Kabir Sanyal
Part 1
It all started with a sandwich. Not the fancy kind with pesto and sun-dried tomatoes, but a simple, over-grilled aloo tikki sandwich that arrived with the wrong name scribbled on the delivery bag. To Ritu. Nayan stared at it, confused. He had ordered a classic cheese sandwich, and his name, in bold caps, was clearly Nayan. But the delivery guy was already halfway down the stairs, humming a Punjabi tune. Nayan sighed and peeled the sticker. Hunger won.
Five buildings away, a woman named Ritu sat cross-legged on her balcony, staring into her phone with equal parts hope and hangry disappointment. She had ordered the tikki sandwich an hour ago. The app said “Delivered.” Her stomach said, “Deceived.” She called the café. A flustered teenager named Arif apologised and promised a refund. He didn’t mention the mix-up.
The next day, fate—or the delivery algorithm—intervened again. Nayan’s doorbell rang at 1:13 PM, and this time, there were two sandwiches. One labelled Nayan. The other, again, Ritu. He raised an eyebrow, half-expecting a camera crew to pop out. Instead, he took both.
An hour later, he stood in front of Flat 4B with one of the sandwiches. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe guilt. Maybe boredom. Maybe curiosity. He rang the bell. Ritu opened the door, half in a bun and half in suspicion.
“You’re… the guy who ate my sandwich,” she said.
He blinked. “Technically, I didn’t know it was yours until I bit into it. Then it felt too intimate to stop.”
Ritu laughed. “Fair. Was it good?”
“Too much mayo. But oddly satisfying.”
They exchanged names, then opinions about mayonnaise. Ten minutes later, they were on her balcony, sharing the second sandwich. He liked her laugh—unfiltered, unapologetic. She liked that he didn’t talk too much. Neither of them mentioned the irony: the wrong name had led to the right doorstep.
Over the next week, their paths crossed again. And again. Sometimes because of mistaken orders, sometimes not. Ritu was an illustrator who worked from home and believed every delivery was the universe’s cryptic note. Nayan was a freelance editor who believed the universe had bad handwriting.
One day, Ritu sent him a message:
“I think you’re the human version of autocorrect—often wrong, but mostly charming.”
He replied:
“And you’re like unskippable YouTube ads—annoying until I realise I actually want to watch.”
She smiled reading it. He smiled sending it. Neither of them called it flirting. Yet.
One Wednesday, he asked, “Do you think names matter?”
Ritu twirled her coffee spoon. “Depends. If you mean labels, then not really. But if you mean people—then yes. People should be called by the right names.”
Nayan paused. “What if someone calls you by the wrong name but makes you feel seen?”
Ritu looked at him for a beat too long. “Then maybe… they knew the right person, just not the name.”
From that day, she started calling him ‘Sandwich Boy.’ He started calling her ‘Wrong Ritu.’ Neither of them corrected each other.
Their story unfolded over chai breaks, mistimed deliveries, half-drawn illustrations, and shared playlists. They never officially dated. They just… kept turning up in each other’s lives like background scores in a movie no one wrote.
But real life, unlike rom-coms, has a way of complicating things.
One day, Nayan got a job offer in Bangalore. A full-time, well-paying editorial position. No more freelancing. No more sandwich drama. He was supposed to be thrilled. He wasn’t.
Ritu pretended to be. She even made him a card—with a sandwich on the front and “Bite into your future!” scrawled in comic sans. Inside, she drew a tiny heart. Then erased it.
The day before he left, he dropped off a bag of her favourite chocolate cookies at her door. No note. No explanation. But she knew.
He didn’t say goodbye. She didn’t open the door.
Weeks passed. Messages stopped. The café never mixed up orders again. The city moved on. But their balconies remained quietly aware of each other.
Then, on a slow Sunday morning in Bangalore, Nayan received a delivery. No sender name. Just a note on the bag.
“For Sandwich Boy. From the real Ritu. Still wrong. Still right.”
Inside was an over-grilled aloo tikki sandwich, too much mayo, and one crisp line:
“When the name was wrong, the love was right.”
And Nayan smiled—finally, and fully—as if the sandwich knew all the words he couldn’t say.
Part 2
Bangalore was louder than Nayan remembered. The traffic honked in fluent chaos, the weather tried to decide between drizzle and heatstroke, and the tea never tasted like Delhi. But it wasn’t just the city that felt off—it was the space around him, the one Ritu used to fill without ever stepping inside.
His new office at “Blue Fountain Editorial” had glass walls, ergonomic chairs, and a vending machine that offered cold coffee at the touch of a button. His manager, a woman named Ayesha who wore sarcasm like perfume, had once said, “You Delhi types walk like the city owes you something.” Nayan had smiled and replied, “Only my change back.”
He edited manuscripts all day, mostly business books with grand titles and empty wisdom. He missed editing Ritu’s captions for her illustrations. They were odd and poetic and always came with a late-night voice note: “Does this line make sense or am I just emotionally constipated?”
