Her — 2:17 a.m.
“Hazaaron khwahishein aisi ke har khwahish pe dam nikle, Bahut nikle mere armaan, lekin phir bhi kam nikle.”
— Mirza Ghalib
PART ONE
Rubble
Chapter One
Her — 2:17 a.m.
“Koi umeed bar nahi aati, koi surat nazar nahi aati.”
— Ghalib
The terrace smelled of rain that hadn’t arrived yet.
Aanya had been standing there for eleven minutes — she knew because she’d watched the clock on her phone tick from 2:06 to 2:17 without doing anything about it. Below her, the street was the kind of quiet that only happened in the hours a city spent pretending it didn’t exist. A stray dog nosed at something near the chai stall’s shuttered gate. Somewhere two lanes over, a bike started and then stopped, as though its rider had changed his mind.
She lifted her phone and took a photograph of the street. No filter. No caption. She posted it to her Snapchat story and put the phone face-down on the parapet wall.
She did this sometimes. Not for anyone in particular. Only because the act of putting a frame around something — that specific rectangle of light and geometry — made it feel more manageable. The street with its sleeping dog and its shuttered stall became, inside the frame, a thing she had chosen to look at rather than a thing she was simply stuck inside.
It was a small trick. It mostly worked.
Three weeks ago, the form had come back to her with three signatures on it and none of them were hers. The registrar’s office had used a rubber stamp. She remembered noticing the stamp was slightly crooked — the institutional seal sitting at a faint tilt above the words “Year Back Confirmed” — and she had focused on that tilt for a very long time because focusing on it meant she did not have to focus on the words.
Back in Rajasthan, her parents believed she was doing additional coursework. Her mother had said, “Hardworking girl, my Aanya,” to someone on the phone, and Aanya had stood in the other room listening and felt something split cleanly inside her chest.
She turned her phone over. No views yet.
She turned it back over.
One view. Username: arjun.m_
Then a message.
arjun.m_—2:18 a.m.
“Why are you awake?”
Aanya looked at it for a moment. She tried to remember who arjun.m_ was. Mutual friend, she thought. One of those follows that accumulates the way lint does — without decision, without cause.
She almost put the phone back down.
She didn’t.
aanya.s—2:19 a.m.
“Why are you watching?”
She sent it and immediately felt slightly ridiculous. It was a Snapchat story. He was watching it because it existed. That was how stories worked.
His reply came in forty seconds.
arjun.m_—2:19 a.m.
“Fair. I’m not sleeping. Your street looks quiet.”
It was such a plain, accurate thing to say that she found herself reading it twice. Not “beautiful photo” or “cool pic” or any of the things people said when they wanted to say something without saying anything. Just: your street looks quiet.
It was quiet. That was the whole truth of the photograph and he had simply named it.
•••
His name was Arjun. She established this much within the first few minutes of scrolling his profile — not in a searching way, she told herself, only the way anyone would glance at the label before opening a door. He was from somewhere in Madhya Pradesh. Private engineering college. A mutual friend in common who she could barely place.
They talked until 1:30 in the morning.
Not about anything important, at first. He asked why she was on the terrace at this hour. She said she couldn’t sleep. He said he was on a rooftop himself — his college had one that nobody locked after 11 p.m. because the warden had given up on the pretense of enforcement. She said that sounded like a good arrangement. He said it had its moments.
It was ordinary conversation. She didn’t know then that ordinary conversation was something she’d been missing without realizing it — conversation without performance, without the careful calibration of what to say next to seem fine.
Somewhere around midnight she asked him, because she was tired and tired people sometimes ask true things:
“What would you do if someone you loved didn’t love you back?”
She expected a joke. People his age — people her age — deflected questions like this with jokes.
He didn’t.
arjun.m_—12:07 a.m.
“I’d love her anyway. That’s the job, isn’t it. You don’t love someone to get something back. You love them because that’s what’s true about you when you’re near them.”
Aanya read this on her terrace with the pre-monsoon wind beginning to stir the leaves of the neem tree below. She read it twice, the way she’d read his first message.
She didn’t know what to do with someone who said things like that plainly, without drama, at midnight on a rooftop in a city she’d never been to.
She typed: “that’s a very certain answer for 12am.”
He replied: “some things you only think clearly at 12am.”
She put her phone down on the parapet wall and looked at the street. The dog had moved on. The neem tree shivered once and went still.
She picked the phone back up.
