Rajesh Agarwal
1
Mira Kaul stepped off the plane from Pune with her sketchbook clutched so tightly in her hand that the cover bent slightly at the corners, the soft paper bruised by the pressure of her restless thumb. The Bangalore Airport smelled of strong coffee, polished floors, and quiet anticipation—a place caught somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, where strangers sat hunched over phones, and neon signs cast pools of sterile light across tired faces. Her connecting flight to Chennai wouldn’t leave until dawn, which meant six long hours of wandering in a place that wasn’t quite hers, surrounded by voices she didn’t know, but that somehow made her feel less alone. Dragging her small navy-blue suitcase behind her, she walked past a row of empty chairs, pausing at Gate 23 not because her flight would depart from there, but because something about its emptiness felt comforting. Mira had always found a strange calm in places meant for waiting: doctor’s clinics, station platforms, and now, airport gates past midnight. She sank into a cold plastic chair, fished a pencil from her pocket, and flipped open her sketchbook to a blank page, letting the scratch of graphite on paper drown out the noise of announcements echoing through the terminal. Outside the large glass window, the airport runway glowed under harsh yellow lights, and a plane taxied slowly into the darkness. She glanced at the time on her phone—11:47 p.m.—and let out a slow breath, realising just how much night stretched ahead of her. The thought of meeting her father in Chennai tomorrow tightened something deep inside her chest, but she refused to let her mind travel there yet. Instead, she focused on the shapes and shadows around her: the silhouette of a woman dozing with her bag clutched to her chest, the reflection of blinking lights on the polished floor, the distant hum of suitcase wheels rolling somewhere behind her.
Kabir Suri nearly walked past Gate 23 without looking, his duffel bag bouncing against his hip, guitar pick keychains rattling softly against the zipper. He had arrived from Kochi barely half an hour ago, his hair still holding the salty scent of the sea breeze, and his morning flight to Delhi felt like an eternity away. Airports at night had always felt strange to him—too many empty chairs, too much light on too many tired faces. He liked to keep moving so he wouldn’t have to think about what waited back home: entrance exams, polite family dinners with conversations that skipped over what really mattered, and the quiet pressure to be someone he wasn’t sure he wanted to be. As he slowed near the window at Gate 23, his gaze caught on the girl sketching intently in a tattered notebook, her brow furrowed as though the world outside her drawing barely existed. There was something strikingly peaceful about her, something that pulled him out of his own restless thoughts. Without deciding to, Kabir dropped into a chair two seats away, slipping off his backpack and stretching his legs until his sneaker tips almost grazed her suitcase. For a few seconds, he stayed silent, eyes scanning the empty gate, the fluorescent reflections, and then drifting back to her sketchbook. “What are you drawing?” he asked, his voice softer than he expected, careful not to startle her. Mira looked up, blinking as though surfacing from a deeper world, pencil frozen mid-stroke. “Nothing special,” she replied, and her voice carried a hesitance edged with curiosity. Kabir smiled, the corners of his mouth lifting in an easy way he’d practiced a thousand times. “Mind if I see?” She hesitated, then turned the sketchbook slightly, revealing a quick charcoal sketch of the very gate they sat in: empty chairs lined like tired soldiers, the hollow glow of the departure board, and a shadowy figure—him—half-formed at the edge of the page.
A soft laugh escaped Kabir’s throat, genuine and brief, as he realised she’d already noticed him before he spoke. “You draw strangers often?” he asked, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, trying not to sound too curious. Mira’s shoulders lifted in a small shrug. “Sometimes. People who look like they’re waiting for something they can’t name.” She immediately regretted how raw that sounded, but Kabir only nodded, as though the words made perfect sense. “Sounds like a lot of us tonight,” he said, glancing around the empty terminal. Silence stretched for a moment, not uncomfortable but tentative, like fresh paint not yet dry. Kabir shifted in his seat, ran a hand through his hair that kept falling over his forehead, and said, “I’m Kabir, by the way.” Mira hesitated, then smiled—a small, cautious smile, but real—and said, “Mira.” They sat there, two names exchanged across plastic chairs, and somewhere beyond them, the airport continued its endless cycle of take-offs and landings. The announcement speakers crackled with a flight bound for Dubai, the blinking lights above Gate 23 reflected in Mira’s wide, thoughtful eyes, and Kabir found himself wondering, for the first time in a long while, if staying still for a few hours might not be so bad. In the quiet space between them, something unspoken settled—a fragile understanding that, for this night at least, neither of them had to keep pretending to be someone else. And outside, the runway lights kept shining into the dark.
2
Minutes blurred into half an hour, and the silence between Mira and Kabir slowly softened into something almost companionable, though neither could quite say how. Kabir’s stomach let out a small, traitorous growl, pulling an embarrassed grin across his face, and Mira, still clutching her sketchbook like a shield, tilted her head and asked if he wanted to get something to eat. Together they rose from the cold chairs at Gate 23, Mira rolling her small suitcase beside her and Kabir slinging his duffel across his shoulder, walking side by side through the mostly deserted terminal. Overhead, signs pointed in bright arrows toward Departures, Arrivals, and Retail, though most shops had their shutters half-down, their neon logos casting lonely reflections across the polished floor. When they reached the food court, it felt like a half-forgotten echo of its daytime self: rows of plastic chairs stood empty, tables bore crumbs and abandoned receipts, and the hum of fridges behind dark counters hummed like a distant engine. Only two stalls remained open—a generic coffee kiosk and a small South Indian place steaming idlis behind foggy glass. Kabir glanced at Mira, a quick, silent question, and she nodded toward the coffee counter. The girl at the register wore an expression caught between exhaustion and boredom, barely lifting her eyes as Kabir ordered two black coffees, then looked to Mira for her preference. “Milk, no sugar,” she murmured, her voice low enough that he had to lean in to hear, and for a fleeting moment, he caught the faint scent of her shampoo—something warm, almost floral—and it tugged at something in him he didn’t have words for. He paid with a crumpled note, waved away Mira’s attempt to offer cash, and together they carried the paper cups to a table by the glass railing that overlooked the lower level of the terminal, where baggage trolleys stood abandoned like silent watchers.
