A few days ago he’d overheard one of the QA testers mention, in passing, that Alok was planning to ask Avantika out before the weekend.
He’d laughed it off at the time.
He hadn’t laughed since.
He sat there hooking his thumbs into his pockets, trying to talk himself down.
What did he actually have with her?
They worked the same floor, talked most days, sometimes ate lunch together on the terrace steps.
She knew his schedule; he knew a little about hers — that her uncle’s family had raised her after she lost her parents young, and that he’d never pushed for more than she offered on that.
Maybe that was part of it.
Or maybe it was just her — the way she was patient with the junior coders when they messed up, the way she talked to the cleaning staff like people, the way she remembered which tea he liked without being told twice, the way she’d stay past nine when someone’s deployment was falling apart instead of packing up and pretending not to notice.
He didn’t know when exactly it had stopped being just a friendship in his head.
He just knew that these days his eyes found her the moment he walked through the turnstile.
And now he was scared — not really of her saying no, but of losing the version of things they already had.
He tipped his head back against the chair.
“Today?” He caught himself almost immediately.
“No.
Too sudden.”
The room clicked along around him, thirty keyboards going at once.
“Then again,” he muttered, sitting forward, “if I sit here and Alok gets there first—” He didn’t finish that one either.
He put his hands over his face for a second.
This was absurd.
He’d finished engineering college, held down a real job, handled production issues without blinking — and one woman laughing near a coffee machine had turned his whole brain to static.
He glanced through the partition again.
Avantika had tossed her cup and was heading back toward her desk, and for a second her path crossed his.
Their eyes met through the glass.
She gave him the same easy smile she always did, and his mouth curved back at her before he could stop it.
Then she was past him, papers rustling.
His chest did something stupid and small.
He looked down at his keyboard.
“Damn it.”
Maybe he was reading too much into all of it.
Maybe Alok was just a team lead who told good jokes.
Or maybe Avantika saw him — Goutam — exactly the way she saw everyone else on the floor.
That thought hurt more than he expected it to.
He checked the clock.
Lunch in under an hour.
He could ask her to walk down with him then — no, too sudden.
After the shift, maybe.
No, that sounded worse, like he was scheduling a meeting.
His phone buzzed against the desk.
Lunch today?
He stared at it a second before he could stop the smile that showed up on its own.
He typed back fast.
Sure.
Where?
His thumb hovered.
He added a line: I wanted to talk to you about something.
Too much for a lunch invite.
He sent just one word.
He looked over at her desk again.
She’d already pulled up a new file, no idea what she’d just set off in his head.
He didn’t have a plan.
He didn’t know how he’d bring it up, or when exactly during the hour he’d manage to say it.
But he was done sitting on it.
**********************
There was a toy — a small plastic elephant she’d wanted for weeks — that appeared on her bed the morning after her uncle told her, straight-faced, that she already had too many toys.
She’d grinned.
He’d sighed like it had cost him something.
Her grandmother had laughed at both of them from the doorway.
Then, one day, her parents didn’t come home.
She kept expecting to hear the front door.
She didn’t stop, for a while, listening to it.
Her father’s chair at the table stayed empty.
Nobody sat in it, and nobody moved it either.
Her mother’s slippers stayed by the door for longer than made sense.
Her uncle became the one who signed her school forms, collecting her from school, attending meetings, or checking her homework .
Her grandmother became the one who sat on the edge of the bed when the nightmares came, not saying anything, just staying until Avantika fell back asleep.
Slowly, she learned to smile again — not because she’d stopped missing them, but because there was still someone in the house to smile at.
Two years later, her grandmother started needing to sit down halfway through hanging the washing.
She’d wave it off.
Then she stopped calling from the kitchen and started calling from her bed instead, her voice thinner through the wall.
She still asked if Avantika had eaten.
She still pretended she was fine whenever Avantika walked into the room.
Her uncle started making more phone calls in the evenings, his voice low, the study door mostly shut.
One morning, the house was quiet in a way it had never been before.
Her grandmother didn’t call her for breakfast.
Her grandmother was gone.
Her uncle stayed.
He tried.
But after that, the house held a kind of quiet he couldn’t do anything about.
*****************
Two days before, Avantika had gone to the grave for the fifth anniversary.
She stood there long after everyone else had left, the sky going the color of wet concrete, and set the flowers down against the stone.
“Grandma.” The word barely made it past the wind.
“I still miss you.”
No answer came, obviously.
She stood there anyway, letting a few memories surface on their own — her grandmother’s hands working through her hair after school, the shape of her waiting by the window when Avantika was running late, the specific way she used to pretend not to notice the sugar jar going missing.
Then, without asking for it, a different memory came.
She’d been in a lecture hall the day it happened, her phone face-down on the desk because devices weren’t allowed out during lectures.
It had been silent the whole time.
When the class ended and she reached for it, the screen was full of missed calls.
Again.
Again.
Her stomach dropped before she’d even processed why.
She called back, and he picked up on the first ring, his voice already broken in a way she’d never heard from him.
“Avantika—”
She didn’t remember getting up.
She didn’t remember the hallway, or what she said to anyone in it.
She remembered the rain hitting her the second she was outside — hard enough that the road had turned into a grey blur past a few feet.
She stood at the edge of the flooded street, scanning for a taxi through the downpour.
One came into view, half-shape, half-glare.
She stepped off the curb without checking.
A horn went off right next to her.
A car was already sliding toward her on the wet road, and she couldn’t move — her legs had just stopped answering.
Someone grabbed her arm and hauled her back, hard, onto the divider.
The car went past close enough that she felt the displaced air on her uniform.
She stumbled, her shoe skidding on the wet concrete, her chest heaving.
A young man was standing in front of her, drenched, water running off his hair and down his jaw.
“You okay?”
She couldn’t get words out cleanly.
“My grandmother.” Her voice cracked apart on the second word.
“She’s dying.”
He didn’t ask her anything else.
He looked past her at the traffic already backing up on the main road.
“Where.”
She gave him the address.
He glanced at the rain, then back at her.
“I’ll take you.”
“You?”
He nodded toward a motorcycle parked at the curb.
“You won’t get a taxi through this.
Not tonight.”
Her hands were shaking.
“I need to see her before—”
“I know.”
There wasn’t pity in how he said it.
He said it like there was no time to argue.
She got on behind him.
The rain didn’t let up.
She held onto the rail with both hands as he cut through the flooded streets, weaving around cars that had given up and stopped.
She got to the house.
It was already too quiet by the time she walked in.
Her uncle was standing near the doorway, his face doing something she’d never seen it do before.
Nobody called out to ask if she’d eaten.
She never got to say goodbye.