The first fight is with the lock. She has to press her shoulder against the peeling brown door, twist the key with both hands until it finally gives way with a grudging click. The plastic tag swings from the keyring as she pulls it free: “Piya – main door” in her father’s rounded blue ink, slightly smudged where his thumb must have held it. For a second she thinks absurdly of buying a new tag, something laminated and neutral from a metro‑station kiosk, and then feels disloyal even to the thought.
She stands there with the door half‑open, the weight of the key still in her palm, as if crossing the threshold requires some official sanction she has mislaid in transit. Behind her, the staircase echoes with a scooter being dragged up one flight, a child yelling “Mummy, pani aa gaya!”; in front, the flat opens like a mouth that has forgotten how to speak.
Her trolley bag bumps over the metal strip at the entrance, wheels catching on years of chipped paint and cement. The sound is too bright in the enclosed space. She sets the bag just inside, in the exact place delivery parcels used to wait for her father to come home from office, and immediately feels she has put it wrong, violated some private geometry.
The air presses against her, warm and faintly damp, as if the rooms have been holding their breath and now refuse to exhale. Somewhere in the corner of her mind, a practical voice begins its list, call the cleaner, open all windows, check the fridge, but her body lingers at the doorway, hand still on the key, unwilling to let the lock off duty.
The air inside is flat and stale, a sealed jar of months‑old life. Heat has settled into the walls, into the sag of the curtains, into the cushions with their faint depressions where his head once rested. Dust motes drift lazily in a narrow beam from the half‑shuttered window, turning in the light like they are considering whether to land or keep hovering. From somewhere, sofa covers, curtain folds, the cotton of an old cushion, there clings the ghost of extinguished incense, that particular after‑smell of sandal and ash her father favoured on Sunday mornings.
She toes off her shoes without thinking, her body reverting to house rules learned years ago: no outside dirt on the floors. Her soles meet the terrazzo with a small shock, the coolness rising up through her skin like a reprimand. Her mind, however, is still fifteen hours and several time zones away, stuck under fluorescent airport lighting, replaying the choreography of security trays and immigration counters. The contrast between those anonymous, wipe‑clean corridors and this slightly sticky, overfamiliar floor makes her feel, briefly, like she has arrived in the wrong country altogether.
She does a slow circuit of the flat, as if taking attendance of inanimate things. A hand on the fridge handle: still humming dutifully, a faint film of grime under her fingers. A glance at the wall calendar he never tore past April: a temple photograph frozen over tiny boxes of days that went on without him. In the living room, the steel almirah looms, doors slightly ajar, belly swelling with files, plastic folders, polybags of “important papers” written in his tight caps. The old wooden desk in the corner where she once coached herself through entrance‑exam guides is barely visible under yellowing engineering magazines, a fossilized optimism about upgrades and projects. She registers, without touching, the drawers that will eventually have to be opened, as if noticing future landmines on a map.
In the bedroom, she clears a small rectangle on the faded bedcover and begins to stack papers with mechanical care: bank passbooks in cracked plastic covers, electricity and water bills folded along the same old creases, doctor’s prescriptions with underlined dosages, pension letters clipped in rusting pins. Each file she coaxes from the almirah leaves behind a faint rectangle of cleaner paint, ghost‑frames of his orderliness against the slow encroachment of dust and neglect. Names repeat across the pages, his, hers, nominees, witnesses, like a chorus that has mislaid its tune. When she pauses, the ticking wall clock swells in the silence, absurdly loud, like someone in the room clearing their throat to remind her she cannot stand still forever.
She drifts to the old study corner and lays her fingers on the wall where a glossy‑god calendar once hung, bank logos blessing her exam stress. The nail remains, slightly bent, haloed by a paler rectangle in the paint, time’s watermark. A neighbor’s pressure cooker shrieks; a TV serial theme seeps through the grille. Among cups he last washed and chairs he last aligned, she feels both intruder and executor, as if the room has been holding her place yet filing a quiet complaint about delayed attendance.
The first morning she misjudges the gas flame and the milk boils over, hissing onto the rusted burner in a white, accusatory froth. The sound is oddly violent in the cramped kitchen, louder than traffic, louder than the distant temple loudspeaker tuning itself. By the time she reaches over and twists the knob, the pan has already formed that familiar brown ring of failure. She cleans it up in practiced motions anyway, as if she has a performance review due: switch off, lift, run the cracked sponge under the reluctant tap, wipe in tight, efficient circles. The sour‑sweet smell of burnt milk rises, mixing with the older smells of turmeric, frying oil, incense ash. She is annoyed with herself for caring whether the stove looks exactly as he kept it, lighter in the same chipped mug, matchbox aligned to the tile edge, yet her hand replaces each item with unconscious precision.
The chai comes out too strong, too sweet, exactly like he used to make for her before exams, when sugar was his answer to everything. She pours it into a steel tumbler that has lost its shine, watching the swirl settle into a flat, opaque surface.
On the balcony, she cradles the warm metal between her palms and leans against the sun‑heated grill, careful not to rest her full weight. She has not forgotten the neighbor’s story about a cousin’s balcony collapsing. The lane conducts its own roll call: schoolchildren in blue shirts and grey skirts dragging oversized bags, mothers in faded nighties herding them towards the main road, office‑goers with ID cards swinging on lanyards, earpieces already plugged in, thumbs scrolling. She finds herself cataloguing them with a bureaucrat’s detachment (government school, private bus, call centre, junior analyst) like evidence files proving that other people’s timelines have kept moving in neat, continuous graphs.
A couple of schoolteachers she dimly remembers from years ago have greyed and thickened; the boys who once played cricket under her balcony are now stubbled young men on bikes, revving impatiently. Each face she doesn’t recognize, each child who could not possibly have been born when she left, confirms with small, pedestrian cruelty how long she has been gone. The lane has aged without her; she is the only thing here that seems to have arrived out of order, like a page torn from the wrong year’s calendar and pasted back in hastily, margins not quite aligning.
By mid-morning she is always in some queue, as if grief has an official token system. At the bank, she stands under a sluggish fan, the blue plastic chip sweating in her damp palm while a TV in the corner murmurs muted news debates. The woman ahead of her argues about minimum balance; someone’s child tugs at a dupatta; a peon shouts, “Next token, ninety‑seven!” in a tone that brooks no tragedy. At the photocopy shop, the plastic stool complains under her slight weight, squeaking with each shift as the machine spits out warm, powder‑scented duplicates of the death certificate. The laminated sample notices taped to the wall, PAN cards, Aadhaar, passport forms, make her father’s name look like just another service.
On the phone with the gas agency or the broadband provider, she listens to film songs dissolved into static between recorded assurances that her call is important. She hears herself answering in the third person, “The account holder has passed away”, a bureaucratic passive voice that keeps her one step removed, while her signature slides along dotted lines that quietly erase him and promote her to “legal heir” without ceremony.
The paperwork turns every outing into a small stage on which she must audition for the role of Responsible Adult. At the bank, she arranges her face into a respectable expression, neither too broken nor too brisk, and answers the clerk’s soft, automatic “Aapko bahut takleef ho rahi hogi” with a thin smile that feels like bad acting. He doesn’t look up as he slides another form across, already calling “Next” over her shoulder. At the electricity office, she hears herself apologising for “disturbing” the officer, though the delay is entirely his. Each errand concludes the same way: she emerges into the white slap of noon, traffic roaring, checks her phone for a message from S that is not there, and forces her feet toward the metro instead of up the comforting, accusing stairs.
On the Yellow Line she learns exactly how to angle her body so her reflection in the metro door is half‑obscured by the route map: enough to confirm she exists, not enough to require an opinion. Rajiv Chowk’s tiled walls, once a portal when she was a student plotting departures, now feel like an immigration counter she must clear daily, papers perpetually “under process.” Kashmere Gate’s echoing platforms and stale samosa smell drag up memories of coaching‑class commutes, of standing with dog‑eared xeroxes and borrowed confidence. As Vishwavidyalaya draws nearer, she feels her shoulders tense, the old muscle memory of deadlines returning without the timetable, without the roll number, with only a vague, panicky sense that something important is due and she has misplaced the assignment sheet.
North Campus in the afternoon is both shrunken and bloated: new glass façades clipped onto moss‑covered departments she remembers, food stalls renamed but selling the same over‑sweet chai in foam cups. She drifts between notice boards, lips moving silently over “ad‑hoc,” “consultant,” “visiting researcher,” trying to see if any bullet point secretly has her name on it. Twice she walks up to a familiar‑sounding office, somebody who might remember her, a secretary who might still be there, and then veers away at the last moment, pretending sudden interest in a seminar flyer, settling instead for a quick photograph she may or may not enlarge again on her cracked phone screen.
At the end of a meandering circuit that took her past three wrong staircases and one locked seminar hall, she nearly walks past a woman marshalling a flock of undergrads down the corridor. The girl at the front is asking something about “internal marks, ma’am,” someone at the back is laughing too loudly, and in the middle of this untidy procession the woman is walking with the harassed, proprietorial air of somebody who has only partially surrendered to the role of “madam.”
Piyali is already stepping aside to let them pass when a profile, caught in the strip of tube‑light between two doorways, lands with a small internal jolt. The jawline is sharper, the hair scraped back into a no‑nonsense bun she remembers only from exam weeks, but the way the woman half turns to snap, “Haan, haan, we’ll discuss this inside, just move,” is pure Nidhi: brisk, efficient, one eye always on the clock.
Recognition arrives a beat too late, as the group has almost flowed around her. By the time her own tongue cooperates, “Arre, Nidhi?”, the tide of students has already carried Nidhi two steps ahead. The name cuts through the corridor noise; Nidhi turns, brows knitting in irritation for half a second before her expression rearranges itself.
There is a tiny, comical pause where they both squint as if focusing a camera: overlaying the other’s face with a ten‑year‑old version in faded college light. Then Nidhi’s eyes widen.
“Piyali? Arey!” she exclaims, the word stretching into disbelief. Her gaze darts, almost involuntarily, to the time on her phone, then back to Piyali, doing a quick mental calculation of how many minutes she can afford to spend on nostalgia without losing the tutorial to chaos.
The students, sensing a possible delay, begin to fan out toward window ledges and corridor pillars like seasoned opportunists. One boy already has his earphones out. Nidhi claps her hands once, school‑teacher style. “Inside, inside, I’m coming,” she calls, not looking away from Piyali, as though the class can be herded by voice alone while she stands anchored in an older version of herself.
They talk over each other at first, bumping sentences like shoulders in a crowded train. “After so long, yaar, you just disappeared,” Nidhi says, half‑accusation, half‑delight.
“You didn’t come for convocation?” she adds, as if that had been the natural checkpoint after which a person was obliged to report back.
Piyali starts, “I was abroad then, my visa, ” but Nidhi is already supplying her own version. “Haan, haan, someone said you went to… Canada? US? Same thing.” She waves a hand, collapsing continents to save time.
“And you?” Piyali gestures vaguely at the students who have begun to orbit. “Full‑time now?”
Nidhi snorts. “Abhi toh just ad‑hoc. Semester to semester, like rented furniture. Let’s see.” She delivers the line with the practised lightness of someone who knows the weight of it intimately.
When Piyali mentions “seeing what’s possible, maybe some consulting, short projects,” the words feel flimsier out loud. Nidhi nods in that frazzled, faculty‑room way. Registering without absorbing, already counting attendance sheets in her head.
As she eases backwards toward the classroom door, she suddenly remembers: “Oh, you know Milan sir is back, right? Methods course, alternate days. Must be in the staffroom now only. Go, say hi!” The suggestion is tossed like extra change at a cashier.
Before Piyali can shape a response, the tide of students surges again, and Nidhi is briskly reclaimed her voice fading into the room as the door swings shut.
Left in the corridor’s echo, the name hangs between the notice boards and her like a choice everyone else assumes she will naturally make. For a moment she imagines climbing the familiar staircase to the staffroom, the particular squeak on the second landing, rehearsing a casual, “Sir, remember me?” that doesn’t sound like a plea to be re‑admitted to an earlier draft of her life. In the fantasy he looks up, recognition clean and uncomplicated; in reality, he might not look up at all.
Instead, she stands where she is and scrolls aimlessly, pretending to check email until the impulse ebbs into embarrassment. She takes a photo of a fellowship flyer, another of a “Research Assistant – temporary” notice, and tells herself she’ll write later. Both to the address on the poster and, maybe, to him. For now, it is easier to bank on future versions of herself handling boldness, while the present one walks back toward the metro, practising indifference with every step.
Evenings in Patel Nagar, her phone becomes the busier corridor. Vibhor’s messages arrive first: a forwarded LinkedIn link with “Suits you?” appended, a screenshot of a Telegram group for “ex‑NRIs in transition,” a carefully colour‑coded Metro map with arrows from Patel Nagar to North Campus and then Gurugram, “if you feel adventurous.”
“Can swing by some weekend, will do pantry audit,” he adds, only to follow it up minutes later with, “Shit, product review shifted, Saturday gone. Next time pakka.” A thumbs‑up emoji arrives as consolation prize; she stares at it, feeling absurdly like the one rescheduling herself.
Between Vibhor’s pings, the family calls stack up like missed alarms. Bhua wants to know if she’s “thought practically” about selling or at least renting out the flat; another aunt forwards a broker’s number mid‑sentence. A cousin, voice syrupy with good intentions, lists “two‑three good boys, both in Noida, package achha hai, parents simple log,” as if reading from a brochure. Each conversation ends with some version of “Bas, tum khush raho, baaki hum dekh lenge”. Blessing as soft cover for an instruction manual she has never agreed to follow, let alone read.
The routine stabilizes her body but not her mind. The alarm, the kettle, the first coughs from the staircase, the rattle of the milkman’s cycle downstairs: her muscles learn the order even as her thoughts refuse. Mornings, she stands on the balcony with over‑steeped chai cooling too fast in a steel tumbler, watching schoolchildren and office‑goers funnel through the lane, uniforms and laptop bags brushing the same dusty parked scooters. She feels like a late addition to a photograph that had already been taken: pasted in after the fact, edges not quite blended.
The terrazzo under her bare feet is the same as when she crammed for engineering entrance exams here, calf muscles aching from hours on the plastic chair, her father’s voice drifting in from the hall: “Bas ek saal aur mehnat, phir dekhna.” Now, the tiny chips of stone in the floor look sharper, as if age has made the pattern more insistent. Every familiar object has shifted a fraction. Steel almirah doors that don’t close as smoothly, a nail in the wall that no longer lines up with the faint square where a calendar once hung. It is as if someone has nudged the whole house half an inch to the left while she was away, careful enough that nothing fell, careless enough that nothing quite fits.
She tests the alignment without meaning to: opening the bathroom tap and waiting for the staggered cough of water; reaching for the light switch that used to be higher before the electrician “modernised” it last year; misjudging the width of the corridor and bumping her shoulder against the same spot on the wall, three mornings in a row. The body relearns; the mind hesitates, refusing to accept this resized version of a life she half‑remembers.
From the balcony she can see a sliver of the main road where the metro feeder buses wheeze past, full of people who have somewhere to be for reasons that don’t require explanation. She sips the too‑strong chai, grimaces, and keeps watching, trying to convince herself that this, too, counts as movement.
Inside, the apartment’s close walls don’t just hold sound; they magnify its absences. Ceiling fans whir with a tired insistence, the pressure cooker next door builds and releases its shrill complaint, a scooter backfires in the lane: and then, between these small explosions, a dense, humming quiet settles over her father’s books and unpaid bills, filling the gaps where his cough, his muttering over accounts, his All India Radio news bulletin ought to be.
She moves from room to room as if sound might resume if she stands in the right spot. In the bedroom, the fan wobbles on its rod, blades slicing the air with a slow, sticky rhythm. At night she lies awake beneath it, the sheet twisted around her ankles, counting the beats between advertisements and TV-serial climaxes seeping through the walls: rising music, a slap, a gasp, silence, then the same detergent jingle again.
When even that fades, there are only the pale hairline cracks in the plaster above her. She traces them with her eyes like railway routes on an old map, following each thin branch to where it disappears into shadow, imagining the alternate futures that might have run along those tracks and never arrived here. The longer she looks, the more the cracks resemble something deliberate: a network of fine, resistant lines holding up the ceiling despite everything that has shifted below.
At night, when the flat has settled into its own uneasy silence, she lies on her back and lets the blue light of her phone pool over her face. Satyaprakash’s name sits near the top of her chats, stubbornly present, his replies having shrunk from paragraphs to single lines. She scrolls upwards into a different climate: breathless updates, photos of bad office canteen food, promises of “jab tum wapas aaogi na…” threaded with cheap data emojis.
Then she drops back into the present, the screen an abrupt cliff. The distance widens not across continents but in the small delay between send and seen. Each time her fingers type “Kab milenge?” and then hold down backspace, the blinking cursor looks less like a prompt and more like a scolding.
Outside, Delhi looks almost the same but feels sharper, more hurried, as if the city has learned to live without her and is faintly irritated by the reappearance. Auto‑walas quote fares with a flat Rs 150 that dares her to argue; the metro crowds part and close around her slower, foreign‑softened reflexes. New glass‑fronted cafés squat beside her old landmarks, selling single‑origin coffee where she once shared samosas, making her feel inexplicably both upgraded and downgraded. On the Patel Nagar main road, hoardings for coaching centres and Canada PR services have multiplied, shouting futures at her in vinyl capitals that her tired eyes can read but no longer know how to want.
Each polite suggestion from family about “next steps” settles on her like added weight, marriage, job, selling the flat, “Beta, ek baar decide kar lo, sab easy ho jayega”, layering over jet lag and grief until even lifting a file feels like effort. Vibhor’s half‑joking “Madam NRIs also have to stand in line here” pings in between, meant as camaraderie, pricking at a nameless irritation she doesn’t trust herself to unwrap. So she replies to everyone with careful, elastic “Dekhte hain” and “Abhi toh just aaya hai na,” phrases that buy time while the gap widens between the life she itemises on paper and the one she is refusing, meticulously, to touch.
One afternoon she stands before the steel almirah with its slightly rusted handle, the same one that used to screech open for school uniforms and exam‑day pens. Now a faint orange dusts the metal where his hand once wore it smooth. She curls her fingers around the cool curve and rests her thumb on the familiar notch near the lock, knowing by muscle memory exactly how much pressure will make the drawer jump.
She doesn’t pull. Her palm just sits there, cooling, as if she’s checking a fever.
She knows what’s inside without looking: the black‑rimmed spectacles with a tiny scratch on the left lens, his old Titan watch with the cracked leather strap, the light brown wallet he stopped carrying once the stairs became too much and the shopkeepers began to send boys up with change. In the weeks before she flew back for the funeral, these objects had existed for her only as props in video calls: caught at the edge of frames, lying on the table next to his tea cup. Now they wait behind the steel slab of the drawer, more solid, more accusatory than any memory.
The thought of opening it feels oddly procedural, like issuing a death certificate to his face.
She lets her fingertips trace the outline of the keyhole instead, then deliberately lifts her hand away. On the bed, manila envelopes fan out like overgrown report cards: bank, pension, electricity, gas subsidy. A more manageable dead man, flattened into forms.
She picks up the passbooks and begins arranging them by year, her father’s life reduced to neat blue columns of debit and credit. 2015, 2016, 2017: ink changing shades as if the bank, too, was getting tired. She makes a separate pile for those before her move abroad and those after, as if the date of her departure were a natural fault line in his finances.
It should be chronological, she tells herself, slipping a rubber band around the earliest set. Once everything “official” is in order, she will be able to see clearly. What to keep for “sentimental reasons”, what to hand to the CA, what to shred. You cannot decide anything in confusion; every grown‑up in her life has said some version of this. System se karo.
By the time she reaches the last few passbooks, his final withdrawals limited to pharmacy names and hospital codes, the rusted drawer behind her might as well belong to a different flat. She notes down account numbers in a small notebook, underlining them twice, grateful for the tiny satisfaction of a task that can be completed.
The almirah stays closed, steady in the corner of her eye like a person waiting to be spoken to. She keeps her back to it, presses the capped ball‑pen hard enough into the paper to leave a faint dent on the page below, and tells herself, not for the first time, that it is better to finish this side of things before she lets herself touch anything that can’t be entered in a form.
On her phone, the WhatsApp chat with “Satya (CP Hotel)” hovers stubbornly near the top, above cousins’ family‑group forwards and Vibhor’s running commentary about traffic. The last message is hers: a brisk little paragraph about landing, jet lag, “settling some bank work first” followed by a polite “Hope hotel not too hectic these days.” Two blue ticks, no reply. The digital equivalent of a nod and looking away.
She types, “When are you free to meet?” watches the words arrange themselves in that familiar green bubble, the question mark hanging there like she’s already begging for something. Her thumb hovers over the send arrow; she can almost see his face reading it, the tightening around his mouth, the obligation settling in.
She deletes “When”, leaving “Are you free to meet?”, deletes “free”, deletes “to meet”, until the line is bare again.
She starts over: “Hope your shifts aren’t too crazy.” Adds a smiley, deletes it. Adds “Take care”, deletes that too: too intimate, too presumptuous. The final message is a bland, courteous sentence that can be ignored indefinitely without either of them having to admit that what they are really scheduling is an ending.
The next day, as she steps off the metro at Vishwavidyalaya, the familiar smell of dust, canteen oil, and over‑steeped chai hits her, an old exam‑season perfume. Muscle memory tugs her left, past the photocopy stall and the peepal tree with its layered protest posters, toward the sociology block. Her feet actually begin to turn before she catches herself, a half‑step of betrayal. From across the road she sees the department’s faded signboard, the paint more peeled than she remembers, a few students clustered near the stairs arguing about something with the earnestness of people who still believe in course options. She imagines Milan inside an office piled with papers and forms and unwashed mugs; she diverts to the library instead, convincing herself she should first “gather information” (fellowships, visiting positions, anything) before bothering him with half‑formed plans and an even less formed self.
Even in the smallest exchanges she sands off the vulnerable edges. When an aunt calls to ask how she is “managing alone”, she reports only locker keys, affidavits, the electricity bill name transfer. Items that sound adult and finite. She omits the nights she sleeps with the kitchen light on because the flat, stripped of his cough and TV volume, sounds indecently quiet. When Vibhor suggests dropping by with coffee, she deflects him to “next weekend” in an airy voice, blaming meetings and paperwork rather than admitting she cannot yet bear anyone, least of all a witness from her old life, to see the unsorted heaps on the study desk: or the unopened drawer in the almirah that has begun to feel like a person waiting to be acknowledged.
By evening, her notebook is dense with bullet points. Bank visits, registrar’s office, possible contacts at North Campus, a neatly numbered sequence of “next steps” whose very orderliness makes her skin itch. Evidence of progress that leaves her oddly hollow. Each completed errand sharpens the outline of what she’s not touching: the grief folded into her father’s looping blue handwriting on old envelopes, the dread coiled behind Satyaprakash’s clipped, overly courteous replies, the comfort and danger of walking into Milan’s office and saying, with no PowerPoint or plan, that she doesn’t know what she is doing. She goes to bed rehearsing a new resolve, tomorrow she will start on “personal things”, already aware that, when morning comes, she will probably choose another list instead.
The next morning, the flat feels heavier than usual, as if the air itself has learned sulking. Even the fan seems to rotate with principled reluctance. She pads to the kitchen, measures tea leaves too carefully, as if precision here might compensate for the general vagueness of her life plan, and waits for the water to boil. The familiar hiss of the gas and the clink of steel against steel are almost comforting; they are, at least, tasks with a beginning and an end.
She makes chai and carries the cup to the balcony, standing by the rusting grill where her father used to shake out dishcloths and pass comments on the neighbours’ parking technique. The lane below is already in motion. Scooters starting with a cough, a sabziwala calling out bhindi rates, the building’s WhatsApp group arguments no doubt warming up somewhere behind closed doors. From up here, everything looks mildly absurd and perfectly in order.
Her phone sits in her palm, warm from her skin. She taps it awake and, with the practised masochism of the week, opens Satyaprakash’s chat. His name, a plain “Satyaprakash (Hotel)” from some long‑ago practical decision, glares back at her, more official than intimate. She scrolls up through the last neutral messages: “We’ll talk when you settle in,” “Let me know your dates,” lines that could as easily have been sent to a guest requesting an airport pickup.
They sit there like stones at the mouth of a well: small, unremarkable, and blocking any view of what lies underneath. She imagines, for a brief, disloyal second, a different thread: him asking, “Reached safely? How’s Uncle’s flat?”; her replying with something half‑joking about dust and electricity bills; the easy shorthand of their twenties. Instead there is this polite cul‑de‑sac.
Her thumb hovers over the keyboard. She types, “Can we meet this week?” and watches the words appear in the blue bubble, absurdly tiny for something that could detonate whatever fragile equilibrium she has assembled. The blinking cursor at the end seems to pulse with accusation: coward, or fool, choose one.
She stares at it long enough for the chai to develop a skin. Her mind races ahead to all the possible scripts: his careful “Haan, dekhte hain,” his non‑committal availability, the calm, reasonable tone he will use to dismantle the last decade as though filing a closure report. She pictures herself sitting in some anonymous café, trying not to cry in front of a man who now signs off with “take care” as if she were a former colleague.
With a small, almost irritated sound, she selects the sentence and deletes it. The chat window collapses back into its mute history. She locks the phone with more force than necessary and sets it face down on the dining table, as if she has successfully neutralised an explosive device.
There is a beat of silence in which she could, theoretically, pick it up again.
Instead, she turns away and crosses the living room. The steel almirah squats against the wall, brown paint scratched at the corners, a small garland of dusty plastic flowers still looped around the handle from some forgotten festival. She grips the cool metal, feels the slight stick of humidity, and pulls the door open with both hands, as if opting for a lesser danger.
The familiar smell of old paper and mothballs sweeps over her, oddly clean compared to the oil‑and‑incense muddle of the rest of the flat. Inside, files are stacked in careful bundles, tied with fading red string, labels in his precise engineer’s handwriting: LIC, PF, “Piyali – education,” “Flat papers,” “Misc. Receipts (Keep).” Even his brackets look disciplined.
She pulls one folder out, “Piyali – education,” inevitably, and sits cross‑legged on the cool terrazzo. A staple scratches her palm. On the top sheet, in blue ink, her name sits in his looping script, followed by figures she never knew he had memorised: tuition amounts, hostel deposits, “GRE coaching (advance)”. There are photocopies of her marksheets, each stamped and countersigned, as if he had been quietly auditing her life while she chased it.
The absence of his running commentary, no muttered lecture on interest rates, no dry “beta, tum log to foreign jaoge, hum yahan kagaz sambhalte rahenge”, lands with a dull thud. Every signature of his feels like a conversation held without her, and each line she now “efficiently” transfers into a spreadsheet sharpens, rather than soothes, the question of what, precisely, all that distance had bought her, and what it had cost him.
By late afternoon, the walls feel as if they’re inching closer, so she forces herself out of the apartment, locking the door twice and pocketing the keys like proof of temporary escape. She tells herself she needs a change of air and maybe to “check something at campus,” as if bureaucracy were a leisure activity. On the metro to North Campus, wedged between a college girl whisper‑rehearsing exam answers into her phone and an office worker dozing against the pole with his tie loosened, she drifts into another silent argument with an imagined Satyaprakash. In her head, she’s accusing then instantly defending herself. By the time the train surfaces briefly and the carriage floods with flat, dusty light, she realises her nails are dug into her palm. When she catches her reflection in the darkened window (jaw clenched, shoulders hunched, eyes bright with a heat that is not just from the crowd) she snaps the fantasy shut, dropping her gaze to the scuffed floor. There is something faintly ridiculous about conducting a full‑blown cross‑examination with a man who is not present, may never offer rebuttal, and currently appears in her life primarily as blue ticks. Embarrassed by the intensity of a fight that hasn’t even happened, she forces herself to study the metro map above the doors, as if she might genuinely miss her stop on a line she once knew by heart.
At Vishwavidyalaya, the winter light slants over red‑brick walls and banyan roots just as she remembers, yet everything feels fractionally misaligned. Sleek cafés where dingy photocopy shops once sweated ink, unfamiliar backpacks and haircuts filling the paths she used to walk half‑running to make 9 a.m. lectures. She drifts toward the sociology notice board, pretending to study fellowship announcements while actually scanning the faculty nameplates along the corridor, half‑hoping to spot “Milan” and half‑terrified she will. The idea of appearing in his doorway and confessing, “I don’t have a plan, I don’t even know if I’m staying,” makes her stomach tighten; instead, she carefully copies an email from a generic “consultancy workshop” flyer into her notes app, another safe, bloodless item for her growing list of hypothetical futures.
On the way back, her phone buzzes with a call from Vibhor; she lets it ring out, then reads his follow‑up text at Rajiv Chowk, pressed against a pillar as commuters surge around her. “Free Saturday? Need to drag you to CP, get you out of that museum you’re living in. Also, have a contact who might help with some project‑type work. Say yes.” She stares at “drag you to CP,” instantly mapping it onto a line of sight that ends at a certain business hotel near the outer circle, where the lobby smell is already too vivid in memory. The thought of colliding her careful avoidance with the possibility of a job lead tangles her chest (grief, pride, and panic briefly arguing in the space of a breath) but she types back, “Okay. Saturday’s fine,” adds a neutral thumbs‑up she immediately deletes, and hits send, feeling, for the first time in days, that something outside her control has been set in motion, the city quietly adjusting its routes around her.
She stands motionless for a few seconds, hands dripping, the tap still running. Foam snakes along the edge of the steel sink, threatening to overflow, but she can’t look away from the tiny, over-polite bubbles on her screen.
Madam.
As if she’s a walk‑in guest who once mildly troubled his shift, not someone whose name he used to murmur into an STD booth receiver, shoulders hunched for privacy.
She turns off the tap, the sudden silence in the kitchen making the distant TV from the neighbor’s flat sound louder: laugh track, some overbright serial wife being scolded. The phone light dims. She taps it awake again, rereads.
This is Satyaprakash. Not “I”. Not even “I hope you reached safely”, the old ritual. Only a courteous identification, as if she might have forgotten who he is. Booked a room for you near CP, easier for you. For convenience, like courier delivery.
The hotel name sits there in English, sharp and clean: three stars, business‑class, nothing romantic about it except in the brochures. She can almost see the lobby: fake leather, the refrigerated air that smells of citrus and something chemical, the perfectly neutral paintings nobody notices. A good place for a smooth, professional exit interview.
“Easier for you,” she reads again, and feels, irrationally, like laughing. Easier than what: hauled up three flights of Patel Nagar stairs past neighbors and pressure cookers and her father’s ghost? Or easier for him, no parents, no colony aunties, no history in the walls?
She scrolls up, as if an earlier, warmer message might have appeared and she somehow missed it. There is only bank OTPs, airline promotions, a missed call from Vibhor two days ago, now buried under spam.
Easier.
Her thumb hovers over the keyboard. A part of her, it sounds suspiciously like her mother on the phone, wants to type, Accha, theek hai beta, whatever suits you. Another part, newly brittle, wants to reply, I have a house. I am not luggage in transit.
Instead she sets the phone face‑down on the counter and turns back to the sink. The plates knock against each other with more force than necessary. Soap stings the cuticle she tore on a suitcase zip; the small pain steadies her.
Behind her, on the counter, the phone buzzes again: one more message arriving into the cramped kitchen.
“Hotel is safe, decent,” the preview bar announces. “Don’t worry.”
She lets the water run loud over the dishes so she doesn’t have to decide yet whether she believes him.
She wipes her wet fingers on the faded towel her father never let her throw away, “still kaam ka, why waste?”, and unlocks the phone again. The words don’t change, but they seem to arrange themselves into new patterns of insult each time she reads them.
Madam.