They sat facing each other, elbows propped on the sticky table surface, each cradling the warmth of the cup between cold hands. “So,” Kabir began, his tone lightly teasing but laced with curiosity, “do you always draw random boys who sit too close?” Mira let out a breath of laughter that surprised even her, a sound that felt unfamiliar and freeing at once. “Only the ones who look like they’re about to run away,” she replied, lifting her eyes to meet his with a quiet challenge. Kabir raised his eyebrows, half-amused, half-exposed, and took a sip of coffee that scalded his tongue. “Fair enough,” he said, his grin softening into something smaller, something more honest. Outside the railing, the terminal lay scattered with isolated passengers dozing on benches, scrolling on phones, or staring blankly at blinking flight boards; the hour had thinned the crowd to those too tired to pretend to be awake. Kabir leaned back, resting his shoulders against the hard plastic, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the fluorescent glow. “Truth is,” he confessed after a moment, “airports freak me out a bit. Too many goodbyes, too many people pretending they’re not scared.” Mira nodded, fingers tapping the cardboard rim of her cup. “I know what you mean,” she said quietly. “Feels like everyone’s balancing on the edge of something, but nobody wants to look down.” The words lingered between them, and Kabir’s expression shifted, the practiced humor in his eyes replaced by something rawer, closer to what he didn’t often share. “You heading home?” he asked gently. Mira hesitated, then shook her head. “To Chennai. To see my father. We haven’t spoken properly in… years.” She didn’t explain why; she didn’t need to. Kabir didn’t ask, only nodded with a softness that said he understood distance could stretch wider than geography. “You?” she asked, turning the question back. Kabir rolled the cup slowly between his palms. “Delhi,” he said. “Home. Sort of. I was in Kochi visiting my grandparents. Dad thinks a few days away might ‘clear my head’ before the coaching starts.” The air quotes hung heavy, the words betraying how he felt about them. Mira’s gaze flickered to the guitar pick dangling from his duffel, then back to his eyes. “Coaching for what?” “Engineering,” he replied with a shrug that looked practiced, as though he’d repeated the answer so many times it no longer felt real. “But I’d rather write songs,” he added, almost like a confession slipping out before he could catch it. The honesty startled them both.
The coffee cooled in their cups, the steam fading as the minutes slipped by. Around them, the food court felt like a ship drifting through night: half-lit, mostly empty, but somehow still afloat. Mira set her cup down, tracing the rim with her finger. “You write lyrics?” she asked, voice softer now, less cautious. Kabir nodded, a sheepish smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Mostly in the Notes app,” he admitted. “Nothing finished. Just lines that won’t leave my head.” Mira tilted her head, curious. “What do you write about?” He hesitated, then said, “About people. About wanting to say something real before it’s too late.” The words struck her deeply, perhaps because she’d thought them herself so often. She swallowed, then offered her own small truth: “I sketch people for the same reason. So they don’t just pass by me and disappear.” Kabir looked at her, really looked, as though he’d only now realised that beneath the quiet and the pencil smudges, there was someone fighting the same fear he felt—that of vanishing before anyone truly saw them. The clock on the far wall showed half past midnight, but time had begun to feel irrelevant; it was as though the layover itself had peeled them from the weight of hours. Kabir let out a breath, and Mira caught it, recognising the tremor of relief that came when you finally said what you’d kept hidden. Around them, the fluorescent lights hummed and flickered, the air smelled faintly of burnt coffee and stale pastries, and for a moment, the food court felt less like a stopover and more like a place suspended outside of everything they’d left behind. And somewhere deep down, both Mira and Kabir realised they had crossed an invisible line: from strangers at Gate 23 to something gentler, something that—if only for the night—felt like the start of being seen.
3
They left the empty food court with coffee cups abandoned on the table like silent witnesses, stepping back into the wide, echoing terminal where the air smelled of cleaning fluid and old carpet. The hour had slipped past one a.m., yet the airport still pulsed faintly with life—occasional flight announcements breaking the hush, luggage carts clattering in the distance, and the soft shuffle of late-night travelers drifting past like tired ghosts. Mira walked a little ahead, her suitcase wheels humming over the polished floor, while Kabir matched her pace, his duffel slung low across his back and his head turning often, eyes catching on the strange beauty of places people rarely noticed: a mother asleep against a pillar with her child curled into her side, a row of wheelchairs parked in silent symmetry, a man scrolling endlessly through his phone under the cold glow of a vending machine. They passed closed shops with metal shutters half drawn, each sign promising perfumes and gadgets to people passing through but never staying. Mira paused before a display window stacked with paperback novels no one seemed to touch at this hour, and Kabir watched her reflection in the glass, how her eyes softened when she looked at stories bound between covers. “Do you read all of them?” he asked, nodding at the books, his voice quiet enough to keep the night intact. “Not all,” she admitted, fingers brushing an invisible line across the glass. “But sometimes it feels like if I don’t read them, they’ll vanish before anyone knows they were here.” Kabir smiled, the softest curve of his mouth, and for a moment he wished he could draw too—just to keep this fragment of her preserved somewhere. Instead, he reached into his pocket, pulling out his phone. “Want to see something?” he asked, and without waiting for her answer, he opened his Notes app, scrolling past half-finished thoughts and random phrases until he found a verse he’d written days ago in Kochi, sitting by the sea. Mira stepped closer, close enough that he caught the faint warmth of her shoulder beside his, and she read the words lit on the small screen, the letters slightly crooked from a hurried thumb.
