Arjun didn't look for her the next day.
He told himself this firmly while shaving with a dull blade in the cracked mirror of their shared bathroom. He told himself this while ironing his only decent shirt with the ancient press that sparked if you held it at the wrong angle. He told himself this while eating the two rotis and thin dal his mother had prepared before dawn, her arthritic hands moving slowly, painfully, lovingly.
He was not going to look for a girl he had met once in the rain.
He had responsibilities. His shift at the warehouse started at seven. His supervisor, Banerjee, docked pay for every minute late. His mother needed new medication — the old prescription wasn't working, and Dr. Sen had mentioned a specialist in Park Street whose consultation fee alone was more than Arjun earned in a week. Priya's school examination was next month, and she needed new notebooks, a geometry box, a graphing calculator that cost more than logic.
He had no time for autumn eyes and broken umbrellas.
No time at all.
"Dada, you're smiling again."
Priya was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her school books arranged in a neat semicircle around her. She was fifteen, sharp as a blade, and utterly merciless when it came to reading her brother's face.
"I'm not smiling."
"You were. Just now. While eating dal." She narrowed her eyes — their father's eyes, deep-set and knowing. "Nobody smiles while eating Maa's dal. It's physically impossible."
"Priya —"
"Is it a girl?"
"Priya."
"It's a girl." She grinned. "Finally. I was beginning to think you were going to marry your textbooks."
"Eat your breakfast."
"I finished twenty minutes ago. I've been watching you stare at that roti like it contains the meaning of life." She leaned forward. "What's her name?"
Arjun stood up, grabbed his bag, and walked toward the door.
"Dada!"
"Study for your exams."
"Tell me her name and I'll study for two extra hours!"
He paused at the door. The morning light slanted through the window, catching dust motes in the air, turning their small, cramped room into something almost golden.
"Meera," he said quietly. Then, before Priya could respond, he stepped outside and pulled the door shut behind him.
He heard her squeal through the thin wood.
He didn't smile.
He absolutely did not smile.
The warehouse was hell.
It was always hell, but today it was a specific, targeted, personalized hell designed by the universe to test Arjun Malhotra's patience. Three shipments arrived simultaneously. A forklift broke down. Two workers called in sick. Banerjee — short, sweaty, perpetually furious — screamed orders like a general commanding a losing war.
"MALHOTRA! Crate seven! Bay four! NOW!"
Arjun lifted. Carried. Stacked. Lifted again. His arms burned. His lower back sent sharp, electric warnings that he ignored with the practiced discipline of a man who couldn't afford to be injured. Injury meant rest. Rest meant no pay. No pay meant his mother's medication, Priya's notebooks, the rent — all of it collapsing like a house of cards in the wind.
So he lifted.
By noon, his hands were raw. By three, his shoulders were screaming. By five, when his shift ended and he collected his daily wage — three hundred rupees, counted out in crumpled notes by Banerjee's tobacco-stained fingers — Arjun felt like his body had been taken apart and reassembled by someone who didn't read the instructions.
He walked to the bus stop. The bus to the university was crowded, as always. He stood, pressed between a man who smelled like fish and a woman whose elbow was surgically embedded in his ribs. The bus lurched through Kolkata's traffic — honking, shouting, the perpetual symphony of a city that never learned to whisper.
He reached the university at six-fifteen.
His class started at six-thirty.
He had fifteen minutes.
He was not going to look for her.
He looked for her.
The Arts Building courtyard was different without rain. Drier, obviously, but also smaller somehow, as if the storm had expanded it into something mythical and the sunshine had shrunk it back to reality. Students milled about — groups of three and four, laughing, arguing, living the university life that Arjun watched from the periphery like a man pressing his face against a restaurant window.
She wasn't there.
He felt something sink in his chest and immediately hated himself for it. What had he expected? That she would be standing in the same spot, waiting for him, holding another broken umbrella? This wasn't a film. This was Kolkata. People met in the rain and then the rain stopped and they became strangers again. That was how the world worked.
He turned toward the Engineering Block.
"Engineer Almost!"
His heart stopped.
Not metaphorically. He was fairly certain it actually stopped, because the world went silent for a full second — no traffic, no voices, no birds — just that voice cutting through the noise like a blade through silk.
He turned.
Meera was sitting on the steps of the Arts Building, a thick book open in her lap, a pencil tucked behind her ear, and a cup of tea balanced precariously on the step beside her. She was wearing a pale yellow kurta today, the kind of yellow that didn't try to be bright — it just was. Her hair was pulled back in a loose braid that was already unraveling. Her feet were bare, her sandals placed neatly beside her.
She was waving at him.
Waving. Like they were old friends. Like yesterday hadn't been their first conversation. Like the universe hadn't spent twenty-two years keeping them apart only to throw them together in a downpour.
"I wasn't looking for you," he said, walking over despite every rational thought telling him to keep moving.
"I know," she said. "You were walking in completely the wrong direction for the Engineering Block, but sure, you weren't looking for me."
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
She patted the step beside her. "Sit. You look like someone tried to fold you in half."
