Chapter Text
Abhimanyu tells himself he doesn't need anyone.
The competition ends and the university resettles into its rhythms. Sudo disappears for several days—long enough that people begin to notice, but not quite long enough for anyone to act on it. When he returns he looks the same. The Dean's resignation becomes a topic of conversation for perhaps two weeks. There is a farewell, other professors organising it with the kind of mild enthusiasm reserved for administrative transitions. The Dean stays for an hour. Then he leaves. Someone new arrives, another academic, and within a month the bonsai on the windowsill and the particular quality of the Dean's morning presence—something bright, almost childlike—become difficult to recall with precision.
Abhimanyu doesn't think about it. He's always been alone, really, so nothing has changed.
Sometimes Jeet comes to the gym and stands close while Abhimanyu lifts, his hands hovering near the bar. Sometimes Shruti sits beside him in lectures and taps his wrist when his attention drifts toward the window. Sudo stays in the corner of rooms looking diminished until someone—usually Jeet—pulls him into conversation, and then for a few minutes the heaviness lifts from his face. Rohan is there too, in the sense that he's always turning a corner just as Abhimanyu approaches, or leaving a room just as Abhimanyu enters. Abhimanyu doesn't look at him. Doesn't register the particular slope of his shoulders or the way his hair falls differently now, shorter. These are just details. They don't mean anything.
Occasionally a car starts somewhere nearby, the engine loud and sudden, and something tightens in Abhimanyu's throat. But that's physical, autonomic. It doesn't mean anything.
Shanaya goes to Boston. Exchange program, fashion marketing and economics. Shruti mentions it casually one afternoon and Abhimanyu nods like it's information he might forget by evening. He stops going out for drinks after that. There's no particular reason. It just seems pointless now, standing at bars waiting for something that won't happen, someone who won't arrive. In the corridors no one calls his name the way she used to, insistent and melodic, repeating it until he had no choice but to turn around.
He thinks about his grandmother sometimes. The particular weight of her hand on his head. The way she'd looked at him near the end, like she was trying to communicate something urgent that he hadn't been ready to understand. He thinks about this and then he stops thinking about it. There's no use.
Life simplifies. He starts waking at five for the gym, earlier than necessary, because the emptiness feels cleaner in the dark. The weight of the bar is the only pressure he can control. During the day he attends lectures and takes meticulous notes, more detailed than required. He's begun researching firms, international placements, cities where no one he knows will follow. Singapore, maybe. London. Somewhere with a skyline that doesn't remind him of anything.
At night he lies in bed and drafts emails to recruiters, updates his resume, reads industry reports until his eyes blur. Sometimes he's still awake at three, four in the morning, but that's fine. Sleep is inefficient anyway. Shruti tells him there are people for that kind of thing, carefully, and he doesn't respond. He's never needed to talk to a shrink to survive. He won't start now.
One more year. Then he'll be free of this place, these people, the accumulated weight of knowing them. He'll go somewhere new and become someone uncomplicated. Someone who doesn't carry the shape of a best friend's absence like a second skeleton. Someone who doesn't remember the exact timber of a girl's laugh or the way she'd touched his arm once, briefly, outside a lecture hall.
He's good at being alone. He's always been good at it. This is just a return to his natural state.
He almost believes it.
Shanaya reaches out to him first. That feels important to note.
r u in lon?
The message pops up on his laptop screen, and he lets it disappear in the flurry of other text messages he is avoiding. It has been three weeks and two days in London, and Shanaya has probably known all this while he is here. Would she think he was a coward for not reaching out to her first? He becomes acutely aware of his own body, the way his shoulders have tensed, the phone in his pocket suddenly possessing weight. It seems impossible that no one else can see what's happening to him.
Yes. LSE. I’m at Southwark.
He takes time to respond to her, maybe forty five minutes. He'd heard she finished her degree. Heard she moved to Boston with her mother. Past tense, apparently. The day he left Saint Theresa he'd sat on the bus with his phone in his hand, her contact open, thumb hovering. He'd felt ridiculous. Childish. Like someone nursing a wound he'd inflicted on himself. Then London appeared on the horizon—an apartment with his name on the lease, a life he could arrange according to his own logic. He'd put the phone away.
