Saanvi Roy
Episode 1 – The Photograph
The city was still shaking off the heat of late afternoon when Maya pushed her way through the crowded lanes of Chandni Chowk. Dust hung in the air like an invisible veil, clinging to her hair and the white kurta she had foolishly chosen to wear that morning. She stopped at the familiar tea stall near the booksellers, a place where she often came after long days at the architecture firm. The stall was old, its tin roof dented, its wooden counter stained with years of spilled chai, but she liked the chaos around it—the vendors shouting, the bicycles weaving, the smell of fried kachoris rising into the evening sky. Here, she could vanish. She ordered her tea, wrapped her sketchbook tightly under her arm, and leaned against the chipped pillar at the corner. She did not notice the man a few feet away, adjusting his lens, crouching slightly, his eyes following the light that fell on her face as she raised the glass cup to her lips. Kabir had been roaming the streets since morning, camera slung around his neck, capturing fragments of lives he would never know. A child licking melted ice cream, an old tailor asleep on his sewing machine, a dog stretched lazily across a shop’s threshold. And then, suddenly, he saw her—the way her eyes seemed far away, as though they belonged to some place beyond the narrow lane, the way the chaos of Chandni Chowk bent itself into stillness around her. He lifted the camera almost without thought. The shutter clicked. A single photograph. Maya felt something, a faint prickle, and turned her head. For a second their eyes met. Kabir pretended to look past her, fiddling with his lens, but she held his gaze just long enough to mark the unfamiliarity of his face, the curiosity in his expression. She looked away quickly, irritated at her own distraction. She was not here to be noticed. Her tea cooled in her hand. The boy at the counter called out for change, rickshaws clanged their bells, the evening crowd swelled, and yet that fleeting interruption lingered. By the time she left, she had almost forgotten. Almost.
Kabir, on the other hand, had not. He reviewed the shot on his camera, zooming in on the edges of her face. It was not posed, not deliberate, and that was what made it alive. He rarely printed his street photographs, but something about this one tugged at him. Later that night, in his small one-room flat in Daryaganj, he printed it out, the ink spreading across the paper like a memory being fixed in place. He pinned it to the wall above his desk, where dozens of other moments already lived, a gallery of strangers and their unscripted intimacies. Her face stood out among them—not because she was beautiful in the obvious way, but because there was a quiet stubbornness there, a refusal to be read. He wondered who she was, what she sketched in that notebook she guarded, and why she looked both anchored and lost. He told himself it was just another photograph. But he knew it wasn’t.
For Maya, the day ended the way most did—files stacked in her bag, colleagues gossiping about promotions she did not care for, the long drive back to her silent apartment in South Delhi. She placed her sketchbook on the table and ran her fingers over the lines she had drawn earlier: an unfinished facade of a building she had been designing. Architecture was her language, lines and angles her only constant companions. Love had betrayed her once, and she had promised never to let it intrude again. The walls she built were higher than any she could draw. That night she dreamed of a camera flash, though she did not know why.
The following week, their paths crossed again. She was boarding the Metro at Rajiv Chowk, pressed by the rush-hour crowd. As the train jolted, she steadied herself against the pole and looked up. There he was—camera hanging from his neck, eyes widening as recognition struck. She frowned, unsettled. Kabir stepped closer, pulling something from his bag. “You dropped this the other day,” he said, holding out a photograph. Confused, she took it. Her own face stared back at her from the glossy paper, half-turned, distant yet strangely tender. Heat rushed to her cheeks. “What is this?” she demanded.
“I clicked it,” he admitted, scratching his head, suddenly boyish. “I thought you should have it. You didn’t drop it. I just… thought it belonged to you more than me.”
Maya stared at him, then at the picture. She wanted to tear it in half, to scold him for photographing her without permission, to remind him she was not a subject in some street artist’s gallery. And yet she didn’t. Something in the honesty of his voice, the unpolished way he spoke, disarmed her. She shoved the photograph back into his hand. “Keep it. I don’t need it.”
He nodded, though disappointment flickered across his face. The train screeched to a halt, and Maya pushed her way out onto the platform, leaving him behind. Kabir watched her go, the photograph still warm in his hand, knowing he would keep it anyway.
That night, Maya placed her sketchbook on her lap but found herself unable to draw. The memory of his eyes, steady and unashamed, intruded again and again. She turned on the radio, hoping music would drown it, but instead she found herself reaching into her bag, as though expecting to find that photograph there. It wasn’t. She felt strangely empty without it.
In his room, Kabir pinned another copy of the photograph on his wall, right beside the first. He told himself he wouldn’t look for her again, that if their paths crossed, it would be fate. But somewhere deep inside, he already knew he would not be able to resist.
And so the first step had been taken, quietly, almost invisibly, in the chaotic rhythm of Delhi’s streets. A photograph. A glance. A refusal. Yet beneath it, something fragile had stirred, like the faint rustle of leaves before a storm.
