The Street You Walked Down Instead of Repeating It

You do not go back. The compulsion is there, a chemical pull in your veins like a low hum, but you go the long way around to the metro. It adds eleven minutes. You spend them noticing how many satellite TV dishes are rusting on the balconies of the old Parsi colony buildings.

You break up with your partner on a Tuesday, because it’s already broken and the sight of a stranger on the street didn’t cause that, it just held up a mirror. The conversation happens on your balcony, not over text. It takes forty-seven minutes. There is relief, and a specific, hollow ache behind your sternum when you hand back the sweatshirt they always stole.

Three months later, your old roommate Aditya needs help moving a server rack from his office in Bandra. The lift is out. You take one end, he takes the other, and you’re sweating through your shirt by the third-floor landing. A woman coming down the stairs presses herself against the wall to let you pass. It’s her. The haircut is different — shorter, sharper — and she’s holding a takeaway coffee from Blue Tokai. You mutter a breathless “thanks” and keep climbing. The moment passes, heavy and real and utterly ordinary.

You don’t see her again. But you start taking that long way home regularly, past the rusting dishes and the badminton court always occupied by retirees. You buy a jasmine plant for your empty balcony. You keep it alive.

It blooms twice a year, small and white.