The railway station smelled like chai and diesel and the particular human density of a platform at six-thirty in the evening.
Vikram stood on Platform 4 with his hands in his pockets and the square outline of a sandwich box pressing against his jacket from the inside where he had been keeping it warm like it was something alive.
This was a terrible idea.
He had known it was a terrible idea from the moment he had conceived it, at approximately two-seventeen in the afternoon while standing in front of the small convenience counter near his office and holding a single red rose that cost eighty-five rupees and feeling, with the complete clarity of a man who was being honest with himself, that the rose was not him. That the rose was what someone proposed with in a film. That he had never once been the person in a film.
He had put the rose back.
He had looked at the shelves.
He had picked up the sandwich.