Episode 2 – Strangers in the Metro
The Metro was a world of its own, a tunnel of pressed bodies, advertisements for coaching classes, and the metallic rhythm of doors closing. Maya disliked it—the heat, the shoving, the way strangers’ shoulders brushed too close—but it was faster than being stuck in Delhi’s endless traffic. She boarded at Rajiv Chowk, keeping her sketchbook clutched against her chest, eyes fixed on the digital board above the doors. She had trained herself not to notice faces, not to be distracted. And then she saw him. The man from Chandni Chowk, camera still hanging from his neck like it was part of him, his eyes catching hers before she could turn away. Her stomach tightened. What were the odds? He smiled faintly, as if embarrassed to be recognized. Maya looked down, pretending to scroll through her phone. But within seconds he had moved closer, maneuvering through the crowd with an ease she found irritating. “You remember me,” he said softly. His voice was low, hesitant, but it carried over the clamor of the compartment. Maya did not answer. She shifted slightly, angling her body away, but the train jolted and forced them back into proximity. He held out a folded piece of paper. She frowned, hesitated, then took it. It was the same photograph—her face framed in sunlight, eyes distant, lips half-parted in thought. She felt heat rising to her cheeks again. “Why are you giving me this?” she asked. “Because it’s yours,” Kabir replied. “It’s not mine. You took it.” “I know,” he said, smiling without apology. “But I feel like it belongs to you. It’s… you. I just caught it.” She should have been angry, and part of her was. Who was he to decide what belonged to her? Yet the photograph unsettled her in ways she did not expect. It was not posed, not artificial, and it showed a version of herself she barely recognized—a woman caught between stillness and longing. She tried to hand it back, but he refused to take it. The train screeched, the doors opened, and she used the excuse to escape, clutching the photograph reluctantly as she stepped onto the platform. He did not follow.
That night, Maya left the photograph on her desk, face-down, as if hiding it would erase the memory of his eyes watching her. She cooked mechanically, ate little, and sat with her sketchbook open but untouched. Lines refused to form. Instead, her gaze kept drifting to the photograph, as though the paper carried a weight far heavier than its grams. She picked it up once, twice, and finally tucked it inside the sketchbook, telling herself it was safer hidden there.
Kabir, meanwhile, walked the length of Connaught Place with his camera unused. Usually the streets filled him with possibility—every corner a story, every passerby a fleeting chance at immortality. But that evening, all he could think of was her face when she saw the picture. He replayed it like a reel: the flicker of recognition, the irritation, the faint curiosity. He wondered if she would throw the photograph away. He hoped she wouldn’t.
Days passed. Their lives resumed their separate rhythms. Maya buried herself in deadlines, site visits, and endless presentations to clients who wanted glass towers where she dreamed of open courtyards. She told herself she had forgotten the stranger with the camera. But one evening, as the first rains of the season darkened the streets, fate forced another crossing.
She was walking out of her office near Barakhamba Road when the skies split open. The storm came suddenly, furious, sending people scurrying for cover. Maya ran to the nearest awning, water dripping from her hair, her kurta plastered against her skin. She was catching her breath when she heard a voice. “You again.”
She turned sharply. Kabir was already there, shaking rain from his camera bag, his grin quick and almost disbelieving. “Don’t tell me you’re following me,” she snapped. “If I were, I’d be doing a terrible job,” he said easily. “I didn’t know architects worked in rainstorms.” She glared, but his lightness made it difficult to stay angry. The rain roared, trapping them in a bubble of sound. People huddled nearby, sharing umbrellas, laughing at the downpour. Kabir tilted his head, studying her. “You don’t like the photograph,” he said. She sighed. “It’s not about liking. I didn’t ask for it.” “Fair,” he admitted. “But sometimes we don’t ask for the things that matter.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s a terrible line.” He laughed, and to her own surprise, a reluctant smile tugged at her lips.
For the first time in months, she felt herself exhale something lighter than irritation. There was something about his presence, unpolished and unscripted, that unsettled her carefully built walls. She told herself it was just the rain, the absurd coincidence, nothing more. Yet when the storm finally eased and she stepped out, she found herself glancing back once, half-expecting him to still be watching. He was.
That night, Maya opened her sketchbook and found the photograph slipped between her unfinished drawings. She held it up, studying it in the dim lamp light. For the first time, she did not see intrusion. She saw possibility.
Episode 3 – Rain and Shelter
The storm that had trapped them beneath the awning lingered in Maya’s mind for days. It was not just the rain that soaked her clothes or the smell of wet asphalt that clung to her skin; it was the strange ease with which Kabir spoke, the careless honesty that pressed against her guarded silence. She told herself it was nothing, a coincidence, a stranger’s fleeting amusement. But even as she moved through client meetings and blueprint revisions, she found herself remembering the sound of his laughter carried over the roar of the downpour.
Three evenings later, Delhi’s skies opened again. She had left the office late, hoping to avoid him, though she would not admit to herself that she even thought of him while planning her route. The streets were glossy with water, neon lights shimmering in puddles, auto-rickshaws splashing waves as they passed. She ducked into a narrow lane near Bengali Market, intending to wait until the rain softened. And there he was, as if conjured by the storm itself—camera bag slung over his shoulder, hair damp and curling at the edges. He raised an eyebrow, amused. “Do you always arrive with the rain, or do I bring it?”
