Antara lives in a city of reliable rhythms. It is a world of glass towers and paved roads, where the sun reflects off the skyline with a hard, brilliant certainty. She has spent twenty years building a life here that is sturdy. A life of straight lines and clear horizons.

But today is his birthday.

And in the quiet hour before dawn, she travels back into jagged, ancient poetry.

She lies in her bed, listening to the breathing of the house, projecting herself thousands of miles away to a bathroom mirror she has never seen. Steam rises in her mind’s eye. Through the haze, she sees him leaning over the sink, shaving his face. “Such a dad thing to do,” she had remarked once, teasing the man he was becoming. It was quite a contrast to the shaggy-faced boy she had madly fallen in love with.

But the boy is gone, and the man has aged in a room she cannot enter. In her own bathroom, Antara pulls a single silvering strand from her hairbrush. A thread of spun moonlight against the dark bristles. She holds it up to the bulb, as it summons a memory of an innocent conversation.

“Are you greying yet?” she had asked him once.

“A few,” he had typed back. “Here and there. And you?”

It was their way of witnessing the quiet settling of time on faces they once held, loving the changes they were forbidden to trace.

The years fold inward. Suddenly, she is five days short of twenty, drifting through a landscape of pine-scented trails, talking to him until the sky turns the colour of a bruised plum.

She remembers the road trip.

The windows were rolled down, drinking in the night air. She remembers the wind, relentless and wild, whipping her hair across the seat, lashing against his face.

He had laughed, spitting out strands of her curls. “It’s annoying,” he had teased. But he didn’t roll up the window. He didn’t push her away. He let the wind bind them together.

And then, in the quiet lull before dawn, the joking stopped. That was where it happened. Her very first kiss. An innocent collision of grief and longing in the shadow of the impending goodbye.

The memory hits her at 2:00 PM, in the middle of a crowded plaza. The heat rising from the pavement summons it. The air becomes thick with the smell of dust. They are sitting on a wooden bench, surrounded by the noise of students rushing to classes they don’t care about.

He is not looking at her. He is looking at his shoes, scuffed and dusty.

He does not reach for her hand. He taps her knee with his hand very gently. It is a code without a cipher. “I am here. Are you?”

In the memory, Antara sits very still. He lays his hand on her knee, palm facing upward. She places her hand in his. He strokes the back of her hand with his thumb, memorizing the shape of her bones.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Sitting in the plaza, twenty years later, Antara feels the ghost of that rhythm. It is a phantom limb sensation. Her knee aches with the absence of his hand.

Antara walks home. The sun is setting, painting the city in violent shades of violet and burnt marigold.

She stops at a park she passes every day. Usually, she stays on the paved walkway. It is a dry, sensible route that leads straight home.

But today, she steps off the path.

Her heels sink into the soft earth. The grass is tall here, unkempt, swaying in a wind that seems to come from a different season. She walks until the city noise fades, until the grid of her life dissolves behind her.

She is looking for a place she read about once, in a book Rajeev loved. A place out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing. A place where the fences have crumbled away.

She stands in the middle of the tall grass. The wind tangles her hair. She closes her eyes.

She imagines him there. Not the young boy from the bench, but the man in the mirror. The man with the grey in his beard. The man who washed his face this morning, and perhaps, for a fleeting second, paused with the water dripping from his chin, feeling a sudden draft in the room, a tap on the shoulder of his soul.

Tap. Tap. Tap.