ALMOST
Chapter 4: PROXIMITY
The first time he showed up at her workplace, she didn't come out.
It was a Tuesday in June — the kind of Pune afternoon that makes you question every life decision that led you to a city where the air itself sweats. Adi had been driving aimlessly, or so he told himself. The therapy centre was on a side street in Kothrud, sandwiched between a medical store and a building under perpetual construction. He'd found the address weeks ago — not through asking, which would have been too direct, but through the kind of low-grade detective work that modern infatuation enables: a location tag in a WhatsApp status, a Google Maps search, the quiet triangulation of breadcrumbs she didn't know she was leaving.
He parked across the street. Turned off the engine. Sat in the driver's seat with the windows down, letting the afternoon heat pour in like a punishment he'd volunteered for.
He could see the entrance. A glass door with a small sign — the centre's name in English and Marathi, a cartoon sun that was supposed to be welcoming and instead looked mildly deranged. Children's artwork was visible through the window: handprints in primary colours, the universal art of small humans who hadn't yet learned that creativity was supposed to be complicated.
She was in there. Somewhere behind that glass door, in a room he couldn't see, doing work he could barely comprehend — the daily, patient, invisible labour of reaching children who lived behind walls the world hadn't built but couldn't breach. She was probably on the floor. She was probably tired. She was probably wearing the same kind of practical kurti she wore to exams, her hair falling forward, her focus total.
He waited for twenty minutes.
She didn't come out. She didn't know he was there. He hadn't told her he was coming — because telling her would have required a reason, and the truth (I drove across the city because being in the same postal code as you is better than being anywhere else) was not a reason he could articulate without sounding like a character in one of his own books.
He left. Drove home. Texted her at 9 PM as if nothing had happened.
"How was work, meow?"
"Tiring. One of the kids had a meltdown. Took an hour to calm him down."
"You okay?"
"I'm fine. I'm always fine."
She wasn't always fine. He knew that. But Capricorns defined "fine" differently than the rest of the species — for them, "fine" didn't mean good. It meant functional. It meant: I survived today, and surviving is enough, and I don't need your concern because concern implies weakness and weakness is a luxury I cannot afford.
He didn't tell her he'd been parked outside her workplace. That secret was his — a small, pathetic, beautiful secret that proved something he already knew: his body would go where she was, whether his brain approved or not.
The next exam changed everything.
She appeared in the hall like a periodic comet — predictable in her returns, brief in her visibility, impossible to ignore. Same seat. Third row, left side. Same kurti — different colour this time, sage green, the kind of muted tone that blended with everything and stood out to no one.
Except him. He stood out to him. She stood out to him.
He'd arrived early this time. Deliberately. Positioned himself in Row F but on the left side — closer to her column, close enough that if she turned around, she'd see him. She didn't turn around. Of course she didn't. She was Siya Kapoor, and Siya Kapoor entered examination halls the way surgeons entered operating theatres: focused, efficient, allergic to distraction.
The exam was Business Economics. Two hours. He finished in ninety minutes — not because he knew the material but because his handwriting had deteriorated to a speed that prioritised completion over legibility. The remaining thirty minutes were spent in the particular agony of proximity: she was right there, six rows ahead, and the distance felt both impossibly small and impossibly vast.
When the exam ended, he didn't let her disappear.
He was on his feet before the invigilator finished collecting papers. Moving toward the door, timing his exit to intersect with hers. The corridor was crowded — the usual post-exam stampede — and he used the crowd the way a pickpocket uses a market: as cover for getting close to someone without appearing to try.
She was walking fast. Bag on one shoulder, phone already in her hand, the posture of someone whose entire relationship with this campus consisted of entry, obligation, and exit. She wore kolhapuri chappals — practical, flat, the kind of footwear that said I am here to walk, not to be looked at. Her dupatta was draped over one shoulder this time, not the chair. The sage green kurti moved with her body — a body he'd only seen seated and was now seeing in motion, and the difference between those two states was a revelation he wasn't prepared for.
She was small. Smaller than he'd imagined. Five-two, maybe five-three. The kind of height that made you want to put your chin on her head. The kind of height that made the decade between them feel even more pronounced — she was young and small, and the combination triggered something in him that was part protectiveness and part something less noble, something that lived in the lower registers of wanting.
He fell into step beside her. Not too close. Not too far. The exact distance that could be coincidence.
"Hey."
She looked up. Recognized him — and the recognition was immediate, which meant she'd known his face before today, which meant she'd been paying more attention than she'd let on.
"Oh. Makad."
Said with the flatness of someone greeting a recurring weather pattern. Not hostile. Not warm. Just: you again.
"How was the paper?"
"Easy."
"For you, maybe. I wrote three pages about supply curves and I'm pretty sure I invented a new economic theory."
The corner of her mouth twitched. That micro-expression again — the ghost of a smile, the same one from the first exam. The one that lasted less than a second and contained more warmth than most people's full grins.