Maya groaned softly, half-annoyed, half-relieved. “Are you following me?” she asked, repeating the accusation she had thrown at him before. “Delhi’s too big for that,” he said. “Maybe we’re just both cursed with bad timing and cheap umbrellas.” His was indeed cheap—the kind sold on street corners, already bent from the wind. She tried not to laugh, but the sight of him struggling to keep it upright cracked her composure. She bit her lip, holding back the smile, but he noticed.
“Ah,” Kabir said. “There it is. I knew you had one.” “What?” “A laugh. A real one. Not the polite kind you give your colleagues when they brag about bonuses. Not the sarcastic one you gave me in the Metro. A proper one.” She shook her head. “You don’t know me.” “Maybe not,” he admitted. “But I see you.”
The words hung between them, heavier than the storm. She wanted to dismiss them, to call it another one of his street-philosopher lines, but something in his voice was too sincere. She turned away, staring at the sheets of rain. “Why do you carry that camera everywhere?” she asked suddenly, her tone sharper than she intended. “Because life doesn’t wait,” he said. “Moments vanish before you notice them. The camera gives me a way to keep them alive. Like the old man feeding pigeons at Connaught Place. Or the little girl selling flowers at the traffic signal. Or…” He paused, glancing at her. “…the woman drinking tea at a Chandni Chowk stall.”
Her chest tightened. She should have expected it, yet hearing herself named as one of his ‘moments’ unsettled her. She did not want to be catalogued, framed, captured. She wanted to remain untouchable, like the lines she drew on paper—neat, predictable, hers. “I’m not one of your photographs,” she said. “I’m not asking you to be,” Kabir replied. “But you already are.”
They stood in silence after that, the rain falling harder, pooling at their feet. The lane smelled of wet earth and frying pakoras from a nearby stall. Maya’s stomach grumbled unexpectedly. Kabir grinned. “Hungry?” She glared at him, but he was already walking toward the vendor. Minutes later he returned with two paper plates, steam rising from the food. He handed her one without asking. “I don’t eat street food,” she protested. “Then consider this an experiment,” he said. “Architects like experiments, right?” She rolled her eyes, but hunger won. She took a bite. The pakora was hot, spicy, burning her tongue, and she coughed. Kabir laughed. “See? Perfect.” She tried not to, but she laughed too, a sound swallowed quickly by the rain.
The storm lasted longer than either expected. They ate, they talked—about nothing at first, then about books she had once loved but abandoned for deadlines, about the places he had photographed, about the city that both suffocated and carried them. She realized he spoke less about himself than about the people he noticed: a rickshaw driver who sang old Kishore Kumar songs, a fruit seller who painted his cart at night. To him, stories were everywhere, stitched into the fabric of Delhi. She listened in spite of herself, pulled into the cadence of his voice.
When the rain finally thinned to a drizzle, Maya realized she was shivering. Kabir noticed and handed her his jacket, thin and damp but warmer than nothing. She hesitated, then accepted it. The gesture unsettled her more than the rain had. She did not like needing anyone. She had built her life to avoid exactly that. Yet here she was, wrapped in the jacket of a man she had met twice by accident, feeling safer than she wanted to admit.
They walked out of the lane together, the city glittering in rain-soaked lights. At the intersection, their paths diverged. She paused, not sure what to say. Kabir simply nodded, as though endings did not need ceremony. “Goodnight, Maya,” he said. She blinked. “How do you know my name?” “You signed your sketchbook,” he replied. “I notice things.” He smiled once more and turned away.
Maya stood there, stunned, the drizzle settling into her hair. She should have been angry at the invasion, at his nerve. But instead, she felt something else—something she had not felt in years. The sense that maybe, just maybe, life was larger than the walls she had drawn around it.
When she returned home, she slipped the damp jacket from her shoulders, folded it carefully, and placed it on her chair. Her sketchbook lay open on the desk, the photograph tucked inside. She looked at it once more before switching off the lamp. For the first time in a long while, she fell asleep smiling.
Episode 4 – Lines and Frames
The week folded into itself like tracing paper—thin, translucent, bearing faint impressions of what had been drawn before. Maya’s days blurred between design presentations, site inspections, and late-night drafting sessions under the harsh white of office lights. She had spent years perfecting this rhythm, building walls of order around her life, each hour plotted like a blueprint. But lately, those walls felt strangely permeable, as though something soft were pressing from the other side. She blamed the rain, the city, coincidence—anything except the truth that kept slipping through her thoughts like light through latticework: Kabir. He had not called her, not messaged, not tried to find her again. That should have comforted her, and somehow it did not. Instead, she caught herself glancing around cafés, scanning Metro compartments, searching for a silhouette with a camera. It irritated her, this quiet anticipation.
It was a Friday evening when their orbits collided again. Maya had gone to her usual café in Khan Market, a small corner place tucked above a bookstore where she liked to sketch in peace. She had just spread out her tracing sheets when she heard the faint click of a shutter. She looked up sharply, ready to scold—and froze. Kabir stood at the counter, ordering coffee, his camera dangling at his side, eyes widening as he spotted her. “You again,” he said, grinning as if fate had a sense of humor. She sighed, pretending to be annoyed, though her lips betrayed a smile. “You really need to stop appearing like this,” she muttered. “Or you need to stop appearing where I am,” he replied easily, taking the chair across from her without asking.
