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A Novel By Dipjyoti Sharma
Part Two — Love Grows
The wedding event ran over two days, and on the second day, they happened to be in the same place for lunch.
There was a big pot of dal and rice set up at the back for the workers and helpers. Divya had pulled Nandini over to eat with her, and Arjun was already there, sitting on a plastic stool with a plate on his lap.
Divya knew him — they had met before through the family connection — and she waved at him and sat down and Nandini sat next to her.
“You work with Prakash uncle?” Divya asked him.
“Sometimes. When he needs people.”
“What do you do otherwise?”
“Data entry. At Suvidha Insurance in the city.”
“Boring.”
“Very,” Arjun agreed.
Nandini was eating quietly. She could feel him not looking at her — the careful, deliberate way of not looking at someone.
She said: “You go to college?”
He glanced at her. “I finished. Last year. Government college — commerce.”
“What did you want to study?”
A pause. “Architecture.”
He said it simply, without drama. But there was something in the word — a small ache.
“Why didn’t you?”
“The fees,” he said.
She nodded. She didn’t say oh, that’s a shame, because she could tell that kind of sympathy would annoy him. She just nodded and ate her food.
They didn’t talk again that day. But something had shifted slightly — a small recognition. Two people who had been invisible to each other were now slightly visible.
Over the following month, they ran into each other three times.
Once at a bus stop near the railway station — she was waiting for Divya, he was on his way to work. They said hello. He looked like he hadn’t slept much.
Once at a bookshop in the market, the small second-hand one that smelled like old paper. She was surprised to see him there. He was flipping through a book on building design — old, its spine broken, cost forty rupees. He bought it.
Once at Divya’s birthday dinner, a small gathering at a restaurant that was neither expensive nor cheap. He was there because Divya had specifically called him. Nandini noticed that he checked the menu prices before ordering. She pretended not to notice.
That dinner lasted three hours. And they talked — really talked, for the first time. About small things, mostly. About a movie that had just come out that neither of them had seen. About whether the new flyover being built near the station was ever going to be finished. About how bad the city traffic had become.
At one point he made a joke about the insurance company he worked at, a quiet, dry joke, and she laughed before she realized she was laughing. And he looked a little surprised, like he hadn’t expected her to find it funny.
After the dinner, when everyone was leaving, they walked to the road together.
“You take a cab?” he asked.
“Usually. Or I call someone.”
“Okay.” He was already looking for an auto.
“Do you—” she started.
“I take the bus,” he said. Not embarrassed, just stating it. “It’s fine.”
“I know it’s fine. I was going to ask if you wanted to share—”
“No.” He smiled a little. “It’s the other direction. But thanks.”
He found an auto and got in and the auto drove away, and Nandini stood on the road for a moment feeling something she couldn’t quite name.
It was Divya who said it first. She always said things first.
“He likes you, you know.”
They were in Nandini’s room. Nandini was at her desk, pretending to read.
“You’re imagining things.”
“I’m not. I’ve known him for two years and I’ve never seen him actually talk to anyone at a party. He barely talks to me. At your birthday he talked for three hours.”
“It wasn’t my birthday.”
“You know what I mean.”
Nandini turned a page in her book. “He doesn’t like me. We just talked.”
“Nandini.”
“What?”
“Do you like him?”
A long pause. “He’s interesting.”
Divya smiled and looked at the ceiling. “Sure. He’s interesting.”
She started noticing small things about him.
The way he listened — completely, without looking at his phone. The way he thought before speaking, like he was choosing words carefully. The way he never asked her questions about her family or money, the questions most people asked, the questions that felt like they were sizing her up. He asked her what she thought about things. What she actually thought.
He asked her once, at the chai stall near the bookshop — they had started meeting there sometimes, casually, without calling it anything — he asked her what she wanted to do after college.
“My parents want me to do an MBA and then get married,” she said.
“What do you want?”
She held the glass of chai with both hands. “I want to open a small school. A real one — not fancy. For kids in neighborhoods like—” She stopped. She had been about to say like yours.
But he understood. “Like Basant Nagar,” he said.
“Yes.”
He nodded. “That’s a good thing to want.”
“My father thinks it’s a waste.”
“What do you think?”
She looked at the street. “I think he doesn’t know everything.”
Arjun looked at her for a moment. “No. He doesn’t.”
That was the first moment she felt it — not butterflies, nothing like that. Just warmth. Like sitting close to a fire on a cold night.
He fell first. He knew it clearly, the way you know something uncomfortable — the way you know you’re spending money you shouldn’t spend.
He tried to talk himself out of it. He told himself that she was from a different world. He told himself that nothing good could come from this. He told himself that he had no time for these feelings, that his father’s hands were shaking worse now, that Priya needed new textbooks, that the gas cylinder had run out and they needed money for a replacement.
He told himself all of this.
And then she texted him a photo of the forty-rupee architecture book she had found in the same second-hand bookshop. The message said: Found this. Should I get it for you?
He replied: I already have that one.
She replied: I know. This one has different pictures.
He stared at his phone for a long time.
Then he replied: Get it. I’ll pay you back.
She replied: Don’t be annoying.
He smiled at his phone like an idiot sitting in the data entry office.
She told Divya she had feelings for him. She said it plainly, without decoration.
Divya’s expression was complicated. “Nandini—”
“I know.”
“Your parents—”
“I know, Divya.”
“It’s going to be—”
“I know.” She looked out the window of the college canteen. “I know all of it. I’m not stupid. I just— I wanted to say it to someone.”
Divya was quiet for a moment. Then she said: “Does he know?”
“No.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
Nandini picked up her cup. “Eventually.”
He told her one evening at the chai stall, when the light was going orange and the stall was almost empty and it had been a bad day for him — his father had been to the doctor and the news was not good, not terrible but not good, and he was tired in the specific way he got when he was carrying too much.
He hadn’t planned to tell her. But she had looked at him and said “What happened?” in a way that was genuinely asking, and he had told her about his father, and then somehow from there things had come loose and he had said:
“I think about you a lot. More than I should. I know that’s — I know there are a hundred reasons why it’s stupid, so you don’t have to say any of them. But I wanted you to know.”
She was quiet.
He looked at the road. “Sorry. That was—”
“Arjun.”
“Yeah.”
“I think about you too.”
He looked at her.
“More than I should,” she added. Quietly. Like an echo.
They sat there in silence for a while, both of them looking at the road. Not holding hands, not saying anything else. Just sitting with the knowledge of it.
It was a small beginning. But it was real.
TO BE CONTINUED ……………………….
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