Monsoon Nights – Part 2: The Power Cut

“You can’t go back out there tonight.”

In the dark, the sentence sounded different from how it would have sounded in the light. Softer. Heavier. Like a door being closed very gently.

Riya realised she was still holding the towel against her chest like a shield.

“I know,” she said. “I worked that out somewhere around the shin-deep water.”

He laughed quietly and his hand left her arm. She felt the absence of it more than she wanted to.

“Stay exactly there,” he said. “I have candles. Somewhere. Photographers always have candles. It’s a professional requirement.”

She heard him moving through the dark, bumping into something metal, muttering an apology to it. A drawer opened. Something rattled. Then the scratch of a match, and a small orange flame bloomed in the blackness, lighting up his face from below.

He looked younger in candlelight. Less sure of himself.

He lit a second candle from the first, then a third, and set them along the long wooden table. Slowly the studio came back to life in pieces: the rain-streaked windows, the plants, the ugly green sofa, the red curtain at the far end, glowing like the inside of a pomegranate.

“There,” Kabir said. “Now it looks like a very cheap romantic film.”

“The kind where the heroine catches pneumonia.”

“Bathroom,” he said, pointing again, and handed her a candle. “Go. I’ll find you clothes.”

The bathroom was tiny and tiled in old green and white squares. Riya set the candle on the sink and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was plastered to her neck. Her kajal had run into two dark smudges. She looked like a woman who had been rescued from a shipwreck.

She also looked, she noticed, flushed.

Stop it, she told her reflection. He’s being kind. That’s all.

There was a knock. She opened the door a crack and a hand came through, holding a folded bundle.

“As promised,” Kabir said from outside. “Very unattractive.”

It was a faded black T-shirt from a 2014 photography festival in Kochi and a pair of grey cotton pyjamas with the drawstring missing. They smelled like soap and sun-dried cotton. She changed slowly, wringing out her kurta into the sink, feeling the dry fabric settle on her skin like relief.

When she came out, Kabir had changed too, into a dark blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was in the tiny kitchen corner, boiling water on a gas stove that, thank God, didn’t need electricity.

He turned around, saw her, and stopped.

The T-shirt was too big. It slipped off one shoulder. The pyjamas were rolled three times at the ankle and still dragged on the floor. She had tied her wet hair up in a messy knot.

“You’re right,” she said. “Very unattractive.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he turned back to the stove a little too quickly.

“Chai?” he asked. His voice was not entirely steady.

“Please.”

They sat on the ugly green sofa because it was the only place to sit, the bun maska from Mr. Yazdani on a plate between them, two steel glasses of chai warming their hands. The candles flickered. The rain kept up its endless drumming on the windows.

“So,” Kabir said. “Tell me something true.”

“That’s a strange way to start a conversation.”

“It’s a strange night.”

Riya considered him over the rim of her glass. “Something true. Okay. I hate this city.”

He looked genuinely wounded. “You don’t.”

“I do. It’s loud, it’s wet, it’s expensive, everyone is always rushing somewhere. I moved here six years ago and I still feel like a guest.”

“Then why stay?”

“Because,” she said, and stopped.

He waited. He was good at waiting. She was beginning to notice that about him. He didn’t fill silences. He just let them sit there, warm and open, until you wanted to put something into them.

“Because I can’t go back,” she said finally.

“Back where?”

“Delhi.” She shrugged. “Long story.”

“We have,” Kabir checked his watch in the candlelight, “roughly eleven hours.”

She laughed, but it came out thinner than she meant it to. She set her chai down on the floor.

“Your turn,” she said. “Something true.”

He leaned back into the sofa and looked up at the ceiling, where the candlelight made the hanging plants throw long, swaying shadows.

“I almost quit photography,” he said. “Six years ago. I was broke. I was shooting weddings I hated for people who didn’t look at the pictures. I’d decided to go back to Pune and join my father’s business. Hardware. Nuts and bolts.” He smiled faintly. “I’d even bought the train ticket.”

“What changed?”

“I took one photograph.” He said it simply. “One. And everything changed after it.”

“What was it of?”

He turned his head and looked at her. For a strange second, something moved across his face. Recognition, almost. Or a question he didn’t know how to ask.

“Someone who stopped pretending,” he said.

The candle nearest them guttered and nearly went out. Neither of them moved to fix it.

“That sounds like a line,” Riya said quietly.

“It probably is.” He didn’t look away. “Doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

The rain filled the silence. Riya became very aware of small things: that the sofa sagged in the middle so they had slid closer together without trying; that his knee was almost touching hers; that his forearm, where his sleeve was rolled, had a small scar shaped like a crescent moon.

“How did you get that?” she asked, nodding at it.

He glanced down. “Darkroom. I was twenty-two, drunk on my first exhibition, and I tried to do a print at 3 a.m. Knocked over a tray, cut my arm on the glass.”

Without thinking, she reached over and touched it. Just the tip of her finger, tracing the curve of the scar.

His skin was warm. His breathing changed.

She realised what she was doing and pulled her hand back. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said, very low.

The air in the studio felt thick suddenly, the way it feels before lightning. Riya picked up her chai again just to have something to hold. It had gone lukewarm.

“Okay,” she said briskly. “Rules.”

“Rules?”

“For tonight. I’m a guest. In your shirt. In a blackout. There should be rules.”