For a while they said nothing. She sketched the facade of an old haveli she had seen in Shahjahanabad, while he quietly observed the room, occasionally lifting his camera. The silence between them was oddly comfortable, like the pause between heartbeats. Eventually he leaned forward, nodding at her drawing. “You make lines. I collect moments,” he said. “Both are ways to hold time still, I guess.” She raised an eyebrow. “Moments fade. Buildings last.” “Do they?” he countered softly. “Even stone crumbles. But sometimes, one photograph keeps a moment alive forever.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a small envelope. Inside were two prints—one of her at the tea stall, the other from the night they ate pakoras, her head tilted back in laughter she didn’t remember giving him. She stared, stunned. “You kept this?” “Of course,” Kabir said. “You don’t realize how rare it is to catch someone unguarded.”
Something shifted inside her then, like a pane of glass coming loose. She had spent years curating her own image—precise, polished, in control. And here he was, handing her pieces of herself she had not known existed. “You shouldn’t keep photographing me,” she said, but her voice lacked conviction. “Maybe I can’t help it,” he admitted. “You make me want to see more carefully.”
They spent hours there, the café growing quieter around them. She told him about her childhood love for drawing temples, how her father used to take her to Humayun’s Tomb on Sunday mornings. He told her about his years wandering cities with nothing but a secondhand camera, the way he sometimes shot weddings to pay rent, though he preferred the streets. They were opposite in almost everything: she craved structure; he thrived in chaos. Yet their differences folded together seamlessly, like the negative and positive of a photograph.
When they finally stepped out, the market was glittering under fairy lights strung across the lane. The air smelled of baked bread and diesel. They walked slowly, neither in a hurry to part. At the crossing, Kabir pointed his camera toward her. “One more?” he asked. She hesitated, then shook her head. “Not tonight.” “Alright,” he said, lowering it without protest, and something in that simple acceptance warmed her more than the lights did.
Later, alone in her apartment, Maya spread the two prints on her desk. The woman in them looked alive in a way she barely recognized. She traced the outlines with her finger, feeling the distance between who she had been and who she was becoming. Then she slid them carefully into her sketchbook, between sheets of unfinished blueprints, as if they belonged there.
Kabir, back in his cramped flat, pinned a fresh contact sheet on the wall. Most of the frames were of strangers, fleeting and nameless. But at the center he placed the new one of Maya—the one he had clicked secretly as she bent over her sketchbook, lips curved in quiet concentration. He stared at it for a long time, then turned off the light.
That night, as Delhi hummed beyond their separate windows, both lay awake thinking of the other—she tracing lines in the dark, he framing possibilities in silence—unaware that the distance between their worlds had already begun to collapse.
Episode 5 – Shadows of the Past
Maya had not seen Raghav in almost two years, and yet the moment she heard his voice echo through the glass atrium of the hotel lobby, her body went still as if struck by a memory she had sworn she buried. She had come only to deliver the revised design pitch to a client—a quick meeting, in and out—but there he was, shaking hands with someone by the elevator, laughing that warm, practiced laugh she had once mistaken for safety. Her breath caught in her throat. He looked the same: sharp suit, polished shoes, the faint smugness of someone who never had to doubt being chosen. He had been her fiancé, once. They had planned a life together—an apartment in Greater Kailash, a dog, vacations penciled into shared calendars. Until the day he decided she was too cold, too distant, too lost in her work to be a woman who could build a home. He had left with barely a conversation, just a message: You love buildings more than people. I can’t live in a house where I don’t exist.
Now he spotted her across the lobby, surprise flashing in his eyes, quickly masked by a smile. “Maya,” he said, striding over. She gripped her sketch tube tighter. “Raghav.” “You look… different,” he said. “Happier, maybe?” She forced a polite smile. “You look exactly the same.” They stood in awkward silence as people passed around them like currents. He glanced at her folder. “Still working like you breathe it, I see.” “Still judging like it’s a sport,” she shot back before she could stop herself. He chuckled, unfazed. “I heard you were engaged to your deadlines now.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but before she could, another voice cut through the tension. “Maya?” Kabir’s. She turned sharply. He stood near the revolving door, hair wind-ruffled, camera slung as always, looking as out of place in the corporate lobby as a monsoon cloud in summer. “You forgot your sketchbook at the café,” he said, holding it out. She blinked, startled that he had come all this way. Raghav looked between them, eyebrows lifting slightly. “And you are?” “Kabir,” he said simply, offering no explanation, no handshake. His gaze stayed on Maya, calm but steady, as if daring her to flinch.
Something inside her shifted. She stepped closer to Kabir, taking the sketchbook. “Thank you,” she said quietly. Raghav’s eyes flickered, just enough for her to see. “Well,” he said lightly, “nice to see you’re… social now.” And with that he walked away, his cologne lingering like a ghost.
They left together, the tension clinging to her like static. Outside, the afternoon had turned heavy, the sky smudged with storm. Kabir didn’t ask who Raghav was, but she could feel the question sitting between them. Finally she said, “He was someone I almost built a life with.” “Almost,” Kabir echoed gently. “He thought I was too cold,” she said, the words tasting like rust. “He said I loved buildings more than people.” Kabir was quiet for a moment. Then: “Maybe he didn’t see that buildings are made to hold people. Loving one is loving the other, in your way.” She stared at him, startled by the simplicity of it, the way he did not flinch from her shadows. “You talk like life is poetry,” she muttered. “Maybe it is,” he said.