But now, there were no voice notes. No random sketches of him as a superhero whose only power was “emotional availability.” No unsolicited playlists with names like “Songs for Slightly Sad Sandwich Boys.” There was only the sandwich.
That one sandwich had travelled farther than most people do for love.
He had placed it in his office fridge. Untouched. Uneaten. Like a souvenir of something unfinished. Every day at 4 PM, he opened the fridge, looked at it, then closed the door. His colleagues thought he had a diet plan. Only he knew it was grief.
Back in Delhi, Ritu had stopped ordering food online. She made her own now—messy, over-spiced, and unapologetically hers. She’d draw during the day and delete half of it at night. She once drew Nayan as a paper plane, stuck mid-air, trailing tiny hearts instead of exhaust. She didn’t post it.
Her friends noticed. “You’re unusually quiet,” one of them said during a video call. Ritu replied with a shrug and a mug of tea so big it nearly hid her face. No one brought it up again.
Then one afternoon, her doorbell rang.
It wasn’t Nayan.
It was a package. Inside was a book. The title: The Grammar of Goodbye. Author: “Various.” But between pages 17 and 18, there was a handwritten note. His handwriting. Slanted, slightly unsure.
“This city has better coffee, faster Wi-Fi, and no one calls me Sandwich Boy. I miss that.”
No name. No return address. But her heart knew. Because love has fingerprints, and this one smudged.
That night, she did something she hadn’t done in weeks. She drew. A simple sketch—two balconies facing each other. On one, a girl with messy hair and a sketchbook. On the other, a boy with a sandwich in hand and a look that said, “Why did we ever let the mailman decide our fate?”
She titled it: Wrong Name. Right Distance.
Meanwhile, Nayan found himself standing in front of a bookstore one weekend, unsure why. It wasn’t planned. He was supposed to be at a networking brunch, pretending to like people and mimosas. But instead, he browsed through aisles, stopping at a shelf titled “Local Artists.”
There, staring at him, was a small postcard-sized print. A sketch of two balconies. He turned it over.
“Art by Ritu Chandra. Available for custom orders. Contact: stillwrong.stillright@inkdrop.in”
He bought the last one.
That night, he wrote an email.
Subject: I still hate mayo.
Body: But I miss the taste.
He hesitated. Hit send. Then paced. Then made tea. Then checked his inbox like it was a horoscope.
No reply.
For three days.
Then, a message.
Subject: You still owe me a sandwich.
Body: Come collect. Or send someone with a better sense of humour.
Attached was a drawing of a boy on a train, holding a sandwich like a love letter.
Nayan booked a ticket home.
He didn’t tell anyone. He packed light. Just clothes, a worn-out book, and that one sandwich—still untouched.
When the train pulled into Hazrat Nizamuddin, it was drizzling. Of course it was. Delhi didn’t believe in subtle comebacks.
He reached her building, same lift, same ding, same hesitation.
He knocked.
Ritu opened the door.
They didn’t speak for five seconds. They just looked. Like people trying to remember the shape of a memory.
Then she smiled. “You’re late.”
He grinned. “You drew me waiting.”
“I always draw what I want,” she said.
“And what do you want now?”
She stepped aside. “A sandwich. And maybe… an ending with a comma, not a full stop.”
Nayan stepped in, and the city exhaled.
Because sometimes, love doesn’t need fireworks or flowers.
Sometimes, it just needs the wrong name on the right sandwich.
Part 3
The room looked exactly as Nayan remembered—half-bohemian, half-chaotic, with fairy lights doing overtime and a large beanbag shaped like a confused tomato. Ritu hadn’t changed much, except maybe the way she looked at him. There was a pause in her glance now, like she was letting the moment breathe before claiming it.
He sat on the floor, legs crossed, holding the old sandwich like it was a fossil of their almost-love. “This has travelled more than both of us,” he said, placing it carefully on the table like an offering.
Ritu smirked. “You kept it?”
“It felt like… unfinished homework. Or a saved draft.”
They both laughed. It wasn’t the easy laugh of before, but it was getting there—like shoes breaking in after a long walk.
“I never asked,” Ritu said, pouring chai into mismatched mugs. “Why did you really go to Bangalore?”
Nayan hesitated. “Part of me wanted to escape freelancing. Another part… wanted to know if I missed you or just the chaos we created.”
“And?”
“I missed the wrong name.”
She looked at him. “I missed the wrong sandwich.”
They didn’t label what they were doing now. It wasn’t a reunion. It wasn’t closure. It was something in between—a comma, like Ritu had said. A grammatical rebellion against the full stop they never signed off on.
Later that evening, they sat on the balcony, just like before. Delhi was doing its typical post-rain performance: wet leaves, honking cars, distant barking, and that soft golden hour that made everything look like a painting in progress.
Ritu spoke first. “So, do we… pick up where we left off?”
“Where did we leave off?” he asked.
“At ‘maybe’,” she replied.
“Then let’s start with ‘definitely maybe’.”
She rolled her eyes, but her cheeks betrayed her. They blushed.