The lines were simple, raw, almost unfinished: “Maybe we’re all postcards, left behind in empty rooms / words scrawled too late to matter, stamps that never saw the sun.” Mira read them twice, each syllable sinking deeper, and when she finally looked up, her eyes shone not with admiration but with something gentler—recognition. “They’re beautiful,” she whispered, and Kabir let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, the one that always caught in his chest when he showed someone what he’d written. “They’re just lines,” he deflected, voice softer now, almost shy beneath the practiced charm. “I never finish anything.” Mira shook her head. “They’re enough,” she said, the words quiet but certain. “Sometimes unfinished things say more.” Her suitcase handle clinked against her bracelet, a delicate sound swallowed by the terminal’s hush, and Kabir felt an urge to tell her that he hadn’t shown those lines to anyone else—that most nights, they stayed hidden between phone screens and fear. Instead, they kept walking, passing a row of empty boarding gates where silent televisions looped weather forecasts no one watched. At Gate 27, Mira stopped, turning to face him. “What are you most afraid of?” she asked suddenly, the question dropping between them like a stone into still water. Kabir hesitated, laughter catching on his tongue before dying unspoken. “That I’ll keep living my life as someone else’s idea of me,” he admitted, voice lower now, stripped of the easy humor he wore like a jacket. “And by the time I realize it, it’ll be too late to change.” The words surprised him, rawer than he meant them to sound, but Mira didn’t look away. “Me too,” she confessed. “Except… I’m scared I won’t even try to change. That I’ll get used to being small.” The honesty felt dangerous and freeing, as if they were confessing to the walls, not just to each other. And somewhere between Gate 27 and Gate 31, two strangers found a fragile truth that felt stronger than the silence they carried.
Minutes stretched and folded, until time felt more like a tide than a clock. They passed glowing departure boards, their names of cities—Dubai, Bangkok, London—blurring into a map of places they hadn’t yet seen. Mira told Kabir about her sketches, how she sometimes drew the same person twice to see if something changed, and Kabir shared how some nights, words came rushing until dawn, and other nights, nothing came at all. They traded tiny, unspoken admissions: that neither felt entirely at home in the cities they’d grown up in, that both feared mornings more than nights, that sometimes the bravest thing was staying rather than running. At one point, they stood by a long window overlooking the tarmac, where a single airplane rested under floodlights, its silver body gleaming like something both real and impossibly far away. Kabir tapped the glass lightly. “Crazy, isn’t it?” he murmured. “How we’re always leaving somewhere.” Mira nodded, her reflection beside his in the window—two figures suspended between here and elsewhere. “And sometimes,” she added, voice barely above breath, “we meet people we’re meant to leave behind too.” The thought hurt, but neither turned away from it. Instead, they stood together, quiet and still, watching ground crew in neon vests move slowly around the sleeping plane. Beyond the glass, dawn was still hours away, but inside the terminal, it felt as if something had already shifted. And though they didn’t say it, both Mira and Kabir understood that this night—this layover—was already becoming a memory neither of them wanted to let go.
4
They drifted away from the bright departure boards and empty shops to a quieter part of the terminal, where floor-to-ceiling glass looked out over the runways lit in ribbons of white and amber. Beyond the glass, the night had thinned into something softer, the deep black of midnight giving way to the blue hush that hints at morning but holds it back just a little longer. Mira wheeled her suitcase to the side and pressed a palm against the cool glass, her breath clouding the reflection for a moment before fading. Kabir dropped his duffel at his feet, folded his arms over the railing, and leaned forward, his gaze fixed on a distant plane that had just begun to taxi. They stood shoulder to shoulder, close enough that Kabir could hear the faint catch of Mira’s breathing whenever a plane’s engines roared to life and the lights flickered across the tarmac. “Do you ever wonder where they’re all going?” Mira asked, her voice low, as if afraid to wake the airport itself. Kabir turned slightly, catching her profile outlined against the pale window. “All the time,” he said. “And who’s waiting on the other side. Or who isn’t.” Mira’s mouth curved into a small, sad smile, the kind that says more than words. A plane lifted into the sky, its nose tipping upward, its wings banking as it caught the wind, and they watched it rise until it became just another blinking dot swallowed by the dark. “Feels like magic,” Kabir whispered, though his voice held a wistfulness that made it sound almost like mourning. “That something so heavy can just… leave.” Mira kept her gaze on the disappearing light. “Maybe that’s what we all want,” she said. “To find the part of us that isn’t heavy enough to stay.” Her words hung in the cold air between them, and Kabir felt the truth of them settle deep, where his heart beat a little faster.
