A boy, a girl, and thirty feet of corridor between the water dispenser and the girls' dormitory door. Bethany School, Kurseong — 2008 to 2011.
Close your eyes for a second and go back. Not to the marks, not to the ranks, not to anything that was ever written on a report card. Go back to the tie loosened at the end of the day.
Go back to your gang. Not one friend, but the whole unruly lot of them — the ones who turned up without being asked, who stood next to you in fights that felt like the end of the world and were forgotten by breakfast.
I had Bethany. You had your school too — a different name, a different gang, a different crush, a different tie loosened at a different last bell, but somehow, unmistakably, the same ache.
— from the Author's Note
In 2008, a boy from Danapur, Bihar arrives at Bethany School, Kurseong — a yellow building on a hill, five floors, tea gardens falling away on every side, Kanchenjunga appearing only when it chooses to. He finds his people at a water fountain after 4:30am volleyball practice. He finds her at a dormitory door.
I Had To Go / She Had To Let Go is a semi-autobiographical novel about the three years that followed — first friendship, first love, first heartbreak — told twice over: once as it happened, at fifteen, and once from a bar in Kolkata and an empty corridor in 2025, by the man who never quite left.
Thirty or forty feet, water dispenser to dormitory door. Everything that mattered happened inside it.
Kanchenjunga appeared on its own terms. You had to earn it — same as everything else that mattered here.
A hundred breakups, a hundred returns, held in something small enough to fit in one hand.
Designed around the same corridor the book is built from: Class IX on one side, the Girls' Dormitory door at the other end, and a boy standing between them holding a diary.
Published through Notion Press. ISBN to be finalised at print.
A companion black-and-white graphic novel adaptation, 30+ memory pages built alongside the manuscript — same corridor, same faces, same fog.
A glimpse of where the story goes — not the whole map.
…and 22 more chapters in between, ending with The Last Goodbye and an Epilogue set in 2025.
Chapter 0 is where the adult narrator begins. The Prologue is where the boy does. Chapter One is where the corridor opens.
I was driving through the city of Kolkata when I saw my screen flash. It was a message from Jana Bhai. Abhishek Jana, a senior from my school, had seen my Instagram stories and noticed I was passing through Kolkata. That was when the message came.
"Are you in Kolkata? Let's meet."
A few hours later, we were standing outside Chandni Bar. Neither of us had chosen it for any particular reason — it was simply cheap, and that felt appropriate. Some habits survive adulthood.
Once upon a time we had stood shoulder to shoulder in Bethany's dining hall, finishing steel tumblers of water before rushing to the next class. Now we sat in Chandni Bar, taking slow sips of beer. Somewhere between those hurried glasses of water and these unhurried glasses of beer, life had happened.
Continues in the full novel →
The goodbye happened in a bus stand. Not at a school gate the way goodbyes are supposed to happen. The Gorkhaland agitation had seen to that.
My father carried my bag to the bus. He checked that my name was on the passenger list. My mother straightened my collar. Then she straightened it again. It did not need straightening either time.
"First time?" I turned. The boy in the seat beside me had settled in without my noticing. "Yes," I said. "Which class?" he asked. "Eight." He nodded. "Same," he said. "I'm Redwan."
"It's a good school," he said. Simply. Not the performed enthusiasm of someone trying to make a new student feel better. Just a statement of fact from someone who knew.
Continues in the full novel →
"Tune kya kar daala, mar gyi main......." the faint song of Kailash Kher reached my ear causing my sleep to break. I turned on the LED light of my wrist watch to see the time, which was 4:30am. The first thought that struck me was: welcome back to hostel.
My eyes got blurred due to exhaustion and when I wiped my eyes with a towel, as soon as my eyes were fresh I gazed at a girl who peeked through the door of her dormitory.
"Madhu, it's not time yet. Come back in." An unknown voice called her back into the dormitory and then she rushed inside.
Who was she? Is she new? How pretty that smile was? A mixed feeling waved through my body, and yes, how did I feel? I felt NUMB.
Continues in the full novel →
Space for your own photographs — Kurseong, the campus, the corridor, the people this book is about. Replace any slot below by editing its <img> tag in the HTML.
On the manuscript, the editing, and the long gap between starting a story and finishing it.
The first pages were written the year I left Bethany — meant, at the time, to be a simple love story. It stayed unfinished for over a decade.
OriginsA road trip from Pune to Sikkim passed a yellow building on a hill I hadn't planned to stop at. I stopped anyway. That walk became the Epilogue.
ReturnFourteen years, two full drafts, a graphic novel adaptation, and a manuscript finally sent to print. More on the editing process soon.
Publishing
Aman Kumar Raja grew up between Danapur, Bihar and Bethany School, Kurseong, where he spent his Class 8 to Class 10 years — the years this book is built from. He began writing this story in 2011, the year he left school, and finished it fifteen years later.
He lives and works today far from those hills, but returns to them, as this book shows, more often than he expected to.
I Had To Go / She Had To Let Go will be available on the following platforms once it launches.