•••
After that first night they talked like normal for a few days — the light, casual way of people who have touched on something real and then retreated to safer ground. How are you. What did you eat. Which subject are you studying. The ordinary maintenance of a conversation that doesn’t yet know what it is.
Aanya went about her days. Classes she attended with varying degrees of presence. The mess downstairs that served food she’d stopped tasting. The terrace at night. Her journal open to a page she’d been meaning to write in for a week.
He texted goodmorning sometimes, among what she suspected were several other goodmornings sent to several other people at once. She recognized the pattern because she’d done it herself — the broadcast warmth, the scatter-shot maintenance of connections because genuine connection felt too much like work and too much like risk.
She didn’t mind. She wasn’t expecting anything.
Then one evening around 11 p.m. he called — properly called, audio, not the usual Snap — and said, “Kya kar rahi ho?” in a voice that sounded like someone who had been thinking of calling for longer than he’d admit.
“Sitting,” she said.
“Mujhe bhi,” he said. “Sunte ho — I have something. Will you listen?”
“Depends what it is.”
He recited a shayari. She didn’t know whose it was — she suspected it was famous, the kind of couplet that has been said so many times it has passed beyond the individual poet into the general atmosphere of longing. But the way he said it, haltingly, as though each word cost him something, made it feel newly coined.
When he finished there was a silence.
“Waah,” she said softly. She meant it.
“Your turn,” he said. And she could hear him smiling.
She hadn’t planned to. But she had been writing something in her journal for three weeks — not a poem exactly, more the residue of a feeling, lines she’d written in Hindi at 2 a.m. without expecting anyone to hear them. She closed her eyes on the terrace and she read it to him. Her voice was steady. She was surprised by this.
He listened without interrupting. When she finished he said: “Irshad.”
The old Urdu word of appreciation. The word you say when something has moved you genuinely and you cannot explain it better than that.
They went back and forth like this for an hour. He had things memorized — Ghalib, Faiz, something from Gulzar — and she had things she’d written herself, and they were exchanging them in the dark like objects found at the bottom of a pocket. Small and inexplicably kept.
At one point he asked: “Aapka koi boyfriend hai?”
She said yes.
He said “okay” in the voice of someone rearranging furniture in their chest.
A little later she told him she was going to Delhi for a few days, to her masi’s house. He said okay, have a good trip, goodnight.
She hung up and sat on the terrace for a while longer. Below her the street was quiet again. The neem tree moved.
She did not write in her journal that night. She didn’t need to. Some things arrange themselves without assistance.
•••
He forgot her name.
He would tell her this later, and she would laugh, and he would be embarrassed in the particular way of someone who knows the embarrassment is deserved. But at the time — a week after their shayari call, in the middle of a stretch of days that blurred into each other — he had simply forgotten which one she was. He texted goodmorning to the several names on his phone, the rotation of connections he maintained at that particular low point in his life the way a person in a dark room will reach for any warm thing, and she texted back like the others, and he carried on.
This was the truth of where he was then, which the story will account for properly. For now it is enough to say: he was in a dim season, and he was not being careful.
She came back from Delhi.
When she texted him from the bus — “back in the city”, nothing more — something in him recognized it before he’d consciously processed who had sent it. He called that evening.
They were both on their respective terraces. He asked about Delhi. She told him about her masi’s house, the small nephew who was notorious and seven years old, the way she’d booked the ticket herself — tatkal, sleeper class, the whole arrangement handled without help from anyone.
“You did all that yourself?” he said.
“Haan.” A hint of amusement. “Why? Can’t you?”
“I’ve never booked a train in my life,” he admitted. “My mother does all that.”
She laughed. Not at him, or not only at him. At the specific absurdity of a twenty-one-year-old boy who could solve differential equations and couldn’t navigate IRCTC.
The conversation was good. Easy in the way that things are easy when they have already been difficult once and survived it.
Then she told him about her boyfriend. Not mentioned in passing this time — properly. Someone she had loved for a long time, someone who loved her back, someone who was still a part of her life even though the life she was living now — the year-back life, the PG life, the life she hadn’t told her parents the truth about — felt so separate from everything else that it barely seemed connected.
He said “okay” again. And then: “You deserve someone who loves you like that. Like it’s simple. Like there’s no question about it.”
She went quiet for a moment. Outside her window the city’s first rain of the season began to arrive, tentatively, the way rain does when it isn’t sure of its welcome.
“That’s a generous thing to say,” she told him.
“I mean it,” he said.
