The Code We Never Wrote

The fluorescent lights of InfoTech Solutions cast their cold gleam across empty coffee cups and abandoned keyboards. Nehal's fingers hovered over his laptop, the cursor blinking like a heartbeat he had learned to ignore. It was just another signal to keep at a safe distance. Nine-thirty PM, and the Bangalore office had finally quieted, leaving only the security guard's radio crackling softly from the lobby.

She was not his. She had never been, not even close.

Dipti belonged to the marketing team on the seventh floor, to her perfectly timed presentations and the way senior VPs leaned forward when she spoke. She belonged to client dinners at UB City Mall, while he lived in the basement server rooms where the real work happened, debugging someone else's spaghetti code until his eyes burned.

Three months ago, the annual hackathon had thrown them together like mismatched variables in a function call. Marketing meets Engineering: usually a recipe for frustrated sighs and missed deadlines. Instead, Dipti had slid her chair closer to his monitor during their first planning session, jasmine scent and all.

“Show me how it thinks,” she had said, watching him trace through the recommendation algorithm's logic.

He had pulled up the code, expecting the usual glazed expression. Instead, she had followed each conditional statement, asking questions that showed she was not just listening, she was translating his nested loops into the language of user stories and market segments.

“It's like watching someone solve a puzzle,” she had murmured during their second all-nighter, when the vending machine coffee had long since turned bitter. “Each function is a piece clicking into place.”

Her hand had brushed his when she had reached for his laptop, and for a moment, neither of them had moved away. The warmth of her palm against his knuckles made him lose track of the elegant recursion he had been explaining.

They had won. The trophy still caught light from his desk lamp each evening, a chrome reminder of seventy-two hours when the boundary between floors had dissolved entirely.

But Monday morning had rebuilt those walls with the efficiency of a production deployment.

The project's success meant bigger teams, formal workflows, and separate tracks. Dipti was pulled into investor roadshows while Nehal sank deeper into architecture reviews. Their interactions shrank to status emails and brief elevator encounters, thirty seconds of careful small talk before the doors opened on their respective floors.

Each time, something twisted in his chest, the urge to suggest lunch, to ask about her weekend, to find some excuse to recreate those conversations when the world had felt infinite with possibility.

The promotion came with a corner office and a view of the cricket ground. Senior Software Architect, a title his parents celebrated by distributing sweets to half of Mysore. It also meant the eighth floor, different meetings, a different orbit entirely.

From his window, he could see Dipti sometimes during the weekend company matches, cheering from the sidelines in her red jersey. She looked like she belonged in that brighter world of visible success, while he built the invisible infrastructure that made it all possible.

He could have found reasons to collaborate. His manager would have supported cross-functional initiatives. Nehal's reputation for making impossible integrations work was well-established. Instead, he disappeared into code with monastic dedication.

Six months later, the news appeared in the engineering Slack channel: Dipti had been selected for the Silicon Valley exchange program. Six months with the global strategy team, the kind of opportunity that launches careers into orbit.

Nehal stared at his screen, the cursor still blinking its patient rhythm. Outside, Bangalore settled into the evening. Auto-rickshaw horns wove their familiar symphony, the smell of dosa batter rising from the street vendor eight floors below.

His phone buzzed. A message from Dipti: “Coffee before I leave? I want to thank you properly for the hackathon project. It changed everything for me.”

He read it three times, his thumb hovering over the keyboard. His grip tightened around the phone. He could see her in the coffee shop downstairs, could imagine the conversation that might unfold. Her gratitude, his careful responses, the growing space between what they said and what they meant.

Then he typed back: “Swamped with a production issue. Congrats on the opportunity.”

The message went out before he could second-guess it. His phone stayed silent.

He opened a new file and began to type:

def unreachable_code():

"""

A function that defines what we never execute

Sometimes the most elegant solution

is the one we never implement

"""

pass

The code flowed like a confession written in a language only he could read. Each function was a verse in the poem of careful distances, of connections too precious to risk. And somewhere on the seventh floor, Dipti was probably backing up her files, preparing for a future that would take her even further from his world of safe abstractions and elegant algorithms.

The fluorescent lights hummed their eternal song, and Nehal wrote code for dreams that would never compile. Each line was a small monument to the careful architecture of cowardice. It was beautiful in its own unexecuted way.