Shanaya drops a location pin, and a time. He closes his laptop. The seminar continues without him. On the street outside he realizes he's walking quickly, but in his stride that wasn't there an hour ago. At the flat he showers and changes his shirt twice, which is absurd, so he puts the first one back on. His reflection in the mirror looks like someone he doesn't entirely recognise.
He leaves eighteen minutes early. This also feels important, though he can't say why.
She’s drinking coffee out of a mug, it leaves a line of foam on her lip. Her hair is cut short, not too different but just enough that she looks older. She had a black coffee waiting for him when he sat down, and a half-smoked cigarette crushed in the ash tray between them. He isn’t sure which part surprises him the most.
“I thought boys stopped growing eventually,” she says, in lieu of hello. “You look taller.”
“I’m always trying to beat the odds,” he tells her, and she breaks into a beautiful smile.
It is not awkward at all, he realises. She doesn’t stop talking for a moment, even to let him speak. She tells him about her life in Boston, her foreign boyfriend who didn’t speak a lick of English and frustrated her mother endlessly, her phase of short hair and dark lipsticks, and work at a fashion house that had seemed important until it didn't. She'd left after six months.
"I haven't talked to Shruti since the airport," she says. "After the competition. We said goodbye and then nothing."
He nods. Jeet sends her things on Facebook sometimes, she adds. Memes, articles. Nothing substantial.
She doesn't mention Rohan.
Abhimanyu watches her hands around the mug. She's wearing a ring he doesn't recognize. Her nails are unpainted. These seem like things he should remember—whether she used to wear rings, whether her nails were usually painted—but he can't.
"What about you?" she asks, and it's the first time she's looked directly at him in several minutes. "Why London?"
He tells her about the gruelling period of entrances and interviews, the hunger to move out of India for once and taste the real world. There was nothing left back home anyways, with his grandmother gone and his aunt becoming more inhospitable as each day passed. He tells her about the final year of college, when he briefly went out with a girl from the swim team, and the rapid but mutual breakup that followed. He doesn’t mention Rohan either.
But Rohan is there anyway, in the gaps between what they're saying. When Shanaya talks about loneliness in Boston her voice does something specific, a tightening at certain words, and he understands she's talking around an absence. When he describes his final year at Saint Theresa she nods with a small furrow between her eyebrows because she knows exactly who isn't appearing in the story. He wonders if she's still in touch with him. If she's not mentioning him because Rohan asked her not to. The possibility sits heavy in his stomach.
He had disappeared all together after graduation. At the afterparty of the ceremony, Abhimanyu stood behind him in line for the loo. Quieter than ever, Rohan had gone in, come out and left without once looking at Abhimanyu. Their shoulders brushed for a second, and it left Abhimanyu overthinking late into the night if it was on purpose. Since then, he’d heard that Rohan was still in India but never in the same city for too long. His brother had joined his father on magazine covers, but no sight of him.
Shanaya is watching him. He realizes he's been quiet too long.
"Sorry," he says. "What?"
"I asked if you're happy here."
The question feels impossible to answer. He looks at her foam-lined lip, the short hair, the ring. He thinks about his flat in Southwark, the careful emptiness of it. The way he's been constructing a life that requires nothing from anyone.
"I don't know yet," he says.
She nods like this is the answer she expected. Like maybe it's the same answer she'd give.
Going out with Shanaya becomes a regular thing soon. Sometimes she is waiting outside his campus, cigarettes and coffees in her hands. Sometimes he goes up to her apartment, where he finds her sitting on the floor with a nail polish brush in one hand and a spread of magazines next to her. Occasionally they go out for drinks too, seedy nightclubs and crowded pubs where she holds his hands to slink through throngs of people.
He doesn’t know what she is doing in London. Distanced from her mother, living in the apartment of one of her step sisters, and so vague to describe her job. But he’s not her keeper, and he can’t imagine Shanaya Singhania to be in a position of suffering or poverty anyways.
So, he doesn’t ask, and she stops bothering to make up excuses after a week or so anyways.
Shanaya talks and he listens. She tells him about a girl she met at a gallery opening who turned out to be married. About her stepsister who works in finance and leaves the flat at six every morning, returning after Shanaya is asleep. About a coat she saw in a shop window that cost more than his monthly rent.
He tells her less. About lectures. His supervisor who makes cutting remarks about his thesis proposal. The fact that his aunt stopped answering his calls after he left India, which was fine, he'd expected it.
