Some bridges, she had come to understand, did not rebuild to exactly their original form. They rebuilt to something different — not weaker, not stronger, just shaped differently, shaped by the specific knowledge of what had broken them and what had been required to put them back. Those bridges had a history in them. You could see it if you looked. She had stopped trying to hide the history and started treating it as engineering data — information about what this thing was made of, what it had survived, what it could hold.
In Bengaluru, walking on MG Road with her hand in his and the Bengaluru night around them, she was not managing the feeling or assessing its risk profile or preparing for the possibility of its failure. She was just in it. Just present, with the specific and ordinary and extraordinary fact of being in the right place with the right person at the right time, which was not something she had planned or engineered or structured correctly.
It was simply what happened when you stopped burning the bridge and decided to build it back.