"Warehouse," he said, sitting down. His body thanked him immediately. The stone was cool, solid, merciful.
"Bad day?"
"Standard day."
She studied him for a moment — that same open, searching look from yesterday that made him feel like his skin was transparent. Then she picked up the cup of tea and held it toward him.
"Drink."
"That's yours."
"I've had three cups today. My hands are already shaking. One more and I'll vibrate through the floor." She pushed the cup closer. "Drink. You need it more."
He took the cup. Their fingers brushed. The contact lasted less than a second, but something warm passed between them — not electric, not dramatic, just warm. Like stepping into sunlight after a long winter.
The tea was strong. Sweet. Perfect.
"What are you reading?" he asked, nodding at the book in her lap.
She held it up. Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore. The cover was worn soft with use, the pages dog-eared and annotated in small, fierce handwriting.
"Tagore," he said.
"You say that like you're surprised."
"You don't seem like a Tagore person."
"What do I seem like?"
He thought about it. "Someone who reads during storms. Not about them."
Something shifted in her expression. The playfulness didn't leave, but something deeper rose beneath it — a flicker of surprise, of being seen in a way she hadn't expected. It was there for only a moment before she covered it with a grin.
"That," she said, "is the most poetic thing an engineer has ever said."
"Almost engineer."
"Right. Almost." She looked down at the book. Her thumb traced a line on the page. "'Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high…'" She read it softly, not performing, just saying the words like they were a conversation with someone invisible. "'Where knowledge is free…'"
"'Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake,'" Arjun finished.
She looked up. Her brown-gold eyes widened slightly.
"You know Tagore?"
"My father used to read him. Every night." He paused. The memory surfaced without permission — his father's voice, rough from twelve hours of labor, softened by verse, filling their small room like incense smoke. "He said Tagore was the only rich man who understood poor men."
"Was?"
The word hung between them. Small. Heavy. Final.
"He died," Arjun said. "Six years ago."
He didn't know why he told her. He never told anyone. Not his friends at the warehouse. Not his classmates. Not even Dr. Sen, who asked about family history during his mother's appointments. Death was private. Grief was private. You carried it inside you like a stone in your pocket, and you didn't show it to strangers because strangers didn't care.
But Meera wasn't looking at him with pity. She wasn't doing the head-tilt, the soft sigh, the I'm so sorry that people offered like spare change — small, meaningless, and ultimately for their own comfort.
She was looking at him like she understood the weight of that stone.
"My mother died when I was eleven," she said. Not matching grief with grief — Arjun could tell the difference. She was opening a door because he had opened one first. Equal. Honest. "Cancer. By the time they found it, it was everywhere. Like it had been hiding, waiting." She paused. "Baba couldn't afford the treatment. He sold his truck. Still wasn't enough."
Silence settled between them. Not awkward. Not heavy. The kind of silence that exists between two people who have learned that some truths don't need commentary. They just need witness.
"Your tea is getting cold," Meera said finally.
He drank. It was lukewarm now, but still sweet.
"I should get to class," he said, not moving.
"You should," she agreed, not moving either.
A beat passed.
"Same time tomorrow?" she asked. Casual. Like it didn't matter. But her fingers tightened on the book's spine, and Arjun noticed because Arjun noticed everything about her now — every small movement, every shift, every breath.
"I'll bring the tea," he said.
She smiled. Not the laugh from yesterday — this was quieter, softer, meant only for him. A private smile. A beginning.
"Deal," she said.
He stood. Picked up his bag. Walked toward the Engineering Block.
At the door, he turned back. She was reading again, her head bent over Tagore, the evening light turning her yellow kurta into gold. She looked like a painting. She looked like a poem. She looked like every answer to every question he had been afraid to ask.
Don't, he told himself. Don't fall. You can't afford it. Not the time. Not the money. Not the heartbreak. Don't.
But the door was already open.
And Arjun Malhotra had never been good at walking away from open doors.
Twelve thousand kilometers away, in the glass tower that overlooked the Thames, Vikram Singh Rathore set the photograph down on his mahogany desk.
His assistant, a thin man named Saxena, stood at attention near the door.
"The girl," Vikram said. His voice was smooth, controlled — the kind of voice that gave orders and expected the world to rearrange itself accordingly. "Meera Sharma. Shantiniketan. Father owns a bookshop."
"Yes, sir. Shall I —"
"I'm returning to Kolkata next month." Vikram straightened his cufflinks — gold, engraved with the Rathore family crest. "Make arrangements."
"For the business meeting, sir?"
Vikram smiled. It was a cold smile. The kind that didn't reach his eyes. The kind that made Saxena's stomach tighten even after three years of service.
"For everything."
Saxena nodded and left.
Vikram picked up the photograph again. His thumb traced the line of Meera's jaw. The image was candid — taken at a university event six months ago. She was laughing in it. Unaware. Unguarded.
Beautiful.
He placed the photograph in his desk drawer, beside a leather-bound ledger that contained the names of fourteen people who had once stood between Vikram Singh Rathore and something he wanted.
None of them stood anymore.
He closed the drawer.
Locked it.
And waited.