They walked toward the main road. The storm broke before they reached the crossing. They ducked into the awning of a shuttered shop, the rain cascading off the edge like broken glass. Maya stood trembling slightly, though not from cold. Raghav’s words had reopened something she thought had healed—an old scar humming under her ribs. Kabir watched her silently, then lifted his camera. “Don’t,” she said sharply. “Not now.” “I’m not taking your picture,” he said softly. “I’m just… holding the moment. So you know it’s real, and you’re still standing in it.”
The words hit her like a crack of lightning. She hated how easily he saw through her, how gently he named the things she worked so hard to hide. She turned away, blinking hard. “I hate that he can still make me feel small,” she whispered. “Then let me remind you,” Kabir said, “you are not.”
The rain softened, and they stepped out. By the time they reached her car, the tension had thinned. “Do you always rescue people from their pasts?” she asked, trying to sound light. “Only the ones who pretend they don’t need rescuing,” he said, and smiled that unpolished smile that disarmed her more than any charm ever had.
That night, Maya sat at her desk long after midnight, blueprints untouched, staring at the photograph tucked inside her sketchbook. For the first time, the version of herself in the picture did not feel distant. It felt possible.
Episode 6 – The Gallery of Faces
Kabir’s message came on a Thursday evening, brief and almost shy: There’s an exhibition tomorrow. My work. Come if you want. No pressure. He attached a location pin—an old restored haveli turned gallery space in Shahpur Jat. Maya stared at the screen for a long time, debating. It wasn’t that she feared art galleries; she had wandered through plenty in college, tracing arches and shadows with the same hunger she brought to ancient temples. What unsettled her was the thought of seeing him through other people’s eyes, of walking into his world and realizing she was just another fleeting moment pinned to a wall. Yet curiosity gnawed at her. And something else, quieter, that she didn’t name.
The next evening she went. The haveli stood at the end of a narrow lane strung with fairy lights, its sandstone walls glowing in the soft dusk. Inside, the rooms were dim and intimate, the air smelling faintly of turpentine and old wood. Photographs lined the walls in neat grids, lit by warm spotlights. People moved slowly from frame to frame, murmuring. And there he was, standing near the far wall, black shirt, sleeves rolled, hair falling untamed across his forehead. For a moment she simply watched him—how still he stood, hands in his pockets, eyes scanning the crowd as though he was waiting without waiting. Then he saw her. Surprise flickered across his face, quickly chased by something softer. He did not walk over. He let her come to him.
Maya drifted through the rooms, trying to pretend she wasn’t searching for something. The photographs were unlike anything she expected. Not polished or posed, but alive: a rickshaw driver laughing mid-song, two women sharing an umbrella, a boy leaping into the Yamuna river with arms flung like wings. Each frame felt like a heartbeat caught mid-beat. And then she saw them—tucked in the corner of a side wall, almost hidden. Three photographs of her. One at the tea stall, eyes lost beyond the frame. One laughing in the rain, hair plastered to her face. One bent over her sketchbook, lips curved in concentration.
She froze. The air seemed to tilt. People passed behind her, oblivious, murmuring about composition and lighting. But all she saw was herself—unmasked, unscripted, laid bare on a wall. Her heart thudded. She wanted to be furious. She wanted to demand why. Instead she stood rooted, because the strangest thing was this: she didn’t hate them. The girl in the photographs looked unburdened, alive in ways she barely recognized. A version of herself she had long ago walled off.
“Too much?” Kabir’s voice was quiet behind her. She turned. He stood a few steps back, hands loose at his sides, gaze steady but unreadable. “You should have asked,” she said, though her voice wavered. “I know,” he admitted. “I almost didn’t. But… you changed the way I see. I wanted people to see what I saw.” “Which is what, exactly?” she asked, sharper than she meant. “Someone who thinks she’s made of stone but is actually full of light,” he said.
Her throat tightened. She wanted to laugh it off, to tell him he was being absurd, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead she said, “You’ve been watching me like a project.” “No,” he said softly. “Like a miracle I almost missed.”
Silence stretched. The hum of voices faded. Somewhere, a wine glass clinked. Maya’s pulse roared in her ears. She forced herself to look away, back at the wall. The photographs blurred. “I don’t want to be anyone’s muse,” she whispered. “Then don’t be,” he said. “Be the story. I just want to be allowed to witness it.”
Something cracked inside her then, sharp and terrifying—a door she had kept barred so long she had forgotten what lay behind it. She stepped back, shaking her head. “I can’t,” she said, and fled before he could answer.
The night air slapped her as she stepped out. She walked fast through the narrow lanes, past laughing couples and glowing shopfronts, her chest aching as though she’d run miles. She hated how seen she felt, how exposed. She hated more how part of her had wanted to stay, to stand there and let him see her until she recognized herself.
At home she stripped off her heels, sat on the cold floor, and stared at the half-finished facade on her drafting table. She tried to lose herself in lines, in logic, but the walls she drew kept collapsing into his eyes. Finally she shoved the sheets aside, curled her knees to her chest, and sat in the dark.