And the strange, uncomfortable thing was: she believed him.
She told him other things that evening. About her masi wanting her to wear shorts, and how she was too shy for that, how she only wore them in her room when no one else was in the PG. He listened — she noticed he listened to the small things as though they were not small — and did not make her feel foolish for mentioning it.
At the end of the call, after an hour and a half, he said: “Acha. I think I deserve a number now. After all this. We’ve moved past the Snap phase.”
“Dekhte hain,” she said.
That night around 10 p.m. she texted him.
aanya.s—10:03 p.m.
“Guesss the last two digits.”
“9XXXXXXXX?”
He tried five or six combinations. Wrong every time. Finally he typed:
“Main itna smart nahi hoon. Haar gaya. 😭”
A pause. Then she sent the last two digits.
He called the next evening, from his phone to hers, for the first time.
“Hello,” he said. “Progress.”
“Ya ya,” she said. “Kaise ho, Arjun.”
“Apke bina kaisa ho pata,” he said — easy, teasing, the kind of line that is deployed lightly so it can be denied if it lands wrong.
It didn’t land wrong.
She told him she was going out for vegetables. He said okay. She said bye. He said cut, okay, and cut the call — not in anger, just in the manner of someone who knows a good exit line when he’s said one.
•••
That night she called him at 11 p.m.
They talked about nothing for a while — kya khaya, kya kar rahe ho, the small domestic inventory of a person’s evening. And then she said, laughing at herself a little, that she had been through a lot.
“Kya?” he said. “Kya hua?”
“Kuch nahi. Nahi bataungi.”
He asked two or three more times. She held firm. He said, lightly: “Itna bura kya ho sakta hai.”
And something in the lightness of it — not dismissiveness, just the ordinary human assumption that things could not be that bad — opened something in her. She had been holding it for so long. The particular exhaustion of holding something nobody knew you were holding.
“Tu nahi jaanta,” she said. “What I’ve been through.”
She told him about M2. The mathematics paper in second semester that she had sat for and not cleared, and then sat for again, and not cleared again. The year back that had accumulated from it like water finding its level. She told him she had given seventeen thousand rupees to a dalal — one of those men who existed in the grey margins of every college administration, promising results they sometimes delivered and sometimes didn’t — and he had taken the money and she had still not passed.
He was quiet.
“Aanya,” he started.
“Ruko,” she said. “Let me say it. Main kehna chahti hoon.”
And she said it. The depression. The months of it. The way she had been a topper — genuinely, without effort, the kind of student who found pleasure in understanding things — and then the way something had simply shifted, like a bone moved from its socket. Jab baaki bachon ke regular exams hote the, she had gone to the ghat and sat there for hours. The Narmada moving in front of her, grey-green and indifferent, doing its ancient business of being a river. She had sat there because if she was at the ghat she did not have to be anywhere else. And sometimes she had thought about not coming back from the ghat.
She said this last part quickly, the way you say the thing you’ve never said — fast, so it can’t be unsaid, so it’s out and can’t be put back.
Arjun didn’t say anything for a moment.
She could hear him breathing.
Then he said: “Main samajh sakta hoon. Not because I know your exact pain. But because — I have a friend. Who went through something like that. Something that crushed them from the inside while everything looked fine from the outside. It’s the worst kind of alone.”
She said nothing.
“And you’re here,” he said. “On the phone. At 11 p.m. talking to me. So — you came back from the ghat. Every time.”
She had not thought of it that way.
You came back from the ghat. Every time.
Such a small rearrangement of the same facts.
“Bachpan se 12th tak topper thi,” she said, because she needed to explain the gap between who she had been and who she was now, and she wasn’t sure she could explain it any other way than chronologically.
“I know,” he said.
“You don’t know,” she said, but gently.
“No,” he agreed. “But I’m listening. That’s different from knowing. That might be better than knowing.”
After a while he said: “The weather is good. Rainy season is starting. Chalte hain kabhi? Just ride. Somewhere.”
She agreed. They planned nothing specific and then said goodnight.
She sat on her bed in the dark for a while after the call ended. Her roommate Riya was asleep, her breathing slow and regular across the room. Outside the window the city was beginning its slow transaction with sleep.
Aanya opened her journal.
She wrote one line, in Hindi, which translates approximately as: “I told someone tonight. Someone I have never met. And it felt less heavy than it did before. I don’t know what to do with that.”
She closed the journal.
She slept.
—
End of Chapter One
