The Cake You Surrendered to the Man with Excellent Taste

You hand over the box. The man on the footbridge, whose sign says his daughter is sick, opens it right there. He looks at the chocolate-vanilla marble cake from Le Petit Four, then up at you. "No fondant?" he asks. His voice is clear, unburdened by the gravel you expected. "I don't like fondant." You stammer that it's buttercream. He nods, satisfied, and closes the lid. "It's a Tuesday," he says, as if this explains everything. You walk home and eat two slices of bread with jam, which feels like a moral failure in a different, pettier way.

You see him the next Tuesday. And the next. You start taking a different route home from work, a longer one that avoids the footbridge over the choked nullah. This adds fourteen minutes to your commute. You calculate this, idly, while waiting for a traffic light. Fourteen minutes, twice a day, five days a week. You are donating hours of your life to avoid a man who judged your cake selection.

A month later, a new client meeting runs late near the old route. You’re hungry, your stomach a hollow pit. You think, irrationally, of the cake. You cross the footbridge. He’s there, but his sign is different. It now reads, in surprisingly neat Devanagari script: "Daughter recovered. Funds for her baking course." He doesn't recognize you. You recognize the plastic container beside him, though — it’s the unmistakable, specific turquoise of a Le Petit Four cake box. Empty.

You stop buying cake altogether. You develop, instead, a precise and costly habit of ordering single-serve profiteroles from a French patisserie in Bandra, which you eat immediately at the little zinc counter there. It feels less like charity and more like a treaty. Your credit card statement tells a story of escalating dessert diplomacy.

The last time you take the old route, the footbridge is being power-washed. A municipal worker in orange overalls is scrubbing away the ghosts of old signs. You stand there for a full minute, watching the grime run into the gutter. You go home and bake a terribly lopsided sponge. It tastes of eggs and regret.

You eat every crumb.