Minutes bled into each other as more planes rumbled down the runway, the hush of waiting broken only by the distant echo of boarding announcements they barely heard anymore. Kabir shifted, leaning closer, and without thinking, pulled out his phone again. “I wrote something,” he murmured, almost to himself. Mira glanced at him, her eyes asking rather than her voice, and he unlocked the screen, thumb hesitating before he opened a note. “I wrote it here,” he added, “in this airport. Just now.” He held out the phone, and Mira took it carefully, as though afraid to smudge something delicate. The words were raw, typed in lowercase: “we are two shadows in a glass window / waiting to see if dawn forgets us / two stories unfinished / two flights away from goodbye.” Mira read them slowly, her lips moving silently, and when she looked up, her eyes shimmered with something that felt like gratitude and sorrow combined. “You shouldn’t hide this,” she said softly, handing the phone back. “It’s yours,” Kabir replied, his voice low, the words escaping before he could catch them. “This moment. You were part of it.” Mira opened her mouth, then closed it again, the emotion caught like a bird beating its wings behind her ribs. Instead, she reached for her sketchbook, flipped to an empty page, and began to draw, the pencil whispering across the paper. Kabir watched in silence as lines became shapes, shapes became something that looked like the two of them: silhouettes side by side, framed by the window, facing the runway where a plane lifted into the sky. When she finished, she didn’t say anything, just turned the book so he could see. He stared at it, seeing himself not as he imagined—smiling, sure—but as he was: tired eyes, a tilt of hope and fear on his lips, and beside him, Mira, drawn not as a girl hiding behind her sketches but as someone brave enough to watch the planes leave.
For a while, neither spoke, the air between them filled with the low rumble of distant engines and the occasional squeak of suitcase wheels rolling over polished floor somewhere behind them. Kabir let out a slow breath. “I don’t want this night to end,” he admitted, voice softer than he meant, as though saying it too loud would make the dawn hurry closer. Mira’s fingers tightened around her pencil, the lead smudging a little on the paper. “Me neither,” she whispered. She stared out the window, her reflection overlaid with the runway lights, and for the first time, Kabir noticed how tired her eyes looked, how raw, and how beautiful in their honesty. “Do you think,” she began, her voice catching, “that it’s possible to miss someone before you’ve even left them?” Kabir swallowed, the question echoing in the hollow of his chest. “I think it’s the only honest kind of missing,” he said. “When you know it’s ending even as it’s happening.” The truth of it settled between them, neither cruel nor comforting, just real. Outside, another plane lifted from the ground, engines roaring as it broke the invisible tether that held it earthbound. Mira traced its path with her eyes until it vanished into the dark, and when she finally looked back at Kabir, her gaze held an unspoken promise: that for what remained of this layover night, neither of them would pretend. And so they stood, two shadows against glass, watching planes take off, sharing silence that felt as intimate as any confession, and waiting for dawn to find them still side by side.
5
The hours after three a.m. unfolded like pages Mira and Kabir hadn’t meant to read but couldn’t stop turning, each minute stitched together by small stories, laughter that felt too loud in the hush of the terminal, and moments of quiet that somehow said more than any words could. They drifted between empty gates and silent corridors, Mira’s suitcase trailing behind like an afterthought while Kabir’s duffel shifted from shoulder to hand and back again. At a forgotten corner near Gate 35, they found a circle of chairs no one had claimed, a little island away from the few travelers still dozing against windows or scrolling through flickering screens. Mira settled into a chair and pulled her knees close to her chest, sketchbook balanced on top, while Kabir sat opposite, elbows resting on his thighs, head tilted slightly as if to hear some thought forming behind his own silence. The glow of the departure board reflected in Mira’s glasses, and for a long moment neither of them spoke, breathing in rhythm with the distant rumble of another plane lifting from the earth. Then Kabir reached into his duffel, rummaging past a tangle of chargers and half-folded clothes, and pulled out a battered notebook edged with stickers and half-torn corners. He flipped it open, showing pages filled with scribbled lyrics, unfinished verses, and smudges where rain or sweat had blurred the ink. “I don’t usually show this,” he admitted, voice softer than the hum of the vending machine behind them. Mira looked at him, surprised not by the words but by the way he said them—without the shield of humor she’d grown used to seeing. “Why now?” she asked. Kabir paused, thumb resting on a page where the words “maybe the night is kinder than morning” trailed off without punctuation. “Because you don’t feel like someone who’d laugh,” he said simply, and in the hush that followed, Mira felt something deep in her chest tighten and warm all at once.
Mira turned the sketchbook in her lap, flipping through pages she usually kept hidden: faces caught in half-glances, doorways from streets she’d never walked twice, a page where she’d drawn herself so lightly the lines almost vanished into the paper. “These are the pieces of me I don’t show either,” she murmured, fingers brushing a corner where the paper had begun to tear. Kabir leaned forward, gaze tracing the shapes, seeing not the perfection of her lines but the small tremors, the places where the pencil had pressed too hard or hesitated too long. “They’re beautiful,” he said, and this time the words held no polite weight, no easy compliment, only the truth of what he saw. Mira lifted her eyes, the rawness in them meeting the rawness in his, and for the first time that night, they both understood they were not just strangers sharing a layover—they were two people standing quietly in the middle of each other’s fears. The minutes stretched, measured not by the ticking of the airport clock but by breaths and glances: Kabir telling her about the first song he ever wrote at fifteen, how he kept it hidden because it sounded too much like who he really was; Mira describing how she once sketched her mother’s sleeping face because it felt safer than trying to talk. They spoke of cities they wanted to see not for landmarks but for the promise of being anonymous, of words left unsent and sketches never finished, of the strange comfort of knowing someone for hours yet feeling as if you’d known them far longer. And in the small circle of chairs under cold white lights, the world outside seemed to shrink away, leaving only the truth of the moment and the weight of everything unspoken.
