Love, Arjun discovered, was not a single moment.
It was not the confession on the steps. Not the tears. Not the forehead pressed against forehead while the sun died behind them. Those were the headlines — the dramatic, cinematic moments that poets wrote about and filmmakers immortalized in slow motion with background music swelling.
But love — real love, the kind that lives in your bones — was made of smaller things.
It was made of mornings.
The first morning after the confession, Arjun woke at five. Same cracked ceiling. Same dying fan. Same thin mattress on the floor. Same pre-dawn darkness pressing against the window like a patient animal.
But the world was different.
He lay still for a full minute, staring at the ceiling, and felt something he hadn't felt in so long that it took him several seconds to identify it.
Lightness.
The weight was still there — his mother's medication, Priya's fees, the warehouse, the rent. The stones in his pockets hadn't disappeared. But they were lighter. As if someone had reached inside his chest during the night and rearranged the architecture of his grief to make room for something new.
Something warm.
Something that smelled like jasmine and old books and rain on stone.
His phone buzzed. A message. Unknown number.
"Good morning, Engineer Almost. I hope you slept well. I didn't. I've been staring at my ceiling for three hours thinking about the fact that I told you I love you and now I'm terrified that I dreamed the whole thing and you're actually a hallucination caused by excessive Tagore consumption. Please confirm you're real. — M"
Arjun read the message four times.
Then he did something he hadn't done in six years.
He laughed.
Not a smile. Not a chuckle. A real, full, unguarded laugh that shook his shoulders and startled the gecko on the wall and made his mother pause in the kitchen doorway, her arthritic hands frozen mid-motion, her eyes wide with something between confusion and hope.
"Arjun?" she called. "Are you... laughing?"
He composed himself with tremendous effort. "No, Maa. Coughing."
"That was not a cough."
"Bad cough. Very bad."
"Arjun Malhotra, I gave birth to you. I know the difference between your cough and your laugh. You haven't laughed like that since —" She stopped. The sentence hung unfinished, weighted with years. Since your father was alive. That was the end of that sentence. They both knew it.
He got up, walked to the kitchen, and touched his mother's shoulder.
"I'm fine, Maa. Better than fine."
She studied his face. Suman Malhotra was fifty-one but looked sixty-five — life had aged her with the casual cruelty of a sculptor who didn't care about the final product. Her hair was grey. Her hands were swollen. Her eyes — Arjun's eyes, dark and deep — held the permanent exhaustion of a woman who had buried her husband, raised two children alone, and fought her own body every day.
But right now, those eyes were sharp.
"There's a girl," she said. Not a question.
"Maa —"
"Don't 'Maa' me. I can see it on your face. You look like your father did when he came home after our first meeting." Her voice cracked slightly on the word father, but she steadied it with practiced resilience. "What's her name?"
Arjun hesitated. Then, because lying to his mother was both impossible and morally terrifying: "Meera."
Suman was quiet for a moment. Then she reached up — slowly, painfully — and cupped her son's face.
"Does she make you laugh?"
"Yes."
"Then she's already given me more than any medicine ever could."
She turned back to the kitchen. Arjun watched her move — slow, deliberate, each step a negotiation with pain — and felt the familiar ache of wanting to fix everything and being unable to fix anything.
But today, the ache was softer.
Today, he texted back.
"I'm real. The ceiling confirms it. Also, I love you. That part wasn't a dream. — A"
Her reply came in four seconds.
"FOUR SECONDS? Were you waiting by your phone?"
"No. I was confirming with the ceiling."
"You're impossible."
"You love impossible."
"Unfortunately, yes. See you at six-fifteen. Bring tea. And yourself. In that order of priority."
He smiled. The gecko watched him from the wall with what he could have sworn was judgment.
Love was made of walks.
They couldn't afford anything else, so they walked. Through Kolkata's labyrinthine streets, past crumbling colonial buildings and chai stalls and flower markets and temples that smelled of sandalwood and centuries. They walked along the Hooghly River at sunset, watching the ferries cut through brown water while the sky turned shades of orange that didn't have names.
They walked through College Street — Kolkata's book district — where Meera moved through the second-hand bookstalls like a woman possessed, picking up volumes, reading random passages aloud, putting them back with the tender reluctance of someone saying goodbye to a friend.
"I want all of them," she said one evening, standing in front of a stall overflowing with paperbacks. Her arms were empty. Her eyes were full.
Arjun had forty-three rupees in his pocket after buying their tea. A used paperback cost thirty.
He bought her one.
Pablo Neruda. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Because she loved Neruda, despite his arguments against the man, and because love meant buying the things she loved even when you disagreed with them.
She held the book against her chest and looked at him with an expression that made the remaining thirteen rupees in his pocket feel like a fortune.
"I thought you hated Neruda," she said softly.
"I hate Neruda. I love you. The math works out."
She kissed his cheek. Quick, soft, devastating. The first physical contact beyond hand-holding. It landed like a spark on dry wood, and Arjun felt the heat spread through his entire body — not desire, not yet, but something adjacent. Something that promised desire and patience and every slow, terrifying step in between.
"Thank you," she whispered.
"It was thirteen rupees."
"It was everything."
They walked home in silence. Their hands intertwined. The city roared around them, but they moved through it like swimmers in a current — together, steady, unhurried.
Love was made of introductions.
On the fourteenth day after the confession — Arjun was counting; he counted everything now, every day with her a number he hoarded like gold — Meera took him to Shantiniketan to meet her father.
