"You know what my mother used to say?" Meera said. "She'd say, 'Beta, some people are chapters, not the whole book. Don't keep rereading a chapter that's already over.'"
"Used to say?"
Meera was quiet for a moment. "She passed away. Four months ago. Cancer."
The vestibule suddenly felt very small.
"I'm sorry," Arjun said.
"She was sick for a long time. Almost two years. The last six months, she couldn't get out of bed. I was her primary caregiver — feeding her, cleaning her, sitting with her through the nights when the pain was bad and the morphine wasn't enough." Meera's voice was even, but there was a tremor in it, like a guitar string that had been plucked too hard. "After she went, I just... stopped. Stopped going to work. Stopped eating properly. Stopped answering calls. My father kept saying I needed to 'move on,' like grief is a traffic jam you can just drive around."
"So you got on a train."
"So I got on a train." She almost smiled. "She loved the mountains. Maa. She always said the hills were the only place she could hear God properly. She wanted to see Kashmir one last time, but we never made it." Meera lifted her camera. "So I'm going for her. To photograph what she would have seen."
Arjun understood that. Not the specifics, but the feeling underneath — the desperate need to do something, anything, to keep a lost person's presence alive.
"What did she look like?" he asked.
Meera reached into her bag and pulled out her phone. She scrolled through her gallery and held it up. A woman with the same dark eyes as Meera, the same slightly crooked smile, sitting on a balcony with a cup of tea, morning light on her face.
"She's beautiful," Arjun said.
"She was the most beautiful person I've ever known. And I don't mean her face. I mean the way she was with people. Rickshaw-walas, shopkeepers, the woman who sold flowers outside the Hanuman temple — she knew all their names. All their children's names. She remembered everything about everyone because she actually cared."
They sat in that rattling vestibule for two more hours. The conversation drifted — from grief to childhood to favourite foods to the specific shade of orange the sky turns over Jaipur at dusk. They didn't solve anything. They didn't have any revelations. They just talked, the way two strangers can when the night is long and the destination is far away.
At some point, Meera yawned. "I should try to sleep."
"Yeah."
She stood up, dusted off her jeans. At the door to the coach, she turned. "Arjun?"
"Yeah?"
"You didn't stop being enough. She just stopped looking."
She disappeared into the dim coach. Arjun stayed in the vestibule for another twenty minutes, listening to the train, feeling something shift inside his chest — not healing, not yet, but the faintest crack in the ice. Like the first thaw of March after a long winter.
When he finally crawled back to his berth, the chai vendor was already making his first round.
"Chai, sahab?"
Arjun bought two cups. He left one on the small fold-out tray near Meera's berth.
He slept for three hours. The best three hours of sleep he'd had in weeks.