Like a stranger at the desk. Like a guest whose surname he has to check before printing the invoice. The impersonal “for your convenience” lands with the soft precision of a rubber stamp, as if this whole arrangement is a logistical problem he has efficiently solved. No need to bother with anything messier. Her chest feels oddly hollowed, not with the heat of anger but with something cooler, like a lift shaft suddenly opening where a room used to be. On the glowing screen, the hotel name looks less like information and more like a judgement someone has typed up on official letterhead. A business hotel near Connaught Place: neutral, efficient, centrally located, perfect for handing over lost property and signing off on old accounts.
In the next room, her father’s old laptop blinks awake on the table with a sulky whirr, demanding updates and passwords she half‑remembers. While she waits for the browser to stop gasping, an email tab auto‑refreshes and a new subject line rises neatly to the top, all capitals and deference: “Informal Consultation on Curriculum Reform – Tea at Ms. Devanshi [Surname]’s Residence.”
For a second she misreads it as spam, some coaching class ad. Then the sender, “Dr Milan [Surname]” via an institutional ID, registers, and she imagines him somewhere on North Campus, fluorescent tube light buzzing, reading the same invitation and pinching the bridge of his nose. Of course. Even his misgivings now came on embossed e‑stationery, with tea.
Close to midnight, Vibhor’s name finally flashes across her screen, not as a call but as a sprawling voice note: breathless apologies, some product launch on fire, “just this week yaar, next week pakka, I swear,” tumbling over each other. By the time his promises fade into the flat blue of read receipts, she is alone again with the ceiling fan’s tired hum and the neighbor’s TV laughter bleeding, absurdly cheerful, through the thin wall.
The next afternoon, a sharp knock at the Patel Nagar door slices through her listless scrolling. The neighbor auntie does not wait to be really invited in; she surveys the half‑packed cartons, the unwashed mugs, Piyali’s swollen‑rimmed eyes, and clucks approval at her own foresight. “Bas do‑teen ghante roz, mera bhatiji aa jayegi, Kailashini. Thoda haath bata degi, beta. Akele kaise sambhaaloge?” It is phrased as benevolence but arrives with the inevitability of building‑politics. Piyali, too tired to construct a polite refusal, nods. “Theek hai, aunty… dekh lete hain.” The phrase is non‑committal; the acceptance is not. She registers only a faint, guilty relief at outsourcing the kitchen and the cartons, not yet the fact that she has just allowed a stranger into the tight orbit of her grief.
The familiar, suffocating loop of solitary chores, muted calls, and restless scrolling fractures the moment she agrees to let someone else step into the apartment’s rhythms.
At first, the fracture is almost imperceptible. A hairline crack in a glass that has been under quiet pressure for days. She rinses the steel tumbler in the sink, sets it upside down to dry, and realises, absurdly late, that tomorrow there will be another pair of hands to do this. Hands that will not know which pan her father always reached for, which shelf the tea leaves belong to, which cup she has silently declared “his” and therefore cannot bring herself to use.
The thought unsettles her more than she expects. The mess has been, until now, a kind of defensive perimeter: dirty dishes as sandbags, cardboard cartons as trenches. As long as she is the only one picking her way through them, the grief is also contained, domesticated into to‑do lists and piles. Letting a stranger in means letting someone see the war zone before she has curated it into aftermath.
She sits on the edge of the narrow bed in the second room and opens the wardrobe mechanically, as if rehearsal might make the intrusion less sharp. Which corner of the kitchen could be surrendered? Which drawer of her father’s desk can be safely offered up for “sorting” without dislodging the thin order she has imposed on his remaining papers? The flat hums around her: pressure cooker whistles from next door, a scooter revving in the lane, the old laptop ticking as it cools. Ordinary sounds that, for the first time in days, feel slightly off‑beat, as if the apartment itself is adjusting its tempo to accommodate another heartbeat.
She tells herself it is temporary. “Do‑teen ghante roz,” she repeats under her breath, borrowing the auntie’s cadence as a charm. A few hours a day. Help with chopping vegetables, wiping surfaces, taping boxes. Not a lodger, not a flatmate. Certainly not a confidante. Her body, however, registers the decision differently. Her shoulders drop a fraction; the tight band around her temples loosens. If someone else is cutting onions in the kitchen, she will not have to pretend that the tears are only from the knife.
Yet the concession comes braided with a thin vein of shame. First she left, fled, some part of her insists, to a life of clean, well‑lit rentals where you pay professionals to vacuum your detachment. Now she has returned, only to outsource even this last, supposedly filial duty to a girl whose name she has only just learned. What kind of daughter cannot even cook her father’s last packet of dal without assistance?
She could, of course, rescind the offer. There is still time to go upstairs, to lean into the doorway and tell auntie that actually, it is not necessary; she is managing fine. The script unfurls easily in her mind, complete with apologetic smile. “Bas emotional ho gaya tha thoda. Ab sab theek hai.” But she does not move. The effort of that performance, too, feels beyond her.
Instead she scrolls through her phone, thumb flicking past curated lives and sponsored comfort. A housing ad, “Let us handle everything, you just move in”, makes her snort. In Patel Nagar, the equivalent service arrives unbidden in the form of a relative’s niece with strong wrists and a willingness to mop.
She realises, with a start, that she is curious. About this Kailashini who can be summoned like a solution, whose time and labour can be reassigned with a casual “aa jayegi.” What does it mean to be the person who is always available to “help out” in someone else’s story? The question pricks her: too close to her own history of being the responsible one, the fixer, the daughter who could be relied on to translate forms and balance accounts.
Perhaps, she thinks, watching a line of ants determine their own silent paths across the floor, bringing another caretaker into this flat will be like placing two mirrors opposite each other: infinite regress, or a new angle. Either way, the loop has been broken. Tomorrow, when the doorbell rings, the apartment will have to admit a different gaze, a different rhythm. And she, whether she likes it or not, will no longer be the sole custodian of its disorder.
The message arrives as a discreet buzz against her thigh while she is still standing in the kitchen, staring at the tumbler. For a second she lets it vibrate out, indulging the fantasy that it might be Vibhor changing his mind, or some distant work email accidentally tethering her back to a more familiar panic.
It is neither. It is Satyaprakash, and it is… professional.
“Hi Piyali. I’ve booked a room for you here at the hotel from tomorrow. Staff discount, so it’s convenient. You can check in whenever after 12. We can meet in the café downstairs. – S.”
She reads it twice, hunting instinctively for some stray warmth, an extra exclamation mark, an unnecessary “yaar”, anything that might smuggle in the intimacy of old. The text offers nothing. No “finally,” no reference to the years of calls, no acknowledgement that this is the first time they will see each other in… how long? It could have been sent to any guest.
“Convenient,” she notes, wryly. Not “I’m looking forward,” not even “it’ll be easier.” The hotel, the lobby café, the staff discount: the terms of their meeting are corporate, neutral, fluorescently lit. He is not coming to Patel Nagar, into the stale air thick with her father’s absence, the neighbours’ scrutiny, the childhood desk. Instead, she is being called out of this cramped, grieving flat and into his controlled, air‑conditioned terrain, where he wears a name badge and a practiced smile and can, if necessary, end a conversation by glancing at the front desk clock.
She imagines arriving there with her overnighter, standing in the same queue as sales executives and tourists, her breakup slotted between check‑in formalities and the complimentary welcome drink. The choice of venue is, she realises, not laziness but choreography. In a lobby, there are CCTV cameras, other people, a café bill. The furniture itself will ask them to sit opposite each other, hands politely on the table, voices low.
Her thumb hovers over the keyboard. “Thanks, that works,” she types, then deletes. “We can meet here in Patel Nagar if you prefer?” becomes, half‑formed, an accusation even before it reaches the screen. Finally she settles on a single word that offends no one and commits to nothing: “Okay.”
She adds a full stop, then takes it away. Sends it bare. The blue ticks arrive almost immediately. No further reply follows.
On the kitchen counter, the rinsed tumbler gleams faintly under the tube‑light, upside down, drip drying. For the second time that day, she has agreed to let someone else set the terms of how her private mess will be entered. Or avoided.
Milan’s name in the sender line stops her thumb mid‑scroll. For a moment, before she opens it, she allows herself a brief, ridiculous hope: a forwarded article, an inside joke from some seminar long ago, proof that the version of her who argued footnotes on North Campus hasn’t entirely died.
Instead there is a subject line with capital letters and colons (“Invitation: Strategy Tea with Trustee Devanshi Mehta”) and a body so polite it might as well be on letterhead. He writes of “opportunities for meaningful curricular reform” and “informal inputs from former students now in industry,” and copies three administrators she does not know.
It is flattering, almost. Also faintly suffocating. Even the futures that are not Satyaprakash arrive couched in agendas and drawing‑room teas, tethered to the same boards and benefactors that once convinced her the university was not built for people like her to thrive, only to be showcased.
She rereads his closing line (“No pressure at all, only if you have the bandwidth”) and snorts softly. Bandwidth, in Patel Nagar, currently means deciding which of her father’s notebooks can be thrown away without feeling like treason. The idea of taking the metro to Lutyens’ Delhi to sip Assam under a trustee’s curated bougainvillea feels like slipping into someone else’s costume.
Still, the email glows there, a door marked “Elsewhere” she cannot yet walk through, but also cannot quite bring herself to delete.
Vibhor’s “this week is crazy yaar, next pakka” lands like a door clicking shut down the corridor. One more person pleading busyness, one more postponement dressed up as reassurance. The flat’s earlier quiet, which she had been treating as a logistical hiccup, thickens into something else: not absence as intermission, but as default setting, a steady background hum of nobody coming today.
The “help” arrives as proposal, not person: one more woman to fold into the apartment’s choreography of dishes and dust. Yet Piyali hears, beneath Auntie’s efficiency, the offer of a witness. Someone who will see the tumblers left half‑washed, the unopened cartons, the days that sag and blur. An unchosen companion who might, simply by standing there, rearrange the loneliness.
The message from Satyaprakash lands first: a rectangular intrusion between bank OTPs and airline spam. For a second she only registers his name, the old reflexive quickening in her chest, before the preview line below it drains away whatever hope had briefly flared.
“Dear Piyali,” it begins, as if they have ever addressed each other like that in writing. No “yaar,” no “are you here then?” Just the correct spelling of her name followed by commas, full stops, the dry architecture of customer communication.
He has, he informs her, “arranged” a room for her at his hotel “for convenience,” the phrase doing a great deal of work. The words are precise, almost copy‑pasted from the tone he must use for corporate guests: “We are pleased to confirm your reservation under our staff discount policy.” Check‑in time, check‑out time, breakfast hours. The address spelled in full, landmarks, even a line about parking facilities, though he knows she does not drive.
Her arrival, their arrival at each other, translated into timings and tariff bands.
He suggests they meet in the lobby café “once you’ve rested from your journey.” There is no question mark. No suggestion he might come to Patel Nagar, help with boxes, see where her father last sat. No mention of her father at all, in fact. As if bereavement too can be kept outside the hotel’s glass doors, along with dust and autorickshaw noise.
She scrolls down, looking for something: an apology, a joke about airline food, a stray endearment that forgot to be edited out. There is only “let me know if this arrangement suits you” and his name, stripped of the familiar abbreviation she still uses in her head.
Arrangement. Suits. The vocabulary of contracts, not of promises. The entire thing reads less like a lover making space for her in his life than a front desk manager optimising logistics. He has chosen the terrain: chilled air, CCTV, uniforms between them. A place where even raised voices would register as disturbance to be managed.
Her thumb hovers over the keyboard. For a wild moment she imagines replying as his most difficult guest: demanding a different venue, a later check‑out from whatever this is. Instead she locks the screen and stares at the fan, feeling the Patel Nagar heat press in, and somewhere beneath the numbness, a small, absurd hurt: that the ending of so many years can be summarised in check‑in time 14:[^00] hrs, check‑out 12:[^00] hrs sharp.
Almost on top of it, Milan’s polite, opportunity‑laden email about Devanshi’s “strategy tea” appears, as if the universe is determined to route all decisions through her inbox. The subject line, “Informal Consultation on Curriculum Reform”, sounds like something from a conference brochure, not from the man who once lent her photocopied readings and asked how her father was managing the fees.
He writes with his usual diffidence, hedging distance and familiarity. “Dear Piyali (if I may),” followed by a careful explanation: a trustee named Ms Devanshi Mehta is gathering “a small group of stakeholders” at her Lutyens’ bungalow to discuss “the future direction” of the department. He thought of her “as someone whose trajectory embodies many of the questions at stake”: a phrase that makes her feel less like a person and more like a case study.
North Campus rises in her mind: the red brick, the banyan trees, the tea in disposable cups that left rings on seminar tables. She can almost see a version of herself walking there again, notebook under arm, still believing that ideas could outshout family expectations and bank balances.
Yet threaded through Milan’s invitation is the faint watermark of patronage: phrases about “benefactors,” “alignment,” “leveraging synergies.” To accept would be to step into a garden where decisions are made over porcelain cups, by people whose lives look nothing like the ones being “uplifted.” To decline would be to confirm what everyone suspects. That those who leave rarely come back for anything more than nostalgia tours.
Her thumb hovers over this message too. Between Satyaprakash’s staff‑discount room and Devanshi’s curated lawn, the city seems to be offering her two impeccably managed versions of herself: guest or beneficiary, never quite at home.
Vibhor’s apologetic cancellation blinks up on her phone like an afterthought, its casual “next week pakka” slicing through the thin routine she has been using to hold herself together. He is “stuck in a release,” “clients breathing down his neck,” all the familiar Gurugram emergencies that had once sounded glamorous when she was in another time zone. Now they just mean he will not, in fact, be sitting on this lumpy sofa tonight making bad jokes about her father’s ancient mixer‑grinder.
“Yaar, I really wanted to come,” he writes, as if intention could substitute for presence. “We’ll do a proper catch‑up, promise.” The promises multiply in her inbox while the actual bodies remain elsewhere, busy, delayed, optimising their schedules around her absence.
In the stale air of the Patel Nagar flat, these three notifications sit side by side on her cracked screen, coolly itemising her future: a room booked, a lawn convened, a friend postponed. Together they shuffle the fragile story she had been telling herself about why she came back, and who, if anyone, was actually planning to be here to receive her return.
Before she can fully name the ache, the neighbor auntie’s suggestion about “ek ladki jo madad kar degi” elbows its way in, translating her unsettled solitude into a household defect to be fixed. Grief becomes clutter, loneliness becomes “adjustment issues,” and the proposed solution is, conveniently, externalised: a temporary helper. A neat, practical sentence that will, in a few days, arrive at her door as Kailashini.
For a few seconds after the auntie leaves, Piyali just stands in the middle of the living room, phone still in her hand with Vibhor’s apologetic message open and Satyaprakash’s hotel details lurking above it, feeling as if decisions are being made around her body rather than by it. The door has barely stopped vibrating from the auntie’s efficient exit, her last “achha beta, soch lo” still hanging in the corridor, when the flat seems to rearrange itself around this new proposed solution.
She becomes acutely conscious of the way she is standing: shoes half‑off, dupatta slipping, shoulders bent as if she has been caught mismanaging not just a home but a life. On the screen, the hotel confirmation sits with its bland competence (“reservation under your name, no worries”) while below, Vibhor’s “next week pakka” glows with cheerful deferral. Now, superimposed on both, is the auntie’s brisk voice assigning her a girl who will “help out” as though grief were an overflowing sink.
She scrolls back up to Satyaprakash’s message. “For convenience,” he has written, as if he is arranging logistics for a conference delegate. Staff discount, nearby metro, no need to trouble herself with travel from Patel Nagar. Such thoughtful outsourcing. Between the hotel room, the strategy tea, and the household helper, her life is being divided neatly into compartments, each managed by someone else’s calendar and someone else’s idea of what is “best” for her.
She tries to imagine herself refusing: telling the auntie she prefers to drown in her own dirty dishes, telling Satyaprakash she would rather meet in the suffocating honesty of this flat. But the words feel heavy, impractical, almost rude. The part of her trained to be grateful, to say yes to opportunities and assistance, quietly raises its hand and votes in favour of compliance. The rest of her just stands there, phone warming in her palm, listening to the ceiling fan’s wobbling whirr as if it might, at any moment, choose a direction on her behalf.
Her first, faint instinct is to protest (“I don’t need help, I’m not that helpless”) a reflexive tightening in her chest, as if someone has just tried to hand her a label she does not remember ordering. The sentence even forms on her tongue in neat, polite Hindi, rehearsed from years of insisting she could “manage” without tuitions, without quota, without favours.
But it withers the moment her eyes actually travel across the room.
There are three unwashed cups on the low table, each with a different shade of dried tea skimming the bottom, like a time‑lapse of her decline. The half‑unzipped suitcase on the divan has begun to sag, clothes spilling out in a tired, accusatory heap, still faintly smelling of laundry from a country she is no longer in. On the floor beside the almirah, her father’s papers sit in a rigid, untouched stack, the top file gathering a thin fur of dust that shows, with scientific precision, exactly how many days she has not been able to bring herself to open it.
“I’m not that helpless” collapses, quietly disproved by evidence.
She drops into the sagging chair at the old study desk, its familiar wobble oddly accusatory, and unlocks her phone again. First, Satyaprakash’s message: the same courteous, managerial tone she remembers from his hostel‑visiting‑hours days, now repurposed to route her into a staff‑discount room and an efficient ending. She reads “for convenience” twice, as if the phrase might suddenly confess what it is really doing there. Then she scrolls to the new contact the auntie insisted on saving: the niece’s number, now sitting in her phone book as “Kailashini – help,” brackets and all. It strikes her, with a cool, almost academic clarity, how neatly her inchoate grief has been converted into logistics, hotel booking, strategy tea, household assistance, by everyone, including, alarmingly, herself.
A small, defensive part of her bristles at the idea of “a girl to help” moving through her father’s rooms, touching his things, witnessing her undone state: some unknown niece evaluating the dust on his trophies, the disorder of her suitcase. Another, more exhausted part leans toward the promise tucked into the auntie’s “until you manage,” the astonishing suggestion that managing is, in fact, temporary.
Her thumbs move almost on autopilot as she types, “Haan auntie, theek hai, kal se aa jaaye,” and hits send before her pride can catch up. The reply chimes back with indecent speed, some polite confirmation, and an odd, hollow quiet settles in the room. Relief arrives first, sharp and practical; then dread, slower, heavier, at the fact that she has just authorised a stranger to witness this interim, half‑collapsed version of her life.
Letting an unknown woman into her father’s flat feels, to her own surprise, like filing a formal notice somewhere: a quiet declaration that she has moved from “managing” to “not managing,” that the situation has tipped from temporary disarray into something requiring outside intervention. It is not a line anyone else can see, no social worker has come, no relative has staged a concerned‑face intervention, but in her own private mythology, the arrival of “help” has always belonged firmly to other people’s lives. Elderly aunts with arthritis and sons in America. Newly delivered mothers whose sisters descend with tiffins and feeding bottles. Landed families on television serials, where cooks and maids appear at the edges of the frame like moving furniture.
Not, pointedly, her.
For years, competence has been her only real wealth. The girl who filled scholarship forms without guidance, who navigated hostel wardens, visa offices, HR portals. The daughter who booked hospital appointments, coordinated test reports, coaxed reluctant specialists to explain “in simple language, please.” Even from abroad, she had managed: online payments to the electricity board, remote troubleshooting of her father’s phone, WhatsApp voice notes about medicines, arranged like subheadings in his day.
To admit she cannot, or will not, now cook regularly, sweep, sort papers, perform the small rituals of keeping a home alive, feels less like a confession of tiredness and more like a character flaw. There is, buried somewhere in the sediment of first‑generation respectability, an article of faith that if you start paying someone to do the basics, some moral muscle will atrophy forever. You will become that NRI cliché: too soft for your own culture, too rich or too lazy to wash your own dishes.
Yet when she looks around, the greasy ring on the gas stove, the laundry she has been cycling through the same two chairs, the unopened envelopes near the door, she has to admit that “managing” has already become a kind of fiction she is performing for no audience. Her days are a series of micro‑negotiations between physical exhaustion and emotional avoidance: step over that stack of magazines, pretend not to see the overflowing dustbin, tell herself she will “properly” start sorting things from Monday, from the tenth, from after she meets S.
The entry of this unseen niece, with her sturdy name and practical promise, forces a small, unwelcome clarity. If someone else is needed, then her own capacity is not infinite; if her capacity is not infinite, then perhaps this heroic narrative she has clung to, that she can single‑handedly honour her father, close out the estate, survive a breakup, and reinvent a career, all while boiling dal and scrubbing bathrooms, might have been exaggerated to begin with.
The thought is both humiliating and, in a way she does not yet want to examine, faintly merciful.
The idea that someone else will touch his almirahs, his magazines, his unwashed cups sharpens her grief into a fierce, almost possessive anxiety she hadn’t named before. It is one thing for the neighbors to speculate in the stairwell, quite another for a stranger’s hands to slide back the stiff metal bolt of his cupboard, to sift through the sediment of his life as if it were merely “stuff to be sorted.”
She can see it too clearly: bangles clinking as this niece pulls out shirts still faintly smelling of his aftershave, stacks of dog‑eared engineering monthlies shuffled into neat, rational piles, the chipped tea mug by the sink finally submerged in soapy water. Each imagined act of tidying feels like a small erasure, the conversion of relics back into objects. For days now, she has been living in careful disarray, as if the exact angle of the magazines on the coffee table, the exact pattern of stains on the kitchen counter, were a crude but necessary diagram of what has happened here. If those markers vanish, what proof remains that something enormous has broken?
At the same time, the prospect of another body in the flat, footsteps in the kitchen, a throat cleared in the corridor, a voice answering the doorbell before she can decide whether she wants to, throws into relief how unlivably silent her days have become. The television stays off because she cannot bear its cheerfulness, the radio because even melancholy songs feel like commentary. The neighbors’ pressure cookers hiss, scooters backfire in the lane, vendors call out in practiced singsong, but inside the apartment the air only moves when she does. Sometimes she catches herself holding her breath without reason, as if trying not to disturb something. The idea that routine sounds might return with this niece lands on her like both intrusion and rescue.
Her phone buzzes; Satyaprakash’s clipped hotel message and Milan’s politely strategic invite arrive in the same notification bar, like two parallel exits dressed up as logistics. Before she can decide which summons to dignify with a reply, the doorbell rings for the auntie, for the niece, for “help”: the only offer moving toward her just as everyone else, it seems, is moving away.
She signs yes almost out of muscle memory, anything to stop being the only moving part in the flat, and only afterwards understands the trade she has opened. This will not be mere “help” but a new axis of dependence, a stranger’s rhythm braided into her days, capable of shoring her up or quietly redrawing who decides what, and when, in her own home.
On the metro to Rajiv Chowk, overnight bag parked between her feet like a slightly embarrassed pet, Piyali replays Satyaprakash’s message until she can see the words even with the screen dark.
“Room is booked for you in our hotel. Staff discount. Will be more convenient for you than travelling back and forth. We can meet in the café whenever suits. Let me know your arrival time.”
No emojis, no stray exclamation mark, not even the lazy affection of a “yaar” tacked on to blunt an instruction. Just “will be more convenient for you,” as if she were a guest whose preferences he had correctly anticipated. The grammar is better than it used to be, she notices irrelevantly; he has been practicing this voice.
Convenient for you, she thinks, would have been Patel Nagar. Tea in chipped cups, the fan clicking overhead, the chance to pretend they were merely resuming a conversation paused by geography. Convenient for him is a hotel lobby where he stands behind a desk, in a shirt with a name badge, on CCTV, framed by neutral lighting and a complaints register. Here, the story can be processed, stamped, filed.
The train jerks; she grips the overhead bar, knuckles whitening, and feels the Patel Nagar apartment recede. Not just in kilometres, but as the last place where their past still leaks under doors and lingers in curtains. There, she could have postponed endings indefinitely by not naming them. Here, heading into Connaught Place with an overnight bag and a booking reference number, she has accepted the premise: that there is something to be checked into and checked out of.
She tells herself she could still not go. She could change at Rajiv Chowk, switch platforms, return to Patel Nagar and declare herself too unwell to travel. Yet her body has already aligned with the choreography of compliance: bag between feet, arrival time texted, Google Maps open on the hotel’s address. By coming here, by allowing his “arrangements” to structure her evening, she has chosen to stand inside whatever script he has written, instead of wandering the comfortingly indefinite corridors of if and maybe from a safer distance.
The sliding glass doors whoosh open, releasing a controlled waft of lobby fragrance, and for a second she hovers on the threshold like a glitch in automatic settings. The bellboy’s hand closes, unerringly practiced, around the handle of her overnight bag; her fingers don’t quite let go. Behind the reception desk, a junior in an identical shirt to Satyaprakash’s, only a different name pinned over his heart, smiles: “ID, ma’am?”
It is such an ordinary request that refusing it would be a kind of scene. Still, there is a sliver of time in which she imagines saying, actually I’ve changed my mind, dragging the bag back out past the potted palms, texting later about a sudden migraine, an uncle’s errand, anything.
The sliver seals. She unzips the outer pocket, slides her passport across the counter. The scanner’s green bar creeps over her photo, her name, her expatriate address, converting her, in this building, from history into data. Signature here, ma’am. One copy for records. One key card, two breakfasts standard. With every small compliance she feels the evening narrow, their story reduced to a reservation that will end, neatly, at check‑out.
In the lift, she studies her reflection in the brushed‑metal walls: airport hair that never quite recovered from the flight, borrowed eyeliner smudged into something too soft for the lobby’s hard light, a cotton kurta that says “home” in a room determined to say “stay only forty‑eight hours.”
A part of her wants to refuse the script embedded in his polite, “You can freshen up and then we’ll talk”. To go straight downstairs as she is, smelling of the metro and grief, and force whatever is coming to meet her without neutral lighting. Another part, bone‑deep weary, longs for the anaesthetic of obedience: shower, change, perform composure.
When the doors slide open, the decision feels less like a choice than a quiet declaration of who she is willing to be for him, this last time.
She sets her bag on the stand, touches the plastic‑wrapped soap, the generic landscape over the bed, the lone chair angled towards a window that doesn’t quite open. Each object seems to instruct her in neutrality: be efficient, be temporary, leave no trace. The urge to stall, to shower, change, claim jet lag and buy herself one last hour in which this conversation remains notional, rises like nausea. She can almost see the script: towel around wet hair, scrolling news, drafting some gentle excuse. But the familiarity of it irritates her; this is the same talent for postponement that helped their calls fade from nightly necessity to fortnightly obligation, then to polite check‑ins conducted with one eye on other screens, both of them pretending not to notice the silence filling the gaps.
Phone in hand, thumb hovering over the keypad, she makes a small, mutinous turn away from that old pattern: instead of typing, “Give me some time, I’ll come down later,” she writes, “I’m here: can we talk now?” and sends it before she can soften or qualify. The message lands like a quiet ultimatum: she is not here to renegotiate, to trial a new schedule of calls, to reopen the file under some more “practical” heading. If this is ending, she wants it spoken in the same room as her body, not outsourced to buffering icons and time zones. A sentence they both hear themselves say, and cannot unsend.
The café is only half‑full, a few laptops open, clinking spoons and low music smoothing the edges of conversation; Piyali chooses the table farthest from the glass doors, aware of the staff’s sidelong glances and the CCTV dome above them. The glass façade reflects the lobby behind her. A faint, double image of reception desk, suitcase wheels, elevator doors opening and closing like a metronome for other people’s arrivals and departures. She takes the chair that faces the room rather than the street, out of old habit; you never know which direction bad news will walk in from.
She places her phone face‑down, silenced, as if fencing in the impulse to flee into messages and distraction. For a second her thumb hovers over the side button, she could still call Vibhor, send a last “Pray for me” joke, text Kailashini a vague update, open her father’s old unread WhatsApps, but the thought of blue ticks, of anyone witnessing this in real time, is unbearable. The black screen offers no witness and no escape.
When Satyaprakash arrives with two cups, “One for you, one black for me”, she notes how his hotel smile doesn’t quite leave his face, even as he sits opposite her. The tray is held at the exact angle he uses at the front desk, wrist neat, movements economical; only the slight tremor when he sets down the saucer betrays that this is not a standard check‑in.
“Madam, cappuccino,” he jokes weakly, before catching himself. They both hear the slip into role. A bead of sweat darkens his collar, out of place in the air‑conditioned chill, and he wipes his hand quickly on his trouser seam, as if erasing fingerprints.
Up close, she sees new lines near his mouth, the faint shadow of sleeplessness under his eyes, and a watch on his wrist she has never seen before. He smells of hotel soap and lobby fragrance, a scent that belongs more to the building than to him. She has an absurd urge to ask whether he gets a staff discount, whether the watch was bought for some future wife more appropriate than her, and swallows it with the first bitter sip of coffee.
“You found the room okay?” he asks, defaulting to script.
“Haan,” she says. “Everything is… very professional.”
He winces almost imperceptibly at the word, and for a moment they simply sit, two clients of the same impersonal system, pretending there is no private history balanced on the edge of the table between them.
For a few minutes they perform the scene of stranger and staff as if they have both forgotten their lines. He asks about the flight, “On time tha? Immigration mein bahut line toh nahi lagi?”. And she hears herself giving tight, factual answers: “Thik tha. Bas thoda delay. Baggage mein time lag gaya.” They move on to traffic from the airport, the Metro line extension he mentions as if recommending it to a guest, the room’s air‑conditioning and whether it was cooling properly, the breakfast buffet timings he recites from memory.
Each topic is a plastic spoon handed over the counter: light, disposable, leaving no mark. She can almost see the layers: Delhi weather, hotel facilities, jet lag, jet lag remedies, all neatly interposed between his careful eyes and hers. Underneath, something sore and wordless presses against the wrapping.
When he finally clears his throat and says, “We should… discuss things, but you must be tired from the journey,” the rhythm is identical to “If there’s any inconvenience, please let us know.” She realizes with a small, cold clarity that if she accepts this deferral now, they might never find their way back out of this laminated politeness.
“Main thak ke yahi toh aayi hoon,” she answers quietly (“It’s because I’m tired that I came”) and before he can slip back into script, she adds, “Aapke paas kitna time hai abhi?” forcing him to name a window instead of an attitude.
He glances towards reception, the reflex almost comical in its predictability: eyes to the desk, to the clock above the lifts, to the junior clerk currently fielding a guest. You can see the calculations: shift rota, expected check‑ins, manager’s round. At last he exhales. “Half an hour, maybe forty‑five minutes.”
The number lands between them like a boundary line, an allotted slot for ending a life. She nods once, pushes the laminated menu aside, and wraps both hands around the warm cup as if gripping a railing. “Theek hai. Jo bhi bolna hai, isi mein bol lijiye. Baad mein aapke guests aa jayenge.”
Her opening (“So this is the end then) chaliye, theek se kar lete hain”: comes out flatter than she expects, the Hindi cushioning the English finality without dissolving it. He stiffens, not ready for an agenda item titled Ending. “Nahin, aisa mat bolo, it’s not about ‘the end’, it’s about… different paths, practical realities,” he begins, voice slipping into the cadence of policy. His gaze keeps flicking to the lobby, the elevator, the blinking reception phone, as if each ping and ring were a possible excuse to stand up, to say “just a minute, madam” and never quite come back.
Listening to the familiar phrases (“responsibility,” “future,” “family pressure”) pile up like bullet points in a PowerPoint, she feels herself split cleanly in two: one part coolly cataloguing each justification, mentally footnoting contradictions; another watching the small betrayals of his body, the sweat beading at his temple despite the air‑conditioning, the way his smile hardens when he says “practical.” When he adds, almost to the table, that “distance changes people” without once meeting her eyes, the cooperative, well‑behaved half of her simply steps aside. She loosens her grip on the cup, leans forward just enough to cut through the café’s background hum, and abandons the safe, neutral language they have been sheltering in.