Just then, her phone buzzed. A message from her art page:
New order request from Blue Fountain Editorial, Bangalore.
Attached: a note—One postcard of two balconies. Add a third one, if possible.
She looked at Nayan. He grinned.
“You ordered a print?”
“I missed the artist,” he said.
“And the sandwich girl?” she asked.
“I think I’ve always been in love with her. I just didn’t know how to spell her name correctly.”
Ritu sipped her chai. “It’s not that hard. Four letters. R-I-T-U.”
He shook his head. “No, not the spelling. The feeling.”
Silence lingered—not awkward, but comfortable. Like the quiet between verses of a familiar song.
Then Nayan pulled out a small envelope from his bag. “I didn’t come empty-handed.”
Inside was a sketch she had once made—a cartoon of him with a sandwich cape and a thought bubble saying, “Maybe feelings are just undelivered jokes.”
“I kept this,” he said.
“You framed a stupid sketch?”
“Not stupid. It was the first time someone saw me beyond typos and footnotes.”
She softened.
He continued, “You made me feel like a character. Not a background one. Like… the kind who messes up orders but somehow ends up in the last scene anyway.”
Ritu stood up, went inside, and returned with something behind her back. “Then here’s your costume, hero.”
It was a T-shirt. White. With a cartoon sandwich wearing a crown.
Text: Still Wrong. Still Right.
He wore it immediately. “Now I’m official.”
“You always were.”
They watched the sky shift to indigo. Two cups, two stories, two sandwiches that never quite ended.
Later that night, they played their old playlist. Nayan danced horribly. Ritu filmed it. He protested. She posted it anyway with the caption:
“Love is a mistimed sandwich and a badly timed dance. I got both.”
The comments poured in.
“Are you two finally together?”
“About time!”
“Still shipping Sandwich Boy and Wrong Ritu.”
They didn’t reply. They didn’t need to.
Because sometimes, love doesn’t begin at “Hello” or end at “Goodbye.”
Sometimes, it’s a mislabelled order delivered to the right heart.
And that night, under strings of fairy lights and stolen glances, the wrong name felt perfectly, stupidly, beautifully right.
Part 4
The next morning, Nayan woke up on the beanbag with a crick in his neck and the soft scent of Ritu’s hair still lingering on his shoulder. She had fallen asleep mid-conversation, as she often did, halfway through telling him about an absurd dream involving a flying auto-rickshaw and a squirrel named Tapan. He hadn’t woken her.
Now, as he sat up and rubbed his eyes, he noticed something new on the balcony: a small handmade board that read—
Welcome back, Sandwich Boy. Population: 2.
He smiled, touching the letters like they were Braille for a language he was still learning to read—this new phase, this quiet return.
Ritu appeared moments later, wrapped in a shawl, her hair resembling a storm cloud that hadn’t quite settled. “You snore,” she said.
He grinned. “You dream in squirrels.”
“Touché,” she muttered, yawning. “Breakfast?”
“Only if it’s the wrong order,” he replied.
She made them upma and orange juice. It wasn’t anyone’s order, and that made it perfect.
As they ate, Nayan asked the question that had tiptoed in his mind since he returned.
“What now?”
Ritu tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, am I… here? Or is this just a really well-written epilogue?”
She thought for a moment, the spoon pausing mid-air. “Do you want to be here?”
“I didn’t come back for a sandwich, Ritu.”
She looked down at her glass. “I know. I just don’t know if we’re ready for… real.”
“We’re already real. We’ve survived mayo, mixed signals, and a one-sided playlist war.”
She chuckled. “That playlist was art.”
“And it made me cry in the middle of a crowded metro.”
“Then I win.”
They clinked glasses—not as a toast, but as a treaty.
That afternoon, Nayan helped her sort through old prints for an upcoming pop-up art fair. She was exhibiting under a new name: “The Wrong Drawer.” A tribute, she said, to all misplaced things that somehow found their way to the right hands.
He read the captions under her sketches—some silly, some heartbreakingly tender.
One showed a boy handing a girl a sandwich with a note that read, “This is how I say sorry.”
Another showed two toothbrushes in a cup labelled “Almost.”
And one—framed and set aside—was a drawing of a metro ride. A boy and girl sitting apart but leaning toward the same song in their headphones.
“That one’s us, right?” he asked.
She nodded. “The day before you left. We both pretended it was just coincidence. But I think the song knew better.”
“Do you still listen to it?”
“Only when I want to feel something slightly painful and slightly poetic.”
They stared at the sketch a little too long. Then moved on.
The art fair was in two days, and they worked like co-conspirators—cutting tags, scribbling labels, even burning their toast while debating over whether one print was ‘quirky enough.’
It was like old times, except better. Because now, every unfinished sentence had a place to land. Every silence wasn’t absence—it was breath.
On the evening before the fair, Nayan found a note slipped into his bag.
**“In case you disappear again, remember:
1. You’re allergic to bad editing.
2. You look stupid in blazers.
3. I’m still Ritu—even if you forget my name again.”**
He flipped the note.
