I met Jason the day after I arrived in Australia as an international student. It was 30 July 2004, his birthday – although I didn’t know it at the time.
It was July-cold – the kind of cold that made a mockery of the “winter coat” I’d purchased in Bangalore – when I dragged myself to my first creative writing class at Sydney Uni. I was late and slid into the only vacant spot in the classroom, next to Jason. Afterwards, the class, new and longing for camaraderie, went to the pub. On paper Jason and I were a poor match: a girl from a conservative Hindu family in small-town India and a boy raised as a Jehovah’s Witness in small-town USA, though we’d both left behind our religious upbringings.
