The Weight of Stars

The monsoon had arrived three weeks early that year, turning the streets of Old Delhi into rivers of memory. Priya stands at her apartment window now, watching the rain transform the familiar chaos below, and remembers the afternoon Shaurya walked into her grandmother's bookshop, shaking water from his kurta as if he were casting off pieces of the storm itself.

She had been sorting through a fresh shipment of Gulzar's poetry. Triveni was stacked beside Raat Pashmine Ki when she heard someone asking about Ghalib in accented Hindi. His voice carried the weight of cities she'd never seen, and when she looked up from her careful arrangements, she found herself staring into eyes the colour of monsoon clouds, dark with flecks of amber that seemed to shift with the light filtering through the shop's old windows.

"Diwan-e-Ghalib," she said, standing and brushing dust from her dupatta. "Second shelf, behind the Faiz collection."

He turned toward the books, reached for the worn spine, and when he faced her again, something passed between them. Not the dramatic love of Bollywood films. Priya had always found such immediacy suspect. It was recognition, like hearing a song her grandmother had hummed, half-remembered but completely familiar.

"Hazaaron khwahishen aisi," he began reading aloud, his voice soft enough that she found herself stepping closer, closer than propriety usually allowed with strangers. "Ki har khwahish pe dam nikle..."

The words hung in the humid air between them: Thousands of desires, each worth dying for.

Something shifted in Priya's chest. It wasn't breaking, but rearranging itself, like her mother's bangles settling into a new pattern on her wrist.

That first conversation lasted until the evening azaan drifted from the nearby mosque. They talked about Ghalib and Faiz, about how old bookshops held the dreams of previous readers, about how monsoon rain made the world feel honest. When he finally left, Priya realised she'd forgotten to serve tea to Mrs. Sharma, forgotten to count the day's earnings, forgotten everything except the way his eyes had brightened when she'd recited her favourite sher: "Hum ko maloom hai jannat ki haqiqat lekin, dil ke khush rakhne ko Ghalib yeh khayal accha hai."

We know the reality of paradise, but to keep the heart happy, Ghalib, this thought is beautiful.

Shaurya returned the next day. And the day after.

There was something about the way he inhabited spaces, never taking up more room than necessary, but somehow making the entire bookshop feel more alive when he was there. He noticed things: how the afternoon light caught the motes of dust dancing above the philosophy section, how old Mr. Gupta bought romance novels but always hid them beneath copies of The Times of India, the precise way Priya's dupatta fluttered when she laughed at his observations about the regular customers.

"You see everything," she told him one evening as they sat in the small room behind the bookshop, sharing chai and samosas from the vendor downstairs while reading passages to each other from Umrao Jan Ada. The monsoon drummed against the tin roof above them.

"Not everything," he said, looking up from Mirza Hadi Ruswa's careful prose. "But I see you."

The words landed between them like a truth neither had planned to speak.

Priya had spent twenty-six years feeling like the supporting character in her own life. She was the daughter who would inherit the bookshop and be grateful for it. She was the friend who listened to everyone's marriage troubles while her mother dropped increasingly obvious hints about suitable boys. She was the woman who made excellent chai and could quote Urdu poetry, but had never been looked at the way Shaurya was looking at her now.

But here, now, in this moment that tastes of cardamom and possibility, she understood what her grandmother had meant when she'd said some people are born knowing how to find the light in others.

They began meeting after the evening prayers, when the bookshop closed and the narrow lanes of Old Delhi settled into their ancient rhythms. Sometimes they would walk to Chandni Chowk, buying roasted peanuts and watching the world flow around them like water around stones. Sometimes they would sit in Lodhi Gardens, where Shaurya would read to her from books he'd collected in his travels. He had lived in Bombay, Calcutta, and even Singapore for a year, while she taught him the ghazals her grandmother had sung while braiding her hair.

He had this habit of leaving small gifts in the books she was reading. They weren't expensive things, just a marigold pressed between pages he thought would move her, a tiny piece of paper with a new Urdu word written in his careful script, sometimes just a question mark pencilled beside lines that made him think of her expressions. Priya began checking every book she opened, these small discoveries becoming the rhythm her days revolved around.

"What are we doing?" she asked him one evening in winter, sitting on the steps of Humay's Tomb while the last light faded from the Mughal arches above them.

"We're writing our story," he said, his fingers finding hers in the gathering darkness.

It was an answer enough. For months, it was everything.

But Shaurya carried something with him that Priya could never quite touch, a restlessness that would appear in his eyes sometimes, like he was listening to music only he could hear. During these moments, he would grow quiet, his attention drifting somewhere beyond their immediate world.

"Tell me what you're thinking about," she would say, studying his profile in the lamplight of her small room.

"Just remembering," he would answer, but never what.

The first crack in their careful happiness appeared on a warm spring evening when Priya mentioned her cousin's wedding in Jaipur, how she was looking forward to the three-day celebration, the chance to see her extended family, the colours and chaos she'd grown up loving.

"You should go," Shaurya said, but his voice had that distant quality again, like he was already watching her leave.

"Come with me," she said, then realised how much she didn't know about his life before the bookshop, before her. In eight months of loving him, she had somehow never asked why he seemed to exist only in the present tense, why he never mentioned family or childhood friends or plans that extended beyond the next day.

He stopped walking. Under the streetlight, his face looked like one of the marble figures carved into the walls of old Delhi's monuments, beautiful and unreachable.