At some point, Kabir unwrapped a packet of almonds from his bag, the crinkle of plastic loud in the quiet, and they shared them, laughter bubbling up at how hard they were to chew, laughter that surprised them both with its warmth. Mira sketched Kabir again, quickly this time, lines flowing without overthinking, and when she showed it to him, he caught something in the drawing that startled him: a softness in his own gaze he didn’t recognize but hoped was real. In return, Kabir read aloud a half-written verse, voice low but steady, and Mira closed her eyes, letting the words settle over her like a blanket. Neither spoke of dawn, though they both felt it coming closer with every passing breath. Instead, they traded memories that felt too small to matter yet somehow meant everything: Kabir remembering a childhood summer chasing monsoon rain barefoot through Delhi streets, Mira recalling nights in Pune when she’d draw by torchlight to keep from waking her mother. The emptiness of the terminal felt almost sacred now, each echo of their voices a quiet promise that they were, at least for these hours, exactly who they dared to be. And though neither dared to say it aloud, both knew that when morning finally arrived, they would miss not just each other but the people they had found within themselves beside one another in the lost hours of a sleepless night.
6
The hour crept toward five a.m., and the airport around them seemed to hold its breath, caught in that thin stretch of night when yesterday feels impossibly far away and today hasn’t quite begun. The white lights overhead glowed softer somehow, and beyond the tall windows, the darkness had begun its slow retreat, thinning at the edges where a faint blue bled into the horizon. Mira and Kabir found themselves near the long, nearly empty corridor lined with gates numbered in the thirties, where the world felt even quieter and more forgotten. They walked side by side, their words fading into silence not because they had nothing left to say but because they had said everything that mattered. Mira rolled her suitcase by its worn handle, the rubber wheels making a soft, steady sound over the polished tiles, while Kabir carried his duffel across his chest as though protecting something fragile inside. Every few steps, Mira would glance at the departure screens that glowed in the distance, where her flight to Chennai was listed now with a blinking “On Time” beside it, and every glance seemed to steal a little more light from her eyes. Kabir noticed, of course, just as she noticed the way his shoulders seemed to sink each time he checked his watch. They stopped at a long glass wall facing the sleeping tarmac, and for a moment neither of them looked at each other; they looked outward, as if searching for something beyond the planes and the thinning night. “It feels closer now,” Kabir whispered, voice rough around the edges, words meant more for himself than for her. Mira nodded, swallowing against a tightness in her throat she hadn’t felt since she was a child afraid of farewells. “It does,” she answered, and the honesty in those two words was almost too much.
They sat on a narrow bench facing the window, knees nearly brushing, and Kabir let his duffel drop to the floor, its zipper half open as though it had grown tired of being closed. Mira set her sketchbook on her lap but didn’t open it; her pencil lay across the cover, unmoving. For a long while, they watched a single airplane in the distance, its windows glowing softly like lanterns, engines humming a low promise of departure. “I thought I’d feel braver by morning,” Mira confessed, her voice quiet, eyes locked on the plane. “But it’s worse now, because now it’s real.” Kabir lowered his gaze to his hands, fingers twining and untwining around the leather wristband he wore, a habit he had when words felt heavier than breath. “Me too,” he admitted. “I kept telling myself I wouldn’t care when it was time to say goodbye. But now…” His words trailed off, unfinished, hanging between them like an unfinished verse. Mira turned to look at him fully then, really look: at the way his hair fell stubbornly over his forehead, the tiny crease that appeared beside his mouth when he pressed his lips together, the rawness in his eyes that she recognized because she felt it too. “Kabir,” she began, her voice catching, “I don’t want to forget this.” He swallowed, throat moving visibly, and after a breath that seemed to take everything in him, he slipped the leather wristband from his hand, the worn brown strap soft with age. He held it out to her, palm open. “Then don’t,” he said. “Take this. So you’ll remember we were really here.” Mira’s fingers hesitated, trembling just slightly, before they closed around the band, warm from his skin. She didn’t trust her voice to answer, so instead, she reached into her sketchbook, tore out the page she had drawn of them together by the window—the sketch that had felt too precious to share until now—and pressed it into his hand. Their fingers brushed, a brief warmth that felt like both a promise and a goodbye.
