The Delhi Chronicles:
Previously:
She was a woman of independent means, but lived counting the echo of his footsteps every Thursday—an arrangement that started as a joke and stayed because no one laughed hard enough to end it.
Every Tuesday at three p.m., he arrived with apologies for traffic that hadn’t happened. “Ring Road was a nightmare,” he’d say. “Total gridlock.”
“Awful,” she’d reply.
He looked at her like as though she had never changed. She looked at him like she knew he never would.
It took him four minutes to undress, each sock treated like silk. His shirt got its own chair.
The sex lasted forty-seven seconds, if you were generous, which she was, but only in her head.
Tea took twenty-three minutes—longer if she asked about the weather, which she always did.
He never mentioned the tea. It could have been lemonade. It could have been antifreeze. Either way, he drank it like it owed him money.
He looks at his phone.
More tea? the woman would ask.
I’m okay, he would say.
They sat eight feet apart, by something older than habit. He stayed where he was, still in that way men get when they believe stillness is dignity.
After a while—ten minutes or so—she moved. Not abruptly. She stood, crossed the room, and settled beside him.
She lay back with two cushions behind her head, her feet resting on his lap as if it had always been that way, or had once been.
He placed a hand on her feet. Not affectionately, nor indifferently. Just the way a person might touch something they used to recognize.
He looked his phone again.
"I should probably head back," he would say at exactly four fifteen.
"Of course," the woman would agree.
At the end of the day, they always leave.
Afterwards, the woman washed two cups— twenty six minutes of tea — an epilogue to forty-seven seconds of sex. The economics felt reasonable for someone who had nothing else to do.
She would go back to bed and lie down, wait till he messaged her— the next day usually.
She might check her email several times in between.
But she is already waiting for the week after.
This was the pattern of a day of a person who had stopped expecting much but hadn’t quite stopped expecting.
Not waiting, not quite. But living in the way you do when the better parts seem to have already passed without you.
She tells her psychologist that he is her happy pill and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.