Sometimes when she's talking she looks at him in a way that suggests she's waiting for him to say something specific. He never knows what it is. The moment passes and she continues and he feels like he's failed a test he didn't know he was taking.
One night at a pub in Shoreditch she gets drunk faster than usual. It is so crowded, and with a football match playing on the television, there is not a moment of peace. She's leaning against him, regardless of choice, her shoulder fitted under his arm, and she says, "Do you ever think about going back?"
"To India?"
"To anything." She's looking at her drink. "Before."
He knows what she means. The late nights in the library, the early morning runs across the football field, the hours lost on long road trips across Delhi in Rohan’s car. The shape of the question is obvious even if she won't name it.
"No," he says.
"Liar."
She says it lightly but doesn't look at him. He can feel the heat of her through his shirt. Around them people are laughing, shouting over music, living forward. He and Shanaya remain very still.
"Sometimes," he admits.
She nods against his shoulder. Neither of them says anything else. After a while she straightens up and orders another round and the conversation moves elsewhere, but something has shifted. Or maybe nothing has shifted. Maybe this is just what they do—circle around the same absence, never naming it, never looking directly at what they've lost.
In his dreams, he is back in his room at Saint Theresa. His heart is heavy, even in his sleep, the weight of grief still too heavy. He’s packing up his things again, just for the weekend. His uncle needs help cleaning out his grandmother’s room. He’s not ready, even at twenty four, to deal with putting her shoes away.
Shanaya appears. She's always there, in the wrong moment but looking inevitable. They're arguing about something he can never quite recall, and then he's moving her hair aside to kiss her. Even now, at twenty-six, he could count on one hand the number of times he's wanted to kiss Shanaya Singhania. It isn't fair that he got one moment and nothing after.
His dreams never end the same though, because sometimes it happens exactly as it did that day. Rohan storms off and then there’s a bruise on his cheek and blood dripping down his shirt. Sometimes Rohan never comes at all and pushes her into the bed, her hands curling in his hair. Fewer times she never enters his room at all and he relives packing his things on a loop. Once, just once, it is Rohan at his door instead of Shanaya.
You need friends right now, especially right now.
I don’t want to be your friend.
He wakes from these dreams with his heart doing something arrhythmic. The flat in Southwark is dark and impersonal. Sometimes it takes him several minutes to remember where he is, what year it is. The sheets are twisted around his legs. His phone on the nightstand shows the time: 3:47, 4:23, 5:01.
He doesn't go back to sleep. There's no point. He gets up and makes coffee and sits at his desk with his laptop open, pretending to work until enough time has passed that he can go to the gym. By the time morning actually arrives he's already been awake for hours, and when people ask if he slept well he says yes automatically, the lie smooth and practiced.
Shanaya texts him around noon. u busy?
He looks at his screen. At the paragraph he's been revising for forty minutes without improving it. At the cursor blinking expectantly.
No, he writes back. Come over.
An hour later, Shanaya is in his kitchen cooking something with meat and vegetables that requires more focus than skill. She’s wearing a dress cut up in odd places over a pair of jeans. Clothes she never would’ve worn at college. For once, she is not smoking. He pours out two glasses of wine and sits back to watch her chop vegetables on the wooden board.
"I was thinking about our kiss the other day," she says, not looking up from the cutting board, "it happened so long ago, but it feels like yesterday."
He goes very still.
"Okay," he says. He didn’t think they were ever going to bring it up.
"I wanted you to. I don't know if you knew that."
The knife pauses. She's still not looking at him. He can see the tension in her shoulders, the deliberate casualness of her posture. She takes a large sip of her wine glass and puts it down loudly.
"I didn't know," he says, which is mostly true.
She makes a small sound, something between a laugh and exhale. "Rohan knew. I think that's why he—" She stops. Set the knife down. "I don’t know which betrayal hurt him more, you know. "
He didn’t understand what she meant. “Did you talk to him after graduation?”
"I kept thinking he'd get better. That he'd become the person he was before everything happened." She turns to face him finally. Her eyes are dry but there's something raw in them. "He didn't. He just got meaner. And I just got more pathetic."
Abhimanyu doesn't know what to say to this. The kitchen feels very small suddenly.
"I wish I'd met you earlier," she says. "Before all of it."