Outside, the first streaks of dawn had begun to paint the horizon in pale gold, and the airport stirred awake around them: lights brightened, footsteps echoed louder, and distant boarding calls broke the hush that had wrapped them together all night. Mira closed her sketchbook, slipping the leather band around it like a keepsake, while Kabir tucked the sketch carefully inside the cover of his battered notebook. Neither wanted to move, yet both knew they would have to. “Will you write about this?” Mira asked softly, forcing the words past the ache in her throat. Kabir nodded, voice low. “Only if you draw it too,” he replied, and the faintest smile tugged at her lips, though it couldn’t chase away the sadness in her eyes. Another announcement echoed, this time unmistakable: Mira’s flight boarding at Gate 23. The words seemed to echo through the space between them, louder than any goodbye. Mira stood first, her suitcase handle cold under her palm, and Kabir rose beside her, duffel slung back across his shoulder. They didn’t rush the steps toward the gate; instead, each step felt like a thread pulling taut, ready to break. When they reached the line of passengers, Mira turned, eyes shining though her lashes blurred them. Kabir managed a small smile, the kind that held every word he couldn’t say aloud. “Safe flight, Mira,” he murmured, voice tight. “You too,” she whispered, and for a heartbeat, the terminal around them vanished, leaving only two people standing on the edge of goodbye. Then she turned, walked slowly toward the gate, and with each step, the distance grew until she reached the boarding tunnel and was gone from sight. Kabir stood still, the sketch pressed against his chest, the ghost of her presence lingering beside him in the cool morning air, and though dawn had arrived, he felt like the night had taken something of him with her—something he wasn’t sure he’d ever get back.
7
The boarding announcement for Mira’s flight to Chennai cut through the terminal like a blade through still water, each syllable sharp against the hush that had wrapped them in a cocoon of shared silence. Mira stood frozen for a breath, her suitcase handle clenched in one hand, sketchbook pressed to her chest with the other, and Kabir beside her felt the tremor in the air that came before something inevitable finally happened. The airport around them, which had felt almost like a private universe through the night, was awake now: passengers hurried past with checked-in urgency, the aroma of fresh coffee unfurled from reopened kiosks, and flight attendants in crisp uniforms gathered near gates with polite, professional smiles. But to Mira and Kabir, all of it blurred at the edges, the only sharp line remaining the thin stretch of space that separated goodbye from what came after. Kabir swallowed, his mouth dry as he searched for words that would make the leaving feel smaller, words that could fold this night into something they could both carry forward, but everything felt clumsy and unworthy. Instead, he stepped closer, close enough that he could see the faint smudge of pencil on Mira’s fingertips and the way her breath shivered just slightly as she exhaled. “You should go,” he whispered, though the words felt foreign in his mouth, like something he’d read in someone else’s story. Mira nodded, her lips parting as if to speak, but nothing came; the honesty of the moment left no space for easy parting words. In the quiet, she reached out, her hand brushing his wrist, and Kabir felt the warmth of her touch burn deeper than anything he could have imagined when the night first began.
For a heartbeat, they stood there, suspended in a pause that felt longer than all the hours they had shared, and then Mira let go, her hand falling to her side, fingers curling around the sketchbook that now held his leather wristband wrapped around it like a promise. She turned toward the gate, rolling her suitcase forward step by reluctant step, and Kabir followed silently beside her until the line of passengers tightened and a security officer gestured for non-passengers to stay back. They stopped just short of the gate, where the boarding tunnel yawned open like the mouth of something final, and the soft beep of boarding passes scanned sounded louder than thunder. Mira turned to him once more, eyes shining with unshed words, and Kabir saw every thought mirrored in them: the wish that the night had been longer, the ache of knowing it couldn’t be, and the quiet question of what waited once the plane’s wheels left the ground. He wanted to say that this wasn’t goodbye, that six hours in an airport could somehow stretch into something more, but honesty felt heavier than hope in that moment. Instead, he reached into his duffel, pulled out his battered notebook, and without thinking, tore out the page with the unfinished verse he’d written beside her hours ago—the one that began with “we are two shadows in a glass window…” He folded it once, then again, pressing it into her hand, his fingers lingering just a breath longer than necessary. “So you won’t forget,” he murmured, voice rough, and Mira’s breath caught in her throat as she clutched the paper to her chest, nodding once because any words would break the fragile strength holding her together.
The boarding line moved forward, and it was Mira’s turn to step into the tunnel. She looked back over her shoulder, her hair catching the pale dawn light spilling through the tall windows, and Kabir felt the ache of distance widen with every heartbeat. Their eyes met—hers saying thank you, his saying don’t go—and for an endless second, the airport seemed to fall silent around them. Then she turned, stepped into the tunnel, and was gone, swallowed by the gentle curve of its walls and the promise of departure. Kabir stood there, notebook still warm in his hand from where he’d held it, the memory of her touch lingering on his skin like the fading warmth of sun after twilight. Around him, the airport moved on: new announcements echoed overhead, travelers hurried past without seeing him, and the sun climbed slowly over the edge of the tarmac, spilling gold across the glass. He walked back toward Gate 23, the place where the night had truly begun, and sat heavily in the same chair where he had first asked what she was drawing. The empty space beside him felt louder than any silence he had known, but inside the hush of his chest, something softer settled: the memory of her laughter in the food court, the truth of their confessions by the window, and the quiet promise that for at least one night, two strangers had been real to each other in a way that morning light could never erase. And though dawn had come, Kabir knew he would carry that night—every unfinished word, every shared silence, every fragile hope—with him, tucked carefully between the pages of who he was yet to become.
