Almost, Always You

Mumbai woke up loud like always. Some cities stretch slowly into the day. Mumbai didn’t. It jolted awake, like a lover late for a train.

Auto-rickshaws hummed like restless bees, pressure cookers whistled behind half-open windows and a street dog barked. Somewhere beyond the thin windowpane, the city was alive trains shrieked, vendors called out, scooter horns filled the air like birds startled from sleep.

The light, too, had its own rhythm grey at first, then a golden blur pouring between buildings, turning water tanks and cracked terraces into something worth noticing. The city was imperfect, impatient, alive.

But inside the fourth-floor apartment, time moved differently, there was only the soft hum of the refrigerator and the whisper of turning pages "Healing Through Storytelling: The Personal and the Political in Modern Journalism.” Books were everywhere some with folded corners, others filled with margin notes in her tight handwriting. Her thesis had become her anchor, or maybe her excuse.

She sat by the window of her small flat the kind of place people called “cozy” when they didn’t have to live in it and watched the city move without her. Horns wailed, vendors argued, trains screamed past in the distance. But inside, it was still. Still, and a little cold. She had been awake since before dawn, though she hadn’t done much. Sleep clung to her skin like something unfinished. She sat cross-legged on the old divan beside her window, a half-read book in her lap, her hair still damp from her morning shower.

Her apartment was small just one bedroom, one kitchen, and a study corner she refused to call a living room — but it held a kind of gentle solitude. Warm-toned fairy lights drooped from one wall. A lone marigold bloomed in a chipped coffee mug on the windowsill. There were too many books and too few visitors. A cup of coffee sat untouched beside her laptop, the steam long gone cold. Her desk was cluttered, but not messy. Everything in her life was like that not chaotic, just tired. Like a woman who used to love wildflowers but now only watered cacti.

Her phone buzzed. A message from Ma.

Ma: Pune is raining again. Are you eating well, Ishu? Baba says he misses your angry chai.

She read the message, smiled faintly. then locked the screen. They had all moved to Pune last year when her father was transferred. Her mother, her aunt, the walls of her childhood gone in one slow, sensible decision. She had stayed — for her PhD, for her solitude, or maybe because she didn’t know how to go back to being someone’s daughter full-time. It wasn’t abandonment. It was just life. But it still stung in places she never spoke of.

She didn’t resent them. But, she just didn’t know where “Home” was anymore.

At 27, Ishani had everything she was supposed to want independence, a sharp mind, a research grant. But loneliness clung to her like the smell of wet books, faint but impossible to ignore.

Then she replied, “yes ma, and tell baba that I miss him to”

Outside, the sky was slowly softening, Her fingers hovered over her laptop keys. She was supposed to be writing a section of her thesis tonight a commentary on truth in trauma narratives. The paragraph she’d written wasn’t good, but at least it existed in her laptop. But what truth? What narrative? When everything she’d been through felt like a story no one had edited properly, a plot twist too sharp to make sense?

She typed, “Pain has no language. Only echoes.”

Then backspaced it. Again.

And again.

The sun dipped. The sky turned the colour of dry marigold petals and that orange-grey moment where the sun forgets to be gold and the city pretends to pause. She stood and stretched, brushing dust from her kurta.. She didn’t want to think. She just wanted movement.

Just then, her phone buzzed again — this time, not a message, but a call.

“Anu♡”

She sighed, half-smiled, and answered.

“Finally! You remember you have a best friend who’s alive and living barely five metro stops away?” Anu’s voice was loud, dramatic, and oddly comforting, like warm socks on a rainy day.

“I was working,” Ishani murmured, already knowing it wouldn’t convince her.

“You always say that. And yet, every time I see you, you look like a tired plant. Get ready. I’m coming over with food and gossip in thirty minutes. No excuses. You need sunlight. Or at least biryani.”

“Anu…”

“Nope. Don’t Anu me. I’ve had enough. You’ve been ghosting me for days ishi! Today, you’re mine.”

The call ended before Ishani could protest.

She looked at her reflection in the window, eyes tired, hair loose, the soft echo of loneliness still clinging to her shadow. But somehow, the idea of Anu barging in with food, laughter, and chaos felt… safe.

And for the first time that morning, Ishani let out a small laugh.

Not the loud kind. But the kind that reminded her that she wasn’t completely alone

She moved to her desk, opened her laptop again, but her fingers didn’t want to type thesis lines tonight.

Instead, she reached for the old brown notebook beneath a pile of research books the one with creased pages and a marigold sticker on the cover. She hadn’t told anyone about it. Not even Anu.

On the first page, written in black ink:

“The window seat diaries”

That’s what she had named it.

Not because she liked traveling but because she’d always felt like she was in motion, yet never really arriving. Watching life blur past from the edges. Always on the side-lines. Always observing.

She opened to a new page. The pen felt heavy in her

She turned to a fresh page, took a breath, and wrote:

“The window seat diaries”

Today, the city woke up without me again.I watched the morning rise like a stranger.Sometimes, I think I don’t live in Mumbai, I just borrow corners of it.But the marigold bloomed today. And maybe that means I stayed.- Ishani