By Jay Samanta
Meher read Dhruv’s silences the way other people read weather apps — obsessively — always half-an-hour too late.
They met on a Wednesday that felt like every other Wednesday — rooftop café in Bandra, fairy lights up for no festival in particular, a mutual friend’s birthday, that humidity that makes everyone’s laugh sound more generous than it is. He was scrolling his phone when she sat down next to him.
“Sorry,” he said, not looking up. “Fighting with my therapist. Over text. Which is, I realise, already the whole problem.”
She laughed before she could stop herself. “You fight with your therapist?”
“I lose. But I make him work for it.”
That was Dhruv. He announced his fractures like other people announced achievements. And Meher — twenty-eight years of being told she was too much, too intense, too quick to say I love you — found something restful in a man who wore the damage on the outside. Less digging required, she thought.
She was wrong about that.
*
Four months. It looked good from the outside, and honestly, it was good, some of it. He carried her slippers across sand too hot to walk on, then got sunburned so badly he couldn’t lie on his back for two days, and complained about it the whole time, dramatically, until she was laughing again. Voice notes ran eleven minutes long on that. A toothbrush at her flat, then a charger, then a hoodie she wore so often it just… stopped being his.
He wasn’t a villain in a costume. He forgot her cousins’ wedding dates. Twice. He was mortified both times — I’m an idiot, tell me the date again, I’ll set four alarms. Once, drunk on his best friend’s terrace, he told her his father left when he was nine, and cried the way men cry who haven’t done it in front of anyone in a long time. Then, after, he said: “Don’t bring this up when we fight. I’ll deny it happened.”
But under the pattern, there was another pattern. He’d vanish — not physically, just into some weather inside him she couldn’t track — two days of nothing. Then: sorry, was in my head. She stopped asking what that meant.
Until she didn’t.
“This is starting to feel like a pattern,” she typed. “It’s making me anxious.”
He called within a minute. New flatness in his voice — rehearsed, almost. “I can’t be responsible for regulating your nervous system, Meher. That’s not fair to either of us.”
“I didn’t ask you to regulate it. I asked you to text back.”
“You’re catastrophising.”
She wanted, badly, to believe him. That was the part she never told anyone. Not the manipulation — her own hunger to be wrong.
*
She started a note on her phone — nothing dramatic, she told herself, just dates.
Nov 14 — silent 30 hrs, called it “protecting his peace.”
Nov 21 — called me clingy for asking if we were exclusive. Apologised. Didn’t apologise for the rest of it.
She never meant to build a case. She just wanted to see the shape of something that kept dissolving the second she looked straight at it.
The train home from his flat in Andheri turned into its own ritual. She’d stand by the open door, Mumbai blurring past — clotheslines, construction lights, a city that never quite finishes itself — and rehearse conversations she never had. She still checked the sky out of habit. Same habit as checking his last-seen.
*
The night it ended, they were on his terrace. She said it without deciding to say it. “I don’t think I feel safe with you. I think I feel managed.“
He didn’t get angry. He went still. The way he did right before a vanishing. “That’s a lot of projection for a Tuesday,” he said.
She looked at him a long moment. “You always do that. Turn my sentence into my diagnosis.”
He opened his mouth. And for once — nothing polished came out. Just, “I don’t— I don’t know what to say to that that isn’t also a deflection. So I’m going to say nothing. And I know how that’s going to look.”
It was the most honest thing he’d said in four months. It changed nothing.
She took an auto home. The city blurred gold through the plastic flap. Lay on her bed, fully dressed, feeling something that wasn’t quite heartbreak — closer to vertigo. The specific dizziness of loving someone who’d taught you to doubt your own eyes – gently, using words that sounded like care.
She didn’t message him, not that night, not the next.
*
Three weeks later. She was at her desk, half-writing a client email, when her phone lights up.
I went back and reread our messages from October. All of them, not just the ones I remembered. You were right about the pattern — I used therapy words to end conversations. Not writing this to be forgiven, or to get anything. I just didn’t want the last thing you knew of me to be a lie I told myself. I hope it was not just a symptom for you.
— Dhruv
She reads it twice, a third time. She hunted for the second meaning under the first one. It was an old habit — half faith, half muscle memory.
Outside, the evening traffic on Linking Road starts its long, indifferent roar. A city that never quite finishes itself, never pauses for anyone’s reckoning. She thinks about the note still sitting on her phone, its small dated cruelties, thinks about how good it felt, at the start, to be with someone so fluent in his own wounds — and how she never once asked why that fluency had never, before tonight, been used to actually change.
The message looks different from the others, she thinks.
That doesn’t mean it is, she thinks.
Her thumb hovers over the keyboard. It was the first time in three weeks that she wasn’t sure which fear was louder — being wrong about him again, or being wrong about herself for wanting to find out.
She started to type.
Jay Samanta is an undergraduate student of English at Panskura Banamali College, West Bengal, India. He enjoys writing contemporary literary fiction.
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