Across the city, Kabir remained in the gallery long after the crowd left. He stood before her photographs, hands in his pockets, throat tight. He wondered if he had pushed too far, too fast. But he also knew something had shifted. She had looked at the girl in those pictures not like a stranger, but like someone she might want to be again. He switched off the lights and walked home through the quiet lanes, the echoes of her still caught inside his ribs like light in an unclosed shutter.
Episode 7 – The Silence Between Them
Maya did not go to cafés for a week. She avoided Khan Market, skipped her usual Metro route, even took cabs to work despite hating traffic. It wasn’t fear, she told herself, just space. Space to remember how to breathe without the echo of his voice inside her ribs. The night at the gallery had split something open—standing in front of those photographs had felt like standing without clothes, without armor. And she didn’t know what frightened her more: that he had seen her so clearly, or that a part of her had wanted to let him. So she drowned herself in work, becoming ruthless with her hours, her designs, her silence. Days bled into each other like spilled ink, leaving behind nothing but exhaustion.
Kabir didn’t call. He didn’t text either. That should have been a relief. Instead it pressed on her like an ache she couldn’t name. She told herself this was what she wanted: distance, clean air, the return of control. But in the late hours, when the city went quiet and her apartment sank into the hum of the refrigerator, she caught herself staring at her sketchbook where the photographs were hidden, wondering if he had erased her from his wall or if she still hung there among his strangers.
One evening, worn thin by deadlines, she left the office without direction. The sky was bruised with the tail end of sunset, Delhi caught between heat and night. She wandered through Rajpath, the broad avenue near India Gate, where families picnicked on the lawns and vendors sold candy floss that glowed like pink clouds in the fading light. She used to come here with her father when she was small, racing paper boats in the fountains. She hadn’t been back in years. She sat on a low stone wall, watching the monument’s silhouette darken against the rising moon. The air was warm, smelling faintly of roasted corn.
She didn’t hear him approach. “I wasn’t sure if you’d come back here,” Kabir said. Her breath caught. She turned slowly. He stood a few feet away, hands in his pockets, shoulders loose but eyes careful, as though he feared any sudden move might send her fleeing again. “I didn’t follow you,” he added quickly. “I just… come here sometimes when I can’t sleep.”
For a moment neither spoke. The world around them dimmed into soft shadows. Finally she said, “You shouldn’t have put me on that wall.” “I know,” he said. “I didn’t do it to claim you. I did it because it was the only way I knew how to say you changed something in me.” She stared at the ground. “You made me feel like a stranger to myself.” “Maybe,” he said gently, “I made you remember who you were before you started hiding.”
Silence stretched. A child’s balloon drifted into the night sky. Maya’s chest tightened painfully. “I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered. “Do what?” “Be seen without breaking.”
Kabir stepped closer, just enough for her to see the exhaustion under his quiet, the way he was holding himself still. “Then don’t break,” he said. “Just be. I can wait.”
The words sank into her like rain on dry earth, slow and deep. She realized with sudden clarity how long it had been since anyone had offered her time instead of demands. She looked at him, really looked—the lines of his face, the faint stubble, the way the wind stirred his hair. There was no demand in his eyes, only an open space where she could choose.
She exhaled, a trembling sound. “You make everything sound easy,” she said. “It’s not,” he replied. “It’s just worth it.”
They stood like that for a long while, side by side, saying nothing. The silence between them was no longer sharp. It was soft, like the hush before dawn.
When she finally rose to leave, he didn’t ask where she was going or when he would see her next. He simply nodded once, as if acknowledging something fragile had shifted. She walked back through the lawns, her footsteps slow, the night air cool on her face.
At home, she placed her sketchbook on the table and for the first time did not tuck the photographs away. She left them lying open beside her drawings, as though they belonged.
Across the city, Kabir stood under the shadow of India Gate long after she left, camera untouched at his side. He felt the ache of holding back and the relief of not losing her completely, both braided together. He tilted his head to the sky where the stars were just beginning to break through the haze, and for the first time in days, he let himself breathe.
Episode 8 – Fragile Truths
The next time Maya saw Kabir, he was on the ground. It was a Sunday morning, pale sunlight dripping over the stone steps of Agrasen ki Baoli, where she had come to sketch the arches. The place was almost empty, just the echo of pigeons and her pencil scratching faintly on paper. She hadn’t expected him, though part of her had grown used to the city conspiring to place him near her. She saw him through the corner of her eye first—moving slowly down the steps, camera in hand, crouching to frame the way the light struck the ancient stones. Then, abruptly, his body folded. The camera clattered on the steps. She was running before her mind caught up.
“Kabir!” Her voice cracked against the quiet. He was crumpled on the stone, breathing shallow, eyes squeezed shut. Panic surged like static under her skin. “Hey, look at me. Kabir—” He groaned, tried to sit up, failed. She steadied him, heart pounding. “What’s happening? Are you hurt?” His lips were pale, his shirt damp with cold sweat. “Just… dizzy,” he whispered. “It happens.” “This isn’t just dizzy,” she said, voice trembling with anger. “We’re going to a hospital.” “No.” His eyes snapped open, dark and sharp despite the weakness. “No hospitals. Please. Just—help me sit.”
