He saw her again two days later, and the coincidence of it — if it even was a coincidence, which he was beginning to seriously doubt — struck him as soon as he recognized her kneeling figure near the temple’s crumbling stone base.
She was crouched beside one of the temple’s lower walls with a small notebook open on the ground beside her and a soft-bristled brush in her hand, carefully, methodically sweeping accumulated dirt and moss away from a carving half-buried beneath decades of undisturbed growth.
She worked with the kind of focused, patient precision that suggested real training rather than idle curiosity, occasionally pausing to sketch something quickly in her notebook before returning to her brushwork.
“You,” Vihaan said, more surprised than he probably should have let himself sound.
She looked up without any particular alarm, entirely unbothered by his sudden appearance.
“Me,” she agreed cheerfully.
“And you, Mr.
Stone Face, are currently trespassing on an active archaeological site, which is a considerably more serious crime than just wandering around unstable ruins.” “It’s a temple,” Vihaan pointed out.
“It’s technically public property.” “It’s a temple that happens to have inscriptions nobody has properly documented in at least forty years,” she said, standing and brushing dirt from her knees with brisk efficiency, “which makes it, for the next several weeks at minimum, officially my site.
Aanya Bisht.
Archaeology, final year, University of Dehradun.
Since apparently we’re doing proper introductions now instead of just insulting each other’s dress sense.” “Vihaan,” he offered.
“Just Vihaan?
No surname, no backstory, nothing?
Very mysterious, Mr.
Stone Face.
I approve.” He ignored the nickname, crouching down instead to examine the carving she’d uncovered more closely — worn, weathered shapes that might have once been bells, or might have been something else entirely, the details too eroded by centuries of monsoon rain to read with any real confidence.
Without quite thinking it through, driven by pure habit, he lifted his camera to photograph the carving properly.
“Wait, don’t use flash, it’ll wash out all the — ” The flash fired before she could finish the sentence.
“— surface detail,” she finished, glaring at him with an intensity that suggested he’d just personally insulted several generations of her academic training.
“Do you have any idea how long it took me to get the lighting angle right for that shot?” “Sorry,” Vihaan said, though he wasn’t entirely sure he meant it.
“You’re not sorry.
You have exactly the kind of face that doesn’t apologize for anything, ever, under any circumstances.” She reached across him to try to angle the camera away from the carving before he could do any further damage, her hand closing around the strap at precisely the same moment his fingers tightened reflexively around the body of the camera itself — and between the two competing pulls, the camera slipped, twisted, and struck the stone edge of the temple’s base with a sharp, unmistakable crack, the lens ring popping loose and skittering a few inches across the dirt.
Silence.
Both of them stared down at the damage for a long, disbelieving moment.
“That,” Vihaan said finally, his voice carefully controlled, “was an expensive camera.” “That,” Aanya shot back immediately, entirely unrepentant, “was your fault for flashing sacred archaeological inscriptions like you’re running a nightclub photo booth.” “You grabbed it.” “You were about to keep flashing it.” “You pulled the strap.” “You held on too tightly.” They stared at each other across the small, undeniable disaster of a broken camera, both equally, stubbornly unwilling to concede the point, until Aanya finally let out an exasperated huff and crossed her arms firmly across her chest.
“Fine,” she declared.
“I am not apologizing, on principle.
But I will, out of the goodness of my heart, help you find someone in the market who can actually fix cameras, because you have clearly demonstrated that you cannot be trusted to survive here without direct supervision.” “I don’t need supervision.” “You needed supervision approximately four minutes ago,” she said sweetly, already turning and walking briskly toward the market without waiting to see if he’d follow, “when you nearly destroyed a two-hundred-year-old carving with an ill-timed camera flash.
Come on, Stone Face.
I am absolutely not asking you twice.” He followed her, telling himself, with considerably less conviction than he would have liked, that it was purely about the camera.