Kuch chehre baarish mein bhi muskaraate hain,

Aur kuch, dhundh jaate hain khud ko bhi bheegte bheegte.

Par kuch rishton ki yaadon mein... baarish kabhi rukti hi nahi.

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Tara Deshmukh - 29

She was not someone who cried easily. Not when the monsoon made her run late to tuition classes, Not when a publisher ghosted her on the fifth follow-up and definitely not when someone mentioned his name.

She had become good at folding pain into practical things: a laundry basket, an edited manuscript, the act of cleaning the stove. Twenty-nine now, she lived alone in a paying guest room in Dadar East, above a noisy medical shop. Her bed was too close to the window, and the rain sometimes slipped through the cracks. But it was hers. Quiet. Predictable.

She worked as a freelance editor mostly self-help books and badly written romance novels and teach sketching to school kids on weekends. She liked silence, cold tea, and buying secondhand books with scribbled notes in the margins. She told herself she had moved on and then came the flood warning and the message from the chawl's residents' group -"Old 3B still open, if anyone needed. Spare keys with Kamlesh kaka." Tara hadn't been to the old apartment in over a year.

Aarav Mehra - 31

He never returned to a city without a deadline. But this time, he didn't have one. At thirty-one, he looked older than his age not in wrinkles, but in silence. He worked with a civic infrastructure firm now, mostly temporary postings. The kind of jobs where you didn't get too attached to people or walls.

He'd been called back to Mumbai for a flyover audit that got postponed because of the weather. The hotel he was booked in had flooded. That's how he ended up at Kamlesh kaka's shop, asking for a key he thought he'd never need again. The old apartment still had water bottles in the fridge, extra shirts in the drawer, a pair of her earrings by the sink. He hadn't thrown them away. Just... hadn't looked at them either.

When he opened the door, the air still smelled like lemongrass and unfinished arguments. He didn't know Tara would arrive later that evening.

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What do you think of Tara and Aarav so far?

What do you think is harder bumping into someone you used to love, or having to live with them again, even for a few days?

Let me know in the comments, and don't forget to vote if this little world has already begun to pull you in