Unravelling

Avinash used to check his watch three times during every business meeting. Now he checks his phone.

The messages from Kavya arrive at unpredictable intervals: a photo of her morning coffee, a complaint about her dance teacher's impossible standards, a random observation about the way pigeons gather outside her studio window. Each notification makes his chest tighten in a way that should concern him, but doesn't.

It started simply enough. Six months ago, she needed fabric for a performance costume. He helped her choose silk that would catch stage lights properly. She stayed an hour longer than necessary, critiquing his taste in music while he measured and cut the material. When she left, taking her laughter and the faint scent of jasmine oil with her, his showroom felt smaller. On the second visit, she brought him tea from the chai stall across the street, too sweet, the way he hated it. But he drank every drop because her fingers had touched the paper cup. The third time, she arrived with a scraped knee from falling off her scooter, and he found himself kneeling on his shop floor, cleaning the wound with trembling hands while she scolded him for fussing.

Now he drives past her dance academy every morning before work. Not to see her, he tells himself, just because it's on the way. Except it adds twenty minutes to his commute, and sometimes he circles the block twice if her scooter isn't parked outside yet.

His mother notices the changes first. "You've stopped eating my parathas," she says one morning, watching him push food around his plate while texting. She's right. Everything tastes like cardboard when his mind is elsewhere.

Kavya has opinions about everything, sharp, uncompromising opinions that sometimes cut. She thinks his business is "soul-crushingly capitalist." She mocks his carefully ironed shirts and asks why he bothers matching his socks when nobody will see them. She's chronically late, leaves her belongings scattered in his car, and has never once thanked him for the small gifts he brings her.

He should find these things annoying. Instead, they make him want her more.

"You know what your problem is?" she says one evening, stealing fries from his plate while they sit in a roadside dhaba. "You think too much."

"About what?"

"Everything. Work. Time. What people think." She gestures with a half-eaten fry. "You live like you're constantly being graded."

He wants to tell her she's wrong, but he's too busy memorising the way her nose crinkles when she's making a point, the way she uses her hands to punctuate every sentence. These details collect in his mind like coins in a jar, becoming currency he spends during the hours they're apart.

His friends notice too. "You missed cricket again," Rohit mentions during their monthly dinner. "Third time this month."

Avinash shrugs. He'd been helping Kavya rehearse, holding her dupatta while she practised turns, trying not to stare at the concentration creasing her forehead. "I was busy."

"With that dancer girl."

It's not a question, but Avinash nods anyway.

"She's got you wrapped around her finger," Rohit says, not unkindly.

"Maybe."

But it's not her finger he's wrapped around, it's something deeper than manipulation, more honest than control. It's the way she falls asleep during movies, her head growing heavy on his shoulder. It's how she hums unconsciously while putting on her anklets, the same melody every time. It's the fierce protectiveness he feels when other men look at her during performances, and the unexpected vulnerability in her voice when she talks about her childhood.

"I think about you," he admits to her one night as they sit on his terrace, sharing silence and watching Old Delhi settle into darkness.

"How much?" Her voice is softer than usual.

He considers lying, offering some casual response that won't reveal the extent of his surrender. But Kavya has always been able to see through his careful composure.

"More than I should," he says finally.

She turns to look at him, and in the dim light from the street below, her expression is unreadable.

"Good," she says quietly. "Because I can't seem to stop thinking about you either."

Later, when she's gone home and he's alone with the lingering scent of her perfume on his clothes, Avinash realises he's stopped trying to resist. She has become his favourite distraction, his most necessary disruption. Not an addiction, something more fundamental than that. Like breathing, or the pull of gravity.

He checks his phone one more time before sleep. No new messages. But tomorrow she'll text him something ridiculous, or show up at his shop with scraped knees and strong opinions, and his carefully ordered world will tilt on its axis all over again.

He's stopped minding the dizziness.