"Jaag ke raat guzaari hai
Socha hai aankh mooond ke
Tujhse bichhad ke jeena nahi
Tujhse mila ke maang le"
~ Teri Ore – Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, Shreya Ghoshal~

I had been lying in the dark for three hours.

Not because I was afraid. Not because I was having second thoughts. My mind was not that kind of busy.

It was just—full.

So full that sleep felt like a waste of the feeling. Like something was happening in me that required being awake to witness. A chapter ending. A new one beginning. The specific liminal quality of a night that knows it is the last of its kind.

I got up at two in the morning and went to the rooftop.

Jodhpur at two in the morning was not silent—the city never fully went quiet, something Aadyant had told me was part of its character. But it was a different sound than the days, lower and steadier, like the city breathing instead of speaking.

The fort was lit up against the sky.

Six hundred years of stone, watching the city it had always watched.

I sat with my back against the low parapet and looked at it for a long time.

The footsteps on the stairs were unhurried. Not startling.

I had half-expected her.

~

KRITIKA SINGH'S POV 

I had been awake too.

I did not sleep well the night before large things. It was a quality I had had my whole life and had learned to work with rather than against—use the wakefulness, let it be productive, let it settle into something.

I found Kashvi on the rooftop looking at the fort.

I sat beside her.

For a while neither of us said anything. The city breathed below. The fort watched above. This was, I was discovering, the quality of Jodhpur at night: it did not demand anything. It simply was. An old city comfortable with silence.

"Are you all right?" I asked eventually.

"Yes," she said. "I'm not—it's not nerves. It's more like—" She paused. "Like I want to be awake for it. All of it."

"Yes," I said. "I understand that."

She looked at me.

"Bua. Can I ask you something?"

"Always."

"You told me, at the haldi, about the day you would have gotten married. The day Dadi applied haldi to your hands."

"Yes."

"You've never talked about that before."

"No. I haven't."

She was quiet. Waiting.

I looked at the fort.

"I was twenty-two," I said. "His name was Arjun. He was kind and funny and very good-looking and we were going to get married in March."

"What happened?"

"He died. An accident, two months before the wedding." I paused. "And I was—devastated. Devastated in the way you can only be at twenty-two when you have planned a future that is no longer possible."

"Bua—"

"Let me finish." I kept my voice even. "I spent a year in grief. And then I came out of it, and I rebuilt. And somewhere in that rebuilding I made a decision—not consciously, not as a statement, but quietly, the way the most important decisions are made—that I would live alone. That what I had with Arjun was complete, was mine, and I didn't want to replace it. I wanted to carry it."

Kashvi was completely still beside me.

"And I built a life," I said. "A good life. My career. My independence. My own home. My choices. And then your parents sent you to me, and I discovered there was more room in my life than I had thought."

"You never told me any of this."

"You were young and healing. There was no reason for you to carry my history on top of your own."

She looked at her hands. Her mehendi hands, the patterns dark and perfect.

"Are you happy?" she asked. "In your life. Truly happy?"

I considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.

"Yes," I said. "I am happy. My life has been smaller than the one I imagined at twenty-two, and also fuller in ways I didn't expect. You are the fullest part of it."

Her face did something very quiet.

"And I want to say this," I continued. "Because you asked me to be honest and I always try to be, with you specifically." I turned to look at her. "I chose what I chose. You are choosing differently. And there is not a single part of me that wishes you were choosing as I did. Watching you build this—watching you open up to love again after everything—is the proudest I have ever been of you. And I have been proud of you every day for three years."

"Bua."

"Let me finish," I said again, gently. "The last thing I want to say is this: tomorrow you walk into a life you have chosen completely freely, with your whole self, without fear. That is a miracle, Kashvi. What you've done—who you've become—it's a miracle. And I need you to know that I see it."

Kashvi had tears on her face.

She leaned her head on my shoulder.

I put my arm around her.

We sat on the rooftop of a Jodhpur haveli at two in the morning with the fort watching and the city breathing below, and neither of us said anything more for a long time.

~

"Are you happy for me?" I asked eventually. "Truly?"

Bua was quiet for one long moment.

"I am the happiest I have ever been for anyone in my entire life."

I breathed out.

Something I had been carrying—not consciously, but there nonetheless, a faint held breath, a small unasked question—left me.

"Okay," I said. "Okay."

"Go to bed," Bua said. "It's two in the morning and you have a very long, very important day ahead of you."

"I know."

"And Kashvi?"

"Yeah?"

"You are already enough. You have always been enough. Walk in there tomorrow knowing that."

I stood up. She stood up.

I hugged her.

Long enough for it to say everything it needed to.

Then I went back to my room and lay in the dark and listened to the city breathing and the fort watching, and felt—not the absence of nerves, but the presence of something stronger.

Ready.

Not because everything was perfect.

Because she was right. I was already enough.

I closed my eyes.

The sky outside the window was beginning, at the very edge, to think about morning.

~

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