P.S. You forgot your framed sketch. Again. Amateur.
He laughed out loud.
Later that night, while walking her home from the print shop, they passed a roadside poet with a typewriter. “Pick a word,” the man said. “I’ll turn it into your story.”
Ritu looked at Nayan. “Should we?”
He nodded. “Word?”
She thought, then smiled mischievously.
“Wrong.”
The poet cracked his knuckles and began to type.
Three minutes later, they received a poem on old paper:
“In the history of hearts,
the wrong ones often arrive first.
But once in a while,
the wrong name walks you to the right soul.
And you realize—
the label was a lie,
but the love?
The love was true.”
They stood in silence, letting the moment settle in their bones.
Nayan folded the poem and put it in his wallet. “That’s better than any editorial copy I’ve ever read.”
Ritu grinned. “Good. Now you have something to quote when we fight.”
“We’ll fight?”
“Obviously. You still think pineapple belongs on pizza.”
“Because it does.”
“Get out of my life.”
“Too late. I brought my own key.”
They laughed their way home. And in that laugh, somewhere between memory and magic, the line between ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ blurred a little more.
Because some love stories don’t need correction.
They just need acceptance.
Part 5
The day of the art fair began with three things: a nervous stomach, a missing stapler, and a playlist titled “Calm the Heck Down, Ritu.” Nayan had created it that morning while Ritu paced the floor like she was awaiting a moon landing, not setting up a five-foot art stall in a Delhi bookstore.
“You think people will even stop to look?” she asked for the eighth time, adjusting a sketch she’d already adjusted thrice.
“They’ll stop,” Nayan said, tying string lights along the side of the table, “mostly because your work is the visual equivalent of emotional déjà vu.”
She paused. “Was that a compliment or a diagnosis?”
He smiled. “Both.”
The fair was hosted at “InkDrop,” a cozy independent bookstore with a hidden courtyard and artisanal coffee that tasted slightly pretentious but wonderfully warm. Artists milled around, setting up their booths, each corner of the place buzzing with soft music, nervous smiles, and too many tote bags.
Ritu’s stall was tucked between a guy selling origami earrings and a girl painting personalized bookmarks. Her display was simple—sketches pinned like Polaroids, each with its own line of text that walked the delicate line between humor and heartbreak.
One read:
“Sorry I fell in love with the version of you that texted back.”
Another:
“We weren’t a story. Just a well-timed footnote.”
A woman in her sixties stopped, read one, and teared up. “You’ve drawn how I felt when I left my first husband,” she said quietly. Ritu nodded, unsure whether to thank her or hug her. She chose both.
Nayan watched from behind the stall, handling cash and wrapping prints while pretending to be the official “Intern of Emotional Affairs.” Every time someone asked who the artist was, he’d point and say, “The sandwich thief over there.”
Ritu, red-faced, rolled her eyes but smiled every time.
Then came the surprise.
Mid-afternoon, as foot traffic peaked and the café next door struggled to keep up with chai orders, a tall woman in a crisp yellow saree stepped up to the stall. She had sharp eyes and a publisher’s badge that read Meenal Kapoor – Acquisitions, PulpTree Press.
She didn’t smile. She scanned. Quietly, thoroughly.
Then she picked up one postcard: a sketch of two hands almost touching, captioned “We almost happened. And somehow, that was enough.”
“Who wrote this line?” she asked.
“I did,” Ritu replied.
Meenal looked up. “And you drew this?”
Ritu nodded.
“Have you considered putting these together in a book?”
There was a pause so full it could be bottled.
“I… no. I mean, not seriously,” Ritu stammered.
“You should. These are like poetry with punchlines. Sad but cheeky. Exactly what sells now. Talk to me next week?” She handed her card. “Send a proposal. With a name.”
Ritu stared at the card like it might vanish. “A name for the book?”
Meenal shrugged. “Something simple. Something wrong, maybe.”
As she walked away, Nayan whispered, “Wrong Name. Right Book?”
Ritu nearly punched him. “Stop reading my mind.”
The rest of the day went by in a blur. They sold out of three prints. A student group requested custom postcards. One guy offered to tattoo her illustration on his arm. Someone from a local podcast asked her to come on air.
By the end of the evening, Ritu sat on the floor, shoes off, hair a mess, face glowing.
“This is too much,” she muttered, sipping cold coffee. “I’m not made for success. I can barely keep my socks matched.”
Nayan sat beside her. “That’s why I’m here. Sock-matching. Panic-handling. Sandwich-retrieving.”
She looked at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“I am. About all of it. The art, the chaos, you.”
She exhaled. “So am I. But I’m scared.”
“Me too.”
They sat in that fear, side by side, letting it exist without solving it.
After a while, Ritu nudged him. “If I do write a book… I think I’ll dedicate it to ‘The Boy Who Got the Wrong Order Right.’”
“And I’ll write the blurb,” he said.
“Sometimes, the best stories begin with a delivery gone wrong.”
She laughed.