"Priya," he said, and she knew from the way he spoke her name, like he was placing it somewhere safe, that everything was about to change.

"You're leaving." The words tasted like ash.

He nodded slowly. "I have to."

"Why?"

"Because staying would mean disappointing you." His voice was barely audible above the evening traffic. "And I've never learned how to stay without eventually becoming someone different, someone smaller than who you think I am."

Priya felt something unfurling in her chest. It wasn't breaking, but blooming in reverse, like the jasmine flowers her mother dried for winter tea. "You don't know what will disappoint me."

"I know what disappointment looks like," he said, touching her face with infinite gentleness. "I've seen it enough times."

They spent their final week pretending time could be negotiated with. Shaurya continued leaving gifts in her books, continued appearing at closing time, and continued existing in her life like someone planning to stay forever. Priya let herself believe, in the spaces between heartbeats, that love might be enough to anchor someone who had never learned to be still.

On his last morning, he made chai the way she'd taught him, strong enough to wake the dead, with just enough sugar to make the bitterness bearable, and they sat at the small table where they'd shared hundreds of morning conversations.

"Promise me something," he said, his hands wrapped around his cup like he was trying to hold onto warmth.

Priya nodded, not trusting her voice.

"Don't let me become a ghost."

She didn't understand until she found the letter he'd left beside her pillow, written in the same careful script she'd discovered in so many book margins:

Priya, you asked me once what I was remembering, and I said just the past. What I couldn't tell you is that I was trying to memorise everything, the way you laugh when you're caught off-guard, how your bangles sound when you reach for books on high shelves, the exact shade of your eyes when you recite poetry. I have spent my life moving through places like wind moves through wheat fields, touching everything, changing nothing, leaving no trace. Until you. You made me want to learn the weight of staying, the comfort of being known completely. But wanting something and having the courage for it are different creatures entirely. I am leaving because I know myself too well. I know how I begin to feel trapped by the very things I thought I wanted, how I start to resent the beauty that once saved me. I would rather leave you with the memory of someone who saw you clearly than become someone who stopped seeing you at all. You are the best thing that has happened to me. Not because you completed something missing in me, but because you showed me what it felt like to be whole, even temporarily. Keep me as I was in those eight months, someone who noticed the way afternoon light caught in your dupatta, someone who loved your voice when you read Ghalib aloud. Don't let me become the person who stays too long and forgets how to see the magic in ordinary moments. Remember me, but don't wait for me. You deserve someone brave enough to choose you every day, not just in the spaces between departures. Forever yours in the memory of monsoons, Shaurya

Priya reads the letter now, a year later, while rain turns the city into poetry outside her window. She had read it twenty-three times that first day, until the words blurred and her grandmother found her crying over the morning chai.

The bookshop carries his absence differently now. Customers still come seeking stories, Priya still helps them find what they're looking for, but the poetry section holds the shape of conversations that no longer happen. She catches herself looking toward the door during the evening azaan, muscle memory expecting to see him shaking rain from his clothes.

The gifts he left became treasures she discovered slowly, rationing the joy like her grandmother had rationed sugar during the shortages of her childhood. Each week, she allowed herself one new finding. In the margin of a Sahir Ludhianvi poem, this verse has your voice. Tucked into The Mahabharata, a dried rose with the words, For when you forget that beauty endures. Pressed between the pages of Bagh-o-Bahar, a tiny paper crane folded from a page of his notebook, with a single word written inside: Fly.

Months passed like seasons changing, slowly, then all at once. Priya learned to make chai exactly the way she preferred it, weaker than Shaurya's version, with cardamom instead of just sugar. She rearranged the bookshop not to erase him, but to make room for the woman she was becoming. She started visiting her cousins more often, made plans to travel to Jaipur alone for the first time.

But some evenings, when the azaan drifted through the warm air and the bookshop settled into silence, Priya wondered if Shaurya was somewhere listening to the same call to prayer, if he was leaving gifts in someone else's books, if he remembered the way she had recited ghazals while the monsoon played percussion on the roof above them.

One evening in late summer, exactly a year after they'd met, Priya was closing the shop when she discovered a book she didn't remember ordering: a new translation of Ghalib's complete works. Inside the front cover, in handwriting that wasn't his but somehow carried his careful attention, were the words: Some people leave marks that time cannot erase.

She looked around the empty bookshop, half-expecting to see him in the poetry section, but found only the familiar comfort of stories waiting to be discovered. Still, Priya smiled as she locked the door, carrying the book home like a small piece of proof that love, even departing love, could be permanent in ways that had nothing to do with staying.

That night, she wrote her message in the book's margin: And some people teach us that letting go can be its form of love.

Outside her window, the late monsoon began its final symphony of the season, and Priya understood that being forgotten and being lost were different territories entirely. Shaurya might have left her daily life, but he lived now in the way she noticed light moving through water, in her habit of buying marigolds for the small temple in her room, in her knowledge that she was someone worth seeing completely.

She had been his anchor in a life of departures. He had been her monsoon, not permanent, but essential, the rain that made everything grow even as it moved on to water other gardens.

The weight of love, Priya realised, watching the rain trace familiar patterns on her window, isn't measured in duration. It's in the way it changes the landscape of who we become, leaving us different, richer, and more aware of our capacity to bloom.

Some storms, after all, are worth dancing in, even when we know they'll pass.