She hesitated, then obeyed, easing him upright, his head against her shoulder. His weight startled her; he always seemed made of restless air, not something that could collapse. They sat like that until his breathing steadied, though his face stayed drained of color. When he finally spoke, his voice was frayed. “You weren’t supposed to see this.” “What is this?” she asked quietly. He closed his eyes. Silence stretched. Then, softly, “I have a heart condition. Congenital. Nothing dramatic. It just… steals my strength sometimes. Like a thief.”
The words sank into her slowly, heavy as stone. “You should have told me,” she whispered. “Why? So you’d pity me?” “So I wouldn’t think you just vanished because you didn’t care.”
He flinched at that, opened his eyes. They were not defiant now, only tired. “I didn’t want to become something fragile in your eyes,” he said. “I’ve spent years trying to be more than the thing that could break.”
Her throat tightened. She thought of the photographs on his wall, of how alive they all looked, how eternal. She had not imagined that the hands holding the camera were racing against time. “How bad is it?” she asked. He smiled faintly, without humor. “Bad enough to make doctors frown. Not bad enough to stop me yet. I just… don’t know for how long.”
The arches above them seemed to sway. She had lived her life building for permanence, anchoring everything in stone. He lived knowing the ground could give way any moment, and still he chased beauty like it could outpace the end. Something inside her cracked. “Why keep pushing yourself?” she asked. “Because,” he said, and his voice was steady again, “if my time is short, I want it full. Full of things that matter. Like light. Like laughter. Like…” He faltered, met her gaze. “…like you.”
Her breath caught. The words should have scared her. Instead they settled deep, like roots breaking through dry ground. She had tried so hard to be untouched, unneeding. Yet here he was, all vulnerability and defiance, and she could not look away.
They sat in silence until the sun climbed high, warming the stones. Finally she said, “You need to go home. Rest.” “Bossy,” he murmured, but let her help him up. She walked him to an auto, fussing despite herself. He grinned weakly as he climbed in. “You’re scowling,” he said. “I don’t scowl.” “You do. It’s terrifying. I like it.” She shook her head, but when the auto drove off, she stood watching until it disappeared.
Back at her apartment, she paced. Her heart still felt rattled, like something had been struck off-center. She had thought of him as unstoppable, inevitable as weather. Now she couldn’t unsee the fragility beneath his ease, the finite thread running through his days. It scared her in ways she could not name. And yet, beneath the fear, something else had taken root—a tenderness she could not kill even if she tried.
That night she opened her sketchbook but did not draw. Instead she wrote, words spilling raw and awkward across the page: You make the world look less like concrete and more like breath. I don’t know how to stop wanting to be in it with you. She stared at the sentence until the ink blurred. Then she folded the page shut, as if hiding it would make it less true.
Across the city, Kabir lay on his narrow bed, chest still aching faintly. He had not meant for her to see him fall. He had spent years perfecting the illusion of invincibility, all while the clock ticked quietly in his blood. But when her arms caught him, he had not felt small. He had felt held. He closed his eyes, and for the first time in days, sleep came without the weight of fear pressing against his ribs.
Episode 9 – A Hundred Letters
Maya found the letters by accident. She had gone to Kabir’s flat to return the jacket he had once draped over her shoulders in the rain, though really she had gone because the thought of him alone with his silence and that fragile heart was unbearable. The door was ajar when she knocked, swinging inward with a faint creak, and she hesitated before stepping inside. The room was small, sunlight slicing through the half-drawn curtains, dust suspended in the beam like tiny galaxies. His wall of photographs dominated the space—faces and moments frozen mid-breath—but what caught her were the notebooks stacked haphazardly on the desk, their spines frayed with use. One had fallen open. Words sprawled across the page in his restless handwriting. She meant to close it, to respect the border of his privacy, but her eyes betrayed her.
The letter began without greeting, as if it had been waiting for her: Today I watched her laugh at something small, and it felt like watching the first bird return after winter. I don’t know why she makes the air feel lighter. Maybe she carries her own weather. Maya’s throat tightened. She turned the page. She builds worlds out of lines. I keep trying to catch the spaces in between where she breathes. Another page: If I could, I would take her to every place I’ve ever seen light fall beautifully, and tell her: this is how you look to me.
Her fingers trembled as she turned page after page, realizing they were all about her. Not poems exactly, not confessions either—just fragments, like scattered negatives from a film he had never developed. They traced her from the tea stall to the café to the rainstorm, each moment pinned in words the way he pinned photographs. And between the lines, like faint pencil marks beneath ink, she saw the shadow of his fear—that his time might run out before he could tell her any of this aloud.
She sank into the chair, the world tilting. No one had ever looked at her this way, as if she were something luminous instead of something guarded. She thought of how carefully he had hidden his illness, not out of pride but out of the desperate wish to be seen for what he was, not what might happen to him. He had loved her, quietly, fiercely, without asking her to notice. And she had spent weeks pretending not to.
The sound of footsteps made her jerk upright. Kabir stood in the doorway, hair tousled, shirt wrinkled, surprise flickering into alarm as his eyes darted to the open notebook. He froze. She opened her mouth, then closed it. Silence roared between them. Finally she said, very softly, “You write about me.”
