The rain started again. Soft this time. Not as an enemy, but as a witness. And on that terrace, at 2:33 a.m., two broken people did not fix each other. They simply chose, for ten seconds at a time, to exist in the same broken world together.
He wasn’t waiting for a bus.
“Go back, Arjun,” she whispered. “You can’t fix this.”
She froze. Not because the words were unfamiliar—they were her mother tongue, Hindi, the language of her childhood—but because of how he said them. Not as a statement. As an anchor. main hoon. na
He didn’t sit beside her. He stood two feet behind, hands in his pockets, breathing still uneven. Not from the run anymore. From the weight of what he was about to say.
Now he stood outside the terrace gate of the old Tiwari mansion—her family’s abandoned property. The place she always fled to when the world became too heavy. The gate was unlocked. The staircase was dark.
“I know,” he said.
He didn’t rush to hug her. He didn’t say everything will be okay . He simply took off his jacket—wet, torn, useless—and laid it over her shoulders.
The rain had stopped three hours ago, but the world still smelled of wet earth and rust. Arjun leaned against the crumbling wall of the abandoned bus shelter, his reflection a ghost in the puddle at his feet. The last bus had left at midnight. It was now 2:17 a.m.
The silence stretched. A train horn moaned in the distance. Somewhere, a cat screamed. Life continued its brutal, beautiful rhythm. The rain started again
Main hoon. Na? — I am here, aren’t I?
“ Main hoon, ” he replied. “ Na. ”