Twenty-one days.
That's how long Arjun held the words inside him.
Twenty-one days of tea on stone steps. Twenty-one days of Tagore and Faiz and arguments about Neruda that always ended with breathless silence. Twenty-one days of her laughter rewiring his brain, her presence rewriting his priorities, her existence making the warehouse bearable, the bus tolerable, the poverty almost — almost — invisible.
Twenty-one days of wanting to say three words and swallowing them like broken glass.
I love you.
He practiced in the bathroom mirror. He practiced on the bus, mouthing the words silently while pressed between strangers. He practiced at the warehouse, stacking crates with mechanical precision while his mind rehearsed a hundred different versions of the same impossible confession.
Meera, I love you.
Too direct.
Meera, I think I'm in love with you.
Too uncertain.
Meera, I've been in love with you since you stood in the rain laughing at a broken umbrella, and every day since then has been a war between my heart and my common sense, and my heart is winning, and I'm terrified, because I have nothing to offer you — no money, no future, no guarantee — just this, just me, just a man who would walk through every storm ever created if you were standing on the other side.
Too long. Too desperate. Too true.
The problem wasn't courage. Arjun had plenty of courage. He had faced Banerjee's fury, his mother's illness, his father's death, poverty's endless humiliations — all without flinching. Courage wasn't the issue.
The issue was arithmetic.
He had done the math. Repeatedly. Obsessively. The way engineers do when they're afraid of what the numbers will reveal.
His income: Three hundred rupees per day. Nine thousand per month. Minus rent, minus mother's medication, minus Priya's school fees, minus food, minus bus fare. What remained was a number so small it was almost fictional.
Her worth: Infinite.
The equation didn't balance. It never would.
He couldn't take her to restaurants. He couldn't buy her books — though she deserved libraries. He couldn't take her to the cinema, to the park, to any of the places where couples went to build memories. He couldn't even afford a second cup of tea most days. The two cups he brought to the courtyard — forty rupees — were budgeted from his lunch money. He ate less so she could drink more.
She didn't know this.
She must never know this.
"You're overthinking," said Rajan.
Rajan Das was the closest thing Arjun had to a best friend — a fellow evening-batch student who worked as a delivery driver during the day and spent his nights studying electrical engineering with the grim determination of a man defusing a bomb. He was short, stocky, perpetually cheerful, and completely incapable of keeping his opinions to himself.
They were sitting in the university canteen — a dim, noisy room that smelled permanently of samosas and regret. Arjun was staring at his textbook without reading it. Rajan was eating his third samosa while studying Arjun with undisguised amusement.
"I'm not overthinking."
"Bhai, you've been staring at the same page for twenty minutes. Either you've discovered a revolutionary new theorem in that paragraph, or you're thinking about the girl."
"Her name is Meera."
"Her name is Meera," Rajan repeated in a dreamy voice, fluttering his eyelashes. "Listen to yourself. You sound like a ghazal. A really bad ghazal."
"I will end you."
"With what? Your deadly charm? Your devastating poverty?" Rajan grinned and shoved the remaining samosa toward Arjun. "Eat. You look like a man about to go to war."
"I might be."
Rajan's grin faded. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, his voice dropping to something serious.
"Arjun. Listen to me. I say this as your friend, as your brother, as someone who has watched you punish yourself for six years because you think you don't deserve anything good." He paused. "Tell her."
"It's not that simple."
"It is exactly that simple."
"I have nothing, Rajan." The word came out harder than intended. Nothing. The sound of it was hollow, like knocking on an empty chest. "What do I say? Meera, I love you, and I can offer you a life of bus rides and cold rotis and a room the size of a cupboard? That's not love. That's cruelty."
"That's your pride talking."
"It's reality."
"Same thing, with you." Rajan leaned back, crossing his arms. "You know what your problem is? You think love is a transaction. Input, output, balance sheet. But love isn't engineering, Arjun. You can't calculate it. You can't budget it. It doesn't fit in your spreadsheet."