Kabir exhaled, shoulders sagging as if something heavy had slipped from them. “I wasn’t going to let you see,” he said. “They weren’t meant to be… weapons. Or traps. Just… echoes. I had to put you somewhere or you’d burn holes through me.”
Her eyes stung. “Why didn’t you tell me?” “Because love has always left me,” he said simply. “And if you left, I wanted to at least keep the version of you that stayed.”
Something inside her cracked open like old plaster. She stepped toward him, slow, like approaching a wild bird. “You think I’m going to leave?” “Aren’t you?” he whispered. “Everyone does. Eventually.”
Maya shook her head. “Not everyone. Not me.”
His eyes widened, the world pausing in their dark. For the first time she touched his face, her palm cupping the stubble-rough line of his jaw. He closed his eyes, as if the gesture itself was too much light. “I’m scared,” he admitted. “Good,” she said, her voice breaking. “So am I.”
They stood like that in the hush of the little room, surrounded by his photographs, his letters, his fragile defiance. She could feel his heart beating fast beneath her hand, rebellious and uncertain and alive. For once she didn’t try to still it. She let herself be pulled into his orbit.
That night she went home and began to write. Not sketches or measurements or deadlines—just words, messy and uneven. She wrote about the way he made silence feel like safety, about how his laughter loosened something knotted inside her, about how the fear of losing him was the sharpest proof that she wanted him near. She wrote until dawn blurred the city skyline, until her wrist ached and her heart felt raw and clean. She slipped the pages into an envelope and wrote his name on it, though she didn’t yet know when she would give it to him.
Across the city, Kabir sat at his desk staring at the empty page he had meant to write on, her scent still faint on the air from where she had stood. He did not know what she had seen in his notebooks or what she would do with the knowledge, only that something in her eyes had changed. It was the same look she wore when she finished a building plan—certainty forged from chaos. He touched the page gently, then began to write again, not because he had to, but because for the first time, he believed she might stay to read it.
Episode 10 – A Hundred Steps to You
The winter morning was pale and breathless when Maya stepped out of the auto at India Gate. The air was sharp with fog, biting at her cheeks, the sky a washed-out silver that made the monument loom like the ghost of something eternal. She had not planned this, not really—yet her feet had known where to go. The letter she had written to Kabir lay folded in her coat pocket, its edges soft from being read and reread through sleepless nights. She hadn’t called him. She wanted the choice to be hers, not pushed by coincidence or storms or the city’s hidden magnetism. She wanted to walk to him. If he was here. If he hadn’t decided to let her go quietly the way he let everything drift once he had caught its light.
But he was there. A lone figure standing near the fountain, hands tucked into his jacket, hair damp with frost. Even at a distance she could see how thin he looked, how the cold clung to him like gravity. For a long moment she only watched, her heart tightening painfully at how small and breakable he seemed against the massive stone arch. Then she drew a breath and began to walk.
She counted the steps in her head. One. Two. Three. Each one cracking through the ice around her ribs. Four. Five. Six. He turned as if he could feel her moving toward him through the mist. Seven. Eight. Nine. Their eyes locked across the expanse. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. His breath made soft ghosts in the cold air. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. She thought of the first photograph, of the girl he had seen at the tea stall who had not known she was still capable of being found. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. She thought of the gallery, her face pinned to the wall like a secret he had been trying to keep alive. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. She thought of the letters. A hundred fragments of her refracted through his wonder. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. The fog thinned around them, the world shrinking to the sound of her boots on stone.
By the time she reached fifty, her throat burned. At seventy, her eyes stung. At ninety, she could see the tremor in his hands though he stood perfectly still. And at one hundred, she stopped in front of him, chest heaving, tears cold on her cheeks. He looked at her as if he was memorizing her in case the world ended in the next breath.
“You came,” he whispered.
“I walked,” she said. Her voice was rough, but steady. “Every step, I chose.”
His face crumpled, the careful composure he always wore shattering like glass. She reached into her pocket, pulled out the letter, and pressed it into his palm. “These are the things I should have said,” she told him. “All the pieces you saw in me before I could believe they existed.”
His fingers curled around the paper like it was something holy. “I don’t know how long I have,” he said quietly.
“Then we won’t waste any of it,” she replied.
Something broke open between them—not with the sharpness of stone splitting, but like ice thawing under sunlight. He reached for her, slow, as if afraid she might still vanish. She stepped into his arms and felt his heart hammering against her, fragile and fierce and impossibly alive. The monument loomed above them, the fog curling like breath, the world holding still as if granting them this one unbroken moment.
They stood like that for a long time, folded into each other while the city stirred awake around them—vendors wheeling carts, pigeons wheeling overhead, sunlight slipping gold through the haze. When they finally pulled apart, Kabir was smiling, weak but luminous. “You walked a hundred steps,” he said, wonder in his voice.
Maya shook her head. “No,” she said. “I walked to you. That’s different.”
He laughed softly, the sound catching on the cold air like music. They began to walk together along the wide boulevard, their hands brushing, then clasping. Ahead, the day waited—fragile, finite, but theirs. For the first time, Maya did not look back to check if her walls were still standing. She knew they weren’t. And she was glad.
Because love, she realized, was not about permanence or safety or control. It was about choosing someone in full knowledge of how easily they could be lost—and walking to them anyway.
