Monsoon Nights – Part 3: The Photograph

Riya stared at the screen until the letters blurred.

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

Six years. Six years of silence, of rebuilding, of teaching herself not to flinch when someone said “Delhi” or “wedding” or “Nikhil.” And now, on this night of all nights, with Kabir’s kiss still warm on her mouth, he was back. Just like that. As if he had the right.

“Riya?” Kabir’s voice was careful. “What is it?”

She turned the phone around so he could see.

He read it. His face didn’t change much. A muscle moved in his jaw, that was all. He handed the phone back without a word.

Another message arrived while she was holding it.

Nikhil: I know I don’t deserve this. I’m at the Taj. Five minutes from Kala Ghoda. I saw your company’s name on the Rampart Row site board today. I couldn’t believe it.

Then another.

Nikhil: I’m not married. It ended. I think about you every day.

Riya laughed. It came out ragged and strange.

“He’s five minutes away,” she said. “He saw my company board. He’s at the Taj, thinking about me every day.” She shook her head. “Six years, Kabir. Six years, and he picks tonight.”

Kabir sat back on his heels. In the candlelight, his expression was unreadable.

“Do you want to see him?” he asked.

“No.” The word came out fast. Then, quieter, “I don’t know.”

He nodded slowly, as if that was a perfectly reasonable answer. He got up, walked to the kitchen corner and began making another round of chai. His back was to her. He was giving her space, she realised. Giving her the room to choose without his face in front of her.

It was the kindest thing anyone had done for her in a very long time, and it made her want to cry.

She looked down at the phone. Her thumb hovered over the reply box.

She thought about the girl on the platform at New Delhi station. The girl in the red salwar kameez, mascara streaming, suitcase handle in her fist, while a thousand strangers walked past and no one stopped. She thought about her father’s silence. Her mother’s phone calls asking whether she had “calmed down yet.” The nights in her first rented room in Andheri, eating Maggi on the floor because she couldn’t afford a table.

She thought about the man who had caused all of it, sitting in a five-star hotel lobby, writing please as if that word could undo anything.

And then she thought about the man standing four metres away, quietly crushing cardamom with the back of a spoon, who had asked her for something true and then held it like it was precious.

She typed.

No.

She looked at it for a second. Then she added:

Don’t contact me again. I mean it this time.

She pressed send. Then she blocked the number, turned the phone off completely, and put it face down on the table, under the plate with the last bun maska.

“Done,” she said.

Kabir turned around. He looked at her for a long moment.

“You okay?”

“Yes.” She was surprised to find it was true. Her hands were shaking a little, but under the shaking there was something solid and light, like she had put down a suitcase she hadn’t known she was still carrying. “Actually. Yes.”

He brought the chai over and handed her a glass. He didn’t sit down.

“For the record,” he said, “I would have understood if you’d gone.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t.”

Something passed across his face then. Relief, and something deeper, older, that she couldn’t name. He sat down beside her on the sagging sofa, close, his shoulder against hers. For a while they drank their chai in silence and listened to the rain.

The candles had burned down halfway. Outside, the storm had settled into a steady, patient rhythm, the kind of rain that sounds like it intends to go on forever.

“Can I ask you something?” Riya said.

“Anything.”

“Before. When I told you about the station. You looked like someone had punched you.” She turned to face him. “What was that?”

Kabir was quiet for so long she thought he wouldn’t answer.

“I promise I’ll tell you,” he said finally. “Tomorrow. In daylight. I want to show you something, and I want you to see it properly. Not like this.” He gestured at the candles. “Is that okay?”

She searched his face. He looked nervous, she realised. Genuinely nervous, for the first time all night.

“Is it something bad?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I hope not.”

It should have worried her more than it did. But she had spent six years with men who explained everything and meant nothing. Kabir explained almost nothing, and she believed every word.

“Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

He let out a breath. Then, very gently, he took the chai glass out of her hand and set it on the floor beside his.

“Riya,” he said. “The rules.”

“What about them?”

“I think rule one is a problem.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Rule one was that you take the sofa.”

“Exactly.” He looked down at the lumpy green cushions with deep distaste. “I’ve slept on this sofa before. It’s a human rights violation.”

She tried very hard not to laugh. “So what are you proposing?”

“Another proposal.” His eyes found hers. The teasing went out of his voice. “But only if you want it. And you can say no at any point, any time, and I’ll sleep on this monster and be grateful for it.”