As they packed up, fairy lights stuffed into a tote bag and print leftovers folded like secrets, Nayan asked, “So what now?”
Ritu grinned. “Now? We go get the worst street momo in town. The kind that’s mostly cabbage and existential dread.”
“Perfect,” he replied.
And they walked off, two slightly ridiculous people, half in love, half in disbelief, whole in each other’s company.
Because some romances don’t come with grand declarations.
Sometimes, they come with the last sandwich, the right sketch, and a publisher’s card tucked inside a pocket full of maybes.
Part 6
The momo shop was exactly as awful as Ritu had promised—dimly lit, perpetually greasy, and with a wall menu handwritten in four colors of faded marker ink. But it was their place now. Nayan bit into a particularly doughy one and coughed. “You weren’t kidding. This momo tastes like a middle-school apology.”
Ritu giggled between mouthfuls. “Told you. But somehow, it comforts me. Like the emotional equivalent of a bad karaoke song—you know it’s terrible, but you still sing it loud.”
They ate in silence for a while, the kind of silence that’s not really silence at all but a low hum of comfort that only shows up when you know someone’s not going anywhere.
“So,” Nayan said, nudging her with his elbow, “book titles. Any front-runners?”
She leaned back, slurping the last sip of Fanta. “I was thinking… ‘Wrong Name, Right Frame.’ Too cheesy?”
“Maybe. Unless it’s a cookbook. Or a dating manual for introverts.”
She grinned. “Okay, how about ‘The Wrong Drawer’—like my art handle. But it means more now.”
He considered. “Hmm. That one sounds like it knows it’s been lost and still chose to be found. I like it.”
Ritu looked at him. “Do you think we’re in the wrong drawer?”
He tilted his head. “Maybe. But maybe that’s what made us right. I mean… you never look in the right drawer first.”
She blinked. “Stop talking like a poet. You’re an editor. You’re supposed to ruin metaphors.”
“That’s what makes me dangerous,” he said, with mock drama.
After dinner, they walked through the colony’s narrow lanes, past shuttered stalls and the last auto parked like a tired dog. The streetlights flickered like lazy applause, and a stray cat followed them for a while before losing interest.
They stopped at a tea stall that was still open. The chaiwala gave them that knowing smile—the kind vendors have when they start rooting for your relationship silently through the steam.
Two cups. Extra ginger. No sugar. Exactly how Ritu liked hers. Nayan had finally remembered.
“You know,” she said between sips, “I keep thinking about how random it was. That one order. That one label. If the app hadn’t messed up…”
“You would’ve had your sandwich. And I’d still be eating mayo I didn’t order.”
She nodded. “Do you think we still would’ve met?”
“I don’t know. But I like that we didn’t force it. We stumbled. We delivered. We misdelivered.”
They clinked their paper cups.
“You think we’re in a cliché?” she asked. “Like those digital rom-coms where everything’s quirky and no one has a real job?”
“Speak for yourself,” he smirked. “I have a real job. I edit other people’s clichés.”
She laughed. “Well, I draw mine.”
The cat reappeared, brushed against Ritu’s leg, then jumped onto the bench beside her. Nayan raised an eyebrow. “Friend of yours?”
“Clearly has good taste.”
A message pinged on Ritu’s phone. She checked it quickly and froze.
“What?” Nayan asked.
She held up the screen. It was an email. From Meenal Kapoor.
Subject: Official Book Interest
Body: Let’s talk timelines. We want to do a hybrid illustrated storybook. Something fresh. Something that reads like a sketch. Possible title: Still Wrong, Still Right?
Ritu’s hand trembled slightly. “This is real.”
He grinned. “You’re about to be a published artist.”
She looked overwhelmed. “What if I mess it up? What if it’s too raw? Too odd? Too… me?”
He reached out and took her hand. “That’s exactly why it’ll work.”
She didn’t speak. Just leaned into him, letting her forehead touch his shoulder. They sat like that a while, chai cooling, cat purring, the night folding around them like an old scarf.
Later, back at her place, Nayan stood near the door, fingers fidgeting. “So… what now? Do I go back to Bangalore?”
Ritu stood across from him, a hundred things she could say spinning in her mind.
Then, finally, “I don’t know. Do you want to?”
“No,” he said simply.
“Then don’t.”
He smiled, slow and certain. “Can I stay?”
“Only if you promise to never get my sandwich order right again.”
“Deal.”
They didn’t kiss. Not yet. They just stood there, stupidly close, grinning like fools who had accidentally rewritten their fate with a mislabeled bag and a too-much-mayo confession.
Because love, as it turns out, is sometimes not loud. Sometimes it’s not even brave.
Sometimes it’s a gentle choice. A familiar voice. A place that gets your tea order right and your name wrong.
And that’s enough.
Part 7
The next few days unfolded like an indie film montage—no dramatic arcs, no sweeping background score—just the tender, mundane acts of two people re-learning how to belong to each other.
Mornings became a ritual: shared toothbrush jokes, badly scrambled eggs, and an ongoing debate over who made the worse coffee. Ritu claimed hers tasted like betrayal. Nayan insisted his tasted like consequence. Both were terrible, but they drank them anyway.
