A. K. Menon
It started with a spilled cup of coffee and a Shakespeare quote. Dr. Aanya Roy, Head of Literature at St. Helena’s College, was pacing across the staff lounge, a worn-out copy of King Lear in one hand and a cappuccino in the other, when Dr. Kabir Mehta entered, unsuspecting, balancing his own mug and a stack of philosophy journals.
Aanya turned mid-step and collided with him. Coffee splashed on both of them, papers flew, and silence echoed—before she muttered, “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.” Her lips twisted in dry amusement. Kabir blinked, then grinned.
“Is that an insult or an invitation to apologize?”
She laughed—an impulsive, surprised sound—and from that moment, something unspoken began between them.
Both were in their late thirties, respected in their fields, long past the reckless fires of youth but not yet dulled by routine. They’d seen each other at staff meetings, exchanged nods in corridors, but never crossed paths meaningfully. Until now.
Their coffee collisions turned into morning routines. First, shared glances. Then conversations. Then debates that stretched across lecture breaks. He admired her sharp mind, her sarcasm laced with poetry. She found his calm intellect refreshing, especially in a campus full of posturing academics.
It wasn’t a whirlwind—it was a gentle, persistent breeze, like spring tiptoeing into an old city. Neither sought love. Neither denied its slow blooming either.
One Wednesday, as sunlight slanted through the ivy-covered windows of the library, Kabir found her tracing lines in an old Emily Dickinson anthology.
“Still reading her?” he asked.
“She reminds me that restraint is sometimes the deepest form of desire,” Aanya replied without looking up.
“That’s cryptic.”
She glanced at him. “You teach Wittgenstein. You should appreciate cryptic.”
They smiled at each other in that quiet, charged way that happens when two people realize they’re speaking in code only the other understands.
Over the months, their lives twined like old vines. Campus gossip simmered. Some whispered, others speculated. They didn’t confirm or deny. They just…were. Present in each other’s silences and absences.
Aanya didn’t believe in fairy tales. Her first marriage—brief and bruising—had taught her the weight of misplaced trust. Kabir, widowed young, had poured himself into academia, emerging a stoic man who rarely showed the cracks beneath.
Still, they found each other.
Not in grand declarations, but in the small things. Her Post-it notes in his books. His habit of leaving her favorite tea—chamomile and mint—by her office door during exam weeks. Long walks after seminars. Quiet dinners. A shared umbrella in the rain. The intimacy of routine.
One rainy afternoon, as they took shelter near the old banyan tree behind the auditorium, Kabir asked, “Why haven’t you written anything new in the last two years?”
Aanya stiffened. “I don’t write for others anymore.”
“That’s a shame.”
She studied his face. “And you? Still teaching students how to think without ever showing them what you feel?”
“That’s deliberate.”
“Cowardly.”
Their eyes locked. He stepped closer. “And you? Are you hiding behind metaphors because real love scares you?”
A beat. Then another. Then silence.
She said softly, “It terrifies me. Happy?”
“No,” he replied. “Just honest.”
They didn’t speak of love again for weeks. But something had shifted.
One late November night, after a college function, they lingered on the terrace long after the lights dimmed. Aanya stood against the railing, the city’s scattered lights flickering in her eyes.
“You ever think about what happens if this ends?” she asked.
“All the time,” Kabir replied.
“And?”
“I’d still choose to begin.”
She turned to him, eyes unreadable. “Even knowing I’m not easy?”
He stepped forward. “Nothing worth having ever is.”
She kissed him then. Soft, tentative, almost afraid. But his arms around her were steady, and for once, neither of them ran.
The affair deepened. It still wasn’t loud or boastful. They didn’t parade affection. But in faculty meetings, her chair angled slightly toward his. In group lunches, he passed her the extra napkin before she asked. When she fell ill, he canceled a symposium to bring her homemade soup.
And yet, as in all things human, the simplicity began to fray.
An offer came. A prestigious fellowship for Aanya in Boston. One year. She hadn’t applied—an old mentor had nominated her. She told Kabir on a quiet Sunday, in her apartment filled with books and monsoon light.
“You should go,” he said after a pause.
“That’s it?”
“What more can I say?”
“That you’ll miss me. That this changes things.”
He looked at her, pained. “Of course I’ll miss you. But your words deserve that audience. Even if it’s oceans away.”
She stared at him. “I didn’t want you to say go. I wanted you to ask me to stay.”
“And if I did?” he asked. “Would you have stayed?”
She didn’t answer.
She left in December. The night before her flight, they sat together in silence. She rested her head on his shoulder. He held her hand. Neither said goodbye.
