The October night in Mohali carried with it a sharp, creeping chill. The air had grown thin and brittle, each gust of wind slicing through the silence like a whisper. Most of the streets were deserted now—shops locked up, shutters rattling faintly whenever the cold breeze whistled past.
Down one such lonely stretch rode Ayan, his bicycle wheels cutting a steady rhythm against the rough road. The faint glow of distant streetlights cast his shadow long and thin, as though chasing him.
His mind, however, raced far ahead of him.
"What madness possessed me to think about Aditi?" he thought bitterly, his hands tightening on the handles. "Siddhant and the others had told me from the beginning… but no, I thought I knew better. And now look—troubles stacking higher than I can bear. They're right when they say love blinds us. In my case, it didn't just blind me—it made me lose sense altogether, like a stone had hit my head."
A faint, self‑mocking laugh escaped his lips. "The bird's flown away with the grain… not that I had any grain to begin with."
The laughter died almost as quickly as it came, swallowed by the emptiness of the road.
He turned into a narrow, dimly lit alley. Here, the light hardly reached—the bulbs flickered weakly, buzzing like tired insects. At the end of the lane stood a two‑storey building, worn and forgotten with time. The paint had peeled away in patches, exposing the gray skeleton beneath, and the cracked walls looked as though they had weathered decades of silence.
Ayan brought his bicycle to a stop beneath the staircase. He checked his phone—ten minutes to eleven. With careful hands he chained the bicycle, tugging the lock twice just to be sure, then began climbing the uneven stairs. The iron railing was cold under his palm, and each step creaked faintly in protest.
On the second floor, he reached the small place he and his mother called home. It wasn't much—just a single modest room with a small kitchen tucked in one corner and a bathroom attached. Too cramped for any visitor, but just enough for survival. To anyone else, it might seem bare and empty, but for Ayan, it held the fragile comfort of belonging, something no other place in the world had given him since his father's death.
That death had been the turning point. His father's family, instead of gathering them in grief, had cast them out like burdens. Since then, loneliness had been their bitter relative, and hardship their constant companion.