The rain had a way of making Delhi look softer than it really was. Streets that in daylight seemed harsh with honking cars, dust, and impatient footsteps now glistened under streetlights like veins of gold stretched across the night. Arjun Malhotra walked them with his hands in his pockets, not caring where he was going, the drizzle sticking his hair to his forehead, a cigarette burning between his fingers.
He wasn't always like this. People knew him now as the charmer—the boy with a lazy smile, the one who could make strangers laugh in minutes, the one who carried heartbreak like a medal on his chest and slept in someone else's bed almost every week. But the truth—that hollow center in him—had been carved years ago, by a girl whose shadow still lingered in his mind.
Her name was Ananya.
Ananya had been everything he wasn't—gentle where he was impulsive, careful where he was reckless. She didn't just date him; she built him. She picked his shirts before class presentations, pushed him to attend seminars he would've skipped, proofread every messy sentence he wrote, and even convinced him that his photography—a hobby he thought was childish—was something beautiful. "You just don't see yourself," she used to whisper, her chin on his shoulder while she flipped through his pictures. And he believed her.
But back then, he had been young, arrogant in that careless way boys often are when they don't realize what it means to be loved so wholly. He laughed at her seriousness, ignored her texts when his friends called him out drinking, dismissed her tears with impatient promises: "Come on, Ananya, don't make a big deal."
And then one day—she left.
There was no drama, no grand betrayal, just a single quiet sentence that split his world apart. "I can't love someone who doesn't know how to be loved." She walked away with steady steps, leaving behind his jacket neatly folded on his chair, his camera lenses wiped clean, his favorite books arranged in a row. The silence she left in his room was louder than any fight they'd ever had.
That was the day Arjun learned the true cruelty of love—it doesn't always end with shouting or betrayal. Sometimes it ends with someone simply deciding they cannot carry your weight anymore.
For months he drowned. He dialed her number until the digits blurred, typed messages he never sent, stared at photographs that seemed to mock him with their stillness. But Ananya never came back. She didn't look over her shoulder. She vanished like she had never been a part of him, leaving him with only memories sharp enough to cut him open.
The boy who once couldn't imagine life without her became a man who decided never to be broken again.
He transformed himself into what Delhi later whispered about in bars and cafés—a Casanova. At first it was desperation, chasing warmth in other people's arms, kisses that erased nothing but numbed everything. But soon, it became his armor. Arjun learned to flirt like it was second nature, to hide his emptiness behind laughter, to walk into a room and own it as if heartbreak had never touched him. Women adored him, friends envied him, and no one saw the boy who once waited all night for a text that never came.
On nights like this, though—when the rain smelled like the same season Ananya had left—he still felt the sting. He would tell himself it was nothing, just nostalgia, but the truth pressed heavier: no matter how many faces he kissed, no matter how many names he forgot by morning, he remained haunted by the one girl he had taken for granted.
And deep down, though he'd never admit it, every time he touched someone new, he was still trying to touch her ghost.
Arjun Malhotra, the man everyone thought was untouchable, was still, in secret, a boy punished by love.