He sat up a little, amused, and put his hand on his heart. “I’m listening.”

“Rule one. You take the sofa. I take,” she looked around, “wherever you normally sleep.”

“Through the red curtain. There’s a bed. Small, but it has a roof.”

“Good. Rule two. No photographs of me looking like a drowned rat.”

“Hmm.” He narrowed his eyes. “That one’s difficult.”

“Kabir.”

“Fine. No photographs.” He paused. “Rule three?”

Riya opened her mouth, and found she didn’t have one.

The silence stretched. He was watching her with an expression she couldn’t read, patient and curious and a little bit dangerous.

“Rule three,” he said slowly, “could be that you tell me the long story. About Delhi.”

Her chest tightened. “That’s not a rule. That’s a demand.”

“A request.” He held up his hands. “You can say no.”

She looked at the candle. She thought about all the people who had asked her about Delhi over the years: her colleagues, her mother, the men on dating apps who wanted to know why a nice girl from Lajpat Nagar had moved to Mumbai alone. She’d given them all the same answer. Better opportunities. Fresh start. You know how it is.

Nobody had ever asked the way Kabir was asking. As if the answer mattered more than the question.

“I was supposed to get married,” she said.

Kabir didn’t say anything. He just shifted slightly so he was facing her.

“His name was Nikhil. Our families arranged it, but I liked him. I thought I loved him, even. Engagement, the whole thing. Five hundred guests. My mother had already ordered the lehenga.” She heard her voice going flat, the way it always did when she got near this part. “Two weeks before the wedding, I found out he’d been seeing someone else. For a year. Everyone knew. His friends, his sister. Some of my cousins.”

“Riya.”

“I called it off.” She shrugged, too hard. “My family was humiliated. My father didn’t speak to me for a month. Everyone said I was being dramatic, that men are men, that I should just forgive and move on.” She smiled without any humour. “I am dramatic. You said it yourself.”

“That’s not dramatic,” Kabir said quietly. “That’s brave.”

“It didn’t feel brave. It felt like dying.” She looked at her hands. “I packed one suitcase and took the first train to Mumbai. I didn’t tell anyone except my sister. I just sat on the platform at New Delhi station for three hours waiting for the train, and I cried the whole time. In front of everyone. A thousand people walking past.” She laughed shakily. “That’s the true thing. Happy?”

Kabir had gone very still.

The candlelight caught his face, and something in it had changed. His jaw had tightened. He was looking at her as if he were trying to see her through a fog.

“New Delhi station,” he said slowly. “Which month?”

“July. Why?”

He didn’t answer. He stood up abruptly, walked to the window, and stood with his back to her, looking out at the dark, flooded street.

“Kabir?”

“Sorry,” he said, without turning around. “I just. Give me a second.”

Riya stared at his back, confused. Had she said too much? Had he heard “cancelled wedding” and decided she was trouble? The old, familiar shame started to creep up her spine.

“I should have kept the long story long,” she said. “Forget it.”

He turned around.

“No,” he said firmly. “Don’t do that. Don’t take it back.”

He came back across the room and, instead of sitting on the sofa, knelt on the floor in front of her, so their eyes were level. The candlelight flickered between them.

“Thank you,” he said. “For telling me.”

“You looked like you’d seen a ghost.”

“Maybe I did.” He shook his head, as if clearing it. “It’s nothing. It’s, I’ll tell you later. I promise.”

“That’s very mysterious.”

“I’m a very mysterious man.”

“You’re a man in a blackout with a broken umbrella and an ugly sofa.”

“Mysterious,” he agreed solemnly.

She laughed despite herself, and when she did, he smiled, a real smile, the one from under the awning. Something in her chest unknotted.

He reached up and, very gently, pushed a damp strand of hair off her forehead. His fingers lingered at her temple.

“Is this against the rules?” he asked.

Her heart was going so hard she was sure he could hear it over the rain.

“We never decided rule three,” she whispered.

“No,” he said. “We didn’t.”

He didn’t move closer. He just stayed there, his hand resting lightly against her face, waiting. Leaving the decision with her. Riya understood, in some deep, quiet part of herself, that he would wait all night if she needed him to.

That was what decided it.

She leaned down and kissed him.

It was soft at first, uncertain, a question more than an answer. His lips were warm and tasted of cardamom and sugar from the chai. For one second he didn’t move, as if he couldn’t believe it. Then his hand slid into her hair and he kissed her back, slow and deep, and the whole drowning city disappeared.

When they finally broke apart, both of them were breathing hard. Her forehead rested against his.

“Rule three,” Kabir murmured. “Good rule.”

Riya laughed breathlessly, and he kissed her again, and this time there was nothing uncertain about it at all.

Somewhere far away, a phone buzzed. Hers, on the table, screen lighting up in the candlelit dark. She ignored it. It buzzed again. And again. Kabir pulled back slightly.

“Someone really wants you,” he said.

“Tanya,” she said. “She’ll want to know if you’re cute.”

She reached over to silence it. Then she saw the screen, and the warmth drained out of her body all at once.

It wasn’t Tanya.

It was a name she hadn’t seen on her phone in six years. A name she had blocked, unblocked and blocked again. A name she’d thought was gone forever.

Nikhil: Riya. I’m in Mumbai. I need to see you. Please.

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Next: Part 3, The Photograph. The past is calling, and on the other side of the red curtain, Kabir is hiding a secret of his own.