They set up a shared Google Calendar, but only for things that didn’t matter—like “argue about pickles at 3 PM” or “compliment each other sarcastically at 6.” There were no plans about forever, no discussions of where this was headed. Just a quiet agreement to be here, now, imperfectly.
Ritu began working on the book pitch with a kind of terrified joy. Every page felt like carving a small part of herself into paper. The sketches were simple—line drawings, muted colors—but the captions carried worlds.
One page showed a girl sitting on a couch, surrounded by open tabs and unfinished ideas. The caption:
“Sometimes productivity is just surviving the day without deleting yourself.”
Another had two people passing each other in the rain, faces blurred.
“We knew each other in another version of this life. The one where we weren’t too tired.”
She’d draw late into the night, with Nayan asleep on the floor beside her, one hand resting on an old sketchbook like it was a safety net. He edited her captions gently, changing only a word or two—never the feeling.
One night, she looked up from her screen and asked, “What would you write if I asked for your version of this story?”
He thought for a moment, then replied, “I’d write about a boy who edited everything—except his own loneliness—until one wrong sandwich gave him a reason to leave it untouched.”
She blinked slowly. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me while holding a spoonful of Nutella.”
“High praise,” he said, licking the spoon.
Despite their cocoon of comfort, life didn’t pause. Work deadlines loomed. Bills needed paying. And Nayan’s Bangalore boss kept calling.
Ayesha’s voice was calm but clear: “Are you resigning over a sandwich romance, Nayan?”
“It’s more than that.”
“Okay. A sandwich plus art fair romance.”
“I’ve never been more sure.”
She paused. “You’re good at this job. But if you’re happier editing the footnotes of someone’s heart, then I won’t stop you. Just send a postcard.”
He smiled. “I will.”
After hanging up, he exhaled deeply and walked to the balcony, where Ritu was sketching a new postcard design. He stood behind her silently, watching.
It was them—again. But this time, drawn as stick figures holding a sign that said:
“No exit strategy. Just each other.”
He whispered, “I quit.”
She turned, brows raised. “The job?”
He nodded.
“Are you insane?”
“A little. But mostly in love.”
She looked like she might cry. Instead, she pulled him down beside her and said, “Fine. But you’re doing all the dishes forever.”
He groaned. “Deal.”
That night, they celebrated with store-bought cake and two cheap plastic crowns from a party shop around the corner. Ritu posted a photo with the caption:
“Wrong name. Right ending. Still writing the middle.”
It went viral. The comments flooded in.
“This is the softest thing I’ve seen all year.”
“Can someone order me a wrong sandwich too?”
“Proof that the universe has a glitch setting just for lovers.”
Publishers, influencers, and even a quirky food delivery brand reached out. One company offered to sponsor her book launch if she included a chapter titled “When Love Arrives Cold but Perfect.”
Ritu laughed until she cried.
Later, while cleaning up crumbs and crown confetti, she turned to him and asked, “Do you think we were always supposed to meet?”
He shrugged. “I think we were supposed to miss each other a few times first. Just enough to know what not having this feels like.”
She nodded. “Then let’s never get it right the first time.”
They clinked their mugs.
And as the night wrapped around them like a favorite sweater, both knew they’d never have a neat love story.
But it would be theirs.
Messy. Mistimed. Mislabelled.
And completely, unapologetically right.
Part 8
By the time spring edged into Delhi, Ritu’s book had a title, a contract, and a looming deadline. It was all real now—her illustrations, her words, their story—being bound into pages that strangers would someday flip through in bookstores, coffee shops, airport lounges. She had always dreamed of it in fragments. Now, it was unfolding all at once, in full sentences.
Nayan, now officially “freelancing again but happier this time,” took on fewer editing projects and more poetry gigs—yes, apparently that’s a thing now. He had started calling himself a “text whisperer,” which Ritu found both ridiculous and strangely accurate.
Their days were a series of patterns and surprises. Breakfasts ruined by burnt toast. Long afternoons on their shared balcony, Ritu sketching with her feet on his lap, Nayan reading manuscripts and mumbling corrections under his breath. Nights filled with half-watched films and full-hearted silence.
One evening, after a particularly exhausting phone call with her editor—something about trimming captions for length—Ritu flopped on the bed dramatically.
“I hate editing,” she said.
Nayan didn’t even look up. “Lies.”
“Okay, I hate being edited.”
He raised an eyebrow. “More accurate.”
She groaned. “I feel like I’m erasing myself.”
He put his book down and sat beside her. “You’re not. You’re shaping yourself so others can hear you better.”
“That sounds dangerously like emotional manipulation.”
“No, that sounds like clarity.”
She stared at him. “How are you always calm?”
“I’m not. I just look like the type who would be. Inside, I’m a marshmallow slowly catching fire.”
She smiled weakly. “You’re good at this.”
“At what?”
“Reminding me who I am when I forget.”