Her question lands harder than she meant it to; Satyaprakash’s fingers tense around the saucer, producing a small, betraying clink that makes both of them glance down. The teaspoon wobbles once, then settles, as if embarrassed on his behalf. For a heartbeat his rehearsed script evaporates, and she sees, not the man with the name badge and the neutral smile, but the boy who had once stood outside the exam centre gate in a faded shirt, holding a plastic tiffin and a bottle of Limca, pretending he wasn’t waiting for her.
That version of him flickers up and then is gone. His jaw tightens; his gaze skids past her shoulder to the glass wall, to the blur of cars and headlights and office workers outside, as if the traffic might offer a prompter. In the reflection she can see the two of them doubled: her thin, travel‑creased outline, his neat hotel silhouette. Two ghosts in an air‑conditioned aquarium.
When he finally speaks, the volume of his voice has dropped, and the polished, reception‑desk cadence has started to fray at the edges. “Main… main do jagah pe ek saath kaise hota?” he says, the English deserting him for a second. “Nobody was there to cover my shifts. Agar main chhod ke chala jaata na, toh yeh log seedha nikaal dete. Phir kaun bharta bill?”
He isn’t looking at her now, only at a point somewhere between the sugar packets and the tissue holder. “You say ‘team’, but team se kya hota hai? ‘Team’ doesn’t pay hospital bills, doesn’t pay rent. Manager ko kya bolta main? Ki meri… friend ke papa hospital mein hain, so I need two weeks off?”
The word “friend” arrives cautiously, like he is testing how little he can downgrade her and still sound reasonable. The irony is so fine‑grained she almost respects it. He clears his throat. “Tum wahan thi… doosre country mein. Tumhaare paas insurance tha, salary thi. Yahan… main akela tha. Mummy ka BP, yeh flat ka kiraya, chhote bhai ki fees. Sab kuch mere upar.”
He shrugs, a quick, defensive lift of the shoulders that reads as both apology and absolution. “Main bhi thak gaya tha, Piyali. Roz raat ko lobby mein khade hokar ‘Good evening, sir, welcome, madam,’ bolte‑bolte. Phir phone pe tumhare messages, tumhare calls… different time zone. Kabhi main so raha hota tha, kabhi double shift. Tumko lagta hoga main ignore kar raha hoon, but… I couldn’t.”
He spreads his hands flat on the table for a moment, palms splayed as if to show they are empty. “Main bas… do jagah pe ek saath nahi reh sakta tha. Tumhare saath team ban’na accha lagta tha jab hum dono student the. Ab yahaan, team ka matlab hai kaun paise daal raha hai, kaun ghar chala raha hai. Whose name is on the lease.”
The last sentence comes out with a bitterness he had not scheduled. He hears it too, because he winces faintly, then adds, almost dutifully, “Main bura insaan nahin banna chahta, samjho na. Bas realistic ho gaya hoon.”
As he starts enumerating rent figures, medicine costs, his mother’s fluctuating blood pressure readings, the words come faster, less curated, as if he has slipped from breakup script into an internal audit that has been running for years. The café’s piped music and the soft hiss of the espresso machine seem to fold in around them, a sterile soundtrack to his ledger of survival. He sketches the months she was gone in bus routes and last‑metro timings, in small loans from colleagues, in nights he spent half‑sleeping on the lobby sofa after an unexpected late check‑in.
Each example doubles as both accusation and defense. Her WhatsApp calls at what, for him, were odd hours (just when he was gulping tea before a night shift, or stumbling home at dawn) become evidence of how far away she had moved. His unread messages after double shifts morph into quiet proof that he, too, had needs she never fully saw. He doesn’t say “class” or “shame” or “envy”; he says instead that her video‑call background and his uniform had started to feel like they belonged to incompatible universes, parallel lives briefly connected by weak Wi‑Fi.
When he finally murmurs that her life abroad had “become another planet,” she hears, under the careful metaphor, a quieter confession: at some point he had stopped being able to picture himself there with her at all. The planet was not distant, she thinks; he had simply decided it did not need an atmosphere that could support him. A dozen counter‑arguments rise automatically. Screenshots of half‑filled visa forms, links she had sent for hotel chains hiring abroad, the night she stayed up reworking his CV while he slept through their call. She tastes each one like a bitter pill and lets it dissolve, asking instead, almost clinically, when exactly he decided to stop trying. The question fixes him; he blinks, fumbles for a neat date, then ends up throwing seasons and crises at her (“after your second year there,” “jab Ma ko phir se problem hua,” “when that promotion didn’t happen”) each phrase a small, inadvertent milestone of disengagement. As he circles around the answer without naming it, she realises he has remembered precisely when hope began to feel expensive, but cannot bring himself to admit that the first thing he cut from the budget was her.
That night in Patel Nagar, the same conversation reappears in softened fragments as Piyali perches on the narrow kitchen stool, watching Kailashini wipe down the counter in small, economical circles. At first she offers only headlines, “He said we changed,” “He talked like it was all a phase”, but under Kailashini’s patient, sideways questions (“Phase kab se laga usko?” “Pehle kaise tha?” “Tumne kya bola?”), details begin to loosen. The cheap coffee outside the coaching centre, the laminated tables damp with spilled milk; the absurd precision with which they had once calculated how many years a small guesthouse would take to break even; the first time he called her “madam” as a joke because she had corrected his email draft. Each recollection arrives half‑apologetically, like contraband, and is folded into the air between them. The cramped kitchen, smelling of tadka, damp dishcloth and phenyl, with its flickering tube‑light and perpetually sticky switchboard, becomes an unofficial confession booth where both grease and old sentences are slowly scrubbed off in overlapping motions.
On some afternoons, she even cuts calls with Vibhor short, saying, “Kal bataungi,” and surprises herself by meaning it. Once, when Kailashini is late, Piyali wanders from room to room, stories pooling uselessly at the back of her throat. When the bell finally rings, the relief is almost physical. They do not name it, but the loyalty feels contractual: her pain, Kailashini’s time.
In the café, Piyali refuses to let his “bachpana” label settle; the word lands on the table between them like a damp tissue, inadequate and already starting to disintegrate. She stirs her coffee once, twice, then sets the spoon down very carefully, as if aligning something inside herself.
“Toh phir woh sab kya tha?” Her voice is low enough that the waiter passing behind them glances once and then away, reassured there is no scene, only two well‑behaved adults discussing something boring.
She does not leave the question abstract. One by one, she names the exhibits, her tone almost accountancy‑flat. The cheap coffees outside her coaching centre, the ones he bought from thelas because “andar toh robbery hai”; the call where they had seriously debated whether “Singh Palace” sounded too much like a bar; the Excel sheet she had once made with projected room tariffs and occupancy rates, half as a joke, half not. She lists them like entries in a ledger, each memory given a neat heading and a rupee‑less figure.
“Yaad hai?” she asks only once.
Satyaprakash’s practiced calm falters at the precision. He looks away from her, away from the wall clock and the glass doors, finally fixing his eyes on the row of sugar sachets in their little metal holder. His fingers straighten one that was already straight.
“Yaad hai,” he says, and the admission arrives stripped of performance. For a second, his face has the unarmoured openness she remembers from bus stops and coaching queues. Then he reaches for the narrative he has rehearsed, almost visibly: a slight inhale, the tilt of shoulders.
“Par woh sab… chhodna pada,” he adds quickly, as if someone has prompted him from an invisible cue‑sheet. “Dheere‑dheere samajh aa gaya na, ki practical kya hai. Tum wahaan, main yahan. Guesthouse‑vesthouse…” He gives a small, strained laugh, tries to wave the word away with his hand. “Suitcase mein sab nahi aa sakta. Kuch cheezein peeche reh jaati hain.”
The metaphor arrives clumsy and mixed but he clings to it, folding each recalled scene under the category of “what had to be left behind,” as if re‑folding a shirt that will not quite fit the suitcase yet insisting on trying. Piyali watches the effort, the way he keeps smoothing an invisible crease, and realises that for him the problem is not that the shirt was wrong, only that it took up space he now needs for other things.
“Tumne decide kiya tha kaun si cheez peeche reh jaaye,” she says, not accusing, simply stating an accounting fact. “Bas itna bata do, kab decide kiya.”
He opens his mouth, then closes it again. “Kab…?” He repeats the word, buying time, eyes dropping once more to the sugar sachets, his thumb worrying their edges. Somewhere behind them the coffee machine hisses, a brief, irritated exhale.
“Yeh sab bachpana tha,” he tries one last time, softer, almost pleading now with the category itself. “Hum dono ke liye.”
“Par bachche toh tum the,” she says mildly. “Main toh tab bhi accounts bana rahi thi.”
He lets out a short breath that is almost a laugh. “Haan, ‘Singh & Sons’,” he says, the words tasting unfamiliar now. “Aur tum hamesha bolti thi, ‘Kaun se sons?’”
She remembers; the way he had insisted the board would have a picture of her father in a tie, even though the man hated ties, the way she had drawn a crooked logo in the margin of her coaching notebook: a little house with “VACANCY” written in a speech bubble. They had once spent an entire bus ride arguing over whether her father would take the money from guests or keep saying, “Arre beta, chhodo, agle time de dena.”
For a second, the picture is vivid enough to feel like an alternate present: her father at reception, Satyaprakash at the back desk balancing accounts, her hovering with spreadsheets and tea, all of them slightly harried and somehow content. The clarity of it startles her. Then the air‑conditioning draft brushes her arm, the lobby music settles back into focus, and the imagined board above a modest doorway dissolves into the actual, backlit hotel logo over his shoulder: some foreign name, shiny brass letters, no “Singh” anywhere.
Later that afternoon, Milan sits at his metal desk on North Campus, ceiling fan chopping the heavy air into lukewarm circles. The brochure lies open beside Piyali’s old essay, its coated pages refusing to lie flat, as if even the paper has too much confidence. Bullet points, “mentorship,” “global exposure,” “bridging worlds”, march down the page in a font that looks expensively neutral. The phrases echo his abandoned grant proposals almost word for word, but where his file margins once carried cramped, angry notes about “structural inequality” and “reproduction of class,” the glossy document supplies smiling faces and a vocabulary of uplift.
He traces Piyali’s underlined sentence, “Mobility is never just upwards; it is sideways, diagonal, and sometimes backwards”, and feels, beneath the academic recognition, a small, stubborn knot of dread.
As he cross‑matches the essay’s case studies with the fellowship’s selection criteria, Milan sees how neatly someone like Piyali could be packaged into a poster child: scholarship kid, foreign degree, bereaved yet “resilient,” perfect for brochures. He pictures her first in a chalk‑dust classroom, then in a hotel lobby chair, the same questions of belonging merely rephrased as “leadership potential” and “narrative of grit.” The thought tightens his chest: if he agrees to front this initiative, he may be helping script the very story that has been grinding her down, turning hard‑won ambivalence into a tidy, fundable arc.
The campus loudspeaker crackles to life with an announcement about some scholarship orientation, its amplified cheeriness jarring in the drowsy corridor. Milan snaps the file shut as if caught eavesdropping on a conversation he helped script years ago. He slides Piyali’s essay back into its worn folder, then, almost guiltily, lays the glossy fellowship brochure on top, the two documents uneasily aligned: handwritten marginalia pressed beneath marketing vocabulary. At the window, watching students pour toward the tea stall in loose, hopeful clusters, he feels his agreement or refusal shift from “policy stance” to something far more intimate: a choice that will touch people like Piyali, whose tangled histories and half‑kept promises are already being rearranged into tidy, fundable narratives.
In the café, the phrase “decent family” lands heavier than any of Satyaprakash’s earlier euphemisms. It is said lightly, almost as if he is merely reporting market conditions, but Piyali hears the full ledger behind it. The shorthand of a whole world: aunts who measure worth in mangalsutras and salary slips, uncles who speak in EMI calculations, cousins who will nod approvingly at biodata where “daughter of businessman” appears in the correct column. In that small, well‑worn phrase, another woman has already been evaluated, approved, and slotted into the role Piyali once, in their more reckless years, allowed herself to picture for herself.
The word “decent” does a brutal kind of housekeeping. It tidies away late‑night calls that spanned time zones and weak Wi‑Fi, the way he used to send her photos of his cramped staff room, asking if she thought the new shirt looked “too much like trying.” It files under “immaturity” the lists they made of cities they might live in, the savings plan chart she’d built on Excel, colour‑coded for rupee and foreign currency. It reclassifies her visa applications, the holidays she spent on video call from a rented European room while her father watched the lagging screen from Patel Nagar, as a sort of extended adolescent detour.
She feels, with an almost professional detachment, sentimentality draining out of her. The romantic vocabulary of “we tried,” “timing,” “distance” shrinks, replaced by a colder audit. She stops arguing about feelings and starts silently inventorying: the missed Diwalis where she sent photos of supermarket diyas; the careful conversions of her salary before transferring money home; the years of being the bridge between two continents and one anxious small‑town boy in a Connaught Place hotel.
Across the table, he is still talking, “pressure at home,” “future security,” “we have to be practical”, but the terms rearrange themselves in her mind into bullet points. Not quite accusations, not yet. More like headings in a report she will later write in her head: sunk costs, opportunity loss, reputational risk. Under “assets,” she tallies what remains to her: a dead father’s flat with unreliable water, a thinning network abroad, an increasingly abstract relationship history that someone else’s “decent family” can overwrite with a single, efficient meeting over chai.
Somewhere between his mention of his mother’s blood pressure and his brother’s children’s school fees, she feels the old, foolish script (waiting, proving, understanding) go slack. It is replaced not by rage, at least not immediately, but by a cool, hollow clarity: the knowledge that, in the story now being told about his life, she has already been moved to a footnote, a youthful phase he has outgrown and can reference, if at all, as evidence of how sensible he has finally become.
When he adds, almost apologetically, that “everyone is just worried about stability now,” she recognises the line as both explanation and alibi. It is the sort of phrase her own managers abroad had used in redundancy meetings: neutral, impersonal, as if “stability” were a weather pattern no one could be blamed for. For a moment, an old reflex answers on cue. She could leave again. She can see the spreadsheet columns, the application portals, the LinkedIn messages to colleagues who still sign off with “you should totally come back.” A six‑month contract somewhere with efficient public transport and anonymous weekends, where this conversation would shrink to a bad memory carried in a well‑organised inbox.
The image that surfaces, however, refuses the usual glamour. It is not of airports and freedom, but of arriving in some wind‑scrubbed city at dawn, the hotel lobby scene sealed inside her like unclaimed baggage. Patel Nagar keys heavy in her handbag, good for a lock thousands of kilometres away, and no one there who has ever heard her father complain about the water pressure or boast about his daughter’s degree. The thought of that rootless efficiency (once her proof of having “made it out”) now feels less like escape and more like consenting to be quietly erased from both maps at once, reduced to a travelling professional with no witness to what, exactly, she has lost.
Later that week, in the dim Patel Nagar living room, the decision leaks out sideways, disguised as banter. They sit cross‑legged on the floor, knees brushing cardboard, as they knot old magazines into neat bundles for raddi. “Bas, sab bech ke nikal jaati hoon,” she says too brightly, the laugh arriving a second too late. The words drift up and linger between them like dust caught in the thin shaft of light from the balcony door. For a beat, even the TV noise from next door recedes. Her mind, obliging as ever, supplies images in quick succession: a broker’s square‑toed shoes leaving black smudges on these terrazzo floors; the wedding photograph coming down, its hanging nail exposed; the study corner dismantled, table pushed aside, as if those late‑night exam vigils were a childish hobby she’d once tried and outgrown; the almirah gaping open while strangers assess “storage potential.” In that imagined inventory, her father’s murmured encouragements become just another thing to be wrapped in newspaper and carried down the narrow stairs.
The shame flares up at once, hot and embarrassingly childish; she cannot quite lift her eyes to the steady gaze in the photograph above the almirah. Her father had traced this flat out for her as security, “Tere naam pe hai sab”, and now weighing brokers and market rates feels like disowning not just a property but the stubborn, studious girl he’d invested in. The thought is so disloyal she bites it back, retreating into questions about seepage, rewiring, fresh distemper, as if a list of repairs could paper over the treachery of wanting, very simply, to disappear.
Across from her, Kailashini shifts, the dori cutting a red line into her skin as she pulls it tight. What swells in her chest is not pity but a sharp, almost disloyal envy. To be able to threaten the city with departure, to treat a flat as an option rather than a lifeboat. What extravagance. Her own geography has always been decided by other people’s illnesses, exam seasons, pregnancies: a phone call, a “beta, bas kuchh mahine ke liye aa ja,” and she appears with her small bag, fitting herself into whatever corner of a borrowed room and life is available. For a reckless second she wants to blurt, “Agar mere paas aisa ghar hota, main kya karti, pata hai?” just to hear the weight of that fantasy aloud. Instead she smooths the knot, lowers her eyes, and lets the feeling pass through the practiced sieve of usefulness. “Soch ke karna, didi. Yeh ghar bhi aapka sahara hai,” she says, the line coming out warm, reasonable, the way people expect from her. The envy cools into a familiar sediment at the bottom of her care, another unclaimed wish folded away with the newspapers.
The conversation, meant to be “just closure,” drifts into accounting almost by muscle memory. They have run numbers together before, scores, savings plans, visa requirements, but this is the first time the arithmetic has no future attached.
Piyali scrolls through her inbox, thumb moving with a small, controlled insistence. The blue‑white light from her phone throws up old subject lines: “Transfer confirmation,” “Urgent. “Yeh dekho. Fifteen thousand. Aur yeh: operation ke time. Aur jab tumhara job chala tha, remember? Main ne bhi invest kiya tha,” she says quietly.
The word lands wrong in her own ear, metallic, like something from a slide deck in a meeting room she no longer works in. Invest. As if what she is itemising is not panic and affection across time zones but a portfolio gone bad. She swallows, but doesn’t take it back.
Across the table, the muscles in Satyaprakash’s jaw clench, unclench. “Haan, kiya tha,” he says, polite, measured. “But you know na, paise se hi sab nahi hota.” There is a faint emphasis on “paise”, as if he is shoring up a line of defence he has rehearsed. He doesn’t look at the screen. Instead he straightens the already straight bill folder, aligns the sugar sachets into a tidy row.
He reminds her, in the same neutral register, of years of split‑second calls snatched on his ten‑minute breaks, of nights he slept on the staff room sofa because the last metro had gone and he had to be early for a training the next morning. “Vo bhi support tha,” he says. “Main idhar se sambhaal raha tha. Mummy, Papa, sab. Tum wahan akeli thi, I know, par…”
In the language available to them they circle what they cannot say outright. She hears only that her transfers have become “paise,” something almost vulgar to mention; he hears in her emails a tally sheet, as if he has been living on her subsidy. It is suddenly important for both of them to prove that they were the more generous party.
“Socha tha jab tum wapas aogi, at least… we’ll be on the same page,” she says, the phrase stiff on her tongue. “I was sending what I could. London mein bhi cheap nahi tha.”
“And I was saying no to extra shifts kabhi kabhi, sirf iss liye ki time mile baat karne ka,” he replies, a little faster now. “Do–do baje raat ko call kiya hai maine. Guests ka checkout khatam karke, standing outside, thand mein. Vo sab help nahi tha?”
They are not really talking about rupees or roaming charges, and they both know it. Under the ledger of who paid, who waited, who stayed late, lies the murkier account neither can phrase without sounding petty: you weren’t there the way I needed. Each example they produce becomes another line item in that unspoken balance sheet, turning a decade of shared improvisation into something that, in this fluorescent café light, resembles a badly managed joint account closing down.
When she brings up the sponsorship letter he had once promised for her visa extension, “Tumne bola tha, next quarter mein pakka sign kara loge, yaad hai?”, the temperature between them seems to drop a notch, despite the café’s stable air‑conditioning. He exhales through his nose, looks away toward the lobby where a family is checking in, and begins the story he has polished for himself: how his manager suddenly changed, how HR tightened rules, how he “pushed as much as possible” but, “system hi aisa hai, Piyali, main kya karta.”
His fingers worry the laminated edge of the bill folder, tracing a groove into nothing. In his version, this was an unfortunate consequence of hierarchy and timing, one more thing beyond his control. In hers, it had been a quiet, decisive betrayal that had bent the entire arc of her life abroad: the difference between extending a contract and packing up a room in a weekend. She remembers staring at an empty email inbox for weeks, then rewriting her CV with a deadline she hadn’t chosen.
“You could’ve at least told me clearly,” she says, not quite raising her voice. “I was planning around that letter.”
“I didn’t want to give you tension us time pe,” he answers, almost offended at his own tenderness being recast as cowardice. “Main khud shame feel kar raha tha. Kya bolta? Ki main kuchh kar hi nahi sakta?”
The unspoken arithmetic spreads across the small table: whose future was quietly rerouted by whose fear, whose silence. It sits between them like a third cup of untouched coffee, cooling, giving off the faint, bitter smell of something that was once meant to be shared and is now simply going to waste.
The suitcase becomes their smallest and sharpest battlefield, a whole era compressed into cheap zippered canvas. “Woh bag abhi bhi tere cousin ke ghar pe hai?” she asks, trying to sound casual and failing. In her mind it unspools at once: the heavy winter coat bought in an end‑of‑season sale, her father’s old watch wrapped in a sock, a stack of letters she never digitised because some things felt safer on paper. All of it now gathering someone else’s dust in some unknown barsati. He assures her it’s “safe,” but can’t recall exactly which cousin took it when they downsized. Her voice tightens as she insists on a concrete plan, numbers, dates, kis din jaa sakte ho, while he checks his watch again, already slotting this errand like any other task between double shifts, family visits, and whatever new life he is quietly arranging without her.
Each time their talk threatens to swell into accusation, the hotel drags it back into shape. A guest appears at reception; Satyaprakash instinctively half‑rises, lowers his tone, eyes flicking to the lobby doors. Even seated, he inhabits his uniform: “Madam” instead of her name when a waiter passes, that thin, trained smile snapping on when the manager strides through. Piyali watches him perform competence and deference in quick succession, realising their years were always fitted around these invisible shift changes: his time carved into rosters, his dignity staked here under CCTV and lobby fragrance. There has never been room in this polished, surveilled space for a scene, only for her anger to be repackaged as “inconvenience.”
Elsewhere on campus, Milan hears a cousin to this logic playing out in Devanshi’s polished pitch. She speaks of scholarships and bridge courses, of “spotlighting real stories,” while her phone screen blinks discreetly beside the china cup. Between “path‑breaking initiative” and “accountability to stakeholders,” he can already see the fine print: English‑heavy publicity decks, “merit” lists filtered through old‑boys’ references, selection panels quietly stacked with the same five surnames. The imagined beneficiaries resemble a tidier, smoother‑edged Piyali, grateful, articulate, camera‑ready. As he nods, asking for data, transparent criteria, some insulation from PR compulsions, he feels the same skein tightening: every rupee braided with expectations about which lives may be framed as uplift, which must remain footnotes, and how much conviction he can spend before the work stops resembling the justice he once promised girls like her under banyan‑tree skies.
In the café, Satyaprakash hesitates just a fraction too long before answering, eyes flicking to the bill folder as if it might offer a script more authoritative than his own memory. The waiter has already placed the black faux‑leather triangle neatly by his elbow; the printed numbers glow faintly under the down‑light, a tidy summary of consumption. It is, she thinks, the only clear accounting either of them will get today.
When he finally speaks, his voice is soft but carefully neutral, the same register he uses with guests who complain without quite shouting. “Piyali, you know na… things didn’t change in one day.” He pauses, watching the condensation slide down her water glass rather than meet her eyes. “Even if you had come earlier, my responsibilities would still be my responsibilities. Maybe we would have… dragged it out longer. But we’d still be here.”
He frames it as inevitability, not choice, the universe as a well‑run front office where outcomes follow policy and not desire. The words carry that hotel vocabulary of helplessness, “protocols,” “system issue,” “nothing in my hands”, translated into the grammar of their relationship. Yet his fingers betray him; they worry the edge of the paper napkin, lifting and smoothing the corner, then tearing it into a clean, anxious strip.
“Responsibilities,” she repeats inwardly, testing the weight of the syllables. His mother’s medicines, his brother’s fees, the EMI he once described in a late‑night call as “like having a landlord sitting on your chest.” All real, all heavy. Still, there had also been the way he used to say “hum dekh lenge” about everything, as if the future were a joint project and not a one‑man risk assessment.
“Hmm,” is all she says aloud. The sound is small, almost polite, but in her chest something rearranges itself with a dry, decisive click, like a suitcase latch finally snapping shut. He inhales as if to add a qualifying clause, “I’m sorry,” or “you understand,” or that most beloved of adult consolations, “life is like that only”, then thinks better of it. A family at the next table laughs too loudly; the lobby music swells with a familiar Bollywood ballad stripped of lyrics, all feeling carefully emptied out.
He reaches for the bill folder at last, relief flickering across his face as he flips it open, grateful for a total he can actually pay. She watches him take out his card, sign, tuck the customer copy away. Numbers, signatures, neat divisions of who owes what: all the clarity they have managed, after years of blurred time zones and fuzzy promises. The napkin strip lies between them on the table, a narrow white line, silently shredded.
The words land between them like something fragile and sharp, too delicate to touch, too dangerous to ignore. Piyali sits back, the vinyl chair suddenly hard under her spine, feeling as though the lobby’s air‑conditioned chill has seeped past her skin and settled inside her ribs. The carefully neutral music, the clink of cutlery, the faint hiss of the coffee machine. Everything seems to recede, as if she is the one behind glass now, observed and soundproofed.
For a moment, she imagines an alternate world cut from the same scene: his mouth forming a reckless “yes,” some uncalculated confession, even a flash of anger that would at least acknowledge that there was something here to mourn. In those versions, they would lower their voices not for decorum but to protect something living. Instead, all she hears is his emphasis on “responsibilities” and “we’d still be here,” the past edited into a policy document.
She nods once, more to signal that she has received the message than that she assents to it, and reaches for her bag with deliberate care so the tremor in her hands remains privately hers.
When they finally rise, the café’s chilled air follows them into the lobby, blurring the line between inside and outside, past and after. Their walk becomes a small, practised fiction: he drifts half a step ahead, as if already rejoining the current of staff, pointing out where breakfast coupons will be kept, what time housekeeping usually comes, how the Wi‑Fi password is on the key‑card sleeve. Tiny, competent reassurances stand in for anything messier. She thanks him for arranging the booking in a register she recognises from herself at foreign check‑ins. At the elevator, they pause. No almost‑touch, no shared joke, only his half‑raised hand, her tight professional smile; an antiseptic farewell quietly taking precedence over every humid, whispered goodnight that came before.
In the room later, she lies on the too‑firm mattress and watches the silent ceiling fan circle above the generic abstract painting, hearing “we’d still be here” on a loop. The sentence mutates under repetition, from helpless fate into quiet preference: he would have chosen this anyway. No alternate visa date, no earlier flight, no heroic sacrifice on her part would have rewritten his calculus. The thought is devastating in its banality, and yet oddly precise, like a diagnosis finally naming an unnamed ache. For the first time, blame begins to unhook itself from effort; she can see, with a cold, almost professional clarity, the outer boundary of what was ever in her hands.
Back at Patel Nagar that night, the notebook on the old study desk becomes her makeshift courtroom. Under “Stay” she lists not reasons but people: “Baba (absent), K (present), V (floating), M (watching).” Under “Leave” she writes, almost against her will, “S (already gone), work?, future‑me?” The categories leak; everyone seems to belong to both. Staying might mean abandoning some, leaving might mean finally choosing herself. When she closes the notebook, nothing is resolved, yet the question has shifted: not what could have saved them, but which life she is prepared to be answerable to.
By three in the afternoon the lobby had the flat, fluorescent quiet of a transit lounge nobody particularly wanted to be in. The lunch rush was over; the evening check‑ins not yet begun. Satyaprakash was half‑watching the news on mute when the glass doors sighed open and a woman in airport sneakers and a crumpled linen dress wrestled in two oversized suitcases.
She paused just inside, blinking at the contrast between the Delhi glare and the hotel’s carefully curated cool. Then she smiled at the front desk with the apologetic brightness NRIs seemed to carry like a second passport.
“Hi. Reservation under… Meera Arora,” she said, the r rolling and then flattening. “Sorry, Hindi thoda… kharab ho gaya.”
“It’s okay, ma’am,” he answered in English, automatic. “Welcome. May I see your passport?”
She pushed it across, adding in a rush, “I mean, I understand everything, but when I speak, everybody laughs. My mom says I sound like a call center.”
He keyed in her details, eye sliding to the booking notes. Ten nights. Single occupancy. Corporate rate. “Purpose of visit, ma’am?”
“Family. And some work.” She hesitated, then, as if filling silence, went on, “Actually, my fiancé was supposed to come this trip, but… long‑distance, you know.” She laughed lightly, eyes skittering away. “Time zones, parents, visas. Very filmy.”
His fingers did not stop moving on the keyboard, but some muscle in his face tightened. The script came by itself. “Long‑distance is… difficult, yes.”
“Everyone says, if it’s meant to be, it works,” she said, sounding as though she was quoting someone she no longer trusted.
He heard himself reply, in a tone so even it surprised him, “Sometimes distance just shows what was already there.”
The words felt practiced, like something rehearsed at a mirror, yet this was the first time he had said them aloud. They left his mouth, crossed the polished counter, and then doubled back, landing squarely in his own chest. For a second, his breath caught. Not dramatically, just enough to remind him that his shirt collar was a little too stiff, the air‑conditioning a little too cold.
She gave a small, noncommittal laugh. “Maybe. Anyway, I’m here, he’s not. What to do.” She shrugged in an NRI imitation of Delhi fatalism.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. His hand moved automatically toward the stack of drink coupons, then stopped midway, fingers hovering over the glossy paper. He blinked, recalibrated. “Breakfast timing is from seven to ten. Wi‑Fi password is on the key card holder. If you need anything, dial zero.”
Only when she and her suitcases had disappeared into the lift with the bellboy did he notice the lone coupon still lying between his hand and the computer mouse, unoffered. He slid it back into the stack with unnecessary precision, as if correcting an error in balance.
On the CCTV monitor, the lift doors closed on a brief frame of her checking her phone, lips pressed together. The screen flicked back to its grid of corridors. In his mind, however, the lobby replayed in a loop: linen dress, apology for Hindi, the offhand “fiancé was supposed to come.” And his own line, distance shows what was already there, echoed with an unfamiliar aftertaste, less like wisdom and more like a verdict he had been too eager to deliver.
Around five, when the lobby had settled into its late‑afternoon stupor, Rafiq from housekeeping wandered over with a printout in hand and his usual conspiratorial grin.
“Sir ji, dekho toh,” he said, flattening the sheet on the counter. “Aapka bio‑data WhatsApp par viral ho raha hai. Full hero item.”
At the top, in bold, was his name, followed by a description that sounded like a distant cousin of his actual life: “Smart, fair, well‑settled hotel professional, fluent English, modern outlook, respects traditional values.” Below, the clincher: “Preference: cultured, homely girl, willing to adjust. NRI proposals welcome.”
Rafiq snorted. “Bas ab foreign return bahu dhoondhni hai. Dollar‑wali dulhan milegi dekhna.”
Laughter rose mechanically in his throat. “Haan haan, dekhte hain,” he said, smoothing the sheet as if it might crease his future.
Rafiq, encouraged, added, “Bas koi zyaada career‑wali mat lana, phir daily drama. Madam busy, madam meeting, madam abroad.” He mimed a tiny suitcase rolling away.
The line landed with surgical precision on a nerve he’d thought neatly cauterised. He joined in the chuckling, but even as he did, a sliver of doubt slid under his practiced certainty. How much of his “practical decision” had been self‑protection, and how much merely an echo of other people’s warnings spoken in his voice?