8
Kabir stayed in the chair at Gate 23 long after Mira’s plane had departed, the minutes folding over him in quiet layers as the terminal shifted from dawn into full morning. The hum of movement returned: passengers queuing with the determined expressions of early flights, voices on phone calls drifting by like fragments of stories he’d never know, and the clink of trolley wheels rolling across the polished floor. But for Kabir, it all felt distant, as though wrapped in soft cotton that dulled the sound of everything except the echo of Mira’s footsteps as she turned away, the warmth of her fingers brushing his when she took the page from his notebook. His own flight to Delhi wasn’t for another hour, but the clock felt irrelevant now—time had already done what it does best: pushed what mattered into the past, leaving him here on the quieter side of goodbye. He opened his battered notebook and stared at the space where the torn page had been, the ragged edge a reminder of the piece of himself he had offered and the impossibility of taking it back. Around him, announcements crackled, calling strangers toward places they longed for or feared, and Kabir traced the rough paper with his thumb, wondering where she was now—maybe seated by the oval window of seat 14A, sketchbook resting across her lap, dawn light catching on her hair. He pictured her fingers turning the folded paper over and over, reading the unfinished verse by the hum of the cabin fans, and he hoped she understood what he hadn’t been brave enough to say: that in six hours, she had changed something quiet but deep inside him, and even if they never crossed paths again, she had become part of the story he carried.
Mira’s plane cut through the soft morning haze, clouds drifting past like slow thoughts, and though she tried to focus on the pages of her sketchbook, her mind kept circling back to the stillness of the gate where she had left him standing. She unfolded the note again, smoothing its creases with careful fingers, and read the words that had been scribbled in hurried honesty: “we are two shadows in a glass window / waiting to see if dawn forgets us / two stories unfinished / two flights away from goodbye.” Her chest tightened, not from sadness alone but from the sudden, breathless clarity that someone had seen her—not just as a girl passing through but as a person trying not to disappear into her own quiet fears. She had spent so many years drawing the world at a distance, capturing people without letting them see her fully, and yet in a single night, beside rows of empty chairs and glowing departure boards, someone had reached past that quiet barrier and simply asked, “What are you drawing?” The question had seemed simple then, but it had opened something gentle and raw that she couldn’t quite close again. Looking out of the window, the sun caught on the metal curve of the wing, and she remembered his voice at dawn, soft and almost breaking, telling her to keep the wristband so she wouldn’t forget. But she knew now that forgetting wasn’t possible—not because of the leather band that now circled the spine of her sketchbook, but because every line she drew from now on would carry a trace of that night: the way he had laughed over coffee, the tremor in his voice when he spoke of wanting to write songs that mattered, and the silence they had shared beside the window where planes rose into the dark.
By the time Kabir boarded his own flight, the morning had brightened into sharp light spilling through the wide glass walls of the terminal, and he found a window seat, resting his forehead lightly against the cool pane. The engines rumbled to life, and as the plane taxied onto the runway, he let his eyes blur the view of baggage carts, runway stripes, and the far-off control tower until they became shapes and shadows, not details to be memorized. As the wheels lifted, pressing him gently back into his seat, he closed his eyes and saw not the city below but Mira’s face turned toward him under the cold airport lights, the small, shy smile that had grown into something braver through the night. He thought of her words, sketched in the air rather than on paper: “Sometimes unfinished things say more.” And maybe that was true, he realized, because though the night had ended, it didn’t feel finished—it felt paused, waiting for a next page neither of them knew how to write yet. In the soft rumble of the plane climbing higher, he whispered her name under his breath, a quiet promise that memory would keep her close even when miles and months widened the space between them. Below, the city shrank into patchwork and haze, and above, the sky opened wide and endless, and in the hush of altitude, Kabir felt the truth settle gently in his chest: some stories aren’t meant to last forever, but that doesn’t mean they don’t change you forever. And as the plane cut through clouds that glowed with morning light, he pressed a hand to the notebook in his pocket—still carrying her sketch—and let himself believe that somewhere, in the quiet spaces between departures and arrivals, what they shared had become something more than a layover at midnight: it had become a part of who they both were, wherever they would go next.
9
Delhi greeted Kabir not with grandeur but with its usual rawness: the dull thud of footsteps on arrival ramps, the damp breath of morning rising off concrete, and the slow heat already building beneath a sky smudged with summer haze. He moved with the crowd, duffel bag slung across his shoulder, each step feeling heavier than the last because it carried the weight of what he had left behind in the airport’s blue-lit night. Outside, horns blared and the smell of diesel tangled with dust and chai from roadside stalls that had barely cooled from the night shift. Yet everything felt strangely distant, as if he were passing through someone else’s morning rather than stepping into his own. Kabir found himself gripping the battered notebook in his pocket, thumb brushing over the page Mira had given him, its soft graphite lines pressing into the paper like fingerprints of the hours they’d shared. The memory of her voice still clung to him, that low, quiet tone that had sounded both shy and brave when she spoke of fears and unfinished drawings. Around him, Delhi moved at its relentless pace—auto-rickshaws weaving past buses, calls of vendors splitting the noise—and Kabir felt the familiar ache of being home in a place that had never truly felt like home. Yet even in that ache, there was something new: a thread of quiet courage, pulled from a girl in a different city who had taught him that speaking your truth, even for one night, could matter more than a thousand silent mornings.
