"I'm not going to fall."
She didn't fall. She got the shot and jumped down, scrolling through the LCD screen with an expression of pure, uncomplicated joy. It was the first genuine happiness Arjun had seen in weeks — not his own, but being near it was enough to make him feel its edges.
They ate breakfast at a dhaba just outside the station. Chole bhature, two plates, and two glasses of sweet lassi so thick you could stand a spoon in it. Meera ate with her hands, unapologetically, licking the masala off her fingers. Arjun ate slowly, surprised by his own appetite. He hadn't been hungry in days.
"Tell me something about yourself," Meera said between bites. "Something real. Not your job title or your zodiac sign."
He thought about it. "I used to draw. In school. Pencil sketches, mostly. I was actually pretty good."
"What happened?"
"Engineering happened. Then work happened. Then life happened." He shrugged. "You know how it goes."
"I do. But I also know that the things we were good at when we were twelve don't just disappear. They go underground, like rivers. They're still flowing somewhere inside you."
The station loudspeaker crackled. Their train was about to leave.
They jogged back to the platform, laughing for no particular reason — the kind of laughter that comes from being slightly out of breath and slightly out of your routine and completely free of anyone who knows your name.
Back on the train, the route had changed. Instead of the flat plains of Punjab, they were moving through greener terrain — fields of sugarcane, orchards of mango trees with their wide, dark canopies, villages with painted walls advertising cement and tuition classes.
Meera photographed it all. But every few minutes, she'd put the camera down and just watch. And Arjun found himself watching too — not the landscape, but her. The way she tilted her head when something caught her attention. The way her hands moved when she talked, like she was sculpting the air. The small furrow between her eyebrows when she was thinking.
He was noticing things. And that was dangerous. Because noticing is the first step. Noticing is how it begins.
"What are you looking at?" she said without turning from the window.
"The sugarcane fields," he lied.
"Hmm." She looked at him. Those dark eyes. "They are beautiful, aren't they?"
"Yeah," he said. "They are."
The train rocked gently, carrying them both through a landscape neither had planned to see, toward a destination that was no longer the point.