That night in the staff dormitory, with the tube‑light flickering like an indecisive thought, he lies on his back, phone balanced above his face, and scrolls through years of Piyali’s photos: hostel corridors with peeling paint, conference badges half‑visible against borrowed blazers, faceless European streets in winter where even the dustbins look organised. Her smile changes slowly across the grid: first relief at having escaped, then a practised ease in airports and seminar rooms.
On one image, a grainy selfie of the two of them from a college fest’s cheap café, he lingers, zooming in on the plastic chairs, his faded checked shirt, the steel tumbler of chai leaving a ring on faux‑wood laminate. The contrast between that cramped table and her later glass‑and‑steel offices abroad makes his earlier reasoning (“she belongs somewhere bigger”) feel both rational and cowardly at once, as if he has cleverly argued himself out of a test he was afraid to take.
By afternoon, an older businessman at check‑in snaps when he stumbles over a German company’s name, waving a gold‑plated card like an ID of a superior species. “Tum logon ko samajh nahi aata global standard kya hota hai.” The flush is instantaneous, old and intimate. In that heat he retrofits the breakup as strategy: better to step aside with “dignity” than wait for Piyali to wince, someday, at his accent, his salary slip, this very counter.
Her aunt hears this as invitation, not boundary. “Time, haan, le lo, lekin soch bhi lo. Yahan sab poochh rahe hain. Shaadi, naukri, wapas bahar?” A thin thread of headache tightens behind Piyali’s eyes. “Haan, dekh lenge,” she repeats, gentler. The guilt arrives on cue: for snapping, for returning, for not yet having a neat, exportable answer.
In the cramped Patel Nagar bedroom, phone wedged between shoulder and ear as she half‑folds an old bedsheet that still smells faintly of Rin and her father’s hair oil, Piyali fields her aunt’s familiar opener: condolences delivered like a script, questions about jet lag and “adjusting back,” a vague, approving “tum bahut strong ho, beta, waise.” The compliment arrives pre‑packaged with expectation: strong girls bounce back, file papers, make decisions.
She switches the phone from one ear to the other, the screen briefly lighting up her own reflection in the black glass: limp hair, an old T‑shirt with a foreign conference logo already greying at the seams. On the wall, the ceiling fan chops the late‑evening heat into tired slices.
When the inevitable, “Ab batao, beta, now what are your plans?” lands, it does so with the weight of the plural: plans as if they are a neat list she has mislaid. Piyali presses the bedsheet’s edge into a hard crease she doesn’t feel. “Dekhenge, Masi,” she says, aiming for nonchalance and hitting something closer to hoarseness, “abhi thoda time chahiye.”
She hopes the word “time” will act like a polite barricade: not a refusal, just a “later,” a “let me breathe first.” On the tiny bedside table, her father’s cracked‑faced alarm clock clicks towards nowhere in particular. From the next room, the TV bleeds a soap opera argument: someone’s on‑screen daughter‑in‑law being accused of neglecting family duty. The irony is unsubtle; the universe of Indian television rarely is.
“Bas thoda time,” she repeats, lighter, trying to put a shrug into her voice that her shoulders cannot quite perform. She tucks a corner of the sheet under the thin mattress, as if anchoring herself might make the vague future more acceptable, as if saying “later” is still allowed when you are thirty‑two, bereaved, and back where you started.
The aunt’s tone tilts, softening in volume but calcifying in intent. “Waise bhi, achha hi hua na,” she ventures, in the singsong of harmless common sense. “These long‑distance things never last, beta. Film mein thodi ho. You focus on your career now, or find some nice local boy. Delhi mein options ki kami thodi hai?”
The words are tossed like kitchen advice: add more namak, marry someone within metro range. The casualness is what stings. Piyali’s hand stills halfway through smoothing the sheet; the cotton wrinkles under her palm.
For a moment, there is only the buzz of the ceiling fan and a faint hiss on the line. She could nod along, say “haan, sahi keh rahi ho,” let the comment pass into the great archive of things older relatives say. Instead something steadier, colder, arrives in her throat.
“It’s not that simple, Masi,” she says.
The sentence comes out flatter than she expects, stripped of apology. It carries, compacted inside it, months of hospital corridors and immigration queues, of pixelated arguments on bad Wi‑Fi, and the small, ridiculous humiliations of an NRI breakup scheduled around time zones and hotel shifts.
On the other end, there is a small, offended silence, as if the line itself has flinched. When her aunt speaks again, the tone has shifted to a cooler efficiency: dates for the tehravi that Piyali has already written in her notebook, reminders about photocopying property papers, a perfunctory “jab sab settle ho jaaye, main aaungi” that sounds less like promise and more like polite exit.
They hang up on a brittle exchange of “theek hai, dekhte hain,” a future‑tense vagueness that pretends to be agreement. The room is abruptly loud with fan noise and TV dialogue. Piyali finds herself staring at the darkened phone screen, surprised by the sharp sting in her eyes. Not only from the remark, but from the speed with which even the “understanding” relatives can convert her private heartbreak into a moral lesson, filed under “what not to do.”
By mid‑morning, the family WhatsApp group lights up with a PDF of a neatly formatted bio‑data: government job, own flat in Ghaziabad, “convent‑educated, non‑smoker,” hobbies including “listening to music” and “family outings,” as if the man has been factory‑produced for matrimonial respectability. Her aunt captions it with folded‑hands emojis and a vague, performatively humble, “For a good girl we know, suggestions welcome,” tagging cousins and siblings but conspicuously omitting Piyali. On her muted second phone the notification blooms anyway. She opens it, scrolls through the details, registers her own absence as cleanly as one notes a missing attachment, and then sets the device face‑down on the desk, telling herself she’s relieved to be, for the moment, administratively invisible.
Later that evening, Vibhor finally pings: “Survived Delhi traffic to CP & back. Delhi breakups and Delhi real estate, two guaranteed migraines 😂 You holding up?” He watches the “typing…” bubble appear and vanish, reappear and vanish again, a stuttering Morse code of reluctance, before her reply arrives: “Haha, sounds like it. How’s work?” plus a neutral 🙂.
He stares at the emoji. Once, she would have sent a rant, or at least a bad meme about Gurgaon. The dodge lands heavier than she intends; it feels like someone quietly sliding a door between them. On his side of the city, in a cab that smells of Ambi Pur and stale sweat, he hesitates over a follow‑up voice note, thumb hovering above the mic, then pockets the phone instead, suddenly self‑conscious about sounding overeager. The driver’s radio fills the silence. Vibhor watches the Metro line flash past outside and wonders, faintly hurt, when exactly their easy, low‑maintenance closeness became another delicate thing he could mishandle with one wrong sentence.
On the narrow service staircase that smells of damp concrete and stale fry oil, he leans against the railing, cigarette unlit between his fingers, rehearsing the line he’s been nursing all day: “Accha hi hua. Ab sab clear hai.” In his head, it sounds firm, adult, almost noble: proof that he can do the difficult, practical thing without melodrama. He imagines telling a colleague someday, in a half‑joking tone, about this “mature” decision. Maybe Deepak on night shift, the one who keeps forwarding motivational reels about “letting go of toxic people.” They would stand here exactly like this between luggage trolleys and discarded carton boxes, and he would shrug and say, “Bas, long‑distance ka koi future nahi tha. Practical sochna padta hai.”
In that version, Deepak would nod gravely and say something approving about “responsibility,” about parents getting old, about “ladkiyon ko bhi clear signal dena chahiye.” The story is already edited in his mind: fewer details, more adjectives. Not “I broke a promise to someone who waited,” but “I handled a tough situation.” He pictures himself as that man, the man who has learned to be realistic, who does not hang around in corridors of what‑ifs.
He takes the cigarette to his lips, doesn’t light it. The lighter is in his pocket; he can feel its rectangular assurance against his thigh. He tells himself he’s cut down anyway. Health, savings, discipline. As if every small renunciation adds up to a larger virtue.
A cart rattles somewhere below, plates clinking, a steward swearing softly at a jammed service door. Overhead, the lobby music leaks faintly through a ceiling vent: someone has set it to a nostalgic Hindi playlist. A song from the year they met floats up, half‑muffled. For a second, the rehearsed speech in his head judders like a skipped CD. He exhales, long and slow, as if that can smooth it out, and silently edits the line again: “Accha hi hua. Ab sab clear hai. Dono ke liye better hai.” Saying “for both of us” makes it sound less like abandonment and more like policy.
He zooms in on the photos: plywood bunks made to look “Scandinavian,” fairy lights, a chalkboard wall with badly drawn world maps. In one shot, a brown‑skinned couple in backpacks lean against the reception counter, laughing at something off‑camera. He can almost hear her voice from that old chat, Dekho, yahan log hum jaise bhi rukte hain, not just white kids with trust funds, followed by three excited emojis she’d never use now.
His thumb traces the room tariffs as if they were lines on a bill he might yet pay. Two nights’ stay converted mentally into shifts: four graveyard duties, or five if he factored in the service charge he never admitted to his parents. He imagines landing in her city, dragging a scratched VIP trolley past a row of shiny Samsonites, rehearsing a different speech about “trying,” about “managing somehow.” The fantasy is so detailed he feels briefly winded, like he’s climbed the hotel stairs too fast.
Then he shuts the tab with a small, decisive jab, almost angry at the screen. “Bachpana,” he says to no one. “Ho bhi jaata toh kya kar leti?”
The search bar still carries the faint ghost of his last query: her city’s name, then “Delhi cheap flights,” the autocomplete almost eager to help him sabotage his own story. He scrolls anyway, past logos he can recognise from boarding passes he prints for guests, not himself, past dates that line up too neatly with the week she had once begged him to “just come, bas ek baar.” A sale fare pops up, teasing, highlighted in red. He calculates automatically: two months of not eating in the staff canteen, cancelling the new phone, telling Ma the bike servicing can wait. His chest tightens at how close it seems, how close it must once have been.
He clicks back in haste, as if someone has walked into the lobby and caught him doing something indecent on the office computer. “Bas dekh raha tha… just curiosity,” he mutters, though the browser window is already innocent again, hotel software blinking blandly in the background. His thumb drifts back to the travel site, to a thumbnail of a hostel with bunk beds and bright murals, the same chain she’d once sent on WhatsApp with a tentative “Someday?” and a shy, hopeful emoji.
Now he hesitates over it as though it were a dangerous link. The description boasts “for budget backpackers and dreamers,” words that once sounded like a compliment and now feel like an accusation. He studies the photo of a mixed dorm with scattered shoes and tangled charging cables, trying to see it the way he insists he sees things now: impractical, childish, unsafe. “Ab thodi na bunk bed mein soyenge,” he tells himself, shaping his mouth around the contempt, ignoring the small, traitorous flicker in his chest that still wants to know what the view from that window looks like.
In his head, he dubs that whole conversation “bacchpana,” downgrading it from vow to background noise: just silly hostel‑plan talk, not a promise. “Waise bhi, foreign jaake kya karte? Wahan ka system, wahan ka culture…” he thinks, piling on visas, leave approvals, Ma’s blood pressure, bosses’ tempers, the idea that no “serious” man abandons his post for romance. Each justification lands slightly off‑key even to his own ears, but he clings harder, as if sheer repetition can blur the picture of her scanning faces at an arrivals gate he never walked through, suitcase handle biting into her palm while his name sits, unsent, in her drafts.
When his break time is nearly up, he finally lights the cigarette, takes two quick, shallow drags, and stubs it out on the stairwell ledge, more for the gesture than the nicotine. The smoke tastes faintly of panic and room freshener. He smooths his shirt, straightens his name badge, checks his reflection in the dark glass of the fire door. By the time he pushes it open and steps back into the cool, over‑scented lobby, his phone is in his pocket and his face has settled into its usual courteous blankness, ready to say “Welcome, sir” on cue. To any guest he now greets, he is the picture of steady professionalism; only the reader has just watched him circle the possibility of a different life and retreat, exposing how his proud narrative of “practicality” is stitched over a quiet terror that he has chosen a smaller, safer version of himself and locked the door from inside.
The next morning, between classes, he finds a rectangle of relative quiet at the end of the corridor, two plastic chairs, a dusty window, the faint echo of someone reciting Marx in the room opposite, and opens his laptop more from muscle memory than enthusiasm. The campus Wi‑Fi, after its customary moment of existential doubt, admits him to his inbox. Another subject line blinks politely at him: “HIGH PRIORITY: Invitation – Core Working Group on Inclusive Futures.”
He already knows the template: the Vice‑Chancellor’s office in small caps, the institutional logo with a commemorative wreath around it, a smattering of visionary nouns. Still, he clicks. A PDF blooms open, glossy even on his scuffed screen. A banner image shows four students under a tree, heads bent over a laptop, the caption in a cheerful sans‑serif: “First‑Generation, Future‑Ready.” Below, bullet points promise “bridging socio‑economic gaps,” “democratizing opportunity,” and “creating pathways for under‑represented talent.” Devanshi’s digital signature sits at the bottom in elegant blue script, its authority both reassuring and constraining.
He scrolls slowly, trained eye skimming for the operative clauses. Under “Eligibility for Flagship ‘Inclusive Futures’ Fellowship,” the first lines are what he would write himself: family income thresholds, rural or small‑town background, government school history. Then, half a page down, under a subheading in smaller font (almost an afterthought) he finds it: “Demonstrated communication skills and institutional fit.”
He pauses, the cursor hovering over the phrase like an interrogation lamp. “Communication skills,” in this context, will not mean the sharp, impatient English of a Laxmi Nagar coaching centre or the hesitant, grammar‑bending brilliance of a Patel Nagar living room. It will mean neutral, polished English, the right intonations, the ability to glide through a panel interview without making the trustees shift in their chairs. “Institutional fit” will mean not asking certain questions too early, not looking too surprised at certain answers.
He resists the reflex to snort aloud; the corridor is too public. Instead, he opens the PDF’s comment function, his fingers typing “vague: could be exclusionary?” before he backspaces “exclusionary,” replaces it with “ambiguous,” then erases the whole comment, leaving only a yellow highlight over the offending words. Even the act of drawing a discreet fluorescent box feels faintly exposed, as if some future RTI query might fish out his hesitation.
A group of undergraduates clatter past, arguing about internal assessment marks, their voices briefly drowning out the low whir of his anxiety. The brochure’s smiling faces beam on from the screen, untroubled. He saves the file with a neutral name and closes his laptop, aware that the real criteria, as usual, are written between the lines, and that merely noticing them already places him on the wrong side of somebody’s idea of “fit.”
On his way out of class, he is still thinking in track changes and footnotes when a familiar baritone calls down the corridor, “Milan ji, two minutes?” It is not quite a summons, not quite a request. The senior administrator, linen shirt, university ID lanyard, the easy gait of a man who has survived multiple Vice‑Chancellors, falls into step beside him and steers him, with practised gentleness, towards a notice board plastered with last semester’s festival posters and a coaching‑centre flyer that has begun to curl at the edges.
Up close, the man’s smile is all collegial warmth. His hand lands lightly on Milan’s upper arm, proprietary without being exactly intrusive. “These are sensitive times,” he begins, voice dropping into a confidential register. “You’re doing good work, very good work. We’re all appreciative. But we must be careful how things appear, especially when donors are watching, hmm?”
He chuckles, as if at a shared joke. “Public criticism of criteria, on email, in meetings, can be misunderstood. Intentions get twisted. And we don’t want that, not when something positive is finally happening.” The tone is advisory, even avuncular; the subtext settles between them as precisely as a stamp on a file: do not push too hard, do not embarrass the people paying the bills, remember your place in the hierarchy that signs your contract.
Back in his small faculty cubicle, where the window did not open fully and the air‑conditioner exhaled more noise than cool air, Milan reopened the draft email in which he had begun, with unusual bluntness, to suggest clearer provisions for students from non‑English backgrounds. The cursor blinked accusingly next to the half‑typed phrase about “structural barriers to participation,” as if waiting to see how brave he felt today. He thought of Devanshi’s careful, almost earnest reformist rhetoric at their last meeting, her promise to “really change something this time,” and, layered over it, the administrator’s light, possessive hand on his shoulder in the corridor. After a long, motionless pause, he deleted the sharper paragraph, replacing it with a dampened line about “perhaps clarifying language so as not to unintentionally exclude promising candidates from diverse contexts,” and felt both relieved, faintly ridiculous, and quietly complicit, as if he had just practised the very “institutional fit” the brochure required.
Later that evening, pretending to focus on routine tasks, he logs into the university portal to upload attendance. A red notification bar catches his eye: CONTRACT REVIEW UNDER PROCESS , RENEWAL DATE: 30 DAYS. The words have always existed somewhere in the labyrinthine menus, but now they sit prominently boxed on the dashboard, as if recently promoted. He stares at the screen, replaying the sequence: the committee invitations, his cautious comments in track changes, the corridor hand on his arm. No one has mentioned his review aloud, yet the timing aligns too neatly, pressing into his awareness like a thumb on a bruise, converting vague unease into a more precise, contractual kind of dread.
He lets the chair tilt back until it complains, staring at the stained ceiling tile above the flickering tube‑light. Technically, nothing overt has happened. No memo on letterhead, no explicit “or else,” only invitations, suggestions, highlighted dates, a hand on his arm. Yet the mapping is neat in his mind: every attempt to name exclusions on one side, the thin, provisional thread of his contract on the other. The awareness does not arrive as drama, only as a low, continuous compression in the chest, a recalibration of risk in which even a politely worded comment now acquires the private footnote: how much of Delhi can you afford to lose, again?
At first she registers it only as another faded spiral notebook, the kind that had multiplied on her father’s desk over the years like an invasive species of stationery. The cover is a dull moss‑green, its corners furred white from being thumbed and knocked against table edges. Someone (almost certainly him) has written “IMPORTANT” on the front in ball‑pen capitals and underlined it twice, as if that would protect it from the slow entropy of paper and relatives.
She pulls it out from between a stack of electricity bills and an envelope stamped URGENT (three years out of date), meaning only to do a quick triage: property papers, pension slips, anything that justifies the heavy metal almirah squatting in the corner like a silent witness. The notebook, she assumes, will be like the others: phone numbers without names, half‑finished to‑do lists, mysterious calculations whose contexts died with him.
She flips it open with the impatient fingers of someone hunting for a specific document and instead finds columns of her own past life. Across the first page, in his cramped, slightly right‑leaning handwriting: “Class XII – Pre‑Boards,” followed by marks in each subject, corrected with a careful overwrite where he has initially miscopied a digit. Next page, “Final Board Result,” underlined, with percentages circled, arrows pointing to “overall” as though the board examiner might appear in their living room to dispute it.
Further in, he has ruled the paper into makeshift columns: entrance test ranks, application deadlines, tiny tick marks next to “hostel brochure mangwana hai,” “loan form,” “coaching fees.” In the margins, he has added question marks, exclamation marks, once even the word “Wah!” next to an unexpectedly high score in English, as if surprised that his daughter could be clever in a language that had never quite sat comfortably in his own mouth.
The pages smell faintly of dust and old ink, of ball‑pens dragged repeatedly over cheap paper. There is something stubborn about the ink, the way it has not fully faded, as if resisting the city’s humidity and the years of neglect. It is the smell of evenings she had tried to forget: him at this same desk under the tube‑light, lips moving silently as he copied numbers from her report card, tapping the end of the pen against his chin while she hovered in the doorway, half‑annoyed, half‑pleased.
She traces a column of figures with her thumb, noticing how he has carried over rupees and paise with the neatness of someone who never fully trusted calculators. Even when she had already left for college and would WhatsApp him photos of online fee receipts, he would call back to confirm each digit, repeating the amount aloud as if anchoring it in reality: “Pachees hazaar chhe‑sau pachpan… haan, theek hai.” Now, in the notebook, that suspicion of machines has become a kind of tenderness. Every sum is checked twice, lines drawn under totals. On one page he has written, “Total kharcha per saal (approx),” then scratched out “approx” and replaced it with “lagbhag,” as though his own language might make the cost more bearable.
She sits back on her heels on the cool terrazzo floor, the almirah door gaping open behind her like a mouth mid‑sentence. Around her, the afternoon presses in: a pressure cooker whistling in a neighbour’s kitchen, a scooter revving irritably in the lane, the ceiling fan above ticking on a beat of its own. The notebook rests open in her hands, a ledger of aspiration and anxiety, reminding her with each ruled line that, at some point, her life had been a project carefully costed and plotted by someone who is no longer here to oversee the overruns.
As she turns a page, a loose sheet slips out, skidding over her knee and landing face‑down on the floor. For a second she just stares at it, irrationally annoyed; the whole afternoon has been like this: files moulting smaller, more demanding pieces of paper. She reaches for it anyway, fingertips brushing dust, and when she flips it over she realises it isn’t a sheet at all but the inside cover, half‑torn from its spine.
The heading, in blue ink that has bled slightly into the cheap cardboard, registers in stages. First: “Piya se poochhne wali baatein,” the casualness of the diminutive lodged next to the officious “baatein,” as if she is simultaneously a child and a quarterly report. Beneath it, in his cramped, slanting Devanagari, a numbered list. “Office ka kaam kaisa hai,” underlined. “Khana time se khati hai ya nahi,” with a small “!” squeezed in later. “Thand mein sweater pehenti hai,” as though adult employment might erase common sense about winter.
And then, halfway down, one entry written more slowly, letters slightly darker: “aur us ladke S. se… kya socha hai.” The single initial sits there, absurdly small, like a pin holding two decades together; everything before and everything after suddenly threaded through that one, hesitant “S.”
Her first reaction is irritation at the intrusion: this was supposed to be the pile of “safe” things, bank forms and utility receipts, not the place where S might suddenly appear like a jump-scare in an otherwise boring filing cabinet. For a second she wants to slam the notebook shut, to re‑establish the clean mental folders she’s been using for weeks: one marked “Papa,” another marked “S,” each grief to be processed separately, in scheduled installments like EMIs. Father: daytime sorting, paperwork, death certificates. S: late‑night drafts, hotel lobby autopsies, careful, controlled weeping. Instead she finds her thumb drifting, almost against orders, to trace the dot above the “S” in his English capital letter, noticing where the pen has pressed harder, as if her father had hesitated before writing it, testing whether the initial belonged on this page at all.
A hot sting rises behind her eyes, unrelated to the dust, like the start of a migraine with feelings attached. Sitting back on the terrazzo floor, spine pressed to the cool steel of the almirah, she hears his voice as it used to sound on choppy calls: “Bas khush rehna, baaki sab ho jaayega.” She had never told him the full story with S: only enough to reassure him there was “someone,” that she wasn’t alone abroad, converting a mess into a neat headline. Now, seeing the question logged like an unpaid bill among fee projections and hostel rent estimates, she understands that in his mind her future had included this unknown boy as one more variable to balance, one more responsibility he was already budgeting for in silence, as if emotional stability could be planned alongside tuition and winter sweaters.
It settles in her chest with a sick, disproportionate weight: breaking with S is no longer just two adults cooling off in an air‑conditioned lobby, it feels retroactively like defaulting on a quiet, invisible SIP her father had been running in the background, compounding hopes on answers that never arrived. The tidy folders she’s clung to, career, relationship, filial duty, curl at the edges, blur into one damp, formless ache. By the time she shuts the notebook, thumb still smudged with blue ink, her throat has narrowed around the knowledge that every choice to stay away, every postponed trip, every drafted‑and‑deleted message has left behind only half‑finished sentences: with S, with her father, with the hypothetical, upgraded self they had both been patiently, anxiously investing in.
On speaker, Kailashini twists the phone cord round her fingers, watching a trail of ants march along the kitchen counter toward a grain of spilled sugar. “Ruk jaoongi,” she hears herself say lightly, as if it were the easiest thing in the world. “Waise bhi kal subah yahin se bank jaana aasaan hoga. Main aa jaaungi, aap tension mat lo.”
The relief in Piyali’s exhale travels across the connection, a soft “Thanks, haan,” followed by the small domestic sounds of Patel Nagar in mourning. Steel plates stacking, a TV murmuring somewhere, the distant call of a sabziwala. They talk another minute about nothing both pretending this is logistical planning, not a request for company. When the call ends, Kailashini stands for a second in the middle of the narrow kitchen, phone still in hand, the two flats superimposed in her mind: this one with its scraped non‑stick tawa and always‑on TV, that one with its dusty almirahs and the silence that hangs like leftover smoke.
From the bedroom, her cousin calls, “Kailu, rotiyaan bel di kya? Mama ko medicine deni hai.” The uncle’s earlier question seems to echo off the peeling walls and now Piyali’s “bas ek din” settles on top of it, as if days were something she could simply issue on demand.
She moves automatically, wiping her hands on her dupatta, setting out the rolling pin, the dough. In her head she begins the calculation no one will ever ask to see: one night in Patel Nagar equals two evenings’ worth of complaints here, plus an extra hour of work tomorrow to make up for leaving early. On the surface, she keeps the old, flexible answer ready on her tongue (“Adjust ho jaayega”) but as she presses the dough flat, feels it push back against her palms, a small, unfamiliar thought flares and then hides: if everyone is adjusting around her, at what point is she allowed to stop stretching.
On the same night, Piyali stands in the dim Patel Nagar kitchen, the tube‑light flickering like it is reconsidering its commitment to the room. A pile of rusted utensils waits in the sink, haloed by a line of ants investigating a smear of haldi. Expired masala packets, brands her father bought on discount, are fanned out on the counter like a failed tarot reading. She wedges her phone between shoulder and ear, fingers tracing the cracked laminate.
“Yaar, agar tum kal raat ruk jao na, bas ek din,” she says, aiming for offhand, for the tone of someone who has options. “Kitchen dekh lenge, bank bhi jaana hai… akeli thoda…” The word “akeli” lands too heavily; she lets the sentence trail into the hiss and rattle of the pressure cooker next door.
She doesn’t add the rest: that the bank manager’s glass cabin makes her feel twelve again, that the death certificate in her bag has the texture of betrayal, that she is absurdly afraid of crying in front of a stranger who will say “I understand” and obviously not mean it. Instead she taps the edge of a steel plate against the counter, orchestrating background noise, as if this were only about utensils and queues, not about wanting someone in the chair next to her when the pen is handed over and the forms slide across.
Caught on the stairwell in East Delhi, halfway between the second and third floor, she shifts the bursting red‑and‑white plastic bag from one damp palm to the other as her phone buzzes again. Network is better here than inside the flat; even her dilemmas require the right signal strength. Piyali’s message this time: “Only if it’s not too much trouble. Don’t worry if family needs you.” As if “family” were some neat, singular thing.
Above, a cousin leans over the railing, plate in hand, “Jaldi aa jao, sab khaane ka wait kar rahe hain.” Below, a neighbor asks loudly whose “ladki” is always running in and out. For a second she stays exactly there, one foot on each step, the stairwell tube‑light humming, feeling the literal split, as if choosing a direction might fix the label on her once and for all.
At dinner, squeezed between cousins and a steel thali that keeps slipping on the plastic tablecloth, she tries to pre‑empt the next remark before it forms. “Woh Patel Nagar waali didi bank ke chakkar mein hai… shayad mujhe wahan kuch kaam mil jaaye,” she offers, turning her care into a potential asset, a line item on some invisible ledger. Her uncle snorts softly, not unkindly but firmly territorial: “Kaam mil jaaye toh sabse pehle yahin ka bill bharna, samjhi? Tum ab bacchi nahi ho.” The table chuckles, someone taps their glass, an aunt mutters “haan, bilkul,” and the line draws a border so clean it almost shines. She nods and laughs along on cue, tasting the bitterness under the dal and the faint metallic tang of having been reclassified from help to obligation.
Later, in the narrow lane with scooters nudging past and a kachori‑wala shouting rates, she tugs her dupatta back up and finally types, “Kal aa jaungi, raat ko bhi ruk jaungi,” to Piyali, thumb hovering before she hits send. Almost at once, her aunt’s voice arrives from the doorway, flat as a verdict: “Phir do din yahan ka kaam ruk jayega. Dekh lena kaise manage karegi tu.” The word “tu” lands like a demotion. Kailashini turns, smile switching on by habit, and produces the only phrase she has left, “Bas, adjust ho jayega”, the magic word that keeps everyone’s worlds running on her invisible overtime. Inside, something in her chest stiffens, a small, unfamiliar refusal that has nowhere to go but inward, where it sits like a stone she is suddenly aware of carrying.
By late afternoon, Patel Nagar feels off-balance, as if the flat itself is listing under the weight of intentions that never turn into decisions. An almirah stands gaping with half-emptied shelves; on the bed, saris are sorted into “keep,” “give,” and a vague “later” pile that keeps swallowing anything she can’t bear to decide on. The small study desk where she once prepared for exams is buried under file covers, bank passbooks, electricity bills with her father’s name, each one a small accusation that she’s living in parentheses.
The fan wobbles overhead with a faint ticking sound, like a disapproving metronome. Every so often she pauses and looks up, as if it might actually fall and end the question of what to do with any of this. It doesn’t, of course; it just continues its determined, slightly off-centre rotation, pushing warm air from one corner to another.
On the floor near her feet, three cardboard cartons sit with their flaps open. One is labelled in her father’s cramped handwriting, “Important papers”, which turns out to mean warranty cards for appliances that no longer exist, bank brochures from 2004, and a carefully folded plastic bag from a jewellery shop they never bought anything from. Another box holds his scribbled notes on engineering formulas, the same ink-spidery handwriting she used to stare at as a teenager, convinced real adulthood meant understanding every symbol. Now the pages seem to belong to a language she has no obligation to learn.
She picks up a passbook and flips through the stamped entries, the slow, steady trickle of deposits and withdrawals marking out his last ten years more faithfully than any diary. There is no dramatic final line, just the same neat blue ink, then nothing. She closes it a little too quickly and drops it onto the “to sort” stack, a category that is beginning to resemble a minor mountain range.
Her phone lies face down on the desk, buzzing intermittently. The hotel’s website is still an open tab in her browser from the night before, the “Call” button waiting obligingly, an option she keeps rehearsing but never selects. It feels, perversely, like a task she must earn the right to do by completing everything else first.
From the kitchen, the pressure cooker whistle from a neighbour’s flat lets out its third, impatient scream. Piyali glances at the clock, realises she has been standing between the almirah and the bed for twenty minutes without actually moving anything, sari end trailing from her hand like an abandoned argument. Somewhere in the building, someone’s television blares a news anchor demanding “clear answers,” and she almost laughs. In this flat, nothing is clear: not the piles, not the future, not whether staying is an act of devotion or simple cowardice.
She folds the sari mechanically and places it on the “later” pile, which has now colonised almost half the bed. Later, she tells herself again, as if later is a real place she is definitely going to, once she finds the right form, the right envelope, the right moment.
She moves through rooms like someone following a checklist she keeps editing mid-step, each item written in pencil and rubbed out before the line is complete. Set aside the electricity bill under “Ask Vibhor (urgent?)”. Draft a polite, non-committal message to the broker about “another visit, just to understand options”. Scribble on the back of an envelope: “death certificates attested – where? photocopy shop? court?” in a handwriting that looks oddly like her father’s when she’s tired.
Every action seems to beget two more: if she updates the bank account, she’ll have to update the PAN; if she talks to the broker, she’ll have to talk to the neighbours; if she thinks about renting, she has to imagine leaving. The flat begins to resemble a bureaucratic escape room designed by someone with a dark sense of humour. Every clue loops her back to the same locked door.
When the broker finally calls, she presses “accept” before thinking and hears herself say, “Abhi thoda hold pe rakhiye na,” voice clipped, professional. She offers no explanation, just silence. After he disconnects with a brisk “Theek hai, madam,” she keeps staring at the darkened screen, feeling as if the phone has caught her in the act of admitting, to a stranger before herself, that nothing in this house is actually ready to move.