The bus ride was three hours. Arjun wore his best shirt — the one he usually reserved for job interviews and funerals. He ironed it twice. Priya caught him ironing and offered commentary.
"You missed a crease near the collar."
"Thank you."
"Also, your hair looks like you fought a bird."
"Thank you, Priya."
"Also, if her father doesn't like you, it's because you have the social skills of a calculator."
"I will sell you."
"You can't afford to. I'd cost more than you earn."
She wasn't wrong. He fixed his hair anyway.
Shantiniketan was different from Kolkata. Quieter. Greener. The kind of place where trees had permission to grow without being cut down for apartment complexes. Rabindranath Tagore had built a university here — Visva-Bharati — and the town still carried his spirit in its soil, its art, its unhurried rhythm.
Meera's father lived in a small house behind his bookshop on a lane lined with neem trees. The bookshop was called Akshar — "Letter" in Bengali — and it was exactly what Arjun had imagined: cramped, chaotic, overflowing with books in Bengali, Hindi, English, and languages he couldn't identify. The shelves were handmade. The ceiling fan was older than Arjun. A cat — fat, orange, imperious — sat on the counter like a furry landlord.
Deepak Sharma was waiting at the door.
He was a large man — not tall, but wide, with thick forearms and calloused hands that spoke of decades of physical labor. His face was broad, weathered, kind. He wore a simple white kurta and reading glasses perched on his nose. His eyes — Meera's eyes, brown with hidden gold — studied Arjun with the careful intensity of a man evaluating a book's worth by its spine.
"So," he said. "You're the engineer."
"Almost engineer, Baba," Meera corrected from behind Arjun.
"Almost." Deepak nodded slowly. "Come in. I've made tea."
The tea was extraordinary. Strong, spiced with cardamom and ginger, served in clay cups that made every sip taste like the earth itself. They sat in the small living room — Arjun on a wooden chair, Deepak on a cane stool, Meera cross-legged on the floor between them like a referee at a match she desperately wanted both sides to win.
"Meera tells me you quote Tagore," Deepak said.
"My father taught me."
"Taught. Past tense."
"He passed away. Six years ago."
Deepak removed his glasses. Cleaned them with the edge of his kurta. Put them back. This ritual, Arjun realized, was how Deepak Sharma bought himself time to feel something without showing it.
"What did he do? Your father?"
"He was a clerk. Government office. Lower division." Arjun held Deepak's gaze. No shame. No apology. "He earned less than I do now. But he read more than anyone I've ever met."
Something shifted in Deepak's expression. The evaluation was over. The verdict was in.
"A man who earns little and reads much," Deepak said slowly, "is richer than a man who earns much and reads nothing." He paused. "Tagore said something like that. Or maybe I just invented it. At my age, the line between quotation and fabrication is blurry."
Meera exhaled. The sound was relief made audible.
"More tea?" Deepak asked Arjun.
"Please."
"Good. A man who says please for tea is a man I can trust." He stood, moved toward the kitchen, then stopped. Turned back. "Arjun."
"Yes, sir?"
"My daughter is the only thing in this world I cannot lose." His voice was steady, but beneath the steadiness was bedrock — the kind of foundation that held up mountains. "I lost her mother. I survived it, but only because Meera existed. She is my reason. My everything." He paused. "If you hurt her, I will not be dramatic. I will not threaten. I will simply stop existing. And that will be your burden."
The room was silent.
Arjun stood. Faced Deepak directly. Man to man. Son to father. One broken heart speaking to another.
"I would rather stop existing myself," he said, "than cause her a single tear."
Deepak studied him for a long, unblinking moment.
Then he nodded.
"More tea," he said, and disappeared into the kitchen.
Meera looked at Arjun. Her eyes were shining. She mouthed two words.
Thank you.
He mouthed back three.
I love you.
She smiled. The gold in her eyes caught the afternoon light streaming through the window, and for one perfect, suspended moment, the small house behind the bookshop in Shantiniketan was the center of the universe.
The cat jumped onto Arjun's lap uninvited.
He took this as final approval.
That night, on the bus back to Kolkata, Meera fell asleep against his shoulder.
Her weight was slight — barely there — but Arjun felt it like an anchor. Not the kind that drags you down. The kind that holds you steady when the sea wants to sweep you away.
He looked out the window. The countryside was dark, dotted with distant lights from villages he would never visit. The bus rumbled and swayed. The driver played old Kishore Kumar songs on a crackling radio. The other passengers slept, read, stared at phones.
Arjun stared at the darkness and made a silent promise.
I will build something. For her. For us. I don't know how yet. I don't know when. But I will take these hands that carry crates and make them carry something worthy of her. I will turn this nothing into something. Not because she demands it. But because she deserves it.
And because love, real love, is not just a feeling.
It's a construction project.
Brick by brick.
Day by day.
Until the walls don't crack anymore.
He pressed his lips to the top of her head. Softly. So softly she didn't wake.
She smiled in her sleep.
And two hundred kilometers behind them, in a five-star hotel in Kolkata, Vikram Singh Rathore opened the file again.
He picked up his phone.
"Saxena."
"Yes, sir?"
"The boy. Arjun Malhotra." Vikram's voice was ice over steel. Controlled. Patient. The patience of a predator who knew his prey couldn't run far enough. "I want him removed from her life."
"How, sir?"
A pause. Long. Deliberate.
"Start gently," Vikram said. "There's no rush."
He hung up.
Set the phone down.
And smiled the smile of a man who had never been told no — and never intended to learn.