He kissed her forehead. “That’s the job. No salary, though.”
“You get sandwiches,” she replied.
“And existential poetry. Perks.”
Later that week, they did something impulsive.
It started with a joke—Ritu had sketched a mock book cover titled How to Fall in Love with a Typo. Nayan laughed so hard he dropped his tea. “We should actually print this,” he said.
The next day, they did. Just a few limited edition zines, sold through her website. The cover showed a doodled version of them—her with inky hands, him with a red editing pen tucked behind his ear. Inside were scraps: their texts, scribbled notes, grocery lists that turned into poems. It was absurdly personal. And it sold out in two hours.
People wrote in:
“I cried reading a grocery list. How dare you.”
“This is what love looks like when it stops performing.”
“Please make more mistakes. I’ll buy every one.”
Suddenly, Ritu’s inbox wasn’t just filled with publication updates—it was flooded with stories. Strangers sharing their “wrong name, right love” tales. A woman who married the guy who delivered her furniture. A man who fell in love with a spam caller. A teenager who met their best friend after being added to a WhatsApp group by mistake.
Ritu read each one aloud to Nayan at night, often crying, sometimes laughing, always holding his hand under the blanket like an anchor.
“This feels… sacred,” she whispered once. “All these little accidents leading to something so human.”
Nayan nodded. “Maybe love is just a series of lucky errors.”
A week before the book launch, Ritu got her first panic attack in months. She was in the middle of signing the proof copies when her hands started shaking. Her breath hitched. Everything felt too loud, too sharp, too exposed.
Nayan found her sitting on the floor, back against the wall, eyes wide and distant.
He didn’t ask questions. He just sat beside her, matching her breath.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
After a while, she said, “What if they read it and don’t feel what I felt?”
He looked at her. “Then they weren’t meant to.”
She blinked at him.
“You didn’t write this book to please,” he said softly. “You wrote it to remember. And that’s enough.”
She nodded, and a tear slipped down without permission.
He caught it on his thumb. “Besides,” he added, “you’re not alone in this.”
She whispered, “I know.”
He leaned in, forehead against hers. “We made this. Out of typos and tea and timing. They can’t take that away.”
And they sat there, two people who had never meant to fall in love, wrapped in a moment too fragile for fear.
That night, Ritu wrote a new caption for her final sketch:
“I loved you quietly, like a correction no one noticed—but suddenly, everything made sense.”
Part 9
The launch day arrived like a quiet birthday—no band, no glitter, but everything felt tender and wide-eyed. The venue was a tiny bookstore café tucked behind an old cinema hall, with chipped red floor tiles and book towers that swayed when someone sneezed. Ritu had chosen it because “it looked like the kind of place where a wrong sandwich might fall in love.”
The posters outside read:
Launch Today — Still Wrong, Still Right by Ritu Chandra
With live reading, awkward jokes, and free bookmarks nobody asked for.
Nayan helped tape the corners of the posters that kept curling up in protest. He wore the same white T-shirt from the early days, the one with the cartoon sandwich and the words: Still Wrong. Still Right.
Inside, the small space buzzed with quiet chatter—friends, followers, curious strangers who had read the zine and wanted more. There was a table with postcards and zines and a guest book titled “Write something you’ve never said out loud.” Already, the first entry read:
“I still dream of you every Tuesday.”
Ritu hovered near the chai counter, nervously rearranging cups. She wore a dark blue kurta with ink stains on the sleeve and a button missing from the cuff. She hadn’t dressed up. She’d just come as herself.
“You okay?” Nayan asked, appearing behind her with a cup of lemon water.
She nodded slowly. “I feel like I’m about to walk naked into an auditorium.”
“Then I’m here to throw blankets of bad jokes at you.”
She smiled, nervously. “Stay close?”
“Always.”
When her name was called, she stepped onto the tiny stage—barely a step, more like a raised plank between shelves. She cleared her throat, the mic squeaking like it, too, was nervous.
“Hi. I’m Ritu. This is my first book, which feels weird because I never meant to write one. I just wanted to make drawings that felt like things I couldn’t say.”
She held up the first sketch—the same one that had started it all: two balconies, facing each other, with a sandwich floating between them.
“I made this the week he left,” she said, glancing at Nayan in the crowd. “I thought it was just for me. Turns out… the world has a lot of unfinished balconies.”
Laughter. Someone sniffed.
She continued reading captions from the book, letting her voice wobble where it needed to, never smoothing the cracks. That was the beauty of her work—it didn’t pretend to be polished. It just showed up, flaws and all, and let people breathe through it.
One of the last pieces she read was new, never-before-seen, even by Nayan.
A sketch of a closed door. Outside it, a paper bag with a sandwich.
Caption:
“I thought I was hungry. But it turns out, I was just waiting for someone to knock.”
When the reading ended, the applause felt shy but sincere. Like everyone had been let into a secret and didn’t quite know how to thank her.
Afterward, as people lined up to get their books signed, Nayan stood to the side, watching her beam and blush and scribble inside pages. Her smile now had a certainty to it—like a light that had once flickered but had learned how to stay.