In small bursts of purpose, she walks to the corner shop to print yet another set of forms: one for a possible rental agreement, one for a fellowship application Milan once mentioned in passing online, one for a campus alumni meet she’s not sure she’ll attend. The boy at the printer barely looks up; “Madam, double side?” he asks, as if she’s been coming here for years. Back home, the fresh pages join earlier stacks on the dining table, weighted down under a steel tumbler so they don’t curl, their headings staring back like multiple-choice futures.
She opens an email draft to an old professor then freezes after “about,” cursor blinking, suddenly aware she doesn’t have a story that sounds coherent even in her own head. “Opportunities?” “Next steps?” “Some time off?” Each phrase feels like a lie in a different direction. She deletes “thinking about” altogether, leaves only “I’m back in Delhi for a bit,” and watches the sentence sit there, honest and useless.
By evening, domestic motions become their own kind of theatre. She rinses lentils in the sink, checks them for grit she’s already washed away, wipes the counter twice, then a third time. She rearranges the few spices her father kept in reused jars (haldi in Nescafé, jeera in Dabur honey) anything to avoid sitting at the dining table facing the empty chair opposite. The pressure cooker whistles from a neighbour’s flat, the same sound that once meant her father would call her to eat; now it syncs with the dull thud behind her forehead. She glances at her phone on the counter, where the hotel’s number sits pinned at the top of her recent searches, like a problem she’s bookmarked rather than solved, and tells herself she’ll call after dinner, after dishes, after she’s “a little more settled,” as if settled were a place reachable by scrubbing.
Night folds in with the familiar whir of the ceiling fan and the blue light of her phone, the only bright object in the darkened room, reflecting faintly in the glass of the almirah like a second, smaller moon. Lying on her back, she opens the hotel website again, scrolling past generic lobby photos and stock‑smiling receptionists until S’s name appears in a staff listing, stripped down to “Front Office Manager,” as if the years she’d attached to it were an embellishment or an editing error. Her thumb hovers over the “Call” icon beside the reception number, breath shallow, constructing and discarding scripts in her head until language itself feels like a trap. She backs out to his WhatsApp chat instead, re‑reading the curt last message (“We’ll talk when you’re here”) like it contains instructions she keeps failing to follow, a policy document with the crucial clause missing. The tick marks remain a flat grey; she does not test what blue would mean. The silence between each aborted attempt thickens the air; even the simple act of stacking washed plates to dry, aligning steel with steel so they don’t clatter, feels weighted with the unspoken admission that none of these motions, forms, files, clean dishes, refreshed web pages, will tell her what to do if he really has already left the story she’s still living inside, if “we” has quietly been archived into a past tense she hasn’t signed off on yet.
The next morning, when the light in the bedroom is already too bright for how little she has slept, she gives up on the pretense of “five more minutes” and sits up, throat dry, limbs heavy in that particular way that belongs to nights spent composing arguments and apologies to no one in particular. Her phone shows the familiar sequence: hotel website, S’s WhatsApp chat, a draft email to her ex‑professor with no body, only a subject line that reads “Quick question.” None of them have moved since midnight, as if the device has politely refused to enable her worst ideas.
By nine‑thirty she is wedged into a yellow line metro coach, the blast of conditioned air hitting her skin with the same faintly chemical chill as a hospital corridor. “Next station, Rajiv Chowk,” the recorded voice intones, and muscle memory does the rest: change here for the blue line, stand to the left on the escalator, avoid the man in the too‑loud shirt elbowing for space. She watches her reflection in the train window, ghosted over billboards for coaching centres and fairness creams flicking past, and notes, with an almost academic detachment, how easily she still looks like a student if you blur the under‑eye shadows.
At Vishwavidyalaya, the doors open to the same rush of bodies and cheap deodorant and excited Hindi, and something in her chest tightens. Groups of undergrads in college society T‑shirts swarm toward the exit, discussing auditions and deadlines; a boy in a fraying backpack is bent over his phone, reading a PDF as he walks. She tells herself, not for the first time, that she is here purely on reconnaissance: to glance at departmental notice boards, to see if there’s a seminar she can sit at the back of, to “orient” herself. It sounds almost respectable in her head, an adult taking stock of options, rather than a woman circling an old life because the new one has slipped out of frame.
Outside the station, the auto‑rickshaw drivers call out college names as if announcing destinations in some mythic city of futures: “St. Stephen’s! Miranda! SRCC!” She shakes her head at each, choosing to walk under the harsh late‑morning sun, partly to save money, partly to prove she still remembers the route. The avenue toward campus is lined with chhole‑bhature stalls and photocopy shops exactly where they always were, but the hoardings have migrated: IELTS coaching, Germany scholarships, coding bootcamps promising “package 25 LPA.” She walks past groups of students arguing about elective choices, their voices ricocheting off the red‑brick walls, and attaches herself to their noise like camouflage.
In her mind, she rehearses an answer for the imaginary acquaintance who will inevitably ask why she’s here. “Just seeing what’s happening these days,” she thinks. “I had some work at the admin block.” “I was anyway in the area.” Each version sounds airy, provisional, free of the desperate centre of gravity drawing her here because she has nothing more solid to stand on than the next two or three weeks. If she keeps moving, metro to campus, campus to canteen, canteen to a stray lecture, perhaps the question of what she will do after that can be postponed to some other, more competent self who will magically appear in the meantime.
Near the sociology department gate, she slows beside a noticeboard colonised by fresh posters. Internships promising “exposure,” call‑for‑papers with deadlines she has no intention of meeting, a glossy flyer for PhD admissions abroad featuring a white‑skinned student in a scarf. She leans in as if comparing fonts, phone heavy in her kurta pocket, the hotel number a small, hot stone she refuses to touch. If anyone looked closely, they’d see her eyes skimming not the text but the margins, as though there might be a smaller, secret notice pinned there explaining what one does when both home and elsewhere have revoked their guarantees.
Behind her, a door marked “Staff Only” sighs open and a thin stream of faculty spills out, heads bent together in the low, irritated murmur produced by committees everywhere. Milan walks among them, shoulders tight from an hour of being politely contradicted, mentally ironing his own story yet again: it’s not a stopgap, it’s “a phase of consolidation,” “time to build something here,” phrases that sit in his mouth like borrowed shoes. He is already composing the line for the next inquisitive colleague when he sees the familiar slope of a neck in front of the posters. The hair is longer, the posture a touch more compressed, but the angle of attention, absorbed and slightly elsewhere, lands with a small, precise shock.
“Piyali?” he calls, the name leaving his throat before the more cautious part of his mind can remind him that past students are like old drafts: revisiting them can mean admitting what one failed to say the first time.
They both slip into practiced banter with almost audible relief, the way one edges into a shallow pool to avoid looking at the dark water beyond. She tips her chin toward the washed‑out sky and the faint brown haze over the ridge. “Trying to recalibrate to PM2.[^5] and parental expectations,” she says lightly. “I’m on a sabbatical from adulthood, you know: test‑driving the Delhi version. Limited‑period offer.”
He smiles, shoulders loosening, and answers on cue. “And I’m back for the long haul, more or less. University and I, ” he gestures vaguely at the red‑brick buildings “, we always find a way to muddle through. Like an arranged marriage no one quite has the courage to leave. Compromise, nostalgia, a few well‑timed grants.” The exaggerated lightness in their voices clicks neatly into place, an agreed‑upon script that rushes in to occupy the space where more dangerous questions might have been.
They fall into step toward the chai stall, each quietly inventorying the other: the faint swelling under her eyes that concealer hasn’t quite negotiated, the way his kurta hangs looser, the new parentheses at his mouth. He buys the tea before she can protest, and rather than ask anything ruinous like “So, how are you really?” she nods toward a lurid protest flyer and asks what he makes of the latest autonomy debates. He exhales in visible relief and slips into lecturer mode, offering a compact, elegant tirade about privatization and “stakeholder language,” hands sketching quotation marks in the air. Shoulder to shoulder in the crush outside the stall, fingers prickling from too‑hot cups, they anatomize a recent op‑ed and trade reading lists, their tones brisk and faintly amused, as if sitting on a panel together rather than standing inside the quiet collapse of their own lives.
Each time the talk tilts towards anything with weight (when he nearly asks how long she’s “back,” when she almost says “Patel Nagar” instead of “this side of town”) they veer off into safer abstractions: curriculum overhauls, fellowship cuts, “the youth nowadays” and their restless aspirations. Silences lengthen, then are briskly plastered over with conference calendars, alumni mailing lists, half‑meant invitations. When her phone buzzes with a bank alert and his with a departmental WhatsApp ping, they both lunge for the distraction, gratefully choreographing a neutral exit: “We should catch up properly sometime, yaar, coffee, long chat.” Walking away in opposite directions (she towards the metro, he back to his cluttered office) they carry a muted, almost respectable ache, as if they’ve watched a lifeboat drift within reach and, with practised courtesy, declined to climb in.
Later in the week, Milan arrives at Devanshi’s bungalow already slightly on edge, the kind of keyed‑up tiredness that faculty meetings produce. He has spent the afternoon in a committee room with peeling cream paint and a malfunctioning AC, listening to oblique references to “difficult budgetary climates” and “the need for responsible partners” that everyone understands as funding threats, though no one is impolite enough to say so. By the time he signs the attendance sheet and steps back into the late‑winter light, his jaw has locked into a dull ache.
The car that brings him to Lutyens’ Delhi feels like a moving corridor between worlds. Out the window, the city mutates: flyovers give way to roundabouts thick with bougainvillea; hoardings advertising coaching centres and real‑estate “opportunities” thin out, replaced by embassy plaques and discreet brass nameplates. At the gate, a uniformed guard checks his name against a printed list, then conducts a small pantomime of welcome. “Sir, Milan ji? Please, inside only. Madam is expecting.”
The sudden expanse of manicured lawn and diffused golden light hits him like a stage set. The air seems cleaner, almost scented; even the crows sound less frantic here. As he’s led along the gravel path, he registers the careful choreography: votive candles along the veranda steps, fairy lights threaded through the trees, a string quartet murmuring softly from a speaker hidden somewhere behind potted palms.
Inside the drawing room, the temperature drops a few degrees, literally and metaphorically. High ceilings, cream walls, contemporary art punctuating old teak; low conversation humming above the clink of glass. He recognizes a few faces from campus, department heads, committee regulars, now softened by silk, linen, and wine glasses instead of ID lanyards and harried expressions. Their laughter has more oxygen in it here. On the far side of the room, a small cluster of young fellows stands near the canapé table, posture hovering somewhere between gratitude and audition.
A staff member appears at his elbow with the unhurried efficiency of someone trained in old‑Delhi households. “Bag, sir?” The automatic deference lands oddly after an afternoon of being deferential himself. He lets the messenger bag slip off his shoulder, watching it carried away as if a part of his identity has been politely checked at the door.
For a moment, he allows himself to be folded into the scene, taking the proffered wine, nodding at a passing trustee, laughing lightly at a joke about “perpetual renovations” on campus. He tells himself it’s just another professional obligation, another room to read, another performance to get through. If the shift from cracked linoleum floors and budget anxieties to Persian rugs and curated conversation feels unreal, he reassures himself that this, too, is part of the university. Just a different classroom, with better upholstery and much more expensive subtext.
Devanshi moves through the room with the kind of unhurried assurance that makes everyone else unconsciously adjust their posture. A hand on a sleeve here, a murmured anecdote there, she stitches together floating clusters into momentary constellations, her laugh low and perfectly calibrated. She says “our initiative,” “our scholars,” with the ease of someone for whom institutions are not walls to be entered but rooms in a family house to be rearranged. The silk of her sari, deep, almost-black blue with a thin silver border, catches the light each time she turns, a controlled current in an otherwise placid pool.
When she reaches Milan, the modulation is so slight it would be invisible to anyone not watching for it: an extra half‑second of eye contact, the smile deepening just enough to suggest prior understanding. “We’re so fortunate to have him back in Delhi; he understands both worlds,” she says, the compliment landing in a soft radius around them. Heads swivel with polite curiosity.
A circle coheres almost instantly: two senior professors whose chairs bear her surname on discreet brass plaques; a political journalist currently enjoying a fellowship funded by “the family”; and two postdocs clutching their wineglasses as if holding on to the future. Their bodies angle inwards, the classic formation of a panel without a dais, and Milan feels the subtle tightening in his shoulders that precedes a public performance. Somewhere behind the gracious welcome he hears the click of an invisible switch: his role has been activated.
The opening exchange unspools with the ease of a rehearsal. One of the senior professors offers a polished line about Devanshi’s “extraordinary vision” for inclusion. How she “really understands marginal voices.” A postdoc follows with a self‑conscious quip about “the rare pleasure of donors who actually read footnotes, not just balance sheets,” drawing a small, appreciative ripple. Milan lets the current carry him, supplying a few safely positive phrases (“interesting framework,” “promising directions,” “space for experimentation”) the verbal equivalent of nodding along.
Then Devanshi, without raising her voice, redirects the beam. “Milan has such important thoughts on inequality,” she says, hand resting briefly on his sleeve. “I hope he’ll help us shape this.” The sentence is all deference on the surface; underneath, he hears the contour: shape this, don’t question it. Around him, spines straighten almost imperceptibly. The little semi‑circle leans in, braced for something that sounds critical but resolves, obligingly, into reassurance.
He feels the old tension between gratitude and honesty cinch tight, like a belt on the last notch, and chooses a narrow ledge to stand on. “I’m just wary,” he says lightly, “of how easily we end up doing that feel‑good reform which photographs beautifully, but doesn’t really disturb anything structural.” He smiles as he speaks, sanding down the edges. The air, however, recalibrates. Laughter arrives a shade off‑beat, the journalist’s eyebrow lifts with predatory interest, and a senior professor’s chuckle thins into something almost admonishing: “Arre, but without patrons like Devanshi‑ji, what can we disturb at all?” The brittle good humour hangs, a hairline in the room’s polished surface.
Devanshi’s expression barely alters; only her eyes register impact, the warmth retracting by a calibrated notch. “Well,” she replies, tone silk‑smooth, “perhaps the real task is to prove that responsible patronage and serious critique can coexist, no?” Her glass lifts in a small, inclusive arc that seals the fissure before it declares itself. The circle exhales; talk slides to safer anecdotes about campus uprisings, op‑eds, television panels. Milan nods in time, but feels something invisible stiffen: a fault line in the comforting fiction of alliance. As a waiter materialises with miniature tikkis, he takes one automatically, tasting only the salt of how much of his disquiet he is quietly redacting, just as she is pruning hers for display.
The Barapullah crawls in fits and starts, a shining river of red brake lights and impatience. Vibhor’s car inches forward a few feet at a time, the AC humming valiantly against the late‑evening heat, while Piyali’s voice, tinny, compressed by WhatsApp’s algorithm, fills the small, fabric‑upholstered world of his hatchback.
She sounds like she’s on a conference call. “So, kal bank locker ka pura inventory ho gaya,” she reports, precise, itemised. “Then I submitted the form for updating PAN card address… that also ho gaya. Phir bijli office mein complaint register kar diya. Hopefully ab random cut nahi hoga.” There’s a tiny, proud pause after each “ho gaya,” as if she’s ticking boxes on a spreadsheet and sharing highlights from the sprint review.
He grips the steering wheel a little tighter. The more efficiently she speaks, the more he hears the blank spaces she’s paving over. No mention of how the locker smelled when she opened it after months, whether her father’s handwriting on old envelopes made her throat close up. Just “inventory ho gaya,” like she’s talking about server capacity.
He knows this voice. It’s the one she used in college presentations when she was running a fever, or when her scholarship was under review and she pretended it was “just paperwork.” Everything folded into deliverables, dependencies, deadlines. Feelings deferred to a later, theoretical release.
“So, I also checked a few hotels near CP,” she says suddenly, words tumbling a fraction faster. “Brokers wahan mil jaate hain.”
On the last word her pitch jumps, then drops, as if she’s stepped on emotional black ice and skidded, caught herself, moved on. A blaring horn yanks his attention back to the road; he brakes, curses softly, then reaches out and taps the rewind icon with his thumb.
“Also checked a few hotels near CP, brokers wahan mil jaate hain.”
He lets it play again, this time listening not to the sentence but to the air around it. The slight drag before “also,” like an edit in her own script. The forced casualness of “wahan mil jaate hain,” as though she’s discovered a clever hack instead of circling, for no good reason, the exact neighbourhood where his mental map slots in one person: the man on whom her whole, carefully suspended future was supposed to rest.
He knows, rationally, that Connaught Place has a hundred excuses. Offices, banks, cafes, alumni meets. But “hotels near CP” tightens something low in his chest. Those anonymous business hotels she could have gone to from the airport. The ones where NRIs stay, where long‑distance lives are briefly made three‑dimensional and then folded back into boarding passes.
The car inches forward; he steals another glance at the waveform on his screen. Blue ridges, one small spike where she says “CP.” He considers hitting record and replying now, “Kis broker ne bola hotel pe milne ko?” or, more directly, “Tu S se mili kya?”, but the thought of her on the other end, marshalling that same project‑manager tone to deflect, exhausts him.
He lets the note finish: more about municipal forms, gas connection transfers, “kal alumni meet bhi hai, dekhte hain kaisa hai.” The word “productive” makes an appearance, like a summary slide.
He stabs the pause button. For a moment the car is silent except for the rhythmic wiper swish against the barely‑there drizzle. Then, on an impulse that surprises him with its childishness, he taps “Mark as unread.” As if by returning it to boldface, he can keep the question inside it alive, unsolved.
“Face to face,” he mutters, easing the car ahead as the jam loosens marginally near the flyover exit. He’ll ask her when they finally manage coffee, when there’s no call dropping, no “…hello? You’re cutting, na” to hide behind. In person she has to look somewhere, at him, at the table, at the stupid sugar packets, and he’ll be able to tell.
For now, he scrolls through their chat, thumb hovering over the keyboard. “Are you okay?” feels too naked. “Sounds hectic, yaar,” too endorsing. He starts typing, “CP waala kaam kya hai exactly?” then deletes it, watching the grey “typing…” bubble appear on his own screen and vanish.
In the end, irritated with himself, he flicks to his downloads, picks a meme (some overworked guy buried under Excel sheets, captioned “Adulting Level: Impossible”) and sends it.
Three dots appear, disappear. Traffic lurches forward again. The unread voice note sits there like a sealed envelope, and the unease it’s delivered settles into the space between his ribs, patient and persistent, waiting for him to decide whether he actually wants to know the answer.
“Hotels near Connaught Place” keeps snagging in his mind like a loose thread. Brokers don’t need lobbies and cappuccinos; half of Delhi’s property market runs on plastic chairs and chipped glasses of chai. If she really wanted, some Patel Nagar uncle with a ballpoint pen and a dog‑eared register would appear downstairs in ten minutes.
Instead, in his head, he traces the white circle of CP: Shivaji Stadium, Barakhamba Road, the ring of interchangeable business hotels with tinted glass and generic names. He’s dropped colleagues there, seen NRIs wheeling suitcases in and out, watched drivers loiter while someone inside finishes a conversation they won’t summarise honestly later. The image that settles has very little to do with square footage or rental yields, and almost everything to do with the man whose name she has carefully kept out of every sentence.
At a long red light near Moolchand, his thumb hovers over the green call icon. For a second he even imagines blurting it out (“Tu CP mein kis se mil rahi hai?”) and hearing the pause on the other end. Instead, he exhales, presses “mark as unread,” and files the discomfort under “discuss when we meet,” that magical category where all difficult questions go to be indefinitely postponed.
By the time they actually manage it, the “quick coffee” is squeezed between his 4 p.m. stand‑up and her next visit to yet another government office. The café, wedged under a Cyber City tower, hums with sales calls and keyboard clatter; a muted IPL repeat flickers above the counter. Vibhor’s laptop is half‑open beside his cappuccino, Slack notifications pulsing accusingly; Piyali’s phone lies face up, screen lighting every few seconds with OTPs and “Dear Customer” alerts.
She talks fast, as if racing her own battery percentage. “Aaj locker ka kaam finally ho gaya,” she reports. “Alumni meet ka email bhi aa gaya, dekhna padega. Broker ko call kiya, wo bol raha tha CP side mein better rates mil jayenge.” Between updates she folds her paper napkin into neat, exact rectangles, aligning them with the saucer’s rim.
“Yaar,” Vibhor cuts in, leaning back, studying the choreography of her fingers more than her words, “why are you suddenly obsessed with property papers and alumni mixers? This isn’t… I mean, this intense project‑manager version of you, at least.”
She stills for one beat longer than conversationally comfortable, then tilts her head, hair flicked back in a practised, almost theatrical arc. “Arre, consultant brain hai na,” she says lightly. “Data gathering. Before any decision, you scan the landscape, do stakeholder analysis, risk assessment” “then you pretend it was all very rational.” She lifts her cup as if toasting a strategy deck, turning her own drift into a case study, her panic into a methodology with bullet points and deliverables.
The joke lands, but only halfway, like a paper plane that glides a bit and then nosedives. Vibhor nudges again, “Decision about what, exactly?”, and she only lifts one shoulder, gaze skimming the tables behind him. “Bas, dekh rahi hoon. Options,” she says, the English word turned into a shield. It covers everything she refuses to itemise: whether to stay, whether to leave, and whether anyone will be standing at either end if she does.
He opens his mouth (“Aur S…?”) but the name emerges only as an audible inhale. She’s already frowning at her phone. “Shit, I forgot, very important SMS to the bank manager, OTP expire ho jayega,” she murmurs, fingers flying, screen a convenient curtain. He lets the moment pass, turning to flag the bill, half‑listening as she mutters about account linking and cut‑off times.
By the time he’s tapped his card, stuffed the receipt into his laptop sleeve, and skimmed a fresh burst of Slack pings, the charged space between “decision” and “S” has been neatly plastered over with notifications. They walk out trading practised complaints about Gurgaon traffic and Cyber City parking, their footsteps in sync, their silences carefully out of step.
On the violet‑line metro, swaying against the doors, Vibhor scrolls back through their thread. Her last week reads like an office file: RTGS slips, KYC updates, alumni‑meet screenshots, a selfie with blurred North Campus banners she claims she “randomly crashed.” He types, “Are you okay, honestly?” watches the words pulse, then erases them. “Did something happen with S?” appears, sharper, and vanishes too. Finally he forwards a tired meme about adulting and property documents, adds, “100% you right now,” and pockets the phone before he can reconsider. As tunnel air whips past and darkened platforms flicker by, a tightness settles under his ribs: the knowledge that whatever is actually happening with her is drawing nearer, and he is politely collaborating in not naming it.
At the Patel Nagar apartment one humid afternoon, the ceiling fan only manages to push the warm air around in circles. In the kitchen, where the window opens onto a shaft of other people’s windows, Kailashini stands at the narrow sink, her wrists already red from the constant rush of tap water. Steel plates clatter lightly as she rinses the last streaks of dal down the drain, balancing them on the wire rack in a pattern she does not need to think about anymore.
Behind her, at the old study desk pushed up against the living‑room wall, Piyali is bent over the laptop and a stack of bills, lips moving as she adds numbers under her breath. The desk lamp is on though it is still afternoon; the room’s single tube light has begun to flicker. On the shelf above, an old stapler and a jar of pens share space with her father’s framed certificate from some engineers’ association, the glass slightly dusty.
Without glancing up, Piyali calls out, “Yeh jo maintenance ka column hai na, usme last teen saal ka average daal dena?” The tone is casual, automatic, the way one might address a junior in office or a long‑suffering sibling. For a moment, the words hang oddly in the cramped air. An instruction addressed to someone who is not staff, not family, and yet has started to function as both.
“Haan,” Kailashini answers at once, more reflex than agreement. She shuts off the tap, wipes her wet hands on her faded green dupatta, and walks over, careful not to drip on the terrazzo floor.
Leaning over the laptop, she feels the faint cool of the fan on the back of her neck. The spreadsheet glows unfamiliar grids and pale blues, rows of numbers marching down: “2019,” “2020,” “2021,” figures in the thousands. The cursor blinks in an empty cell where, she understands, something clever is supposed to appear on its own.
“Average matlab…?” she begins, but Piyali is already halfway through a phone call, pinching it between shoulder and ear. Some bank manager, some “sir” who is not picking up. “Haan, ek minute, Milan Sir, I’ll just. Kailashini swallows the question. “Theek hai,” she murmurs instead. She clicks into the cell, presses the arrow keys experimentally. Somewhere she has seen Vibhor, or one of her cousins, do something like “equals” and brackets; she remembers nothing beyond the gestures.
She does not know how to calculate it, not really. She begins copying the numbers down the side onto a scrap of newspaper with the corner of a ball‑pen that skips, then adds them slowly in her head. Her fingers tap out the total on the table edge before she divides, clumsily, by three. It is the long way around, the school way, but it gets her to a number that at least looks reasonable.
When she types it in, nothing explodes. The cell accepts it meekly; the sheet looks no different. Still, a small, guilty satisfaction warms her. She tells herself she is “learning something useful” from this, computer ka kaam, accounts ka kaam, skills that might one day sit nicely on a CV or in some interview she has not yet been called for.
“Ho gaya?” Piyali asks between two “Hello, hello, can you hear me?” into the phone.
“Haan, daal diya,” Kailashini says.
“Great,” Piyali replies, already turning back to the next column. “Kal tak poora sheet ready ho jaaye toh broker ko bhejna asaan hoga.”
Broker, bank, maintenance, average: the vocabulary of other people’s futures. Kailashini stands there for a second longer than necessary, watching the rows of figures where her afternoon has quietly disappeared, before she turns back to the sink to wash the one steel glass they both forgot.
When she finally reaches East Delhi that evening, sweat drying in itchy patches under her kurti, her aunt is already installed at the dining table, plastic tablecloth cleared of everything except a neat fan of bills. The television blares a soap in the background, volume lowered just enough to make it clear this scene has priority.
“Dekho, sab ka due date aa gaya hai,” the aunt announces, tapping the electricity and gas slips with a ball‑pen as if conducting an audit. “Bijli, pani, gas… sab time se bharna padta hai. Tum toh roz wahan ke kaam sambhaal leti ho, yahan ka bhi thoda dhyaan rakh lo na.” The tone is half‑complaint, half‑compliment; the implication, pure arithmetic. If her hours are increasingly spent in Patel Nagar, her contribution here must be recalibrated.
“Haan, Maasi,” Kailashini says, already fishing out her small, over‑folded wallet. From the sofa, a cousin’s husband chuckles without looking up from his phone. “Waise achha hai, Piyali Didi ko tum jaise ladki mil gayi,” he calls out. “Tum toh bilkul nurse ban ke baith jaati ho logon ke paas. Full‑time caretaker.”
Laughter rises, easy and unembarrassed. Her cheeks burn; she arranges her face into an answering smile. “Arre, aisa kuch nahin,” she protests lightly, eyes on the crumpled notes in her hand. Inside, something tightens, a small awareness that everyone has correctly identified her role. Even before she has named it for herself.
Over the next few days, a subtle choreography settles in, as if the building has collectively updated its understanding of her. Patel Nagar neighbors start knocking with casual requests, “Beta, jab neeche jao na, yeh bijli ka form bhi de aana office mein,” or “Kal subah gas wala aayega, tum waise bhi aa rahi ho na? Zaraa dekh lena”. Phrased as favors but delivered with the serene confidence that she will say yes. Someone asks her to sign for a courier, someone else to taste the achar and “tell honestly.” On the shared staircase, one elderly neighbor tells another, loud enough for her to hear, “Aaj‑kal toh wahan ek ladki rehti hi hai poora din. Bahut shareef lagti hai, kaam‑waaam bhi sab sambhaal leti hogi.” The comment lands like a stamp: she is no longer just visiting; she is becoming infrastructure, a quiet, unpaid utility folded into the architecture of the flat.
One afternoon, after a double run to the bank and the gas agency, Kailashini finds herself automatically sweeping Piyali’s balcony, the jhaadu scratching against terrazzo while Piyali sits inside comparing rent figures on her laptop, glasses sliding down her nose. “Kal ek aur broker aane wala hai,” Piyali says, eyes fixed on the screen. “Tum aa sakti ho na? Thoda samajh‑bujh ke log lag rahe hain, alone deal karne mein ajeeb lagta hai. Tum ho toh…” She trails off, already clicking into another tab, invitation quietly converted into expectation. “Haan, dekh lenge,” Kailashini hears herself reply, surprised at how automatic the words sound, as if her time, her body, her schedule now belong to this flat by default.
On the crowded bus back to East Delhi that night, shoulder pressed against a stranger’s backpack, Kailashini unlocks her phone for the first time in hours. At the top of her call log: a missed call and a terse text from her cousin. “Interview wale ne aaj follow‑up mangaa tha, tumne confirm kiya ki nahi?” She reads it twice, trying to remember when they had even fixed a date, a time, a company name that belonged to her. Around her, the conductor shouts “Akshardham! Anand Vihar!” over someone’s tinny ringtone, a heroic film song looping its chorus. In her lap, a plastic bag of bhindi and potatoes for her aunt cuts into the crease of her wrist each time the bus lurches. She scrolls back through the week: cylinders, passbooks, broker timings, gas refills, “kal zaroor aana”: a tidy archive of other people’s urgencies. There is not a single reminder about her own applications, not one message she has sent herself. A thin, unfamiliar thread of panic slips under the familiar tiredness, tightening with every bump in the road. By the time she types, “Kal baat karte hain,” thumb hovering before she hits send, she knows she has already missed more than just a call; she has mislaid a small, tentative version of herself.
The next afternoon, the heat in Patel Nagar feels adhesive, a slow‑drying glue on Piyali’s arms and the back of her neck as she sits at her father’s old desk. The plastic cover on the desk has bubbled slightly near the edges over the years; her forearms stick to it when she leans forward. On the laptop screen, a white rectangle waits politely: “Dear Ms. Devanshi,” blinking cursor underneath like an impatient metronome.
The official invitation from the trustee’s office sits open in another tab, full of weightless flattery. Attached below, the concept note for the “vision session”: neat bullet points that manage, in under two pages, to evacuate everything she once admired about Milan’s work. Where he had talked, in half‑smudged lecture notes and smoky addas, about structure and inequality and the violence of aspiration, the document now offers “stakeholder engagement,” “leveraging alumni narratives,” and “building aspirational ecosystems.”
She clicks back to her draft and types, “I am honoured by your kind invitation, but I’m not sure I am the best placed to moderate this discussion at this stage, ” The sentence looks prim, almost sulky. She frowns, adds: “given my current personal circumstances.” Immediately deletes “personal circumstances.” Deletes “at this stage.” The cursor returns to “honoured,” that most obedient of words, blinking as if in reprimand.
She tries again: “Thank you for thinking of me. Unfortunately. That she does not know how long she is even staying in this country? That “vision” at the moment means managing water timings and electricity bills? That the idea of sitting on a dais between Devanshi and Milan, pretending to be a coherent “alumna success story,” makes her want to laugh and lie down at the same time?
Her fingers still. The fan above grinds through another slow rotation, its whir swelling and receding like bad traffic. A bead of sweat travels down between her shoulder blades, caught under the strap of a bra that doesn’t quite fit right anymore. On the desk, among carefully stacked passbooks and gas receipts, the framed passport‑size photograph of her father in his work shirt watches her with unblinking, matte eyes.
“Honoured,” she backspaces. “Unfortunately,” gone. The whole sentence dissolves. She stares at the blank space, the cursor boxing air. Somewhere outside, a sabziwala calls out “bhindi, tamatar,” his voice thin but persistent through the double windows. In the corridor, a pressure cooker whistle shrieks in three short bursts.
She could accept. Say yes, moderate, smile on stage, perform alumna‑who‑made‑it, and perhaps get a neat line on her CV. She could refuse, politely, citing “prior commitments” she does not yet have. Either way, she will have to choose a version of herself on paper, commit it to the polite archive of Devanshi’s inbox.