They walked together toward the parking lot. Not by arrangement. By the inertia of two bodies moving in the same direction and neither choosing to diverge. The campus was emptying around them — students scattering to auto-rickshaws and buses and the canteen where post-exam anxiety was treated with vada pav and cutting chai.
She asked him something about the syllabus. He answered. She corrected his answer. He pretended to be offended. She called him makad again — this time with the faintest emphasis on the second syllable, a musical lilt that turned the insult into something almost affectionate.
And then, in the parking lot, next to a row of motorcycles baking in the Pune sun, she asked him for a pen.
Not any pen. She'd lost hers during the exam — left it on the desk, forgotten in her rush to leave. She needed one for something, she said. An application she was filling out. The kind of small, practical need that meant nothing and became everything because of what happened next.
He reached into his bag. Found a pen. Held it out.
She reached for it.
Their fingers touched.
The contact lasted less than a second. The transfer of a pen from one hand to another — one of the most mundane physical interactions in human experience. People touched fingers passing pens a billion times a day across the planet, and not one of those billion contacts registered as anything more significant than the exchange of a writing instrument.
This one was different.
He felt it in the pads of his fingers first. The warmth of her skin — warmer than the pen, warmer than the air, a specific and personal warmth that was neither fever nor sun but the ordinary temperature of a living body, amplified by the fact that it was her body. Her fingertips against his. The briefest overlap of skin on skin — index finger to index finger, the thumb brushing the side of her hand as the pen passed between them.
The shock travelled. He would swear this later, in the privacy of his own obsessive reconstruction: the shock travelled. From his fingertips through his hand, up the wrist (where the pulse was already doing something irregular), along the forearm where every hair stood in a wave that rolled from wrist to elbow like a ripple in water. The forearm hair — standing. All of it. As if his body had received an electrical signal that his brain hadn't yet decoded.
One second. Less than one second.
She pulled her hand back. Pen secured. No acknowledgment of what had just passed between them — no widened eyes, no intake of breath, no visible sign that the contact had registered on her nervous system the way it had registered on his.
But he watched her left hand. The one that hadn't touched his. And he saw it — so small that anyone else would have missed it, so involuntary that she didn't even know she was doing it:
She pulled her dupatta tighter.
The sage green fabric, draped loosely over her shoulder, was gathered and pressed against her chest with her left hand — a containment gesture. The body's way of pulling itself together when something has come loose. Capricorns did this. They compressed when they felt too much. They made themselves smaller when the world got too big. They held on to fabric, to routine, to control — anything external that could substitute for the internal steadiness that had just been disrupted.
She'd felt it.
She'd felt it.
He said nothing. She said nothing. They stood in the parking lot, two feet apart, the Pune sun hammering down on them like a divine spotlight, and the space between their bodies hummed with the residual charge of a touch that had lasted less than a second and would last, in his memory, for the rest of his life.
"Thanks for the pen," she said.
"Keep it," he said.
She nodded. Turned. Walked toward the auto-rickshaw stand.
He watched her go. The sage green kurti. The kolhapuri chappals. The dupatta clutched against her chest.
His fingers were tingling. The specific fingertips that had touched hers — they were alive in a way that the rest of his hand was not, as if the nerve endings in those exact millimetres of skin had been awakened from a dormancy they didn't know they were in. He rubbed his thumb against his index finger, trying to hold onto the sensation. It was already fading. But the memory of it — the temperature, the softness, the barely-there pressure — had been engraved into his somatosensory cortex with the permanence of a scar.
He drove home with the windows down, his left hand hanging out of the car, letting the wind cool fingers that still felt warm.
The chocolate was his next move. He knew it was a move. She knew it was a move. The difference was that he owned it and she pretended not to notice — the silent agreement of two people engaged in a pursuit where one was the pursuer and the other was being pursued but had stopped running and was now walking at a pace that could, if you squinted, be interpreted as waiting.
He showed up with 99% dark chocolate. Her preference — discovered during a 2 AM conversation about food, filed away in the mental dossier he kept on everything she'd ever told him. Most people didn't like 99% dark. Most people found it bitter, aggressive, an acquired taste that they had no interest in acquiring. Siya liked it because it was bitter. Because it didn't try to please. Because it was honest about what it was — dark, intense, unapologetic — and she respected honesty even in confectionery.
He placed it on the desk between them at the campus canteen — the one time she'd agreed to stay after an exam instead of immediately fleeing. She looked at the chocolate. Looked at him. Looked at the chocolate again.
"Why?"
"Because I saw it and thought of you."
"You think of me when you see bitter chocolate?"
"I think of you when I see anything, meow. The chocolate just happens to be the most socially acceptable excuse for showing up with a gift."
She didn't smile. But she didn't push the chocolate back. She unwrapped it slowly — precisely, the way she did everything — and broke off a small piece. Placed it on her tongue. Closed her eyes.