"I don't have a spreadsheet."
"You have a spreadsheet in your head. I've seen you calculate bus fare in your sleep." Rajan's voice softened. "She brings you food, bhai. She waits for you every evening. She argues with you about dead poets for an hour and then looks at you like you're the only living poem she's ever read. That girl doesn't care about your bank balance."
"She should."
"Why? Because the world is unfair? Because rich men get beautiful women and poor men get loneliness? Is that the rule?" Rajan shook his head. "If that's the rule, then break it. You break every other rule. Break this one too."
Arjun said nothing. He stared at the samosa on the plate. It was cold, greasy, slightly crushed from Rajan's enthusiastic handling. It was, objectively, the saddest samosa in Kolkata.
He ate it anyway.
"Tomorrow," he said quietly.
"Tomorrow what?"
"I'll tell her tomorrow."
Rajan studied his face for a long moment. Then he smiled — not his usual grin, but something warmer, something almost proud.
"About damn time," he said.
Tomorrow came wearing gold.
The evening light over Kolkata was different that day — softer, warmer, almost deliberate, as if the sun had decided to set more slowly just to give the city a moment of grace. The courtyard was bathed in amber. Shadows lay long and gentle across the stone. Even the dust motes in the air seemed to hang suspended, waiting.
Meera was already on the steps. She was wearing white today — a simple white kurta with small blue flowers embroidered at the sleeves. Her hair was down. She almost never wore her hair down. It fell past her shoulders in dark waves, catching the gold light and holding it like a secret.
She was reading. Not Tagore today — something smaller, older, a paperback with a cracked spine and faded cover. She looked up when she heard his footsteps, and her face did the thing that destroyed him every single time — it opened. Brightened. Became more of itself. Like his presence unlocked a version of her that she kept hidden from everyone else.
"You're early," she said.
"Banerjee let us go at four." He sat beside her. The stone was warm from the sun. "What are you reading?"
She held up the book. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.
"'Love possesses not nor would it be possessed,'" she quoted, "'for love is sufficient unto love.'"
Arjun's throat constricted. Of all the days. Of all the lines.
"Are you trying to prepare me for something?" he asked. His voice was lighter than he felt. Much lighter.
"Always." She closed the book and turned to face him fully. Cross-legged. Attentive. The way she sat when she sensed that a conversation was about to matter. "You look different today."
"Same face."
"Same face. Different eyes." She tilted her head. "Your eyes are louder today. Like they're trying to say something your mouth won't."
He looked at her.
The gold light was behind her now, framing her in a halo that would have been ridiculous on anyone else. On Meera, it looked inevitable. Like the light had been waiting its entire existence for someone worth framing.
Tell her.
His heart slammed against his ribs. His palms were damp. His mouth was dry. He was an engineering student — he understood structural integrity, load-bearing capacity, the precise amount of force required to break something.
Three words. That's all.
Three words that could break everything.
Or build everything.
"Meera."
"Yes?"
"I need to tell you something."
She waited. Patient. Open. The blue flowers on her sleeves trembled slightly in the breeze. A bird — a sparrow, small and ordinary — landed on the step above them, cocked its head, and watched.
"I don't have money," he began. The words tasted like iron. "I work at a warehouse. I earn barely enough to eat. My mother is sick. My sister needs school fees. I live in a room with cracked walls and a fan that sounds like it's dying." He paused. The sparrow didn't move. "I can't take you to nice places. I can't buy you books. I can't promise you comfort. I can't promise you security. I can't promise you any of the things that a person should be able to promise the person they —"
He stopped.
The word hung in the air. Unfinished. Enormous.
Meera's eyes were bright. Not with tears — with something fiercer. Something that looked like anger and tenderness fused together.
"The person they what, Arjun?"
He looked at her. At the white kurta. At the blue flowers. At the hair holding gold light. At the brown eyes with autumn hidden inside them.
Jump.
"The person they love."
The word landed between them like a stone thrown into still water. Ripples spread outward — invisible, unstoppable, reaching the edges of everything.