Emails came first. Then infrequent calls. Time zones stretched connection. But more than that, it was the weight of unspoken fears. Aanya immersed herself in teaching, lectures, cold Boston evenings. Kabir continued his quiet life in Delhi—philosophy classes, afternoon walks, solitary dinners.
They weren’t broken. Just paused. Or perhaps changed.
Ten months later, Aanya returned—not with fireworks, but on a misty morning, stepping into the campus with a tote full of books and uncertain hope.
He was in the library, thumbing through a new journal. She stood behind him.
“You’re reading Ethics and Uncertainty. Very on brand,” she said.
He turned. Their eyes met.
“You’re early,” he said.
“Couldn’t stay away.”
He said nothing. Just looked at her.
She took a deep breath. “I wrote a new piece. It’s about waiting. About missing someone in a way that doesn’t hurt, but holds.”
“Did you finish it?”
She nodded. “But I haven’t published it.”
“Why not?”
“I wanted you to read it first.”
A long silence.
Then he stepped forward, placed his palm on her cheek. “Read it to me. Over coffee?”
She smiled. “Only if you promise not to quote Wittgenstein halfway through.”
“No promises,” he whispered.
They walked out of the library together.
And just like that, they resumed the story they had never stopped writing.
Kabir had never spoken much about his past. People assumed it was because he was a private man, but the truth was simpler—memory, to him, was a place he visited carefully. His wife, Radhika, had died in an accident eight years before he met Aanya. They had married young, both chasing tenure-track dreams, and moved from one university town to another. Radhika had a laugh that could disarm cynics and a stubbornness that matched Kabir’s quiet resistance.
When she passed away—just like that, a speeding truck, a rainy street—Kabir became a ghost of himself. He buried himself in lectures, finding strange comfort in the logic of Kant, the cold clarity of Descartes. Philosophy didn’t heal him, but it helped him survive. Love, he told himself, was a chapter closed.
And then came Aanya. With her chaotic office full of crumpled poems, her refusal to drink tea without two spoons of sugar, and her maddening ability to quote Sylvia Plath during faculty meetings.
She reminded him that grief doesn’t cancel out the possibility of joy. That hearts can be broken more than once, but they also remember how to beat again.
Aanya’s past, too, was carved in quiet scars.
As a university student in Pune, she had fallen for her mentor—a brilliant, troubled man who read her poems and promised her the world. He taught her how to wield words, how to speak softly and still be heard. She loved him the way young people do—with everything and no caution.
But the power imbalance lingered like a shadow. When the relationship turned cold, and he began favoring other students, Aanya felt discarded, humiliated. She didn’t leave the house for weeks. When she did, it was with a new armor—irony, wit, and a refusal to be seen as someone needing love.
Years later, when she met Kabir, she didn’t recognize the quiet way affection could grow. She waited for betrayal, for the other shoe to drop. It never did.
Because Kabir didn’t try to possess her. He simply stayed.
Now, two decades after that first spilled coffee, their hair grayer and steps slower, Aanya and Kabir sat in their bookshop café, a tiny bell ringing every time someone opened the door.
The shop, Marginalia, had become a local legend—students came for poetry slams, retirees for conversations, and couples for the way light fell through the old glass panes in the afternoon.
Aanya sipped her tea, fingers curled around the chipped cup they never threw away.
Kabir read a letter aloud—one from a former student.
“She says our ‘Between Lectures’ class changed her life. That it made her believe love could be gentle.”
Aanya smiled. “We should have told her it can also be messy.”
“But worth it,” Kabir added.
Their eyes met, softened by time, but still carrying the same fire.
“Do you regret not marrying?” he asked suddenly.
She raised an eyebrow. “Why? Want to propose now?”
He chuckled. “I mean it.”
“No,” she said. “What we have… it’s beyond paper. You’re my home. That’s enough.”
The bell rang. A young couple walked in, drenched from the rain. They laughed as they shook off their umbrellas and looked around.
“Do you think they’ll find what we did?” Aanya whispered.
Kabir took her hand.
“If they’re lucky.”
That evening, they walked together to the campus amphitheater, now mostly used for student events. The wind was cool, the lights dimmed. A poster announced an upcoming inter-departmental cultural fest—”Kalaangan: Celebrating Arts & Ideas.”
Kabir nudged her. “You should give the keynote this time. Show the kids how it’s done.”
Aanya laughed. “Only if you moderate the open mic night. Imagine you, quoting Ghalib.”
He placed a hand on her back. “Stranger things have happened. We fell in love, didn’t we?”
She smiled.
And in the golden quiet of that late afternoon, surrounded by books and memories, two professors who had once fallen in love between lectures sat side by side, still writing their story—word by word, day by day.