Instead, she drags the mouse to the corner of the draft window and just…stops. No saving, no sending, no deleting. She leaves the salutation hanging. Devanshi,” lonely and over‑formal. And lets her hands drop to her lap. The laptop hums lightly, the fan above hums louder, until the two sounds merge into one thick, featureless noise.
Her phone buzzes on the desk, a small, insistent vibration that jolts the edge of the plastic cover. The screen lights up with Vibhor’s name, followed almost instantly by a flood of blue and green in their alumni WhatsApp group: screenshots of the university event poster, zoomed‑in selfies of the college gate from someone already on North Campus, three separate jokes about free samosas and watery coffee. In between, a tag blinks at her: “@Piyali, nostalgia trip incoming?” Someone adds, “Panel pe aa rahi hai kya, madam UK‑returned?” The words feel like they’re addressed to a version of her living in some parallel tab she forgot to close.
Almost on cue, Vibhor’s separate text drops down from the top of the screen: “Boss, North Campus mein client ne milne ko bola. 3 baje ke around. Tu aa sakti hai? Proper catch‑up, promise. Bilkul work talk nahi.” A second bubble follows: “Waise bhi tumhari Devanshi‑types ka event hai na, dono ka ho jayega.”
She stares at the message, thumb hovering over the keyboard, aware, like a low, steady ache, that this is the honest conversation she has been postponing since she landed. The one where “How’s home?” and “How are you really?” can’t both be dodged with jokes about traffic.
Instead, almost gratefully, she reaches for the familiar alibi of busyness. “Dekhti hoon, schedule tight hai thoda,” she types, adding a neutral smiley, then deleting it, finally sending the message plain. The blue ticks appear almost immediately; three animated dots suggest he’s replying, then vanish.
She flips the phone face‑down on the desk, as if that simple motion could cancel obligation. Guilt prickles at the back of her neck, a fine, irritated heat, but she tells herself she will reply properly “baad mein,” when she has decided something: about the event, about the flat, about leaving or staying. For now, she lets the screen go dark and pretends the silence is mutual.
Before the screen even dims, the broker’s name flashes: another call she’s been dodging. This time she answers, tucking the phone between shoulder and ear while shuffling through a bulging file of electricity bills, gas receipts, death‑certificate photocopies. “Madam, ekdam accha party mila hai. Family‑plus‑corporate type, rent on time, no drama,” he insists, voice competing with a siren and auto horns on speaker. “Aaj shaam ko hi dikha dete hain flat, kal ko toh woh Gurgaon side dekh lega, phir mat bolna chance gaya.”
Piyali presses her fingertips into the edge of the desk, eyes snagging on the half‑typed salutation to Devanshi’s office. She hears herself say, “Theek hai, aa jao 7 baje,” polite, efficient. Inside, a small, panicked voice protests that she has just traded one more evening for logistics instead of decisions, movement instead of choice, as if constant arrangements could pass for a plan.
By early evening, the day’s demands knot together with the slow insistence of a headache. Milan’s name appears in her inbox. Forwarded program details from the department, a brief line beneath: “Apparently you’re moderating? Will be good to see you on campus again.” No emoji, no question mark; the assumption sits there, tidy and complete. Her chest tightens at the way everyone seems to have quietly decided who she is and where she’ll be. She starts to reply, “Actually, I’m not sure yet”, watching the words march across the screen like a small act of rebellion, when the cursor jerks, freezes mid‑“s,” and the laptop screen turns an indifferent grey. A second later, the room goes black as the fan shudders to a halt and the inverter, for once, doesn’t bother to rescue them. Outside, a chorus of exasperated voices rises from neighboring balconies: “Light chali gayi phir se!” “Generator bhi nahi chalu kiya abhi tak?” Her phone vibrates in her hand with three near‑simultaneous notifications, the only lit object in the room: Vibhor’s “Confirm kar na yaar, warna main bhi adjust kar loon,” the broker’s “On the way, 20 minutes,” and, chiming on top, a reminder from the building WhatsApp group about signatures needed for a water‑supply petition.
Her confession seems to startle aunty more than the dark. “Arre, sabko hi nahi samajh aata,” the older woman mutters, recovering, thrusting the clipboard closer. “Bas sign kar do, baaki committee dekh legi.” Footsteps and television noise leak from other flats; somewhere a pressure cooker hisses. Piyali signs anyway, her name looping neatly, absurdly intact, while Kailashini’s hand hovers, almost but not quite touching her arm.
For a second, Milan’s fingers toy with the capped pen placed for signatures, the gesture of institutional compliance so ingrained it almost answers for him. He pictures the pre‑event email from Devanshi’s office (keywords highlighted, potential “sensitive areas” underlined) and feels how neatly his usual responses fit into that template: acknowledge, reframe, reassure. The words line up in his mind like safe furniture pushed against the walls of a too‑small room.
He could begin with, “Thank you, that’s an important question,” and watch the emcee relax. He could talk about “complex histories” and “emergent cultures of accountability,” scatter a few references to global best practices, and return everyone to the comforting script where critique is a flavouring, not the main course. He knows the tone, the tempo, the little self‑deprecating joke that would invite a ripple of relieved laughter.
Instead, what rises is an image of his own scholarship form from decades ago, photocopied at the DU chakkar shop until the ink blurred at the edges, his father’s signature trembling at the bottom. No Devanshi‑type trustee had ever been visible then, only a faceless “management” whose benevolence he’d learned not to question too closely. Grateful children did not ask who owned the building.
He hears his own lectures in his head, the ones where he tells students that structures are reproduced not only through law and policy but through “habits of speech and silence.” The phrase returns now with an irritating accuracy. He can feel Devanshi somewhere in the front row like a pressure point even without looking directly at her: composed, observant, counting on him to be the reasonable one who translates this awkward moment back into the language of partnership.
His thumb rubs the ridge of the pen cap. The student’s question hangs there, not just about donor families but about people like him who have learned to describe power so elegantly that no one in particular ever seems responsible. Milan thinks of his contract letter, “subject to renewal based on institutional needs and funding”, and of the small flat he is still not sure he can keep beyond the year. Practicality, he reminds himself, has its own grammar.
But beneath that, older and more stubborn, is the memory of classrooms where he once told himself he would not become the kind of academic who edits his sentences to match the cheque book. The habit of caution and the promise of honesty wrestle in the same breath. He inhales, realizes his fingers have stilled on the pen, and understands that whatever he says next will be heard not only by the student at the mic and the trustees in the front row, but by some younger version of himself who is listening very closely.
From the corner of his eye he registers the choreography of discomfort: the faculty convener half‑rises, then remembers the cameras and folds himself back into the chair; a student volunteer near the aisle taps her watch at the emcee with the frantic politeness of someone told this is “being live‑streamed, haan, so timing is crucial”; a man in a blazer in the third row leans towards his neighbour and murmurs, “typical activist type,” lips curling just enough to signal that everyone sensible in the room understands the category. A few heads turn towards the trustees’ row, not to look directly (no one is that unschooled) but to register whether faces there are amused, annoyed, or impassive.
The student at the mic, though, doesn’t flinch. Her hand grips the notebook, knuckles pale, ink smudged along the margin where she has clearly rewritten this once already, but her chin stays level. She does not smile to soften the blow, does not preface with “I may be wrong but…”. Milan realizes she is asking not just about policy but about what it costs to speak plainly in rooms where gratitude is the preferred accent.
He clears his throat once, buying a breath, and hears himself start with the familiar buffer, “That’s a complex question…”, before he stops mid‑sentence, the trained cadence short‑circuited. The microphone catches the break; it sounds louder than he expects. The auditorium air thickens around the pause, that collective shift when an audience senses something has slipped off script. In that stretched second, he thinks of the first‑generation students who never made it to panels, who sat outside these halls doing form‑filling for others. Of grant applications rewritten to sound less “political” and more “capacity‑building.” Of donors’ emails that never quite said “don’t invite her,” only flagged people as “too sensitive just now.” The well‑worn script in his head suddenly feels like another small betrayal, this time executed in public.
“Dekhiye,” he begins again, this time without the preface that would have turned critique into abstraction. He leans closer to the mic, shoulders squaring as if he’s shifted from defending a project to answering to a peer. “Hum jab kehte hain inclusion, humein yeh bhi dekhna padta hai kaun decide karta hai ki kisko include karna hai,” he adds, slipping deliberately into Hindi, letting the questioner’s language set the terms instead of the brochure’s. “Aur kis condition pe.” The sentence lands slower than his usual classroom patter, each clause separated by a small, audible intake of breath. A few phones lift to record; in the dimmed light, screens glow like small, watchful eyes, tiny rectangles already translating this fragile, spoken hesitation into shareable evidence.
Near the front, Devanshi’s stillness becomes, paradoxically, the most noticeable movement in the room. She does not interject, does not offer the practiced trustee’s clarification; her pen, poised over her leather folder, hovers an inch above the page, as if even a note would commit her to a side. Milan feels the weight of her attention and chooses, consciously, not to dilute what he is about to say with jokes, jargon, or detours meant to reassure donors. When he finally continues, naming how money arrives with invisible footnotes, how gratitude is often demanded as the price of entry, how refusal is quietly punished, the words fall with the quiet, irrevocable thud of something that cannot be unsaid.
Before he answers, he lets the question hang so long that people begin to shift in their seats, assuming he has either taken offence or is preparing the standard committee‑room reply. He is not looking at the convener at the aisle mic, who is already bending towards him with a performative, “Yes, very important point…”, ready to intercept. Instead, his gaze runs over the rows like he is trying to remember the room rather than dominate it.
The first few faces are familiar types: faculty colleagues already bracing for damage control, a couple of journalist‑adjacent people near the front, expressionless but alert. Beyond them, in the middle rows, a group of students from some coaching centre or other, clutching backpacks and plastic folders, half‑ready to leave if the event turns out to be mere brochure recital. And at the very back, under the blue exit signs, a looser cluster: some leaning against the wall, some sitting on the steps, phones half‑raised. Their expressions are a mix he recognises from his own student days. He can almost hear, like bad hold music in the background, his own internal “be diplomatic” script: acknowledge the concern, soften the edges, gesture to ongoing efforts, slide towards the safe abstraction of “systemic issues” without naming any of the people in the room who benefit from them. He remembers the email from the organizers with bullet‑pointed “suggested talking notes,” the gentle warning about “not derailing from the positive narrative.” All of that runs through his head in an instant and then, just as quickly, recedes. As if someone has nudged the volume down on a channel he’s been tuned to for years.
What remains, oddly clear, are scattered images: a girl in his old university who worked nights at a call centre and days on campus, who never had time to attend events about “inclusion” because she was always on the other side of the help desks; a funding proposal he once rewrote three times to sound less angry, more “constructive”; a younger version of himself, standing outside a seminar room, imagining that if he ever got a mic, he would not waste it on reassurance.
By the time he finally leans toward the mic, the decision is already made somewhere below the level where strategy lives. He does not run it past the convener with a glance; he does not search for Devanshi’s face to gauge tolerance. The room sharpens into a simple configuration: a student who has risked asking a question that was clearly not on the brochure, and a chance to answer as if he is speaking to that student rather than to the donor reports that will later quote this event.
He exhales once, not quite a sigh, more like the clearing of a blockage, and feels the familiar, careful preface rising to his lips, “That’s a complex question…”, before he lets it die there. The silence that follows is thin but charged, like the second before a photograph develops. He adjusts the mic, not to buy time but to commit, and when he opens his mouth again it is with the quiet, almost private certainty of someone who has finally decided he would rather disappoint a few powerful people than keep pantomiming gratitude on behalf of everyone else.
“Yeh sawaal bilkul sahi hai,” he begins, and this time the sentence does not curve politely away from its point. The easy buffer phrases, “we’re all doing our best,” “within certain limitations”, never arrive. Instead, his voice settles into an oddly plain register as he starts naming things usually left to annexures and footnotes: specific clauses in MOUs that tie money to “preferred profiles,” stipulations about which departments may expand, unspoken expectations that research should avoid “controversial” ground if it wants renewal.
He does not dramatise it; he inventories it. Hiring committees that quietly pre‑sort CVs because certain backgrounds “fit the vision” better, fellowship calls that are technically open but drafted in a language only a particular class can parse, feedback from donors about “messaging” whenever students raise uncomfortable slogans on stage. As he speaks, the ambient rustle in the hall thins. Even the pair of students near the back door, half‑turned towards the exit a minute ago, have stilled. The convener at the aisle mic stops nodding on autopilot, his smile freezing as the familiar vocabulary (“partnership,” “support”) is replaced by “conditions,” “filters,” “trade‑offs” that do not sound like a celebration at all.
He lets each phrase hang long enough to become a little uncomfortable before moving on: “conditional grants,” “preferred profiles,” “outcomes that photograph well.” They do not sound sinister, just tired, as if worn smooth by years of committee minutes. Then, dropping jargon, he sketches scenes that land closer to the bone. Personal statements rewritten to sound humbler, more indebted; students coached on which parts of their lives to display as “impact stories”; research quietly bent toward what will look good in a brochure or on a plaque.
“Kabhi kabhi,” he says, “madad aise hoti hai ki uska asli daam shukriya hota hai. Baar baar, chhoti chhoti baaton pe.” In the middle rows, a couple of students huff out involuntary laughs, then clamp them down, caught between recognition and caution. Others look down at their laps, thumbs worrying the edges of ID cards, as if someone has read aloud a private contract they thought only they had signed.
“Charity jo shukriya ki rasam pe tikki ho, woh bas hierarchy ka naye roshni wala version hai,” he says, and the line lands heavier than he intends. Against his own discipline, his gaze skims the front row. Devanshi is a still life of composure, fingers laced over the leather folder stamped with her foundation’s crest, eyes trained on him with an unreadable steadiness that is not quite challenge and not quite retreat. The flash on the PR photographer’s camera whines and then stills; he lowers the lens a few inches, uncertain whether to capture this frame or pretend it did not happen. In the small pause that follows, even the restless shuffling of bags and notebooks dies down. A thin, humming quiet spreads from the trustees’ row outward, as if the air itself is waiting to see whether anyone will laugh it off, correct him, or let the sentence stand.
From a distance, it is barely a flicker: the slight tightening at the hinge of Devanshi’s jaw, the pause before her fingers resume their composed interlacing. To the front rows, it can be read as irritation at a speaker straying off script; only she feels the clean click of his phrases into an older, tamed unease she has for years padded with respectable language, “constraints,” “pragmatism,” “board sentiment.” She does not lean towards the mic, does not perform magnanimity or offer the soothing trustee’s boilerplate about “learning journeys.” The convener behind her rustles his papers with frantic delicacy, eyes darting between her profile and Milan, as if a better agenda order might retroactively soften what has been said. On stage, Milan hears his own sentences refuse their usual curving retreat, and in that flat steadiness recognises that he has stepped over a boundary both of them had, until now, politely pretended was not there.
The moderator’s laugh lands a half‑beat too high, a fizz of sound that doesn’t quite disguise the stiffness in his shoulders. “Thank you, Professor Milan, for that… very, ah, provocative perspective,” he says, fingers tightening on his cue cards as if they might offer a script sturdy enough to climb back onto. “Of course, as we all know, there are also so many inspiring success stories from under‑represented backgrounds” (he leans heavily on the phrase) “that show what is possible when philanthropy and public institutions work together.”
The segue is so visible it might as well have indicator lights. For a second, no one moves. Then a few students in the middle rows start to clap on reflex, the way they have been trained to at the end of any intelligible sentence from a podium. The sound begins as a polite patter, then, as their brains catch up with their hands and replay what was actually said, it changes texture. Palms hit harder, rhythms diverge; the applause stops being about the moderator’s salvage operation and turns, without anyone announcing it, into answer and endorsement.
It hangs in the air a fraction longer than is comfortable. You can see the moment the faculty up on the dais understand that this is not just background noise. A senior professor with silvered hair and a silk dupatta stops halfway through adjusting her mic, eyes narrowing slightly. Beside her, someone from the administration (title vague but power real) keeps his expression smooth and bored, only the tapping of one foot betraying an impatience to move on.
On cue, he leans forward. “Yes, yes,” he says, into the nearest microphone, “very rich points. As Professor so rightly reminds us, we operate within complex ecosystems.” The phrase “complex ecosystems” drops like a sandbag over the room’s brief updraft. “There are multiple stakeholders, multiple compulsions. We must be careful not to oversimplify.”
The moderator seizes the lifeline, nodding vigorously. “Exactly. And that’s why,” he continues, voice steadying as he returns to his rehearsed arc, “it is important to focus on constructive dialogue and collaborative solutions.” The projection screen obediently flicks to the next slide: a smiling scholarship recipient framed by a giant cardboard cheque, the caption in corporate‑blue font promising “Transforming Lives, One Opportunity at a Time.”
In the rows where Piyali sits, the applause frays, then dies. A few students look at each other with the quick, conspiratorial glances of people who have heard something truer than they were supposed to. Others bend over their notebooks or phones, performing distraction. The moment folds itself up neatly, like a misprinted flyer slid to the bottom of a stack, and the panel resumes its pre‑arranged choreography. Only the faint heat in faces and the slightly over‑bright politeness of the next questions betray that, for a minute, the script almost slipped.
As the moderator performs his last, brisk summary and declares the “interactive segment” closed due to time constraints, a collective exhale runs through the hall. Milan lowers his gaze, nods once, and replaces the mic in its stand with an exaggerated care that buys him two extra seconds to steady the slight tremor in his fingers. The cool metal base scrapes faintly against the table; the sound feels louder than it is.
The convener tilts towards him, smile fixed in place like something laminated. Up close, the man’s eyes are already elsewhere, tracking trustees, checking exits. “Very… candid, Milan,” he murmurs, the pause doing more work than the adjective. “We’ll, uh, shape the narrative in the report.” The word “shape” carries the easy assurance of someone who has cut out inconvenient sentences before; Milan can almost see his remarks dissolving into “lively discussion” in the eventual write‑up.
Below the dais, students hesitate, then begin to surge towards the steps in tentative clusters. A few hover near him with programmes clutched to their chests, faces lit with a cautious, almost embarrassed admiration. One young woman in a faded kurta opens her mouth, thinks better of it, and settles for a small nod that is half thank‑you, half apology. Others, catching the sidelong glances of faculty, veer away at the last minute, their curiosity curdling into that practiced campus instinct: do not be seen standing too close to someone who has just said something slightly inconvenient into a microphone.
Near the side exit, an organizer angles herself neatly into his path, clipboard still clutched like a prop of authority. Her smile is efficient rather than warm. She offers a brisk handshake that ends a fraction too soon. “Thanks for adding… texture,” she says, eyes already scanning over his shoulder. The pause around the word does the work. “Next time, maybe we can foreground the positive models? Trustees get nervous otherwise. We don’t want the narrative to turn… adversarial.”
Before he can answer, she has pivoted away, calling instructions to volunteers to clear the dais, straighten standees, herd students towards the refreshments. A junior administrator, badge swinging, inches closer into the temporary privacy of the exit corridor. “Sir, thoda zyaada ho gaya,” he murmurs, tone confiding, almost friendly. “Ma’am khud baithi thi. Woh sab sun rahi thi. Bas… dhyaan rakhiye ga. Yahan log jaldi yaad rakhte hain.” The warning is wrapped in collegial concern, but it drops into place with the quiet finality of a remark entered in an invisible file.
Stepping into the aisle, Milan registers, with anthropologist’s detachment and participant’s sting, the subtle rearrangement of his prospects: panel invitations that will quietly stop arriving, a fellowship proposal now even more hostage to Devanshi’s variable goodwill, the head of department suddenly absorbed in his phone. He gives the administrator a noncommittal nod, aware his brief, uncamouflaged honesty may have cost him months of careful, smiling labour: and feels, under the prickle of anxiety, an almost physical loosening, as if some carefully cultivated scaffolding of security has been traded away for the dangerous relief of having finally said what he meant.
At the doorway, Devanshi rises with practiced composure, a staffer materialising to lift files and bag before she fully straightens. For a moment their eyes nearly meet across the thinning crowd; Milan’s muscles ready for that small, summoning tilt of her head, the familiar code for a debrief over tea, for being briefly folded into her orbit of consequence. Instead, she smooths the pallu at her shoulder with a gesture almost ceremonial, turns to a waiting colleague and, in a voice pitched just loud enough to carry, begins discussing “next steps for the initiative,” “stakeholder comfort,” “media optics.” She walks past without the slightest flicker of acknowledgment. The omission is technically nothing (no slight anyone could quote) but to both of them it lands as verdict: her choosing institutional smoothness over any performance of easy alignment, and him understanding, in that soft, surgical severing, that whatever future he has here will not be bought with polite complicity.
“Arre, tu toh PM hi raha, sab ko roadmap chahiye,” she throws back, the line arriving on autopilot, polished by years of teasing him about Gantt charts and OKRs. Vibhor snorts, “Haan, tum logon ka bhi quarterly review lagana padega,” but the repartee hits air and falls flat, like a ball lobbed into an empty court.
The plastic cup in her hand has gone soft and tacky, sides bowed in like it, too, is tired of being held together. Her fingers have been clenched so long around the flimsy rim that when she forces them to uncurl, the release feels obscene. The skin of her palm is damp; the chai has cooled into that specific campus lukewarm. Too sweet, a thin skin forming on top. A thin pulse jumps at the base of her thumb. She presses the pad of her index finger there, as if she can manually steady it.
Behind Milan’s shoulder, the double doors of the auditorium bang open on another tide of students. Backpacks, dupattas, institute‑branded lanyards, a small swarm of ambition and uncertainty. Snatches of conversation drift over: “…that media fellowship. “Explore options,” the phrase lines itself up obediently in her mouth, the same way it did with her chacha on the phone, with her former manager on Zoom, with a puzzled immigration officer at Heathrow. Strategic pause. Re‑evaluation. Time to think. She can almost see the bullet points. But now, under the bougainvillea’s dusty pink and the scrape of a distant auto on the campus road, the words feel like something sour left too long in the fridge. They rise, touch the back of her teeth, and refuse to come out.
Instead she hears herself exhale, a small, embarrassed puff that might be a laugh and might be a sob refusing promotion. Her tongue tastes of over‑boiled tea and metal. She looks at the sloshing dregs in the cup and, absurdly, thinks of the hotel lobby’s coffee. Two weeks ago? Three?. The neat white cups, the tiny sugar sachets lined up like options on a tray. “We can talk,” S had said then, voice so careful it felt like a script. “We’ll figure out what makes sense.” Even that, she realises, had sounded like a project plan.
Vibhor’s question hangs between them, heavier than the humid evening. Kya hua actually. Her usual sentences, about “taking stock,” about “needing proximity to family,” about “giving India another shot”, hover like a familiar menu. Only now, reading them, she feels the faint nausea of someone who has eaten the same thing every day until the smell alone is unbearable.
Milan shifts his weight, shoes grinding a little grit into the packed earth, sensing the current change but reluctant to herd it back toward abstractions where he is fluent and safe. “You don’t owe us a neat answer,” he says finally, voice low enough that it sits between them rather than addressing the courtyard at large. “Kabhi‑kabhi…things don’t come as a project plan.”
He hears himself and winces inwardly at the weak attempt to borrow Vibhor’s vocabulary and make it reassuring. A workshop joke, a facilitation line. Out here it feels like using a whiteboard marker on a cracked wall. It lands gently enough, doesn’t provoke flinch or laugh, and then simply…sinks. Against the memory of his own sentences on stage half an hour ago it sounds painfully thin, like moral small talk.
He watches her profile: the tightened jaw muscle that works as if she’s chewing and swallowing something unsayable; the way her eyes keep skimming past them to the patch of road beyond, as if she might bolt. For the first time, he recognizes that all his careful, framing language may be one more polite casing she has to fight through just to say something plain.
Vibhor exhales, some of the sting leaking out of his posture, leaving only rumpled worry. “Main bas…confuse hoon, yaar,” he says, voice dropping, the words more admission than accusation. “Tumhari LinkedIn pe toh sab sorted lag raha tha, onsite, promotion track, sab.” His hand lifts, then falters mid‑air, as if even his gesture doesn’t know where to land, finally sketching a vague circle that takes in the red‑brick departments, the notice boards, her tired face. “Yahan aa ke bhi ‘dekh rahe hain’ sun ke lagta hai, tu khud se bhi kuch chhupa rahi hai. Ya humse. Dono se.”
The sarcasm has drained out; what remains is blunt, worried affection. His words sit there, unornamented, making a small, exposed clearing between them, filled only by the hiss of the kettle, the clink of glasses being rinsed in a plastic tub, a vendor calling out for ten‑rupee biscuits to a passing cluster of students.
In that silence, the images she has been holding apart start to overlap and blur, like badly aligned transparencies: her father’s rubber slippers still half‑tucked under the Patel Nagar bed; the blue‑white glow of her laptop abroad with spreadsheets open at 2 a.m.; Satyaprakash’s WhatsApp messages shrinking from confessional paragraphs to polite thumbs‑up emojis; the university mailer with Devanshi’s face beside words like “transformative” and “access”. The scripts she has fed each world, dutiful daughter on temporary leave, high‑performer on sabbatical, girlfriend investing in a future, no longer line up, joints showing. She feels, with a small physical jolt, how much labour it has taken just to keep those stories from touching.
The effort slips. Her shoulders sag, and she stops arranging her face into the competent neutrality that usually reassures people, clients, HR, Visa officers, aunties. “Main…strategy nahi bana ke aayi thi,” she hears herself say slowly, half‑Hindi, half‑English falling into each other. “Job chhod diya, ticket book ki, bas itna socha ki…yahan aake sab theek ho jayega somehow. Ki main jo bhi toot rahi thi, woh yahan chipak jayegi.” She lets out a breath that is almost a laugh, almost a sob. “Par hotel ke lobby mein khadi thi, uske saamne, and he was saying it’s not practical anymore. Aur mujhe us waqt bhi lag raha tha, I should have an answer, some plan. Ki main PowerPoint nikal ke dikha doon, ki dekho, recovery roadmap ready hai.” The confession hangs there, raw and unembellished, clearing the space for what she will soon admit outright about having come back with nothing lined up at all, sirf ek khokhla sa confidence ki somehow Delhi will catch her if she falls.
The silence after her last sentence stretches, not dramatic so much as stubborn, like Delhi traffic that refuses to unjam just because you’re late. Somewhere behind them, a microphone squeals as the auditorium staff test it for the next event, a thin, metallic shriek that slices through the afternoon hum and makes her flinch. No one at their little plastic‑table corner is looking at the source of the sound, but she can feel the way it lands in their bodies: Vibhor’s jaw tightening, Milan’s fingers pausing mid‑stir over his tea.
She drops her gaze to her own shoes, grateful for something safely inanimate to focus on. The black leather is scuffed to a dull grey at the toes. Along the sides, near the bend of her foot, the leather has begun to crack in fine white lines, like dry riverbeds on a map. She flexes her toes experimentally; the fissures widen, then settle back.
It feels like a metaphor so on‑the‑nose that if she read it in a novel, she would roll her eyes. Still, her throat tightens. These were the shoes she’d worn that first day she landed abroad in cold, wet air, telling herself, Walk like you belong. The same pair clicked down unfamiliar glass corridors; the same pair stood politely in Satyaprakash’s lobby, toes pointed towards him, waiting for words that never quite matched the years.
Now, there is a faint, dark line of Delhi dust dried into the stitching, the way it does in old flats where the balcony never fully seals shut. She has been meaning to buy new ones, of course. Add to cart, save for later. Like everything else. Promotion plans, visa renewals, wedding dates, return tickets.
“Tum thak gayi ho,” Milan says quietly after a moment, not so much a question as an observation. His tone has no big academic words in it, only a tired recognition that makes something in her want to both lean on him and shove him away.
“Sab thak jaate hain,” she replies, too quickly, still staring at the cracks. “Main koi exception thodi hoon.” It comes out sharper than intended, defensive against an accusation he hasn’t made.
Vibhor shifts his weight, trainers scraping against the uneven paving. “Haan, par tu hamesha woh wali thi jo…manage kar leti thi,” he says, searching for the right phrase. “Jiske shoes kabhi…” He trails off as his eyes follow hers, landing on the leather. “Yaar, tu toh inhi mein Europe ghoom ke aa gayi na?”
“Great,” she mutters, a corner of her mouth twitching. “Legacy item declare karte hain inko ab? Exhibit A: aspirational footwear, 2013–2023.” The joke is thin but it’s something, a small edge against the humiliation humming under her skin at being read so easily, even via cracked leather.
A group of undergrads jostles past with paper cups and samosas, their laughter rising and falling, the words “start‑up”, “internship”, “higher studies” floating in the air like familiar, outdated buzzwords. One of them glances over at their trio, two slightly harried men, one woman in tired formal shoes, and looks away, already occupied with her own possible futures.
The microphone squeals again in the distance, then settles into a low murmur. Piyali exhales slowly, feeling her shoulders drop another fraction of an inch, as if even her posture has finally accepted that the old story has worn thin at the seams.
“Papa ke colleagues abhi bhi message karte hain,” she says suddenly, voice flattening in that way it does when she quotes other people. “Forwarded photos of some felicitation function, ya koi Teachers’ Day meet. Bolte hain, ‘Tum toh hamare building ki success story ho, Piyali beta. Bachchon ko tumhara example dete hain. Papa bahut garv feel karte honge upar se.’”
She huffs out a short breath, the sound catching on something sharp. “Kabhi‑kabhi sochti hoon, agar main unke saamne actual spreadsheet khol ke dikha doon na. “Column A: savings ka balance. Column B: ticket ka kharcha. Column C: yahan auto, rickshaw, Metro ke fare. Column D: kitne din aur main is flat mein reh sakti hoon before I have to…actually pick a direction instead of just hovering.”
She glances up briefly, then away. “Par unko toh sirf woh purana slide dikh raha hai. Small‑town girl goes abroad, foreign job, settled. Unko kaise bataun ki abhi main literally soch rahi hoon, kal Ola loongi ya bacha ke DTC pakad loon.”
The confession doesn’t just hang between them; it seems to strip the air of its polite, panel‑discussion oxygen. Whatever thin layer of performance she had been holding onto peels back. She looks up at Milan, eyes searching his face as if seeking permission to keep unspooling.
“Campus mein aake lagta tha, at least yeh jagah toh mujhe jaanti hai,” she says, nodding towards the red‑brick façade with its familiar moss stains and political posters half‑torn. “Ki yahan…meri file already khuli hui hai, you know? History, context, sab.”
She huffs a small, incredulous breath. “Par aaj panel mein jab aap log ‘pathways’ aur ‘support structures’ bol rahe the na, I kept thinking. Where was any of that when I was just…standing in that lobby, suitcase ke saath, waiting for someone to tell me what comes next? Koi form bhi nahi tha fill karne ke liye. Bas woh fragrance, woh reception bell, aur woh sentence ki ‘yeh sab practical nahi hai’.”
Vibhor shifts his weight from one foot to the other, jaw tightening as if he’s biting down on a reflexive joke. “Tu ne toh kabhi yeh version nahi bataya,” he says softly, the usual banter stripped from his voice. “Teri mails mein sab bas, ‘haan, dekhte hain, options explore kar rahi hoon’… LinkedIn posts bhi woh hi tone.” He trails off, hears the faint edge of accusation in his own words, and winces. “Maine bhi shayad poocha nahi properly,” he adds, more quietly, eyes dropping to his trainers. The admission hangs there beside hers, another small fracture in the old script where he was the stable friend and she was the sorted one, the one he could point to when his own life felt directionless.
The wind picks up, rustling the peepal leaves overhead, sending a few dusty flyers skittering against their ankles like insistent reminders of deadlines she no longer recognises. Piyali swallows, throat dry. “Mujhe laga tha,” she says, slower now, “if I just keep acting like I have a plan, eventually the plan will appear. Jaise confidence bhi ek kind of EMI hai: regular performance karo, baad mein approval mil jayega.” She lets out a brittle half‑laugh. “Ki agar main admit kar loon ki I have no idea what I’m doing, sab log (family, professors, even you”) she glances briefly at Vibhor, then back at Milan, “feel cheated. Like I broke some contract.” The word “cheated” catches, scraping against the memory of S calling their love “impractical,” and she falls quiet, shoulders finally dropping, as if she has set down something heavy she carried too far without ever agreeing to lift it.