He knows immediately this is wrong but can't say why. Two years ago, he would’ve kept his mouth shut right now. Now he cannot stop: "We wouldn't have worked."
"What?"
If Rohan was never in the picture, Abhimanyu wouldn’t have looked at Shanaya twice. Shanaya wouldn’t have given him the time of the day if she didn’t need him to make Rohan jealous. Abhimanyu lost so many things in his life to Rohan - the football match, the race, the competition story, the friendship of a lifetime. None of it stung as much as the look of abject shock on Shanaya’s face when Rohan walked into the room that day.
"If we'd met earlier. We wouldn't have—" He gestures vaguely between them. "This wouldn't exist."
She's watching him carefully now. "Because of Rohan."
"Yes."
"So you're saying we only work because he ruined both of us first?"
It sounds cruel when she says it like that, but it's essentially accurate. It almost knocks a laugh out of him. He'd never looked at her properly until that day outside the sangeet, grief making everything sharp and immediate. And she'd never looked at him at all until Rohan had given her reason to.
"I'm saying the timing matters," he says.
She considers this. Picks up the knife again, sets it back down. "That's depressing."
"Yes."
"But it's true."
"Probably."
She crosses the kitchen. He thinks she might leave—he's prepared for her to leave—but instead she stops in front of him. Close enough that he can smell her perfume, something expensive and floral that her stepsister probably bought.
"Can I kiss you?" she asks.
The question feels impossible. Not because he doesn't want it but because of what it means. In his mind Shanaya Singhania is still attached to Rohan, has always been attached to Rohan, and exists only in relation to Rohan. Kissing her now feels like a betrayal even though Rohan lost the right to be betrayed years ago.
He still wants to kiss her though.
"I don't know," he says honestly.
"That's not a no."
"It's not a yes either."
She touches his face, her palm cool against his cheek. He can feel his pulse in his throat. Around them the flat is quiet except for something boiling over on the stove that neither of them moves to address.
"He treated me terribly," she says. Not angry, just factual. "For so long. And I let him because I thought—I don't even know what I thought. That he'd wake up one day and remember how to be kind."
Abhimanyu wants to say something but his throat has closed.
"I'm tired of letting him ruin things," she continues. "Even now. Even when he's not here."
The logic is sound but it doesn't change the feeling. That kissing her is somehow still wrong. That Rohan is in the room with them, will always be in the room with them, a ghost they've both agreed not to acknowledge.
But then she's kissing him anyway, she's decided for both of them, and his hands move to her waist without his permission. She tastes like the wine she's been drinking while cooking. He feels like a college student in his dorm again.
When they break apart she's breathing hard. So is he.
"Was that okay?" she asks.
He doesn't answer immediately. Behind her the pot is definitely boiling over now, water hissing against the burner. He should move. He should say something. Instead he just looks at her, at her hair shorter now and her unpainted nails and the particular way she's watching him, hopeful and guarded in equal measure.
"I don't know," he says again.
She laughs, surprising both of them. "You're terrible at this."
"I know."
"We can stop. If you want."
He doesn't want to. That's the problem. He's wanted this for so long that having it feels like a category error, like reality has made a mistake. He thinks about Rohan at the graduation ceremony, their shoulders brushing. The careful way Rohan had avoided looking at him. The years of silence that followed.
"He's not here," Shanaya says quietly, reading his mind. "He doesn't get to be here anymore."
This should be permission enough. It isn't, but he kisses her anyway. And this time when she responds he lets himself believe it might be okay. That they might be allowed this. That the ghost of Rohan can exist in the room without consuming all the oxygen.
Later, when she's asleep in his bed and he's lying awake beside her, he'll think about the alternative timeline. The one where they met first, before Rohan, before Saint Theresa, before everything broke. In that version they're strangers. She doesn't know his name. He wouldn't look at her twice.
The only reason they work now is because they're both damaged in compatible ways. Shaped by the same absence. It's not romantic. It might not even be healthy.
But when she stirs and reaches for him in her sleep, her hand finding him automatically, he takes it. And for the moment that's enough.
They don't put a name to it.
He makes eggs the next morning. She hovers at his shoulder, close enough that he can feel the warmth coming off her body, and talks about her day—a meeting at eleven, someone she needs to call back, something about her stepsister's dry cleaning.
She's wearing his shirt. Neither of them mentions this.