The rain filled the silence. Riya felt the whole night narrow down to this one moment, to his face in the candlelight, to the space between them that had been getting smaller since the moment he stepped under her awning.

She thought about Nikhil, who had never once asked her what she wanted.

She stood up.

For a second, Kabir’s face fell, just slightly, and he nodded as if he’d expected it. Then she held out her hand to him, the same way he’d held his out to her on the flooded street.

He looked at her hand. Then at her.

“Are you sure?” he asked quietly.

“I’m dramatic,” Riya said. “I’m not confused.”

He took her hand.

She led him across the studio, past the long table, past the plants, toward the red curtain at the far end. The candlelight followed them, throwing their shadows huge and tangled across the wall. At the curtain she stopped and turned to face him, and he kissed her again, slowly, his hands framing her face as if she were something he wanted to memorise.

“Still sure?” he whispered against her lips.

“Still sure.”

He pushed the curtain aside.

The room behind it was small and simple: a low bed with white sheets, a window streaming with rain, a stack of books on the floor, one candle he lit with a match from his pocket. The glow turned everything amber. He turned to her, and for a long moment neither of them moved. They just stood there, breathing, in the warm flickering light.

Then he reached for the hem of the faded festival T-shirt and paused, his eyes asking the question one last time.

She answered by raising her arms.

The curtain fell closed behind them.

What happened next belonged only to them: to the rain on the window and the candle burning low, to his voice saying her name as if it were the only word he knew, to the slow, astonishing feeling of being wanted by someone who also saw her. Somewhere in the long dark hours, she stopped thinking about Delhi, about the platform, about anything at all.

Much later, lying with her head on his chest and his fingers drawing slow circles on her bare shoulder, she listened to his heartbeat gradually slow.

“Kabir?”

“Mm.”

“This city,” she said sleepily. “Maybe I don’t hate it.”

She felt him smile against her hair.

---

When Riya woke up, the rain had stopped.

Grey light was coming through the window. Somewhere outside, a crow was shouting, and a pressure cooker whistled in a neighbouring flat. The candle had burned down to a puddle of wax. The space beside her in the bed was empty and still warm.

She lay there for a moment, letting the night come back to her in pieces. The awning. The broken umbrella. The power cut. The kiss. The red curtain.

She smiled into the pillow like an idiot.

Then she heard the shower running on the other side of the studio and she sat up, wrapping the white sheet around herself. Her clothes were nowhere to be seen. Kabir’s blue shirt was lying on the floor. She pulled it on. It came down to her thighs, and it smelled like him.

She pushed the red curtain aside and stepped into the studio.

In daylight, it was a completely different place. Sun was breaking through the clouds outside the arched windows, and the whole room was full of soft, washed light. The plants glowed green. The long wooden table was covered in contact sheets and prints she hadn’t noticed in the candlelight.

And on the far wall, the one that had been in darkness all night, there was a single enormous photograph.

It was black and white. Maybe two metres wide, beautifully framed, lit by a small spotlight that must have come on when the power returned.

Riya walked toward it slowly, her bare feet silent on the wooden floor.

It showed a railway platform, crowded and blurred with motion. Hundreds of people rushing past, their faces smeared into streaks by a long exposure. Porters with luggage on their heads. A chai seller. A family dragging a suitcase. Everyone moving, everyone in a hurry, everyone a ghost.

Everyone except one figure, perfectly sharp in the middle of the frame.

A young woman sat alone on a metal bench, a suitcase beside her. She was crying, not delicately, but completely, her face open and wrecked, mascara running in dark lines down her cheeks. One hand gripped the suitcase handle like a lifeline. In the middle of all that blur, she was the only real, still, honest thing.

Riya’s breath stopped.

She knew that bench. She knew that suitcase, blue with a broken wheel. She knew the red salwar kameez that looked grey in the photograph. She knew the exact shape of that grief, because she had lived inside it.

At the bottom of the frame was a small brass plaque.

Stopped Pretending. New Delhi Railway Station, July. Winner, National Photography Award.

Behind her, the shower stopped.

She heard footsteps. She heard Kabir come into the studio, heard him stop dead when he saw where she was standing.

Riya didn’t turn around. She couldn’t take her eyes off the girl on the bench.

“Kabir,” she said, and her voice didn’t sound like her own.

“Why do you have a photograph of me?”

---

Next: Part 4, After the Rain. The truth about the photograph, and the choice that will decide everything.