The hours blurred as he reached the family apartment, voices overlapping in greetings and questions, his father’s careful smile betraying relief at seeing him back, his mother’s touch lingering a little longer than usual on his shoulder as if to reassure herself that he was truly there. Kabir answered softly, words coming slower, his mind still caught in the echo of airport gates and quiet benches beside Mira. Later, in the privacy of his room, he unpacked slowly, folding clothes with deliberate care while the battered notebook lay open on the bed, Mira’s sketch resting like something alive on the page. He traced the lines she had drawn of them by the window: his own face caught in a rare moment of unguarded honesty, hers sketched with eyes that seemed to look right through every defense he’d ever built. The afternoon light spilled through the curtains, catching on the edge of the page, and Kabir felt a hollow ache deep in his chest—a strange mix of loss and gratitude, the certainty that what they had shared couldn’t be undone, even if it couldn’t continue. He lifted his guitar from its stand, fingers hesitating over the strings, and then played the first hesitant notes of a melody that had haunted him since dawn: soft, unfinished chords that spoke of leaving and meeting, of silence shared and words too heavy to speak. The music grew, a little steadier, as if each note carried the memory of Mira’s voice whispering that unfinished things sometimes spoke the loudest. Kabir didn’t know if he would ever see her again, but in that quiet room, the song felt like a bridge built from memory—a promise that some moments live beyond parting.
In Chennai, Mira stepped off her flight into warm, salt-scented air, the airport bright and awake in a way that felt at odds with the quiet heaviness in her chest. The city rose around her—streets alive with horns and laughter, walls worn by monsoon and sun—and yet her mind drifted back to Bangalore airport: to the hush before dawn, to Kabir’s words murmured beside the glass, to the way her own reflection had looked braver when he was there to see it. At her father’s house, rooms held the weight of silences too old to name, and yet Mira found herself holding the sketchbook closer than ever, the leather wristband wrapped around it like a shield. In the hush of late afternoon, she opened to the page where she had drawn him: the tilt of his head, the half-smile, the raw hope in his eyes that had matched her own hidden fears. She touched the drawing lightly, the paper warm beneath her palm, and whispered a promise to herself that she wouldn’t let this night slip into memory’s fog. That evening, she sat by the balcony overlooking the restless street, pencil in hand, and sketched not to keep the world at a distance but to bring it closer—to remember the boy who had asked what she was drawing, and in doing so, had helped her see herself more clearly than she ever had before. And as the sun dipped behind the city, Mira closed her sketchbook with quiet certainty: that even unfinished stories could leave marks that no departure board could erase, and somewhere beyond the crowded skies, she carried a piece of him as surely as he carried her words pressed between pages.
10
Weeks turned quietly into months, and the memory of that night in Bangalore Airport settled into Kabir’s life not as something fading, but as something quietly alive beneath the skin of every ordinary day. Mornings returned to routine: hurried cups of tea before traffic swallowed Delhi’s roads, long hours in classrooms that felt too small for the words that still stirred in his chest, evenings spent strumming his guitar until calluses formed on his fingers like small, stubborn reminders of the song he had begun that dawn. But always, when the city turned softer—when dusk pooled against windows and streetlights blurred into amber ghosts—he would reach for the battered notebook, now more worn at the edges, and turn to the page where Mira’s sketch waited. Her lines had caught a part of him he hadn’t known existed: the part that dared to speak without apology, to feel without armor. Some nights he wrote beneath the drawing—lines unfinished, verses that began with thoughts of her and trailed off into confessions he still couldn’t share aloud. And though the airport felt a thousand lifetimes away, Kabir found her presence living in unexpected places: in the hush of a metro ride at sunset, in the shape of moonlight falling across his guitar strings, in the quiet ache that came with wishing someone well who might never hear it. Even in silence, she had become part of his music, a note that trembled just beneath the melody, unseen yet unmistakable.
In Chennai, the salt-warm air and restless streets grew familiar again, yet something in Mira had shifted so deeply that nothing felt quite the same. Her sketchbook, once a private refuge, became something braver: a space not only to capture what she saw but to reveal what she felt. On late nights when the city fell into its humid hush, she’d sit by her window, pencil scratching softly as she drew moments she’d never wanted to forget: Kabir’s half-hidden smile as dawn lit the terminal glass, the slump of his shoulders when words felt too heavy, the quiet courage in his eyes when he tore the page from his notebook. Her fingers learned to draw without fear of imperfection, trusting that truth often lived in the unfinished edges. The leather wristband he had given her stayed wrapped around the sketchbook, softening over time yet never losing the shape of his wrist, and every glance at it was both comfort and reminder: that a single night could matter more than some entire years. She caught herself wondering where he was—if he still wrote verses on crowded trains, if he’d finished the song that had hovered between them like an unspoken promise. Yet Mira no longer drew only to remember him; she drew because in that night, she had remembered something of herself too—the part willing to be seen, even if only for a layover’s length of time.
Then came a morning months later, sun climbing hot over Chennai’s rooftops, when an envelope arrived—plain, hand-addressed in a handwriting Mira recognized from that single page he had given her. Heart thudding, she tore it open by the window where she had first whispered goodbye to the sky that carried his plane. Inside was a single sheet: a poem, finished this time, words scratched in ink that spoke of dawn, of glass windows, of two strangers who met not by chance but by quiet necessity. And at the bottom, a line almost lost in the rush of letters: “Maybe one day, another layover, another midnight, and we’ll finish what we started.” Mira pressed the page to her chest, breath caught between hope and ache, and closed her eyes to see not the words, but his face in the soft blue light of that long-ago night. Far away in Delhi, Kabir tucked a copy of the poem into his notebook beside her sketch, closing the cover gently as though to keep that moment breathing. And though miles and months stretched long between them, both Mira and Kabir understood something neither had known before that night in the airport: that even the briefest meeting, held in honesty and quiet bravery, could become a story that never truly ended—unfinished yet complete, like a song that kept playing in memory long after the last note had faded.