At quarter past nine she checks her phone and makes a small sound of distress. "I have to go. I can't show up like this."
He watches her gather her things. Shoes, bag, the jacket she'd draped over his chair. She moves quickly but not frantically. At the door she pauses like she might say something, then doesn't. After she leaves he strips the bed. The sheets smell like her perfume, something he can't identify but will probably notice on strangers now.
It was good. That's the thing. It was good and he doesn't feel terrible, which somehow makes it worse. If he felt terrible at least he'd know what to do with that.
He makes coffee and opens his laptop. Tries to work. The cursor blinks at him. He reads the same paragraph four times without absorbing it. In the kitchen he finds an earring in a teacup, He picks it up. Turns it over in his palm. He brings it to his lips. Kisses it once, quickly, like someone might see.
To hell with forgetting, he decides.
She leaves for Delhi on a Thursday. Wedding, she says. Her cousin or maybe second cousin, she isn't sure. She sends him her flight details without context, just the screenshot, and he looks at it for longer than necessary before closing the message.
His supervisor emails him a new project. Economic modelling, something with trade routes. Dense enough to require complete attention. He takes it to the library and stays until closing. Then he brings it home and works past two, past three, the laptop screen the only light in the flat.
The earring is in his pocket. He keeps transferring it—jeans to jacket to the dish by his keys. She hasn't mentioned it.
She texts when she lands: delhi is exactly as terrible as i remembered
He types three different responses and deletes them all. Eventually he just likes the message.
For a week she's silent. Not completely—there are Instagram stories, her in a sari at what must be the wedding, her face partially obscured by someone's shoulder. Her and an older woman who might be her mother, both looking away from the camera. But nothing directed at him. No texts, no late night messages asking what he's doing.
He doesn't reach out. He could. He thinks about it constantly, which is worse than actually doing it. His thumb hovers over her name in his contacts and then he puts the phone down and returns to the project, the numbers that need organising, the models that need building.
When she lands back in London she sends: home. exhausted. family is a nightmare
This time he responds immediately: Want to come over?
The reply takes four minutes: tomorrow? too tired tonight
Tomorrow's fine
She sends a heart emoji, which feels significant or meaningless, he can't tell which.
He stays up anyway. Finishes a section of the project he could have left for morning. At some point he takes the earring out of the dish and holds it, pressing the metal between his thumb and forefinger until it warms. Then he puts it back. This feels important somehow, the returning of it to its place. The not-keeping-it-on-his-person.
Tomorrow she'll come over and they'll either talk about what's happening between them or they won't. Most likely they won't. They'll have coffee and she'll tell him about the wedding and he'll pretend he wasn't counting the days she was gone. This is how they work now. Everything significant communicated through what they don't say. He goes to bed at four and doesn't sleep.
What he doesn't expect is for her to mention Rohan.
"He was there every night," she says. She's sitting with her legs folded under her on the couch, ashing into the empty coffee cup. He should say something about this but can't locate the objection. "Just standing in corners. You know how he does."
"Did you talk to him."
It comes out flat, not quite a question.
"No." She grinds the cigarette out against the porcelain. "He was avoiding everyone. Like they might be contagious."
Abhimanyu can picture it precisely. Rohan after the competition had become something feral and withdrawn, always at the edges of rooms. There had been moments when Abhimanyu had wanted to grab him, force some kind of response—anger, anything. He never had, obviously.
"I didn't try," Shanaya adds. She's looking at the crushed cigarette. "If that's what you're asking."
He wasn't asking but something eases in his chest anyway. She sets the cup on the table. The lighter next to it. These small domestic gestures. She pushes her hair to one side and then she's moving, closer, into his lap, hovering over him with her hands on his shoulders.
He can smell the cigarette smoke on her and underneath it her perfume. Her weight is barely resting on him, like she's prepared to move away quickly if needed.
"Is this okay," she says.
"Yes."
Her eyes do something he can't read. "You're thinking about him."
"No."
"Liar."
She's right but he doesn't confirm it. She kisses him and he tastes the coffee, the cigarette. His hands find her waist automatically. This should feel simpler than it does. She's here and Rohan isn't. That should be enough.
When she pulls back she's watching him with that particular expression she gets sometimes, like she's trying to solve an equation that keeps changing variables.
