Chapter 4: After the Storm

The power came back at seven-fourteen. Meera knew the exact time because her phone — which had been face-down on the table above, forgotten during the three hours under it — lit up with forty-seven messages from Priya, escalating from "How's it going?" to "Did you talk to him?" to "Are you dead?" to "If you're dead I'm taking your bookshelf."

"I should tell my roommate I'm alive," Meera said.

"Probably wise."

They were still on the floor. Not under the table anymore — at some point during the storm's final hour they had shifted, backs against the wall, legs stretched out on the mosaic. Arjun's arm was no longer around her shoulders. The absence of it was louder than the thunder had been.

The Coffee Loft was a mess. Water had come in through the doorframe — a centimetre of it on the mosaic floor, reflecting the newly returned fluorescent lights. The pastry display was dark and the pastries inside were warm. Kaveri was mopping with the resigned efficiency of a woman who had survived twenty-seven years of Bangalore weather and who treated flooding the way most people treated traffic: as an inevitability to be managed, not a crisis to be mourned.

"Kaveri aunty, I'm sorry about the floor," Arjun said, standing, offering Meera his hand.

"The floor has survived worse. Is the girl okay?"

"The girl has a name," Meera said, taking the hand, standing, finding that her legs were stiff and her knees were sore and that her hand was now in Arjun's hand and that neither of them was letting go.

"The girl with a name who sits at table three every morning and reads terrible books and has been staring at my barista for four months — is she okay?"

"Kaveri aunty," Arjun said. His voice had the tone of a man who had just discovered that his employer had been observing his personal life with the attention of a surveillance system.

"I'm sixty-two, not blind. And I make coffee, not miracles. If two young people can't figure out how to talk to each other without a thunderstorm, that's their problem, not mine."

Kaveri returned to her mopping. Meera looked at Arjun. Arjun looked at Meera. Their hands were still connected. The mosaic floor was wet. The fluorescent lights were flickering — not from the storm, from age, the specific flicker of heritage building wiring that Bangalore heritage preservation laws required you to maintain rather than replace.

"Do you want to—" Arjun started.

"Yes," Meera said.

"I haven't finished the question."

"The answer is yes regardless."

He smiled. Not the laugh — the smile was different. Quieter. More private. The smile of a man who had spent three hours on a floor with a woman and who had learned more about her in those three hours than in four months of coffee orders, and who was now holding her hand in a flooded coffee shop while a sixty-two-year-old woman in a cotton sari mopped around them with pointed commentary.

"Coffee," he said. "Tomorrow morning. Not here. Somewhere else. I know a place in Basavanagudi — they roast their own beans and the owner is a retired Carnatic musician who plays veena while you drink. It's ridiculous and perfect."

"That sounds like a date."

"It is a date."

"Okay."

"Okay."

"Can I have my hand back? I need to text Priya."

"Do you want your hand back?"

"Not particularly."

Kaveri's mop sloshed past them. "Lock up when you leave. I'm going home. Some of us have grandchildren to feed."