, we still build around it. We make routines. We chase ambitions. We discover places. We become comfortable. We create a life, even when we know somewhere inside that we will eventually have to leave it.

Maybe impermanence does not make something less meaningful. Maybe it makes us notice its meaning.

If the city were guaranteed to remain ours forever, perhaps we would never look at it this closely. If there were always another semester, perhaps we would never realize how quickly the current one is disappearing. If every ordinary day could be repeated, perhaps we would never understand the value of the one happening now.

Soon, the final semester will arrive. Then the final months. Then the last few weeks. Then the farewell and scribble days where we will see most batchmates for the last time. People will start asking what comes next. Some will stay in Delhi. Some will leave for other cities. Some will return home. Some will move abroad. Some will have their futures planned down to the smallest detail, while others will still be trying to figure out what direction to take.

Two years have already passed. Only two semesters remain.

If you know something will end, does that make it less real, or more precious?