Meera didn't move.
She didn't breathe.
For three seconds — the longest three seconds of Arjun's life, longer than the night his father died, longer than the walk home from the hospital, longer than every sleepless night stacked end to end — she was completely still.
Then she spoke.
"You absolute idiot."
He blinked. Of all the responses he had prepared for — rejection, pity, awkward silence, gentle let-down — this was not on the list.
"What?"
"You come here with your speech about cracked walls and broken fans and not being able to afford books —" Her voice was shaking now. Not with anger. With something that sounded like a dam breaking. "— as if I care about walls. As if I care about fans. As if the reason I sit on these steps every evening is because of your financial portfolio."
"Meera —"
"I sit here because of you." She jabbed a finger at his chest. Her eyes were glistening now — fully, unmistakably, beautifully glistening. "Because you listen when I read. Because you quote Faiz with perfect pronunciation. Because you walked into the rain for me on the first day without even knowing my name. Because you bring me tea that you can't afford — yes, Arjun, I know you skip lunch to buy those cups, I've known for weeks, and I drink them anyway because throwing them back in your face would break your stupid, beautiful pride."
The world tilted.
She knew.
She had always known.
"You think love is an equation," she whispered, and now the tears fell — two silver lines tracking down her face like the rain that had started everything. "You think you need to earn me. Like I'm a prize on a shelf. Like my heart has a price tag."
"I didn't mean —"
"My heart has no price, Arjun. That's the point. That's what Gibran means. That's what Tagore means. That's what every poet who ever lived has been screaming into the void for centuries." She took his face in her hands. Her palms were warm. Her fingers trembled against his jaw. "Love is not a transaction. It is a gift. And I am giving you mine. Right now. For free. No conditions. No balance sheet."
He couldn't speak.
He couldn't breathe.
He couldn't do anything except look at this woman — this impossible, fierce, rain-loving, storm-reading woman — who was holding his face like it was the most valuable thing she had ever touched.
"I love you," she said. Clear. Steady. Unafraid. "I have loved you since you told me my umbrella needed a funeral. I have loved you through every cup of tea, every argument about Neruda, every evening on these stupid steps. And I will love you through cracked walls and broken fans and cold rotis and every single thing you think makes you unworthy. Because none of it does. None of it."
A sound escaped him — not a word, not a cry, something between the two. Something that had been locked inside him for six years, trapped behind walls of pride and poverty and the quiet, crushing belief that he did not deserve to be loved.
The walls crumbled.
He leaned forward and pressed his forehead against hers. Eyes closed. Breathing her in. Feeling her tears wet against his skin, or maybe they were his tears — he couldn't tell anymore, and it didn't matter, because the same rain was falling on both of them.
"I love you," he whispered. "I love you, Meera. I have nothing. But I love you."
"You have me," she said. "That's not nothing."
The sparrow on the step above them sang once — a single, clear note — and then flew away into the golden sky.
They stayed like that. Foreheads pressed. Hands tangled. Hearts beating in a rhythm that neither of them controlled.
The sun set.
The courtyard darkened.
The world, for one perfect moment, was kind.
But kindness, in this world, is borrowed.
And somewhere over the Arabian Sea, a private jet cut through the clouds like a blade. Inside, Vikram Singh Rathore sipped single malt whiskey from a crystal glass and reviewed a file.
The file contained everything.
Arjun Malhotra's address. His mother's medical records. His sister's school. His warehouse schedule. His evening classes. His route to the university. His bank balance — a number so small it made Vikram smile.
And at the bottom of the file, clipped neatly with a silver binder, was a photograph.
Not of Meera this time.
Of Arjun.
Sitting on the steps of the Arts Building, holding a cup of tea, looking at someone outside the frame with an expression that made Vikram's knuckles whiten around the crystal glass.
That expression was love.
And Vikram Singh Rathore did not tolerate competition.
He closed the file.
Finished his whiskey.
And watched India rise beneath the clouds like a continent preparing for war.