"He looked terrible," she says quietly. "If you were wondering."
He wasn't wondering. Or he was and didn't want to admit it. The distinction seems irrelevant now.
"I don't care how he looked."
"Okay."
"I don't."
"I believe you." She doesn't sound like she believes him. She kisses him again, longer this time, and he lets himself stop thinking about corners of rooms and whether Rohan's avoidance was general or specific. Whether seeing Shanaya there meant anything to him. Whether he would’ve asked about Abhimanyu.
Her hands move to his collar. His move under her shirt. Neither of them stops.
These are facts that Abhimanyu is sure of.
One - He was in love with Megha in school. She was sweet, and she shared biscuits with him in class. She had a small mole on her cheek and on most days, Abhimanyu’s concentration began and ended on the mark. She left school before he was ever able to tell her that he thought she was beautiful.
Two - His parents death was not his fault. That one took a while to unravel for him, no matter how much his aunt tried to convince him otherwise. When he was younger, he wished he’d gone in the car accident with them, but that was a past horror. There is nothing in his life that his parents would’ve provided to him that his grandmother did not.
Three - Shanaya does not have a mole on her cheek, but she has one at the crux of her shoulder. It does not have the same effect on Abhimanyu, but he traces it regardless when she falls asleep next to him. She is the most beautiful girl that has ever looked back at him twice. He doesn’t believe he gets to have this.
Four - Rohan was not the first boy he’s been in love with. He’s just the first one that has ever made him act deranged.
He thinks about these facts at odd times. Making coffee while Shanaya showers. Walking to campus. Lying awake at three in the morning with her breathing steady beside him. They feel like coordinates he's mapping, trying to determine his location. Where he's been. Where he is now.
Shanaya stirs. Her hand finds his chest, resting there. She doesn't wake.
The mole on her shoulder is just visible above the sheet. He touches it and thinks about certainty, how little of it he actually possesses.
These are things he doesn't know.
One: If he'd told Megha in time maybe he'd be married to her now in some small town in Punjab. Maybe he would have been content. Or maybe he would have been more miserable than he'd ever been at Saint Theresa, and he'd never know the difference.
Two: He's more of an orphan now than when his parents died. At least then he'd had his grandmother. Now there's no one who looks after his needs without him asking. No one knows what he requires before he does. He is truly without family. This fact arrives at strange moments—buying groceries, sitting in lectures. The absoluteness of his solitude.
Three: He doesn't know if Shanaya loves him. He doesn't know if he's a placeholder, someone to occupy the space Rohan left vacant. And worse: he doesn't know if he loves her either, or if she's just the person who happened to be available when he needed someone to be.
Four: He might be obsessed with Rohan Nanda for the rest of his life. Years could pass—are passing—and still he circles back. Still he thinks about shoulders brushing in a bathroom queue. Still he keeps the shape of that loss like something he's responsible for maintaining.
Shanaya's breathing changes. She's waking. In a moment she'll open her eyes and look at him and he'll have to be someone who knows what he's doing. Someone who has chosen this deliberately rather than stumbled into it.
He traces the mole one more time. Then he closes his eyes and waits.
The next time there's a wedding she asks him to come.
Udaipur. A family friend's daughter. They fly economy because he won't let her pay for his ticket and she doesn't argue about it. The coffee tastes like it's been sitting for hours. No vegan options. She drinks it anyway without comment.
During descent she presses her palms over her ears. He didn't know this about her, that turbulence does this. She speaks too loudly to compensate and a woman across the aisle glances over.
"Will you match your kurta to my dupatta?" she asks.
He's playing with her hair, the strands falling through his fingers. "You should have mentioned this earlier."
"Will you tolerate my tantrums when the family gets unbearable?"
"Depends. If you take it out on me I'm leaving you with your aunts." He says it lightly. "I need to get back to work intact."
She goes quiet. He wonders if he's miscalculated.
"Will you make a scene," she says carefully, "if I introduce you as my boyfriend?"
The question arrives with weight he wasn't prepared for. Around them people are gathering bags, preparing to disembark. The seatbelt sign is still on.
"No," he says.
She looks at him. "No you won't make a scene, or no you don't want me to?"
"No, I won't make a scene."
Something eases in her face. She nods once and then the plane is taxiing and the moment closes.
