Chapter 0
THE SCARS WE CARRY
Chapter 0 — The Silence Between Us
02:14 AM.
[SHIV]
The cursor blinked.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
Shiv stared at it without typing a single word.
The laptop had been open for almost an hour, but the work on the screen hadn’t changed.
Neither had he.
Outside, the colony was almost silent.
A distant dog barked somewhere in the darkness.
A truck passed far away, its engine slowly disappearing into the night.
Then silence again.
Shiv leaned back in his chair.
His eyes were tired, but sleep wasn’t coming.
It rarely did anymore.
He looked down.
A cigarette rested between his fingers.
For a second, he almost smiled.
There was a time when he hated smoking.
He hated the smell.
Hated seeing people do it.
He couldn’t understand why anyone would willingly put themselves through it.
Funny how life worked.
Sometimes you became the person you once promised yourself you’d never become.
He watched the smoke rise toward the ceiling.
Maybe that was the strangest part.
Not that he had changed.
But that he couldn’t remember exactly when.
The boy he used to be had been different.
He studied.
He played.
He laughed easily.
He thought failure was something that happened to other people.
Now, every exam felt like another opportunity to prove that he wasn’t good enough.
Every result carried the same fear.
What if I fail again?
He looked back at the laptop.
The unfinished work was still there.
He didn’t touch it.
His mind had already wandered somewhere else.
To a person.
A person whose name he didn’t even want to say out loud anymore.
Because saying her name made everything feel real again.
He picked up his phone.
Opened the same conversation.
Nothing.
He stared at the screen.
There were so many things he wanted to say.
Explanations.
Apologies.
Questions.
Words he’d rehearsed in his head a thousand times.
But every version ended the same way.
He didn’t know how to reach her anymore.
He didn’t even know if he was supposed to.
His thumb hovered over the keyboard.
Then stopped.
[SHIV]
How do you convince someone to talk to you when they’ve already decided they never want to hear your voice again?
He locked the phone.
For a few seconds, he sat completely still.
Then—
A train.
The sound came faintly from somewhere beyond the colony.
Shiv lifted his head.
The wheels grew louder.
Metal against metal.
A familiar rhythm.
And suddenly, the room around him didn’t feel like his room anymore.
The sound pulled him backward.
Years backward.
Before the exams.
Before the mistakes.
Before the cigarettes.
Before the silence.
Before the scars.
[SHIV]
I was six years old.
And back then, I didn’t know what love was.
I didn’t even know what missing someone meant.
Life was simple.
Wake up.
Go to school.
Come home.
Play.
Study.
Repeat.
The railway colony felt like the whole world.
The houses seemed enormous.
The roads seemed endless.
And everyone knew everyone.
Especially the children.
Then one morning, I saw her.
She was across the road.
A girl I’d never seen before.
I remember looking at her.
Not because I knew who she was.
Not because I understood anything about her.
I simply wondered—
Who is she?
I didn’t know it then.
But that question would follow me for years.
[JHANVI]
He remembers seeing me that morning.
I know he does.
But he doesn’t remember everything.
He remembers the girl across the road.
He remembers wondering who she was.
What he doesn’t remember...
is that I had noticed him too.
Not because he was special.
Not yet.
He was just another boy in the colony.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
But there was something about him.
Something I noticed before he ever noticed it himself.
And maybe that’s the strangest part of our story.
He spent years believing that he was the one who slowly fell for me.
Maybe he was.
But there was something I knew before he did.
Something neither of us understood at six.
Something that would take years to reveal itself.
If you want to know what it was...
Go back.
Back to the railway colony.
Back to the classroom.
Back to the day our teacher decided where we would sit.
Because that’s where our story actually began.
Not at the first kiss.
Not at the goodbye.
Not at the scars.
At a classroom.
Two children sat there, completely unaware of what they were about to become to each other.
