We were at Bhubaneswar airport on an April evening, waiting for Woodward and Rishaw’s flight from Meghalaya. Me, Pravash, Bidura. The three of us had been in the same wing of Akash Bhawan at IGIT Sarang between 1997 and 2001 — the same corridor, the same noise, the same bad mess food. Bidura had arranged everything properly for the reception: aluchap, bara, samosa, ghuguni, the full Odia evening spread. He had also brought flowers. One bouquet for Woodward’s wife, one for Woodward’s son, one for Rishaw. Bidura is a senior officer at the Airport Authority of India, so our Thar was parked right at the main arrival lane — a small thing, but when you are waiting for people you haven’t seen in twenty-five years, small things feel large.

We still had food on the plate when Pravash stood up.

“The flight will land,” he said. “We should go.”

Bidura and I looked at each other. The flight was on time, not early. Pravash was already walking.

This is the thing about him. It is not impatience, exactly. It is that he takes the happiness of his friends more seriously than his own comfort. Woodward and Rishaw were coming from Meghalaya for the first time. They had not stood in the same room as us since we were young men with bad haircuts and strong opinions. Pravash had decided — somewhere inside him where such decisions get made — that they would not spend one extra minute waiting at the arrival gate.

We were there before the flight landed.

Courtesy Bidura, the Thar was at the main lane. We were there before the flight landed.

When they came through the doors, there was a moment before anyone spoke. Twenty-five years does something to a face. You see the person you knew and the person they became at the same time, both of them standing there in the arrivals hall. Then Pravash was forward first, arms wide, and whatever that moment was it broke apart into noise and laughter and Bidura pressing flowers into everyone’s hands.

Woodward’s son watched five grown men become suddenly louder and more freely themselves than they probably were at home. He looked like a boy trying to understand the language of another country.

We took photographs. We took too many photographs. Nobody minded.

Woodward and Rishaw had come from Meghalaya. The last time we were all in the same place, we were twenty.

That night, Pravash had already arranged food in the rooms at the government guest house in Satyanagar. By the time we said good night, it was late and the day had been long and good, and I drove back thinking about the next day.

Pravash had already been thinking about it for weeks.

He had called me many times in the days before — sometimes late, sometimes in the middle of other things. His worry was specific: Woodward and Rishaw were coming from Meghalaya, where it is cool and green. Odisha in April is neither. He wanted the day to feel like a gift, not an endurance test. We had considered Puri and then Satpada and then crossing Chilika by boat to a friend’s place for lunch on the other side. Then Paradeep. Both plans came apart for different reasons. Finally, one of Pravash’s friends — a sharp and sensible man called Ullas — suggested Rambha Panthanivas on the southern shore of Chilika. Ullas would handle the food. Pravash would handle everything else.

Pravash would always handle everything else.

Day 2. We drove out of Bhubaneswar in the early morning. Golak joined us on the way — another one from our Akash Bhawan batch, mechanical engineering, always laughing, clean at heart. He came with his wife and son and his own driver, because Golak will be the first to tell you he is not a driver. Bidura couldn’t make it. Woodward and Rishaw were in my Thar. Pravash rode ahead with his wife and Woodward’s family.

On the way, we stopped for tender coconut. My wife bought mangoes from a roadside stall. Pravash had already arranged breakfast for everyone before we left.

The Panthanivas was waiting when we arrived — rooms booked, Ullas and his team assembled under a large mango tree near the water where a proper kitchen had been set up. We checked in quickly and gathered under the tree. The starters arrived: prawn fry, fish fry, Odia-style kheer. The lake was visible from where we sat, grey and wide under the late morning sky.

Ullas and his team had the food ready before we arrived. Pravash had made sure of that too.

I wanted to take Woodward and Rishaw out on the water before lunch — not from the shore but from the middle of it, where the water stretches out and the horizon loses its edge. It may have been their first time on a lake this size. Out there we also spotted sea hawks circling above the water, three of them, unhurried, riding something invisible in the air.

Some things you don’t plan for. The sea hawks were one of them.

Pravash did not come with us. He waited on shore. About thirty minutes in, my phone rang.

“Satya,” he said, “come back. It is already lunchtime. They will feel hungry.”

We came back. Lunch was crab curry, fish, rice, more things than I can remember now. Pravash watched everyone eat and kept asking if they needed more. It was 3 in the afternoon before we were done.

We loved Woodward. Woodward loved crabs. Pravash loved that everyone was happy.

Then Pravash raised the dolphin question.

Chilika has Irrawaddy dolphins — a small, rare population that moves around the lake. They are most often spotted near Satpada and Janhikuda on the northern side. From Rambha, that is an hour and a half of driving. The dolphins, everyone knows, do not reliably appear after the light starts going. It was 3 pm. We had eaten a long lunch. The math was not good.

The rest of us said as much. It’s too late. It’s too far. What’s the point of going all that way now?

Pravash said we should go anyway.

He was the only one who said it. But when Pravash says something like that — not as an argument, just as a plain statement of what should happen — it has a way of becoming the plan. We drove north. On the way he called me.

“We missed our chance, Satya,” he said. There was something real in his voice, not dramatic, just honest. “We should have started earlier.”

We reached Janhikuda at nearly 5:30. The boats officially stop at 5. Ullas and his friends had quietly arranged for one more. We were on the water by 5:40.

Whatever Pravash had been feeling about the dolphins, he did not show it now. He sat in the boat and talked and laughed and took photographs like everyone else. An hour went like that — the lake getting quieter around us as the light changed, the water going flat and dark at the edges, the far shore a thin line. We were coming around toward the Satpada side when someone said — nobody remembers exactly who — “Look.”

They were there. Irrawaddy dolphins, three or four of them, moving in long arcs just off the bow of the boat.

We sat with that for a moment. Then everyone started talking at once.

Ullas, who grew up near this lake, who had spent years on this water — Ullas looked genuinely surprised. The boat stopped. We stayed there fifteen, twenty minutes, watching them surface and turn and go under.

Pravash did not say anything in particular. He did not need to.

The man who believed they would show — and they showed.

The drive back was easy. By the time we reached Bhubaneswar it was evening, and the air had cooled, and the birds were doing what birds do at that hour. We said good night somewhere around 9. The next morning everyone scattered toward the larger batch get-together and the day moved fast the way those days do.

The morning after that, we drove to the airport.

At the departure gate, nobody knew quite what to say. You make plans — we will do this again, we will visit Meghalaya next time, we will not let it be another twenty-five years. You believe them and you know they are hard to keep and you make them anyway.

I thought about Pravash calling me on the drive to Janhikuda, the honest disappointment in his voice. We missed our chance, Satya. He had arranged the food, the rooms, the boats, the flowers, the breakfast, the tender coconut stops. He had called me a dozen times in the weeks before to make sure it would be right. And still he was worried that he had not done enough.

The dolphins had disagreed.

Some people carry their friends in their chest like a second heartbeat. Pravash is one of those people. The rest of us are lucky to know it.