At the hotel her relatives absorb them immediately. Aunts, cousins, people whose relation to Shanaya he can't track. She introduces him as her boyfriend and he watches her mouth form the word, casual and definitive. No one seems surprised. Her mother appears briefly, assesses him with one long look, and then moves on to other concerns.
They fall into routine. Morning chai while she gets ready, the elaborate process of her dressing. He matches his kurta to her dupatta without being asked again and she notices, touches his collar with something like approval. At the ceremonies they sit together. Her hand finds his during long speeches. She leans into him when she's tired.
It's easy. That's what surprises him. He keeps waiting for the complication but it doesn't arrive.
One night after the sangeet they're walking back to their room and she's drunk, leaning on him, laughing about something her cousin said. He's steady beside her, his arm around her waist. In the elevator she kisses him and tastes like champagne.
"This is good," she says. Not quite a question.
"Yes."
"You're not going to ruin it by overthinking?"
He doesn't answer immediately. She's watching him with that look she gets, the one that suggests she already knows what he's thinking.
"I'll try not to," he says.
She nods, satisfied. The elevator doors open.
Later, when she's asleep and he's lying awake beside her, he thinks about how consistently he fights against the simplest option. How he could have had this months ago if he'd just allowed it. With Shanaya his life could be straightforward. Convenient, even. She fits into his routines. Doesn't ask him to explain himself. Accepts his silences.
He watches her sleeping. The mole on her shoulder was just visible. Her hair spread across the pillow.
He thinks about Rohan briefly, inevitably. Then pushes the thought away.
This is what he has. This is what he's chosen, or what's chosen him. The distinction seems less important than it used to.
He touches her shoulder gently. She doesn't wake. Outside the window, Udaipur continues, the lake dark and still. Inside the room everything is quiet. For now, that's enough.
He moved into her flat three months later. Not a discussion, really, just a gradual accumulation of his things in her space until the question of where he lives becomes obsolete. Her mother invites them to dinner and Shanaya assumes it's to meet husband number four, but instead the mother spends the evening asking Abhimanyu about his work, his plans. It feels like an interview he's passing.
His uncle emails. Too late, obviously, but the gesture exists. Money appears in Abhimanyu's account. He wants to know how he's doing, what London is like. A subsequent email mentions a box of photographs from when his grandmother bought him a camera for his twelfth birthday. Abhimanyu opens the attachment. Looks at it for maybe thirty seconds. His grandmother and aunt in the kitchen, kneading dough, everything slightly out of focus. Part of his finger obscuring the left side of the frame.
He doesn't reply. Two days pass and the idea of replying becomes impossible.
Shanaya never asks about his family. At dinners with her relatives no one mentions parents or siblings or where he's from, exactly. Her stepsister almost says something once—he catches the beginning of "so much better than that other—" before someone interrupts. He sits very still for the rest of the evening. Shanaya's hand finds his under the table but he can't feel it properly.
A year passes like this. Shanaya gets hired at a fashion house, something legitimate this time. The hours are terrible and she comes home furious most nights, but she says she loves it. Her cigarette consumption doubles and then one day she announces she's quitting. He watches her white-knuckle through two weeks of withdrawal. Sometimes her hair smells like smoke anyway but he doesn't mention it.
His own job offer comes shortly after. Investment banking. The kind of position he'd been constructing his entire life toward. The salary is obscene. He accepts without hesitation.
They celebrate at a restaurant neither of them can pronounce the name of. Shanaya orders champagne and he drinks more than usual. In the taxi home she's pressed against him, talking about a vacation they should take, somewhere warm. He agrees to things he won't remember in the morning.
In bed later she falls asleep quickly, the champagne and exhaustion pulling her under. He lies awake. Their life has become solid somehow when he wasn't paying attention. Lease agreements, joint dinners, her mother's phone number in his contacts. The architecture of a future that didn't require his explicit consent to construct itself.
He thinks about the photograph. His grandmother's hands in the dough, capable and sure. His aunt was beside her, before everything became complicated. His own finger in the frame, evidence that he'd been there, that he'd tried to capture something and failed.
Shanaya shifts in her sleep. Her hand finds his chest, resting there. Outside the window London continues, indifferent. Inside the flat everything is arranged in the shape of a life. His clothes are in the closet. His toothbrush by the sink. A second key on his keyring.
It should feel like enough. Most of the time it does.