Milan instinctively opens his mouth, then closes it again. A familiar vocabulary springs up, neat and useless: “structural pressures,” “emotional labour,” “survivor’s guilt.” On the dais, under soft lighting and a banner about “pathways to inclusion,” those words had sounded responsible, even necessary. Out here, under a peeling faculty‑block wall and a half‑dead bougainvillea, they feel almost obscene. He becomes acutely aware of the weight of his messenger bag cutting into one shoulder, of the way his faculty ID card is still clipped to his kurta like an admission ticket to a safer, abstract world.
He exhales slowly, resisting the urge to reach for a framework that would make this moment legible and therefore bearable. For once, he lets the silence lengthen, lets her words sit there between them without translating them into anything else.
“Contract kisne sign kiya tha, Piyali?” he says finally, voice lower than he intends. “Tum se zyada hum logon ne benefit liya hai uss kahaani se.” His hand makes a small, embarrassed arc, indicating the campus, the hall behind them, himself. “ ‘Look, system works’, ” he switches briefly into polished English, the phrase sounding hollow now that it’s stripped of PowerPoint bullet points, “very convenient for everyone except you.”
He feels the sentence scrape against years of carefully managed respectability: keynote introductions that name him as “a product of exactly these support structures,” recommendation letters that cite his own scholarship story as proof of concept. The admission tastes like disloyalty. Towards Devanshi’s initiative, towards the committee that just applauded him, towards the version of himself who once needed desperately to believe in meritocracy.
But under the metallic aftertaste of betrayal there is something cleaner, almost bracing: the sense that this might be the first honest thing he has said all day. He meets her gaze and doesn’t look away, not even when he sees the flicker of recognition there. The small, bitter relief of finally hearing someone from “the system” say out loud that the story they sold her had fine print she never agreed to read, let alone sign.
Vibhor huffs out a breath that is not quite a laugh, cheeks puffing, then collapsing. “Example ka tag na,” he mutters, toe worrying a pale groove into the dust, “non‑refundable hota hai. Ek baar lag gaya toh log samajhte hain tumhara khud ka koi breakdown policy hi nahi hai. Unlimited usage, zero returns.” He risks a sideways look at her, measuring whether he has overstepped. “Hotel lobby mein break‑up hua, toh hua. Matlab, fucked up hai, haan. Par uss din se tumhari LinkedIn achievement section cancel nahi ho gayi. Degree wapas nahi le li unhone. Koi ‘success story revoked’ ka mail nahi aaya, na?”
The joke lands crookedly (more like a limp apology than a punchline) but there is no teasing in his tone; it is an awkward bridge he is building so she does not have to stand alone on that sentence about disintegrating. He clears his throat. “Aur waise bhi,” he adds, voice dipping, “agar system ko tumhari story chahiye thi brochure ke liye, toh thoda maintenance cost bhi unka hi hona chahiye tha. Sab ko sirf before‑after photo chahiye, beech ka mess koi sponsor nahi karta.”
A scooter backfires near the gate, making a few students jump; a dog barks, someone yells for chai in the distance, a vendor’s aluminium kettle clanging faintly as he moves. The ordinary campus sounds wash over them, absurdly indifferent, like background music to someone else’s coming‑of‑age montage. Piyali rubs a thumb over the paper cup rim, noticing her tea has gone cold, a skin forming on top; her fingers are tacky with condensation and cheap sugar. “Sab ko lagta hai this is just…a phase,” she says, more level now, as if reporting a symptom. “That I’ll go back to ‘normal’, jo bhi tha. But I don’t even know if I want that life back. Abroad, project plans, S ke saath carefully scheduled calls, weekend groceries in some sterile supermarket…” Her voice trails off; she looks up at Milan, the fluorescent‑lit auditorium version of him overlapping with this one in the afternoon haze. “Aap bhi abhi stage pe wahi keh rahe the na. Structures change kar sakte hain. What if the structure is me? Agar main hi woh framework hoon jisko sab ne stable assume kar liya, par foundations hi hil gaye?”
Milan feels the question lodge in his chest like a stone. All the lines he had rehearsed for Devanshi, the safe critique that keeps the grant while sounding radical, suddenly look flimsy against her gaze, like a backdrop in a college play. “Structures hum sab ke through chalte hain,” he answers slowly. “Par iska matlab yeh nahi ki tum sirf poster ban ke raho. Tum thak sakti ho. Gir sakti ho. Abhi bhi.” He hesitates, choosing each word as if signing something on her behalf. “Aur agar tumhare girne se un logon ka confidence toot jaata hai jo tumhe sirf ‘success story’ ke frame mein dekhte hain…toh shayad problem unki imagination mein hai, tum mein nahi. Framework faulty hai, foundation nahi.”
Something like relief and panic flickers across her face; she huffs out air that is almost a laugh. “Yahan bhi performance hi hoti hai na, usually,” she murmurs. “CV, cause, campus nostalgia…” She looks from Vibhor’s earnestness to Milan’s troubled calm, as if testing the edges of this sudden permission. “Theek hai,” she says finally, voice low. “Shayad main thodi der ke liye bas…fail ho ke dekhun.”
She closes the door with her heel and doesn’t bother with the latch. The bag slides off her shoulder and slumps against the shoe rack, half‑open, passport peeking out like an accusation. For a long moment she just stands there, fingers still curved around air where the strap used to be, waiting for the familiar muscle memory to kick in: laptop on the table, charger in the socket, emails, lists, proof that the day was not wasted.
It doesn’t arrive. Her knees give up first.
She lowers herself to the terrazzo, back finding the cool steel of the almirah, and sits there amid a small drift of dust and two forgotten chappals. Above her head the fan ticks, the same uneven rhythm she tried to memorise during exam nights a decade ago. Someone in the neighbouring flat bangs a cooker lid; a TV theme song rises and falls, melodrama condensed into thirty seconds. The usual soundtrack of other people’s lives proceeding on schedule.
In here, nothing proceeds. She doesn’t even turn on the light.
Her eyes adjust slowly: the shadowed curve of her father’s handwriting on a calendar page never torn off, the faint square where a photo once hung, a cobweb she’s been meaning to clear for three days and hasn’t. Her throat tightens at the sight of the steel tiffin box on the side table, still smelling faintly of last night’s dal, which she had told herself she’d wash “after I finish that form.”
There is no form. No application, no task to organise herself around. Tomorrow is a blank, which used to be a luxury in PowerPoint slides and now feels like standing at the edge of a well, not sure how deep it goes.
She pulls her knees up, rests her forehead on them, and lets the day replay: Devanshi’s careful distance, Milan’s watchful eyes, Vibhor’s helpless anger, Satyaprakash’s face as if seen through glass. The ridiculousness of trying to contain all of that with bullet points or a new tab hits her with a small, hysterical clarity.
A key scratches at the outside of the door, then a soft knock. “Didi?” Kailashini’s voice, tentative. “Main aa sakti hoon?”
Piyali considers saying, “Five minutes,” the old automatic deferral. Instead she swallows and says, to the floor, “Haan, aa jao. Bas… light mat jalana.”
The door opens, a rectangle of harsher corridor light framed by plastic buckets and someone’s washing line. Kailashini steps in, shuts it gently, and pads across the room. She sees Piyali on the floor and doesn’t exclaim or fuss; she simply folds herself down beside her, their shoulders almost touching, cotton kurti brushing against creased shirt.
For a while they sit like that, the only sound the fan and a distant serial heroine crying more loudly than either of them can manage. Piyali waits for the inevitable list of suggestions, chai, walk, doctor, temple. None come. Instead, after several minutes, Kailashini says quietly, “Aaj kaafi ho gaya na?”
Something in the understatement undoes her. The first sob escapes as an ugly choke, shocking in the still room. Then another, and another, until she is crying with the gracelessness of a child who has missed too many bedtimes. Nose running, breath hitching, body shaking against the almirah.
She does not apologise. She does not get up to fetch tissues or to make self‑mocking jokes about overreacting. She lets herself cry until the sounds from the neighbouring flats blur and the terrazzo beneath her feels damp through her salwar.
When the storm ebbs, she realises her head is tipped sideways, resting lightly against Kailashini’s shoulder. A hand, tentative at first, rests on her forearm, not patting, not soothing with platitudes, just there.
“I should…” she begins, automatically reaching for some task. “Kal,” Kailashini says, with a firmness Piyali has not heard from her before. “Aaj nahi.”
Tomorrow. An empty word, not yet a plan. For once, Piyali doesn’t try to fill it. She closes her eyes, letting the chorus of pressure cookers, TV ads, and someone’s ringtone rise and fall around them, and admits, finally, that she has no idea what comes next. Only that for this one evening, she will not pretend otherwise.
On the yellow line, swaying between stations, Milan found his body performing the familiar commuter ballet while his mind stayed back in that overheated seminar room. Snatches replayed themselves without his consent: Vibhor’s joke that landed too sharply, then softened into an awkward, genuine, “Boss, this is too much”; the exact moment Piyali’s spine lost its careful straightness and she seemed to fold in on herself; Devanshi’s brow lifting half a millimetre when he’d said “structural,” the microscopic flinch of someone unused to hearing herself included in the problem.
He opened his notes app, thumbs hovering over the blank screen as the train lurched out of Kashmere Gate. The first line came out stiff: “Dear Ms. Mehra, with reference to today’s discussion…” He deleted “Ms.,” tried “Devanshi,” then backspaced again. Another attempt: “I’m grateful for your confidence, but I can’t…” He stared at the word “can’t,” aware that once it lived in her inbox instead of here, in the safety of drafts and intention, it would redraw whatever fragile alliance they were pretending to have.
Outside Vishwavidyalaya station, he drifts past the auto queue and office crowds to the tea stall he’d haunted as a student. The vendor nods in recognition, already reaching for the chipped glass. Vibhor leans against the warm metal counter, thumb hovering over his phone, composing and erasing like a man trying on versions of himself.
“Are you okay?” sounds stupid; obviously she isn’t. “You’re strong, you’ll get through this” feels like something a LinkedIn post would say. A paragraph of advice on therapists, side projects, weekend plans swells, then disappears under his fingertip.
Finally he types, slowly: “I’m here. Whenever you want to yell, or say nothing. No agenda.” He sends it before he can edit the sincerity out, pockets the phone, and watches the steam from his tea blur the station lights.
In the lobby, under the too‑bright downlights and canned piano music, Satyaprakash lingers at the glass doors long after his shift technically ends, watching anonymous travellers wheel their suitcases into the humid night. Only now does the delayed weight of his own quiet exit from the life he’d once outlined with Piyali settle in, his clean, practical narrative beginning to fray at the edges.
As the car glides through the wide, emptied‑out avenues toward Lutyens’ Delhi, Devanshi scrolls through a stream of board messages already converting the afternoon’s rupture into bullet‑point “learnings” and media strategy. She locks the phone, watches the dark trees flicker past, and understands with an almost physical jolt that if she keeps polishing over these cracks, her curated reforms will remain exquisite, hollow theatre.
Milan hits send on his email, feels his throat tighten as the whoosh leaves his outbox, and immediately wants the sound back. For a moment he simply stares at the screen, as if the message might wobble, reconsider, and tumble back into Drafts. It does not. The little paper‑airplane icon disappears; the cursor blinks in an emptied window.
He pushes his chair back too fast and the plastic wheels skid against the uneven mosaic floor. The rented room is its usual unflattering self: off‑white walls with old nail holes, a tube‑light humming faintly, one overloaded extension board sulking near the bed. He paces between the narrow cot and the desk, counting the steps without meaning to, four and a half, turn, four and a half, turn, while a part of him waits for the familiar rush of what‑have‑you‑done.
It doesn’t arrive on cue. Instead there is a thin, unsteady quiet where self‑reproach normally sits, rehearsing counter‑arguments on behalf of the powerful. He images Devanshi in some paneled study, glasses sliding down her nose as she reads his refusal; the association‑committee, already drafting a narrative where he is “idealistic but not team‑player material”; the colleagues who will say, with sympathetic shrugs, that this is why one should not send such mails.
He lies down without meaning to, staring up at the ceiling fan as it wobbles on its rod, moving the warm air just enough to remind him there is air. The part of his mind trained to anticipate fallout begins its usual calculations, possible funding lost, invitations rescinded, whispers in corridors, but their edge feels oddly blunted, as if they are lines from an old article he once wrote about someone else.
After a while he recognizes the sensation with a kind of rueful surprise. It is not triumph, certainly not security. It is the small, almost impersonal relief of having said something he can stand by tomorrow without rewriting the story of himself.
In the Patel Nagar apartment, she begins in the safe, vague way she is used to (“us time pe,” “woh jab yahan tha,”) circling the story rather than entering it. It holds for a few minutes. Then, without quite planning to, she says his name.
“Satyaprakash…” It catches, a small hitch in her throat, and she has to pause, sip the now‑cold tea, start again. “Satyaprakash.”
Said slowly like this, without the cushioning of “Sattu” or “tum log ke Sattu bhaiya,” the name lands with an almost bureaucratic flatness. She hears how ordinary it is, how it belongs to a man who stands at a front desk and checks IDs, not to the half‑mythical figure she has defended in absentia to colleagues abroad, to relatives who asked pointed questions, to herself in endless mental arguments on late trains. As she describes the missed calls smoothed over with “network problem,” the texts delayed because “lobby busy tha,” the way “practical” slid in to replace “promise,” the little room seems to thicken around them: fan noise duller, traffic more distant. Yet her own voice, listing these small, unromantic evasions, sounds steadier in her ears than it has in months, as if she is finally reading a document out loud instead of clutching it to her chest.
Kailashini listens without interrupting, absently smoothing an already straight crease in the bedsheet between them, fingertips moving back and forth as if reassuring the cotton. Once or twice she inhales as if to ask something, then lets the breath go instead, eyes fixed on a loose thread near Piyali’s knee. The fan ticks overhead; a scooter backfires in the lane; Piyali’s words run out in a hoarse, embarrassed tumble.
When silence finally settles, heavy and uneven, Kailashini does not offer verdicts or consolations. She only tilts her head, as if considering both of them from a gentle distance, and says, “Thak gaye honge dono.”
Something in that plain sentence, no hero, no villain, only fatigue, makes Piyali’s shoulders drop, a small mercy loosening the knot in her chest.
At the hotel, his thumb hovers over “Send” on a half‑finished, over‑courteous message. From the corner of his eye he watches the lift doors close on the young woman who had been dabbing at her eyes while her boyfriend scrolled. Without entirely deciding to, he deletes the line about hoping Piyali is well, locks the phone, and understands that what he is offering her now is not kindness but the consistency of his absence.
On the slowing metro, Vibhor rereads his own brief text to Piyali and pointedly resists the urge to smother it with logistics or jokes; the unsaid sits in his chest like an unfamiliar weight. Much later, when he finally shuts his laptop, the blank notebook page in front of him fills not with product ideas or sprint diagrams but with a single, shaky sentence about being tired of pretending everyone leaves for “better opportunities,” that they are not, in fact, escaping. He stares at the ink, surprised by his own pettiness and honesty. Writing it doesn’t solve anything, but it leaves him oddly lighter, as if he has finally admitted that her departures and his stagnation are part of the same story.
Milan had rewritten the first paragraph three times.
The original, breezy “Thank you for thinking of me, I’m honoured” had been stripped down, sentence by sentence, until only a bare statement of position remained: he could not, in good faith, be the emblem of reforms whose rules he had not helped shape and whose accountability he did not trust. The politeness was still there (years of institutional training did not vanish overnight) but the decorative foliage had been pruned. What remained looked, to his own eyes, almost rude.
He reread the middle section, where he had insisted on transparent selection criteria and an independent committee rather than “informal consultations.” The phrase had cost him twenty minutes and a short walk to the balcony. Too sharp, he had thought. Then, watching a myna hop along the parapet, he had heard his former dean’s voice in his head, praising him for “not making trouble” back when he had quietly acquiesced to dodgy appointments. The memory made his jaw set. He came back in and changed “I have some reservations” to “I cannot participate in a process structured like this.”
Now the cursor blinked at the end of his closing line, “I hope you will understand that my refusal is an attempt to take your stated goals seriously, not to undermine them”, as if daring him to believe his own explanation.
Somewhere in the bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi, he imagined Devanshi at one of those enormous desks, the email opening on a screen already full of other people’s demands. He could almost see the tiny tightening at the corner of her mouth, the quick weighing of risk and optics. For a moment, the old habit tugged: soften, delay, ask for a meeting instead.
His finger hovered over “Send,” stomach a small knot of anticipatory regret. Then he thought of his first years abroad, telling students to question structures, not just personalities, while carefully avoiding doing it himself. The hypocrisy of that sat heavier than the possible consequences of this one email.
He clicked.
The whoosh of the mail client sounded absurdly loud in his quiet flat. A beat of panic followed: an impulse to recall, to explain further, to apologise for tone. But beneath it, like a slow exhale he had been holding for years, there was something else: the faint, disorienting lightness of having finally refused to play the useful prop, even if no one clapped, even if the stage lights simply shifted away.
On the sofa that still bore the faint indent of her father’s evening naps, Piyali found herself telling a story she had edited, for years, into something almost charming.
“He used to come in July,” she began, meaning Satyaprakash, tracing circles on the condensation ring her glass had left on the centre table. “Always saying how humid Delhi was, as if he didn’t live here the whole year.” The practiced half‑smile faltered. As she described one of those visits: the awkward way he had perched on the same sofa, the too‑loud TV anchoring the silence between them, her father fussing with samosas as if snacks could fill the gaps. Her throat tightened.
“I kept thinking, this is the part where I should feel… happy,” she said, and the word came out thin. “But it was like… like hosting a relative who wants to leave.”
Her voice broke on “relative,” surprise and old humiliation catching together. The memory hurt with a clean, surgical precision. Yet as she finally said aloud how lonely she had felt even while he was physically in the room, something in her chest shifted. An unfamiliar, fragile sense that she was no longer protecting a story that had never protected her.
Later, when Kailashini quietly refilled her glass and did not rush to offer remedies (no “you should sleep,” no “chalo, let’s make chai and forget”) it took Piyali a few seconds to notice that something was missing. Or rather, that nothing extra was being added.
She had not said “sorry” once. Not for the tears, not for the blotchy face, not for taking up space on this sofa that still smelled faintly of pain balm and old newspapers. The conversation did not lurch away to safer topics, rent, ration, some neighbor’s drama. They stayed exactly where the hurt was.
The discovery arrived as a physical sensation: a small unclenching at the base of her throat. To simply be witnessed, without being managed, felt shockingly like permission to exist.
At the hotel, between check‑outs and calls about late airport pickups, Satyaprakash deletes another bland “Hope you are well” draft. The polite sentence sits there, accusing, before he erases it and is left with the blinking cursor. For a few unguarded seconds, he lets himself admit he misses being someone’s future, not just a polite, efficiently concluded past.
Vibhor stared at the line until the ink looked too dark on the cheap ruled page. “People always leave,” he had written, then, almost angrily, gone back to insert “me” between “leave” and the full stop. His throat tightened. Normally this was the point to slam the notebook shut, make a joke, open YouTube. Instead, he uncapped the pen again, underlined the sentence once, then twice, pressing hard enough to dent the paper beneath. The repetition steadied his hand. It wasn’t insight, not yet, but it was a small, deliberate refusal to immediately tidy the feeling away, to stop pretending departures only ever happened to other, more fragile people.
The next morning, he opened his calendar with the same grim determination he usually reserved for quarterly reviews, then (almost on impulse) clicked “Decline” on an 8.[^30] p.m. “quick sync” that had appeared overnight. His cursor hovered for a second, as if expecting a shock, a pop‑up, at least a rumble of distant thunder. Nothing happened. The meeting box simply vanished, leaving a small, pale rectangle of evening that did not yet belong to anyone else.
When his manager pinged in the team group, “If needed we can pull in Vibhor later, he’s usually online”, Vibhor typed “Have a thing, might be offline post 7” and hit send before he could edit it into something more apologetic. A thing. As if grief and unease and the memory of an old friend breaking in front of him on a campus bench could be scheduled like broadband installation.
All day, the decision sat in the back of his mind, oddly heavy for such a minor logistical adjustment. At 6.[^45], when people began their ritual announcements, “Just grabbing dinner but I’ll be back,” “Quick smoke, on call still”, he shut his laptop properly instead of half‑closing it. The thunk of the lid meeting the base sounded alarmingly final.
“You’re logging off?” a colleague on the next desk looked startled, as if he had announced he was emigrating mid‑sprint.
“Yeah, early day,” Vibhor said, standing up and snapping his charger into a coil. “Family…stuff.” The lie tasted less like deceit and more like a placeholder. Some part of him wondered if he counted as family to himself yet.
In the lift, without the blue glow of Slack and spreadsheets to flatten his thoughts, the empty evening expanded, unfamiliar and slightly vertiginous. He felt as if he had stepped, very slightly, out of formation.
On the metro, he unlocks his phone automatically, thumb already searching for the neon comfort of the Reels icon. The muscle memory is so strong he almost doesn’t see himself doing it. Then, instead of tapping, he scrolls upwards, past work groups, family forwards, discount codes, until he hits the names that have slipped to the fossil layers of his chats. People who had once been daily fixtures: hostel roommates now in Canada, a college crush married in Pune, the ex‑flatmate who’d left after “one small onsite opportunity” and never really come back.
He opens a few threads at random. The last messages are painfully banal. “We should catch up properly sometime yaar.” “Call soon, okay?” Blue ticks, no replies, or replies that never led anywhere. Mini goodbyes without the dignity of a scene.
The usual instinct, to screenshot something stupid, make a self‑deprecating meme of it, rises and ebbs. He lets the slight burn behind his sternum sit there, unmollified. The train sways; someone’s backpack brushes his shoulder. He locks the screen, slips the phone into his pocket, and lifts his head.
Around him, the carriage is a small moving anthology of other people’s evenings: a schoolboy half‑asleep over an economics guide, a woman in formal wear rubbing off her lipstick with a tissue, a delivery guy scrolling through addresses, an older man staring at nothing with the practiced stillness of someone who has learned not to take up space.
For once, Vibhor doesn’t compete with their silences by inserting noise into his own. He leans back against the cold metal panel, watches his reflection flicker in the darkened window between stations, and tracks the faint, disorienting sensation that maybe not every gap has to be filled immediately. With content, with work, with jokes. Some can simply be gaps, honestly felt, carried from Rajiv Chowk to HUDA City Centre like an invisible extra bag he is, for once, willing to hold.
At home, he drops his bag in its usual corner and stands in the kitchen longer than necessary, thumb hovering over his phone. The food‑delivery icons glow like old habits. He watches them for a few seconds, then locks the screen and shoves the phone into a drawer as if it’s contraband.
The fridge offers its usual uninspiring inventory. Leftover dal, half an onion, two wrinkling tomatoes. He rinses rice, chops mechanically, the knife thudding a small, stubborn rhythm onto the cheap chopping board. Oil sputters, the exhaust fan drones, and for once he doesn’t add music, a podcast, a panel discussion about productivity. The silence is not pure, pressure cookers from next door, TV dialogue leaking through walls, but the slow, ordinary motions of stirring and tasting shave the edge off his thoughts in a way noise never does.
Later, he drafts and erases half a dozen messages to Piyali, jokey one‑liners, links, an almost‑meme, each one feeling like a dodge. Finally he types, “How are you holding up today?” and forces himself not to add an emoji, a GIF, a self‑mocking caveat. He hits send, drops the phone face‑down, and lets the nakedness of the question stand.
He showers, brushes his teeth, does all the small automatic things of shutting a day down, and still doesn’t reach for the remote. Instead he pulls the notebook closer, adds a second, hesitant line under the first: this one about staying. He caps the pen with care, surprised by how ceremonial it feels, how these tiny, stubborn choices might be the earliest contours of another way of being.
He rereads the two brief lines, surprised by how much they say, not about what he wants to move toward but about what he has been sprinting away from in ever‑tightening circles. On another night he might have laughed at himself, framed the whole thing as some mid‑thirties cliché, “guy has feelings, buys notebook”, and buried the page under a Netflix queue and a dozen open tabs. Tonight the words sit there with a small, stubborn clarity that refuses to be scrolled past.
“What am I actually afraid of?” he hears Milan’s voice from years ago, half‑teasing from the front of a classroom, a question thrown casually at a roomful of overcaffeinated twenty‑year‑olds. Back then, the answer had been simple: failure, irrelevance, going back home with nothing to show for Delhi. Now the list is messier, less presentable. He is afraid of becoming one of those men in offices who joke about “golden handcuffs” and never try the lock. Afraid of choosing a life and then discovering, too late, that he never really chose it at all, only let it calcify around him.
The first line on the page, about not running every time something hurts, is embarrassingly obvious, almost self‑help‑ish. Yet it lands with the force of a confession. How many exits has he taken while congratulating himself on being efficient, practical, realistic? Friendships faded because he “got busy.” Ideas shelved because “timing wasn’t right.” Even with Piyali, there had been that low‑level assumption that she would manage somehow, that his role was to lighten the mood, not to actually stand still and be seen fumbling.
The second line (about staying) looks worse. Staying in Delhi? In this job? In himself? He realizes, with a wince, that he has no vocabulary for staying that isn’t tied to stagnation or failure. Every story they grew up on, success stories, anyway, involved leaving: hometowns, small flats, government colleges, the country if you were really serious. Staying was for those who couldn’t crack the exam, couldn’t clear the interview, couldn’t get the visa.
And yet, watching Piyali crack open on campus, watching Milan refuse the easy prestige of being Devanshi’s poster boy, something in that script had shifted, hairline but definite. Maybe staying was not the absence of escape but a different kind of risk: the risk of being known where you are, of not hiding behind time zones or traffic or corporate busyness.
He closes the notebook for a moment, palm flat on its cheap cardboard cover as if steadying a restless animal. The room looks the same, unremarkable rented flat, half‑packed shelf of books, laptop blinking faintly on the table, but the arrangement of his excuses feels slightly off‑balance, like furniture moved a few inches in the dark.
He thinks of texting Piyali again, typing something glib to soften what he has already sent. Instead he leaves the phone where it is. For once, he will allow a question to hang without immediately cushioning it with humour. He flips the notebook open again and, under the two tentative lines, writes a third, even smaller: “Try not to disappear from your own life.” It is awkward, earnest, unbranded. But it is, he admits, uncomfortably accurate.
Instead of dismissing the discomfort, he lets it sit, the way one might let a low‑grade fever run its course rather than swallowing the first pill to shut it up. He can feel the day pooling behind his eyes: Piyali’s voice on the phone, brittle and oddly precise even as it frayed at the edges; the memory of her on that campus bench, shoulders shaking while she kept apologising for “making a scene”; Milan’s offhand question from years ago echoing under all of it like background static. Normally this is where he would reach for a punchline, downgrade everything to “yaar, life is mad” and move on. But tonight the old repertoire feels thin, like overused screenshots saved in the wrong resolution.
He tries, experimentally, to replay the afternoon without adding commentary. No mental hashtags, no imaginary audience. Just her face crumpling when she thought no one was looking, the flat weight in his own chest when he realised he had no cleverness to offer that wouldn’t be a lie. The silence that follows is clumsy, unstructured, almost embarrassing. He stays with it anyway.
He feels the old itch in his fingers, that reflexive scrambling for a lever to pull. A certification, a side hustle, some breathless “next big thing” that will prove he is not stuck but merely between triumphs. His gaze drifts to the laptop, to the phone, to the mental shortlist of MOOCs and incubators he carries like a talisman against stillness. This is usually the moment a new browser tab flowers open, promising structure, modules, deliverables. Instead he lets the devices sit, dark and accusing, and does nothing. He registers, with a mixture of dread and relief, the unfamiliar sentence forming and staying: I don’t know yet. Not what comes next, not what I actually want, not who I might be without constant motion.
In that uncertainty, other people’s choices float up, oddly insolent: Milan’s gentle but firm refusal to play mascot, Devanshi’s tight‑lipped irritation that still didn’t turn vindictive, Piyali’s unguarded, almost indecorous rawness. He has been treating all that as interesting drama at the edge of his own plot. Now he admits their risks unsettle him because they imply a metric beyond success or escape, one in which endurance and honesty actually count.
Lying in the half‑dark, he realises that staying with his own unease, without performance, without a rescue plan dressed up as “growth”, is itself a quiet decision, one no KPI will register, no mentor will applaud. Yet something minute and treacherous tilts inside him, as if tomorrow’s familiar script has been smudged just enough that he may not read his lines the same way.
Outside, traffic thickens on Patel Nagar’s main road, pressure cookers whistle in adjacent kitchens, and a serial’s theme song leaks through the thin walls; the city’s noise neither softens nor sharpens for anyone’s private catastrophes. Scooters honk at handcarts with the same impatient staccato, schoolchildren spill into the lane shouting over each other, and the subziwala calls out the day’s prices as though grief has a market rate. Someone upstairs drags a piece of furniture with a screech that runs straight through Piyali’s skull; a baby two floors down begins to wail in protest at something as banal as hunger or sleep.
By late afternoon the balcony fills, as it always does, with the domestic theatre of the lane. A neighbour argues with a courier boy about a missing COD parcel; an aunty in a faded nightie supervises her plants as if they were particularly underperforming children. Laundry flaps from balcony grills, shirts and dupattas and one particularly loud bedsheet with cartoon characters that her father would have found “too childish” and secretly enjoyed. Somewhere a mixer‑grinder shrieks into life, drowning out, for a brief merciful moment, the looped memory of Satyaprakash’s careful, managerial goodbye.
The mundanity is almost insulting in its competence. The water tanker still arrives late and is still besieged with buckets and jugs, power still cuts for exactly twelve minutes and returns with that resigned collective cheer of ceiling fans heaving back into motion. The building WhatsApp group continues its relentless dispatches, “Please close main gate properly,” “Lost: one black sandal,” “Anyone has extra dahi?”, as if nothing more consequential than footwear and fermentation were at stake.
It occurs to her, in a detached corner of her mind, that this is perhaps what “the world moving on” actually looks like: not a grand betrayal, but the unembarrassed persistence of errands and entertainments. Her father’s absence has left a specific silence inside the flat (the missing cough after climbing stairs, the unclaimed cup hook on the kitchen wall) but the lane outside has simply absorbed the news and kept its schedule. It will keep accruing new noises, new arguments, new serial plots long after she has decided whether to sell this place, to rent it, or to tether herself here.
The recognition is both desolating and faintly kind. If the city can bear the weight of so many small apocalypses without slowing, perhaps she, too, is not required to produce a coherent narrative on demand. For now, she lets the sounds wash over her each one an indifferent metronome marking the fact that, in spite of her reluctance, time is passing.
At the Connaught Place hotel, Satyaprakash straightens brochures and checks rooming lists with the same practiced efficiency, his colleagues gossiping about demanding guests and upcoming appraisals as if nothing in his life has shifted. The computer screen reflects his face in faint, fractured segments between cells of names and check‑in times; he adjusts the brightness instead of meeting his own eyes. A family from Indore is arguing about an extra bed, an NRI uncle wants late checkout “because my flight is very odd hour,” and the junior on night shift is already angling to swap duties for a cousin’s wedding. All of this requires the familiar repertoire: polite nod, calibrated apology, solution offered before irritation ripens.
His body falls into the choreography he has rehearsed for years (phone to ear, pen to register, keycard slid across the counter with just the right half‑smile) while somewhere under the starched shirt he is aware of a new, raw vacancy, like a room that has been abruptly vacated but not yet cleaned. No one notices; occupancy is high, complaints are within acceptable range, and the day’s ledger will still balance.
