AJNABI

The room was cluttered, clothes and papers scattered across the floor as if no one had bothered to notice them in days. Amulya lay on her bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling, but her mind was somewhere else entirely — chasing questions she couldn't answer, circling back to them again and again until her chest felt tight and her thoughts refused to settle.

Her phone rang. She turned her head just enough to see the screen, then let it ring out.

For a long moment she didn't move. Then, slowly, she pushed herself up and walked into the bathroom to get ready.

When she came out, she was already running late. She grabbed the first thing she found in the kitchen, barely glancing at it, and hurried out the door.

By the time she reached the office, stepping through those doors felt like stepping into another world — one with its own rules, its own rhythm, one that made sense to her in a way little else did.

Amulya was a writer. She always had been, even before anyone paid her for it. The words she could never say out loud, the emotions she couldn't hand to another person directly — she gave them all to her stories instead. Writing wasn't a job to her. It was the only place she fully recognized herself.

But her days weren't spent on her own stories. She worked as an editor at a publishing house, spending her hours polishing other people's words, and her nights chasing the ends of her own unfinished ones.

She sat at her desk now, eyes resting on the file in front of her without really reading it. Outside, the office hummed faintly — footsteps, a phone ringing somewhere, someone laughing too loud. Inside her office, it was quiet.

Then came a knock at the door.