When the crowd thinned, she walked over and hugged him without warning. Not tight. Not dramatic. Just a press of bodies that said, You were right here through all of it.
“Come with me,” she said suddenly.
“Where?”
“Outside.”
They stepped into the narrow alley behind the café. The sounds of the city were distant now—muted honks, someone singing badly in the distance, the faint clink of dishes.
She pulled a folded paper from her bag.
“What’s that?” he asked.
She opened it. It was the order slip from that very first sandwich—crumpled, browned at the edges, but still legible.
Order for: RITU.
Item: Aloo Tikki Sandwich.
Delivered to: Flat 5B.
“You kept this?” he whispered.
“I was going to throw it away. Then I didn’t. Then I hated that I didn’t. Then I started loving that I couldn’t.”
She looked at him, eyes glinting. “This was the first time my name was on something you didn’t mean for me. And it still found me.”
He swallowed the lump in his throat. “You’ve always been the right name. I just didn’t know how to read it yet.”
Ritu stepped closer.
“And now?”
“I see it in bold, all caps. With an exclamation mark.”
She laughed. “Then maybe you’re finally ready.”
“For what?”
“For the next chapter.”
Part 10
The apartment felt different now. Not because of the furniture—it was still the same mismatched chairs and the couch with the dent from too many Netflix marathons—but because the silence had changed. It no longer echoed. It held warmth, like a paused song waiting to be resumed.
Ritu stood in the middle of the room, holding two mugs of coffee. She handed one to Nayan without a word. He took it, sipped, grimaced.
“Still tastes like confused ambition,” he said.
“And yet,” she replied, “you keep drinking it.”
“Because it’s yours.”
They had been quiet all morning. The book launch had gone better than either of them expected. Reviews poured in with words like “honest,” “tender,” “deliciously awkward.” Her editor had sent flowers. Her inbox had blown up.
But that wasn’t what had filled the air between them.
It was the sense that something was shifting.
“Hey,” Nayan said suddenly. “What if we… left the city for a bit?”
Ritu looked up. “Like a trip?”
“No. Like… a pause. Not a forever-thing. Just a now-thing.”
“Where would we go?”
He shrugged. “Anywhere. Someplace with silence. Fewer notifications. And maybe better coffee.”
She considered it. “You’re serious?”
“I am.”
“But I have deadlines. And a second print run. And interviews.”
“And all of that will still be there,” he said, gently. “But maybe we don’t have to be. Not right away.”
She stared at him. “You sound like you’ve already packed.”
“Mentally, yes. In reality, I don’t even have clean socks.”
She smiled. “Okay. Then let’s go.”
Two weeks later, they were on a bus to nowhere in particular. Somewhere with hills, and fog, and patchy signal. Nayan had a backpack filled with books and pens. Ritu carried sketchpads and her childhood teddy bear, which she had unapologetically named “Deadline.”
On the third evening, they sat on the roof of a quiet homestay, wrapped in one blanket, sipping chai that actually tasted good.
“Do you think we’ll get tired of each other?” Ritu asked.
Nayan looked at her, then at the fading sun. “Of you? Never. Of chai? Possibly.”
She elbowed him.
“But seriously,” he continued, “I think what we have… isn’t the kind of love that burns out. It flickers. Stumbles. Spills tea on itself. But it stays.”
Ritu rested her head on his shoulder. “Do you ever miss the chaos?”
“Sometimes. But then I remember the quiet that came after you.”
They stayed like that until the stars took over.
Back in Delhi, life moved on without them. Emails piled up. Deadlines shifted. Readers sent messages like, “I saw myself in your book. Thank you for writing me before I knew I existed.” One fan even sent them a hand-stitched pillow that read:
“Wrong name, right home.”
And that’s what they had become. A home made of errors and edits, soft apologies, and loud laughter.
Months later, when they returned, Ritu found the original sketch she had drawn the day after that first sandwich. She had tucked it into a drawer, forgotten.
It was faded now. But the caption still read:
“He never knew my name. But somehow, he got everything else right.”
She framed it.
Nayan, ever the sentimental fool, printed out his first text to her—the one where he confessed to eating her sandwich—and taped it on their fridge. Right next to a grocery list that included:
Bread
Pickles
Aloo tikki (non-negotiable)
A reason to come home
On their one-year not-anniversary, they didn’t go out. They stayed in, ordered food, and—no surprise—received someone else’s order again.
They looked at the bag.
Order for: Nayan.
Item: Grilled paneer wrap.
Delivered to: Flat 5B.
Ritu raised an eyebrow. “Full circle?”
He nodded. “Almost poetic.”
They split the wrap and wrote a new caption for their wall.
“Love doesn’t always arrive on time. Sometimes, it takes a wrong turn, a cold sandwich, and one soft yes to find its way.”
And so they stayed—wrong on paper, but right in every way that mattered.
Because some stories aren’t meant to be edited.
They’re meant to be lived.
With the wrong name.
And the right love.
THE END