At North Campus, the afternoon unfolds on schedule. Students knot around chai stalls, arguing placements versus UPSC, CTC figures versus “selling out,” elections versus boycotts; someone shouts about fascism, someone else about FOMO. Flyers for internships and coaching classes curl at the corners on sun‑bleached noticeboards, ink running slightly in the heat, QR codes half‑torn where hopeful fingers have already tried their luck. A fresh poster announces a talk by “Dr Milan Singh (Visiting Faculty)” in sober fonts; two boys glance at it only to check if attendance will be marked, a girl snaps a photo to maybe forward to a group, but otherwise his name is just another line among many as they hurry towards canteens, tutorials, metro gates.
In Lutyens’ Delhi, Devanshi’s driver eases the car to the porch at precisely the usual time, gardeners trim hedges into predictable, obedient shapes, and a courier signs in at the gate with routine deference, unaware of the email open on her screen, where a polite refusal threatens to rearrange years of carefully curated alliances without disturbing a single bougainvillea.
In East Delhi’s lanes, Kailashini’s relatives argue over the inverter bill, children chase a punctured football, and a water‑tanker horn blares; dinner must still be cooked, laundry still folded, even as grief and doubt sit quietly at the edges of these tasks. When Piyali calls, Kailashini ducks into the stairwell, voice soft, one hand still smelling faintly of chopped onions.
The inverter’s low buzz, the pressure cooker whistle from next door, and the newspaperman’s shout pull Piyali awake before her alarm; instead of burrowing back under the sheet, she lies still for a moment, letting the familiar noises register as a kind of timetable rather than an intrusion. A scooter starts, stalls, starts again in the lane below. Someone’s TV blares the tail end of a devotional song before switching to the morning news. Above her, a chair scrapes. Mehta on the fourth floor, punctual as a factory siren.
She watches the faint cracks in the ceiling for a few breaths, feeling the old impulse to count the hours until she can escape the house, office, metro, anywhere with air‑conditioning and anonymous faces, rise and then ebb. There is nowhere to rush to this morning that requires heels or a blazer. The only calendar alerts on her phone are ones she set herself: “Follow up with client (logo iterations)” and “Call bank re: nominee change.”
Her throat feels dry, city‑dust catching at the back of it. She swings her legs over the side of the bed, her heel finding automatically the cool patch of floor between two specks where the terrazzo has chipped. The room smells faintly of closed‑up books and last night’s dal tadka. On the chair by the window, her laptop bag hangs like a guest who has stayed past its expected departure date.
For a second she considers checking her messages, Europe time, someone might have replied, but her screen, when she glances at it, is blank of new notifications beyond a food‑delivery promotion and an old group chat reviving with plans she is no longer part of. She puts the phone face down on the bedside table.
In the hallway, the ceiling fan ticks as it turns, the same irregular click she heard while memorising physics formulas at seventeen. Back then, mornings were something to be conquered: a fixed number of chapters before school, questions circled in red. Today, the sounds filter in not as deadlines but as cues, soft markers of a day that will be made, not merely endured.
She wraps her dupatta around her shoulders against the faint morning chill that still manages to survive Delhi’s spring, slides open the bedroom door carefully so it doesn’t bang against the stopper, and steps into the living room. Light from the balcony falls in a thin strip across the old study desk, illuminating the piles she has rearranged but not yet fully claimed: a stack of her father’s engineering magazines, her own notebook balanced precariously on top, a pen uncapped beside it as if she has been caught mid‑sentence.
On the wall, the black‑and‑white wedding photograph watches her cross to the kitchen, its glass slightly fogged at the corners. She acknowledges it with a brief, almost amused nod, as if to say, Fine, we are all still here, then turns towards the source of the more immediate ritual: the first cup of tea.
In the narrow kitchen she rinses her father’s chipped steel mug, hesitates over reaching for one of the newer ceramic ones, then sets a fresh teabag in the steel without overthinking it; as the water boils she wipes a thin layer of dust off the gas knob and the window ledge, not in a frenzy, just a slow, practical acknowledgment that this is now her routine to maintain.
She switches off the gas and lets the tea sit, darkening. For once she doesn’t drink it standing by the sink or wandering from room to room in absent‑minded circuits; instead, she carries the mug carefully to the living room, the metal almost too hot against her fingers, and sets it down on the study desk as if testing a new rule: this is where mornings begin.
The fan above ticks, a metronome she didn’t choose, and she aligns the mug with an old ring on the wood left by some other glass in some other decade. The wedding photograph looks on, blurred slightly by the steam. She takes a tentative sip, too strong, slightly oversteeped, but doesn’t dilute it, accepting its bitterness the way she accepts the faint oiliness on the cup’s rim that no amount of scrubbing has ever quite erased.
When the mug is half empty she reaches for a scrap of paper and writes, in slow, unhurried letters, “To‑do (for me, not for paperwork),” then begins a list that mixes the banal and the quietly radical: “emails, bank, groceries, call Milan?, look up DU part‑time positions.”
She returns to the old study desk and, with unexpected deliberation, pushes aside an open engineering magazine, its schematic diagrams fanning briefly in protest. With the edge of her palm she smooths the dust into a faint border, measuring out a neat rectangle that did not exist here before. Her laptop goes squarely in the cleared space, lid reflecting the mottled ceiling; beside it she aligns a notepad, a reliable blue pen, and a single clip file holding printouts and scribbled half‑formed freelance ideas. The entrance‑exam guides remain stacked to one side, their spines familiar as family names.
Through the morning she oscillates between the accusingly blank cursor of a proposal email and the building’s micro‑urgencies: a dash downstairs to sign for the water can before the delivery boy gives up, a ritual haggling with the sabziwala who asks if she’ll be needing lauki “like old times,” a quick ATM visit that stretches into a ten‑minute chat with the guard about card limits, rising fees, and “how things are abroad.”
Back at the desk, fan wobbling overhead and the Wi‑Fi sulking in brief, unhelpful flickers, she answers two tentative client messages, drafts a modest pitch, and pins her hand‑written list to the wall with tape scavenged from a kitchen drawer. A stray Post‑it joins it, “rent? stay?”: crooked but visible. By late afternoon a loose pattern emerges: emails, chai, errands, notes; less an escape from the apartment than a way of letting its inherited routines slowly bend, almost imperceptibly, toward her own.
The first time the power cuts that week, plunging the study into its familiar dimness, she no longer abandons the half‑written pitch; instead, she waits a moment, listening to the way the building absorbs the outage. A chorus rises on cue: a pressure cooker’s whistle tapering off next door, someone’s exasperated “arey yaar light chali gayi,” the whirr and cough of an inverter switching on somewhere further down the lane.
She opens the balcony door and the heat presses in, thick but honest. Dragging the chair closer to the thin shaft of late‑afternoon light, she feels the terrazzo scrape under its legs, an old classroom sound. Outside, children whoop as if the cut were a scheduled holiday, not an infrastructural failure; a boy on the opposite balcony shouts down to the street about which transformer has gone this time. The fan above her is a frozen gesture, but a stray breeze does manage to slip past the grille and ruffle the edge of her notepad.
She flips the laptop shut with a soft thud and keeps drafting in her notebook, the blue pen moving more slowly than keys but somehow more decisively. Bullet points grow into sentences, fees into ranges, “deliverables” into something that resembles actual work she can imagine doing in this room. The darkness is not total; Delhi’s particular, dusty luminosity seeps in from the lane, turning her handwriting faintly golden at the edges.
For once she does not tell herself that proper work needs uninterrupted broadband and ergonomic chairs and the hum of some distant Western cafe. She accepts that the city’s interruptions will be part of how work happens here, not a reason it cannot. On the margin of the page, without quite meaning to, she notes the time of the outage and how long it lasts, as if tracking weather in a place she is not just visiting.
When an aunt on the phone repeats the question (“Toh ab yahin rahogi na?”) with that blend of concern and bookkeeping that turns a life into a tick box, Piyali feels the old script rise to her lips: something about pending visa paperwork, “dekhenge,” maybe a joke about direct flights being cheaper these days. Instead she hears herself say, almost courteously, “Abhi kaam dekh rahi hoon, Maasi… dekhte hain,” and let the silence pool for a second before the aunt, relieved by any words at all, veers off into onions, cholesterol, and a cousin’s coaching classes.
She doesn’t rush to fill the gap, doesn’t patch it with assurance. When the call ends and the apartment tilts back into its usual hum, she returns to the desk and opens her journal, the one that has become a private counter‑record to all the phone conversations. On a fresh page she writes, in slower Hindi‑English loops, that she is not “back for good” or “only visiting”; she is, for now, learning to live inside an answer that may always remain provisional, a sentence without a full stop that still has to be spoken aloud.
One evening, confronted yet again with the three magazine piles occupying half the living room floor like an unresolved equation, she resists the familiar temptation to slide them back under the table “for now.” Instead, she sits cross‑legged on the cool terrazzo and pulls a few copies into her lap, feeling the dust print itself onto her fingers. In the margins of a twenty‑year‑old article on bridge design, her father has underlined “load‑bearing” and written, in his cramped Hindi‑English, “Life also like this.” She smiles, winces, and sets that issue, along with a few similarly annotated ones, deliberately in the “keep” stack. They are no longer obligations weighing on future decisions, but chosen relics she is willing, even curious, to carry forward.
On campus, after another sluggish committee meeting where funding lines and titles are endlessly rehearsed, Milan steps out into the corridor and, rather than drafting a long complaint email, sends a brief, matter‑of‑fact message declining a proposed advisory role on a Devanshi‑backed initiative. He reads the email twice, surprised by his own lack of panic, then walks to the chai stall where students from the morning’s seminar are still arguing over theory and internships, gossiping about supervisors, and calculating rent. He stands a moment at the edge, paper cup warming his fingers, before sliding into the circle, offering a reference here, a question there, joining them not as a savior but as one more participant trying to make sense of partial change.
Later that week, in a back row of a student‑organized discussion in a hot, overfull classroom, listening to a first‑generation undergraduate describe juggling part‑time work, family remittances, and erratic attendance, Milan notices that he is no longer mentally drafting applications elsewhere. Instead, he jots down concrete changes for next semester’s assignments (flexible deadlines, field notes from students’ own neighbourhoods) small adjustments that might widen space for students like her. Closing the notebook, he feels a quiet, provisional satisfaction: this scale of impact might have to be enough: for now, and, he concedes, maybe for longer than he had once planned.
On a humid afternoon, with the cooler refusing to do more than push warm air around the room, Piyali sits at her father’s old desk, the one that still rocks slightly if she lean too hard on the left edge. The plastic chair creaks in quiet protest when she shifts. On the screen in front of her, a blank email window glares back, cursor blinking patiently over the “To:” line as if it has all the time in the world.
The first reflex is muscle memory: type an old colleague’s name from abroad, someone who will understand phrases like “transition phase” and “short‑term.” Her fingers tap out the initial letters, auto‑complete obediently fills in the rest. She stares at the familiar address and can already feel the sentences lining up: “I’ll only be here a few months,” “once things settle with the flat,” “after I figure out paperwork for…” The same scaffolding she has used for every explanation of India in the last year, as if a definite return ticket were simply delayed in the system.
Instead of yielding to that rhythm, she presses backspace until the address line is empty again. The blinking cursor now looks almost accusatory. She exhales, wipes a thin sheen of sweat from her upper lip, and, after a moment’s hesitation, types the name of a different friend. Someone farther away, time‑zone and life‑wise, who has not been updated in polite bullet points.
She doesn’t explain Patel Nagar or probate or even her father. She writes one paragraph, plain and unornamented, about not knowing how long “here” might last, about the way “for now” has stretched and frayed into something she cannot fold neatly into a plan. She admits, without drama, almost conversationally, that she is no longer sure “going back” means back to where, or when, or whom.
Her fingers hover over the keyboard as she re‑reads the lines. There is no justification, no projected deadline, no apologetic Emoji of reassurance. The absence of all that makes the text feel oddly exposed, like standing in the balcony without her glasses.
She does not add a second paragraph. She does not revise the first into something more upbeat. She does not move the word “here” into quotation marks again to make it ironic or temporary; it remains stubbornly literal, referring to a flat that smells faintly of Dettol and old cumin, to a city whose heat presses its palm against the back of her neck.
Without filling in the subject line, she clicks “Save draft.” The little notification, Saved, blinks in the corner of the screen and disappears. Nothing in the material world has shifted: the ceiling fan continues its slow, wobbling rotation; a scooter backfires in the lane below; from the neighbour’s kitchen comes the whistle of a pressure cooker.
Yet as she leans back, letting her hands fall into her lap, she notices a small loosening at the base of her throat, as if some invisible thread she has been pulling tight around her own story has finally given way. The admission exists now. Not in a final, sent form that invites replies and opinions, but in a quiet, private corner of the server, where even she can forget it for days. It is enough that, somewhere, she has written it down: that uncertainty is no longer a problem waiting to be solved, but a room she is, whether she likes it or not, already living inside.
The next morning, wedged sideways between a schoolboy’s backpack and a man in a crumpled shirt arguing softly into his phone, she lets the Blue Line rock her towards Rajiv Chowk and beyond, thumb moving over her screen. Job listings, fellowship calls, contractual teaching, research assistance. Tabs accumulate like unpaid bills. She doesn’t bother with the old taxonomy of “stopgap” versus “career move,” doesn’t colour‑code or mentally tag them as “until I leave.” Anything within a forty‑five‑minute radius of North Campus gets bookmarked, from a badly paid research assistantship in a cramped NGO office to a part‑time methods tutor post that promises “exposure” more than money.
As the train pulls out of Karol Bagh, she glances up at the route map, at the familiar blue line snake she once traced as a temporary commute before better things. Today it is simply the line that connects Patel Nagar to potential colleagues, paycheques, canteens. Rajiv Chowk arrives in its usual rush of elbows and announcements; she steps aside to let people push past and notices, with a flicker of surprise, that she has not assigned this station the role of “escape hatch” in any future story. It is merely an interchange, useful for changing lines, not lives. When the doors beep closed again and the train surges forward, she returns to the listings with a steadier, almost workmanlike attention, as if looking not for exits but for doors that, for now, will open and close at predictable hours.
Later that week, after office hours, Milan stays on in his faculty room with only the whir of the ceiling fan, the distant clatter of a peon locking classrooms, and a stack of student essays beginning to list on one side of his desk. His planner lies open, biro uncapped, a thin blue vein across the page. For a long minute he merely traces idle loops in the margin, postponing the small violence he knows he is about to do to his own handwriting. Then, with a deliberate stroke, he draws a line through an old five‑year trajectory: arrows pointing to “ERC grant?”, “visiting chair – U.S./U.K.,” “sabbatical abroad.” Names of conferences, cities, senior scholars blur under the ink.
In their place, he rules a simple grid for the coming semesters, the columns slightly uneven, as if his hand hasn’t yet adjusted to this scale. Into the little boxes he writes modest tasks: “revise methods assignment for working students,” “office hour for hostel kids – weekly,” “collect life‑histories, no rush,” “first‑gen mentees x3 (at least).” He pauses, then adds, almost as a joke at his own expense, “say no to 1 unnecessary committee.” The sight of these small, local commitments, anchored to rooms he can actually unlock and corridors he actually walks, brings a faint steadiness, a sense that ambitions shrunk to what his actual desk, colleagues, and corridor can hold might, for the first time in years, be ambitions he can reasonably keep.
He tests this new scale in a late‑evening email to himself titled “work that counts,” listing not publications or promotions but last week’s conversation with a struggling hostel student, a reading group that may or may not outlive midterms, and the outline of a small research project with no obvious funding or citation payoff; as he hits send and shuts the computer, the room’s harsh tube‑light seems less accusatory, its peeling noticeboard and dented almirah less like evidence of personal failure and more like the unremarkable backdrop for work that is allowed to be local, modest, and simply ongoing.
Across town at a polished dining table in Lutyens’ Delhi, Devanshi lets her relatives rehearse the usual monologues about family trusts and future wings in their name while she nods and sips water, one hand resting lightly on the slim folder in her lap that holds a proposal for a quiet, needs‑based scholarship named after no one. When the conversation swells into familiar forecasts of legacy, who will sit on which board, which cousin’s son should be groomed for which committee, she chooses not to argue or perform rebellion, only noting absently who will later sign off the cheque. Instead she plans which dean she will call in the morning, which bursar might discreetly manage selection, accepting that this small, almost invisible initiative may change little on paper and will never be mentioned in such dinners, yet deciding it is still a piece of the life she is beginning, cautiously, to choose for herself.
At the chai stall, their first few meetings wear a faint, ill‑fitting formality. Milan, standing with his steel tumbler of over‑sweet tea, keeps reaching for faculty‑room vocabulary: “So, what are your plans?” “Any prospects on the horizon?” He hears himself and winces internally, but habit is stubborn. Piyali, opposite him on the low cement ledge, answers in the language she has been performing for relatives and bank managers: updates on “processing times,” “conversion rates,” “one more document they suddenly asked for.” Between them, the steam from the aluminium kettle rises and dissolves into a grey air already thick with dust and exhaust.
Every now and then, a silence opens. Long enough for traffic to intrude, for a scooter to screech past, for a group of undergraduates to thrum around them in a neon‑bag, earphone‑tangled blur: and he nearly asks, “And how are you really?” but the question feels indecently direct in this public, plastic‑stool geography. She nearly says, “I dreamed of my father in this campus again,” but the line sounds melodramatic in her own head. So instead they retreat to safer ground: PhD acceptance rates in Europe, UPI glitches at the registrar’s office, the new Metro line, how smog season keeps shifting earlier each year.
It is in the middle of one such respectable exchange, Milan halfway through a sentence about “leveraging networks,” Piyali obediently nodding, that the air turns against her more sharply than usual. A fit of coughing clamps down on her throat, words shattering into a rasp. She doubles over, eyes watering, trying to wave away both fumes and his concern. Milan, already hoarse from a day of chalk dust and stale conference rooms, starts coughing too in sympathetic uselessness.
For a few moments the two of them simply stand there, bent slightly, wheezing like bad caricatures of Delhi residents. The vendor passes them a grimy steel glass of water without comment; a student at the next table mutters “welcome back to North Campus, ma’am” under his breath, with the casual cruelty of youth. When she can finally inhale properly again, Piyali hears herself attempt to resume the previous sentence about “long‑term strategy,” only for it to collapse into a ragged laugh.
Milan catches the absurdity a beat later. The senior academic dispensing wisdom, the supposedly cosmopolitan NRI returnee, both unable to complete a single earnest thought without being physically throttled by particulate matter. And he starts laughing too, helpless, chest still tight. The sound is short, more air than mirth, but it is unguarded in a way their conversation has not yet managed.
“Clearly,” he coughs, “Delhi has some… feedback on our planning discourse.”
“Maybe the smog is just allergic to five‑year plans,” she manages, wiping her eyes on the corner of her dupatta.
The joke is not especially good, but it is joint property, and it lands in the exact space where “sir” and “beta” and “you must do this” have been hovering like additional pollutants. The invisible line of teacher and former student, consultant and subject, blurs a little. For the first time she sees him less as the composed lecturer from her memory and more as another slightly foolish adult trying to sound like he knows what he is doing, and failing. For the first time he registers that whatever mythic competence he has been projecting onto “students who went abroad” has not protected her lungs or her life from anything.
They do not discuss the moment afterwards; North Campus does not encourage extended reflection on small embarrassments. But on the next visit he asks, without preface, “Tea or nimbu paani? It’s a ‘how long do we want to live’ question,” and she answers, straight, “Nimbu paani. Let’s at least pretend to choose survival.” The shared awareness that both of them are, quite literally, out of breath in this city sits quietly between them, loosening, more effectively than any conscious effort, the old hierarchy they had each been politely maintaining.
Over the next weeks, the balance tilts further. Milan turns up late one evening, hair slightly askew, muttering apologies about “some ridiculous committee skirmish” and then, without quite meaning to, narrates the blow‑by‑blow: who invoked “international best practices,” who implied that his time abroad qualifies him mainly to smile in brochure photographs. “Apparently I’m a walking accreditation seal,” he says drily, thumbing his phone screen dark when a colleague’s name flashes again.
Piyali, who has spent the afternoon shuttling between a bank branch and the registrar’s office, snorts into her tea and counters with her own saga: the attested copy that must now be re‑attested, the portal that crashes at the final payment step, the clerk who, on hearing she has returned from abroad, assumes she is here to donate, not to beg for a part‑time assignment. She hears herself say “structural opacity” and stops, visibly irritated with the phrase.
They both catch the slide at roughly the same moment: their miseries turning into neat examples, ready for symposium slides or consulting decks. There is a pause, and then, almost in concert, they back away from analysis as if it were a shared allergy. “Forget it,” he says. “Are you sleeping at all?” She shrugs, admits to three‑a.m. WhatsApp scrolls and a diet of toast and Maggi. He confesses to subsisting on canteen samosas and borrowed coffee, to waking up with terms like “deliverables” lodged in his jaw.
From there, the questions grow smaller and more inconveniently honest: whether either of them actually wants the fellowships, the visiting posts, the safe contracts they keep applying for; whether the imagined future lives those forms point toward are ones they would recognise from the inside. She confesses that some days the Patel Nagar desk feels like a lifeline, other days like a trap she is furnishing. He admits that the permanent job he once dreamt of now resembles a slow, polite suffocation. The words are not especially tidy, and no one rushes to tidy them; they sit between them like an open file that, for once, does not need closing.
Some evenings, no one performs insight at all. They find the same stretch of low wall near the chai stall, edge themselves into a companionable shoulder‑to‑shoulder line, and accept whatever the kettle is dispensing as “tea” for the night. The conversation idles on safe, almost comically minor terrain: which slang has mutated beyond comprehension, which coaching centre has rebranded itself as an “academy,” which shortcut through the Arts block has been blocked by a new security barricade. They conduct running commentary on backpacks, hairstyles, and exam‑season expressions of doom, as if narrating a nature documentary. And then, without apology, they let the talk thin out altogether, letting long intervals of shared quiet accumulate, an unspoken permission that not every meeting must solve or confess anything.
When Vibhor joins them or meets Piyali elsewhere in the city, his presence stops being purely functional; he still brings job leads and hacks for negotiating landlords, but he also starts confessing, without punchlines, that the constant pivoting and “ownership” at work are wearing him down. Sometimes he catches himself about to add a joke and doesn’t. Instead of dismissing it as temporary burnout he allows the discomfort to hang between them, lets her sit with it alongside her own worries, trusting that being witnessed is, for once, enough and does not require a solution deck.
Meanwhile, in the crisscross between East Delhi and Patel Nagar, Kailashini’s new boundaries acquire a practical, slightly comic texture: she circles class hours on the wall calendar in red pen, practises “I won’t be free then” under her breath, and repeats it even when an aunt’s eyebrows rise or a cousin jokes about “modern girls.” With Piyali she turns housework into a rough rota so that care stops being an invisible current always flowing from her and becomes a series of small, spoken agreements both women can see, renegotiate, and occasionally even refuse.
In Patel Nagar, “starting over” narrows from life plans to logistics: a cheap second‑hand chair instead of a full renovation, a shared Google Sheet for bills instead of unspoken generosity, a conscious choice to leave one evening dish unwashed rather than letting care dissolve entirely into Kailashini’s hands. What shifts is not the square footage but who feels responsible for filling every inch of it. The old study corner, once her father’s command centre for electricity bills and repair chits, acquires a laptop, a mismatched coaster, and a small, stubborn potted plant that keeps dropping leaves and being persuaded back to life. The desk no longer belongs entirely to “Papa’s papers”; one file of freelance contracts nudges aside a stack of yellowing manuals.
Neighbours notice, of course, in the way neighbours always do. “Ab to kaam yahin se karegi?” someone asks in the stairwell, half‑teasing, half‑auditing. Piyali smiles, says, “Dekhte hain,” and realises she has not offered a full explanation; the world has not ended. Some afternoons she works with the balcony door open, the pressure cooker whistles and serial theme songs drifting in as background noise instead of interruption. On days when the internet fails or the inverter protests the heat, she copies notes by hand at the same desk where she once solved entrance‑exam questions, amused by the circularity.
The apartment stops being a shrine and resumes the more modest career of a place that is lived in. A plastic bucket acquires a fracture line and is taped rather than instantly replaced; the almirah gains a hook for Kailashini’s bag as well as her own. In tiny, negotiable gestures, who buys the next gas cylinder, who gets the slightly better pillow, who is allowed to close the bedroom door first, Piyali relearns how to inhabit a home not as a dutiful daughter visiting a relic, nor as a temporary tenant passing through, but as a person tentatively claiming square inches of the ordinary.
At North Campus, Milan revises his own idea of progress from conference circuits and named endowments to a thinner timetable with one unclaimed afternoon a week, reserved not for some future book but for wandering between canteens and chai stalls. The first Thursday he does this, he feels faintly fraudulent, as if a committee might appear from behind the banyan tree and demand to see his output metrics. Instead, a student stops him to ask about a reading, an old colleague waves him over to share rumour of yet another restructuring, and he finds himself listening rather than positioning.
When Devanshi’s office emails about a panel he drafts three polite acceptances before deleting them and typing a single, unambiguous “I’m unable to.” Saying no, he discovers, is less a rebellion than a small recalibration of whose urgency he treats as default. The world does not tilt; the department does not exile him. One quiet afternoon later, nursing over‑sweet chai, he admits to himself that this, too, is a form of work: attending to the life that remains when ambition is turned half a notch down.
In Lutyens’ Delhi, Devanshi’s reforms shrink in scale but deepen in texture: instead of unveiling a grand centre in her name, she signs off on a modest pilot fund whose selection committee never meets in her bungalow and whose recipients she might never meet at all. The guidelines are drafted by junior faculty she has only briefly spoken to; a student representative is added on someone else’s insistence, and she does not object. Reports land in her inbox in dense PDFs; she skims, approves disbursements, resists the reflex to ask for “profiles” and photographs. For the first time, her signature feels less like a stamp of control and more like a deliberate lightening of touch, a quiet step sideways out of the centre of the frame.
Vibhor, staring at overlapping calendar invites on his phone, begins treating one weekly Delhi evening not as “free time” but as a task with stakeholders. Blocking it out in the same colour he uses for critical meetings and labelling it, with faint embarrassment, “City catch‑up.” He declines a late client call once, then again, discovering that nothing collapses; deadlines edge, teammates grumble and adjust, the world tilts a millimetre and then keeps going. The real shift is not dramatic resignation but the slow reweighting of whose expectations, manager, client, friend, self, are allowed to overrun his days.
On the desk, her laptop hums softly beside an open notebook and the chipped blue mug that was once her father’s. Of all the variables in this cramped geometry, water timings, metro schedules, bank forms, the only ones she can currently alter are her own narratives: about success, about leaving, about what it means to stay and not call it failure.
The fan above her hangs inert in the heat, its blades faintly outlined against the ceiling as the rechargeable lamp casts a tight, yellow circle over the desk. Beyond it, the rest of the room recedes into shadow: steel almirahs, the framed wedding photograph, the outline of cardboard boxes stacked for some future sorting that keeps being postponed. Dust motes drift lazily through the lamplight, turning with every faint movement of air from the open balcony door, like a slow, indifferent snowfall that never settles or melts.
On the nearest almirah, the locking handle glints dully; a strip of old brown tape still clings to the side from some long‑ago move, the ink on the label smeared into illegibility. One cupboard door doesn’t quite shut, leaving a thin, dark mouth open to shelves of folded bedsheets and files her father had meant to “organise properly when there’s time.” Time had gone elsewhere; the files had stayed.
The wedding photograph, its glass slightly fogged at the corners, hovers at the edge of the lamplight. From where she sits, only her parents’ shoulders and the suggestion of garlands are visible; their faces are swallowed by the gradient into darkness. It feels oddly apt: the ceremony still framed and central, the people themselves half‑erased by years and poor lighting.
The cardboard boxes, squat and patient against the wall, bear black‑marker inscriptions in her own hurried hand, “PAPA BOOKS,” “BANK/IMPORTANT,” “MISC.” The last one in particular mocks her every time she looks up: a lifetime collapsed into a category reserved for leftovers and unclassifiable debris. One flap has bowed outward slightly, revealing a spill of old envelopes, a tangle of charger cables, a marigold‑orange file she dimly remembers from some university scholarship application.
Every so often, as she shifts in the plastic chair, one of the boxes emits a soft settling creak, as if to remind her that their contents are not static but waiting. The postponed “sorting” is not just labour; it is cross‑examination. Of receipts, of notebooks, of the person who once lived here and the person who left. For now, the lamp’s circle stops just short of them, granting a temporary amnesty.
From the open balcony door, the lane sends in its usual chorus, a soundscape she now half‑expects at this hour: a scooter sputtering to a protesting halt before being kicked, coaxed, and finally silenced; a neighbour stretching out a child’s nickname into a long, public summons, the reply a sulky “aa rahi hoon” that everyone in the building is invited to witness. The sing‑song of a kulfi seller drifts up from the street, his cry bending around parked cars and laundry lines, promising cold sweetness to people who will haggle over five rupees and still buy.
From somewhere below, a burst of TV serial dialogue escapes, accusations, background music, a gasp, then abruptly cut off as someone shuts a balcony door. Farther off, a pressure cooker hisses and releases in small, regular sighs, like controlled exasperation. Over it all, faint but distinct, a metro’s automated announcement surfaces, the female voice smooth and unbothered as it lists stations and doors and safety, washes over the packed buildings, and thins into a metallic echo that lingers a moment before folding back into the hum of the lane.
Her laptop battery icon hovers at forty‑three percent, a number that feels neither urgent nor secure: like most things at the moment. A campus email slides into the corner of her screen: subject line about a visiting lecture Milan had mentioned in passing, the body padded with formalities, a registration link, and, further down, a brief note about openings for casual research assistance. She reads the bullet points twice, mind already composing and unconposing possible replies: too overqualified, too directionless, too “between things.”
Before she can decide whether to star it, archive it, or let it drown quietly under newer mail, a WhatsApp banner barges in on top: a stupid meme from Vibhor about “adulting levels,” so on‑the‑nose it makes her exhale through her nose in something almost like a laugh, a tiny, private concession that surviving might also count as a skill.
A second buzz: a photo from Kailashini, slightly blurred but unmistakably triumphant. A laminated certificate held up with both hands, her thumb half blocking the printed logo, her face cropped to just the edge of a grin. “Ho gaya,” the caption reads. “Ab dekhte hain aage kya.” Piyali types “Proud of you,” deletes it, replaces it with “Bahut accha, kal bata na sab,” stares, then adds a single clapping emoji (careful enthusiasm, not ownership) and sends it, waiting just long enough to see the twin blue ticks bloom before looking away.
The lamp hums faintly, its circle of light pooling around the keyboard and the old ballpoint pen she still reaches for out of habit. She leans back, letting her fingers trace the groove in the wooden desk where her father’s knuckles used to rest while he explained some diagram she barely remembers, his breath smelling faintly of chai and Ponds cold cream. “Bas thoda aur,” he would say, palm hovering over her notebook like a modest blessing, and she hears it now, not as pressure but as permission, an allowance to be unfinished. Outside, someone quarrels amiably over sabzi rates; a scooter horn protests. Hand flat on the warm wood, she closes her eyes once (testing whether tears are coming; they are not) opens them, adjusts her glasses, nudges the cursor back to life and begins typing again: one more paragraph, one more email drafted, one more small invoice template half‑designed, one more tab of government guidelines for freelancers opened and bookmarked. No master plan, no dramatic decision about staying or leaving, just the slow, continuous movement of the cursor in a room and a city she is no longer trying to keep separate from the life ahead, both of them allowed, for now, to coexist on the same flickering screen.