Maya and Arjun's story is not unique because it ends with sweeping triumph or melodramatic revival. It is normal like all true love: full of imperfections, it is kept going by hard work and made light and luminous through laughter. They found that the separations between them--space, dissimilarity, aspiration--need not be emptiness. Curiosity, care wonder, those spaces then might be landscapes where both might be cultivated.
Many years later they would wander along the river and indicate the location where they had first kissed and the bench where they had reunited. They would joke about fights they had had in the past and recollect on all the little niceties that had held them together. At home they had their own archive of their work: pictures of other countries he never visited, a pile of campaign modelages, a bowl that Ana gave her because her hands shaped it. Their love would not be an ideal carving but an animate object, at times sloppy, often graceful, often persistent.
There are different ways that people associate. Some of them love violently, and temporarily, others gradually and progressively. The lesson that Maya and Arjun received was a lesson that was very much informed by the heart: that love is not a one-time thing but a continuum. It takes care, integrity, readiness to reform, and the ability not to turn tail and run when the world tells you to run.
Eventually there was nothing between them but less absence and more room--room to do work and wonder, room to fall, and to be patched, room to be apart and to be united. And in that room, over a cup of tea and a camera on the window sill, they discovered the monotony of the life they had made a second and a third and a fifth time, not because it was easy, but because it was worth the effort.