The closing of her eyes was involuntary. He knew this because she would never, voluntarily, close her eyes in front of him — that would be vulnerability, and vulnerability was the one thing Capricorns rationed more carefully than affection. But the chocolate triggered a sensory response that bypassed her defences: the bitterness hitting the back of her tongue, the slow melt of cocoa butter, the complexity of 99% cacao revealing itself in layers. She closed her eyes to taste it properly, and in closing her eyes, she gave him something she didn't intend to give.
Three seconds of her face unguarded.
He memorized it. The slight furrow of her brow (concentration, not displeasure). The way her lips pressed together as the chocolate melted (savouring, not grimacing). The micro-relaxation of her jaw (pleasure, the kind that starts in the mouth and radiates outward). Three seconds of a face that was usually locked behind Capricorn glass, now visible, now readable, now his to witness.
She opened her eyes. Caught him looking. The Capricorn glass slammed back into place.
"It's fine," she said. About the chocolate.
He heard: It's perfect, and I hate that you know me this well, and I hate even more that I like being known.
"Just fine?"
"Haan haan."
That phrase. Her signature dismissal. Haan haan — said with the particular cadence that meant: okay fine, you're right, but I won't admit it directly. He was learning to love those two syllables the way linguists love rare dialects — for what they revealed about the culture they came from.
She wrapped the remaining chocolate carefully and put it in her bag. She would eat the rest later, alone, in the privacy of her own company, where enjoying something didn't require performing enjoyment for an audience. He knew this about her. He knew that she experienced pleasure privately, hoarded it like a miser, allowed herself to feel it fully only when no one was watching.
The thought made him ache. Not sexually — not yet. The ache was structural, architectural. A deep-bone wanting to be the person she felt safe enough to enjoy things in front of. To be inside the circle of her privacy instead of outside the wall of her performance.
The walk to the parking lot became their ritual.
Every exam — and there were four more that semester — ended the same way: the hall emptied, she stood, he materialised beside her as if by coincidence, and they walked together through the corridor, down the stairs, across the campus, to the parking lot where her auto-rickshaw waited and his car baked in the sun.
The walks lasted five minutes. Seven, if they walked slowly. Ten, if one of them said something that required elaboration and they slowed their pace without acknowledging why.
On the fourth walk — a September exam, early evening, the Pune sky turning the particular shade of orange that made the city look like it was being painted by a god who only owned warm colours — she walked closer.
Not dramatically. Not a lunge or a lean or any of the telegraphed gestures that movies use to signal intimacy. Just: closer. An inch, maybe two. Enough that their shoulders occupied adjacent space. Enough that the normal gap between two people walking side by side — the polite gap, the stranger gap, the we-are-classmates-and-nothing-more gap — had been closed by exactly the width of her decision.
Their shoulders brushed.
The contact was different from the pen exchange. That had been accidental — or at least, plausibly deniable as accidental. This was a choice. Her shoulder against his arm (the height difference meant her shoulder met his upper arm, not his shoulder, and the asymmetry of that contact — her softness against his solidity, her smallness against his height — was its own kind of electricity).
She didn't move away.
He didn't move away.
For thirty steps — he counted, because that's what obsessive men do, they count the steps of walks with women who won't name what's happening between them — for thirty steps they walked with their bodies touching. Shoulder to arm. The fabric of her kurti against the cotton of his shirt. The warmth of her skin, separated from his by two layers of cloth but present nonetheless — a warmth that radiated through cotton the way sunlight radiates through curtains, diminished but undeniable.
Neither acknowledged it. That was the rule of their particular game: the body was allowed to speak, but the mouth was not allowed to translate. They could touch and pretend it was the crowd (there was no crowd). They could walk close and pretend it was the narrow path (the path was wide). They could let their bodies say things that their words had not yet found the courage to articulate.
Thirty steps. Then the parking lot opened up, the space widened, and she drifted away — back to the polite distance, the plausible deniability, the safe gap. She raised her hand for an auto-rickshaw. One pulled up. She climbed in without looking back.
"Bye, makad."
"Bye, meow."
He stood in the parking lot after she left. The spot on his arm where her shoulder had been was warm. Not metaphorically warm — literally warm. The skin retained the thermal memory of contact, and he pressed his opposite hand against the spot to hold onto it, the way you cup your hands around a match to keep it from going out.
Thirty steps.
It wasn't enough. It would never be enough. But it was what she was willing to give, and he had learned — was still learning — that with Siya, you didn't take. You received. Gratefully. Patiently. Without demanding more.
And you waited.
Because the girl who walked close enough for her shoulder to brush your arm — that girl was telling you something. Not with words. Not with confessions. With physics. With the simple, irrefutable language of a body moving toward another body instead of away from it.
She was telling you: I'm not ready. But I'm closer than I was yesterday.
End of Chapter 4
© 2025 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to read and share with attribution.