"Do you know how long these stops usually last?" the girl next to him asked.
"Could be ten minutes. Could be three hours," Arjun said. "No way to tell."
She nodded, unbothered, and pulled out her camera. She angled it toward the window and started photographing the still landscape — the flat yellow fields, a lone tree, a cluster of mud houses with blue plastic roofs.
Click. Click. Click.
"You're photographing... nothing," Arjun said.
She lowered the camera and looked at him. "There's no such thing as nothing. You just have to look harder."
He didn't have a response to that.
The train didn't move for forty-seven minutes. In that time, Arjun learned three things about his seat neighbour: her name was Meera, she was going to Jammu to photograph the mountains for a project she wouldn't elaborate on, and she had a habit of humming under her breath when she was thinking — some old Hindi film melody he couldn't quite place.
She learned nothing about him. He didn't offer, and she didn't ask.
The train groaned back to life. Meera put her camera away and pulled out a book — a dog-eared copy of a poetry collection. Arjun stared at the fields rushing past, trying to feel something. Anything. The numbness that had settled into his chest since yesterday was thick and cold, like fog over a lake.
He thought about Nandini. About the morning she'd sat at the kitchen table and told him, in a voice so calm it was almost clinical, that she'd been seeing someone else for three months. A colleague. Rahul from product management. She'd said it like she was giving a quarterly update. "I think you should know. I didn't plan this. But I can't pretend anymore."
Seven years. From college sweethearts to a shared flat in Koramangala. Seven years of inside jokes and weekend movie plans and her mother's rajma chawal on Sundays. Gone, like the signal on his phone — there one moment, bars dropping to zero the next.
The chai vendor came through the coach. "Chai chai chai, garam chai!"
Meera bought two cups without asking and placed one in front of Arjun. He looked at it.
"You look like you need it," she said simply.
He took a sip. It was too sweet, the way railway chai always is. But it was warm, and warmth was something.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't mention it." She went back to her book.
The sun dropped lower. Orange light filled the coach, painting everything in that brief golden hour that photographers and poets live for. Meera instinctively reached for her camera, then stopped. She just looked. Arjun noticed her doing that — choosing to see with her eyes instead of through a lens.
The train rolled on toward the night. Arjun didn't know it yet, but he was heading toward something far more terrifying than heartbreak.
He was heading toward hope.
