The train pulled into Udhampur at 7 AM — a full eighteen hours behind schedule. The platform was chaos: coolies in red shirts, families with too much luggage, a dog sleeping peacefully in the middle of everything like a guru who'd transcended the material world.
There was an announcement. The train would terminate here. Waterlogging on the tracks ahead had not cleared. All passengers bound for Jammu Tawi would need to board a bus from the station.
Meera took the news with a calm that Arjun was beginning to understand wasn't indifference but acceptance — a deep, practised willingness to let things be what they are.
"So," she said, standing on the platform with her camera bag and her messy bun and her white kurta that was now wrinkled beyond salvation. "Bus to Jammu?"
"Bus to Jammu," he agreed.
The bus was a Tata that had seen better decades. The seats were torn, the windows were either jammed open or jammed shut, and the driver had the radio tuned to a station playing exclusively sad Kishore Kumar songs, which felt personally targeted at Arjun.
They found two seats near the back. The road from Udhampur to Jammu wound through the Shivalik foothills — narrow, hairpin turns with drops that made your stomach relocate to your throat. But the views were staggering. Deep valleys carpeted in green. Waterfalls appearing and disappearing between folds of rock. Eagles circling above like punctuation marks in a sky that went on forever.
Meera photographed everything, leaning across Arjun to shoot through his window when her side offered nothing but rock face. Each time she leaned over, her hair brushed his neck. He pretended not to notice. He noticed everything.
"Arjun," she said, mid-lean, her camera pointed at something outside.
"Yes?"
"What's your plan? After Jammu. Are you going back to Bangalore?"
He hadn't thought about it. In two days on the train, 'after' had felt like a theoretical concept — something that happened to other people.
"I don't know," he said honestly.
"Would you..." She lowered the camera. Looked at him. Something crossed her face — hesitation, maybe fear, maybe the same unnamed thing that kept him awake at night. "Would you want to come with me? To Kashmir?"
The bus hit a pothole. Everyone bounced. A woman in the front row yelped. The driver didn't even blink.
"To Kashmir," Arjun repeated.
"For the photographs. I could use a second pair of hands — someone to carry the equipment, help with setups. And honestly..." She paused. "Honestly, I don't want to do this alone. I thought I did. When I left Jaipur, I was sure I wanted to be alone. But I was wrong. Some things are better when they're shared."
Arjun felt the ground shift beneath him. Not from the road. From something deeper.
Every rational part of his brain screamed no. You don't go to Kashmir with a woman you met two days ago on a train. You don't rearrange your already-unravelled life further. You go home, you fix things, you be an adult.
But there was another voice. Quieter. The one that used to draw pencil sketches and notice the way light fell on walls and believe that beauty was a valid reason to exist.
"I have one condition," he said.
"What?"
"I get to draw while you photograph. Whatever you shoot, I sketch. Two records of the same journey."
Meera's face broke into a smile — not the quick one from Platform No. 3, but a slow one, the kind that starts in the eyes and takes its time reaching the mouth. The kind of smile you remember years later, in unexpected moments, like a song you haven't heard in a decade.
"Deal," she said.
The bus groaned around another curve. Kishore Kumar sang about someone leaving. The mountains listened, indifferent and eternal.
And just like that, two people with no plan, no destination, and no idea what they were doing to each other, decided to keep going.
