Not a call. Not a voice note. A photo.

May 17th. Seven months since Diwali. Seven months since the last time her name appeared on my screen with anything more than a festival greeting. Happy Diwali. The kind of message you send to twenty people in thirty seconds. I had replied. She had replied to my reply. That was it.

I had saved her name as Ittefaq.

Because that's what it was. An accident. A coincidence. Ittefaq se mil gaye the. I used to say that to her, laughing, like it was charming. Ittefaq se ishq hua hai. She'd smile. Not fully. The way she smiled at things she didn't want to encourage but couldn't help finding true.

The phone buzzed and I picked it up with my eyes still closed.

Downloaded the image without seeing it. Put the phone down. Closed my eyes for five more minutes. Knew I'd have to open them eventually. Didn't want to. Body already somewhere between sleep and whatever comes after sleep, that underwater place where you know you're lying in your own bed but you can't fully claim it yet.

Five minutes passed. Maybe ten.

I opened my eyes.

Blurry. Everything soft at the edges, like the world was taking its time arriving.

White base. Blue work.

I blinked.

Wedding card.

I remember the exact sequence.

First: nothing. Just the image sitting in my eyes before my brain had caught up.

Then: her name on WhatsApp. Ittefaq. The word just sitting there above the card she had sent me.

And then something shifted. Not dramatically. Not like in films, where the protagonist grabs his chest or slams the phone face-down. Just, something moved inside me. The way a season changes. You don't see it happen. You just notice, at some point, that it already has.

Ittefaq.

Ittefaq se ishq hua hai.

I had thought that was a sweet thing to say. A romantic thing. I hadn't thought about what happened to accidents eventually. How the world absorbs them. How they stop being accidents and become just, things that happened. Things that are now over.

I tried to get up.

Couldn't.

Not metaphorically. My body had simply decided it wasn't done with sleep yet. I was awake, fully, horribly awake, but my limbs hadn't gotten the message. I lay there, phone in hand, wedding card on screen, completely unable to move. Every instruction my brain sent to my arms, my legs, delayed. Returned unopened.

Sleep paralysis. I'd had it before. I knew what it was. That didn't make it easier.

I tried to make a sound. Couldn't. Tried to cry. The tears happened, I could feel them, warm and sideways across my face, but no sound came with them. I was screaming somewhere inside myself. I know I was. My lungs had the shape of a scream in them.

But the room stayed silent.

Just me. The phone. The white and blue card glowing in the dark.

Ittefaq shifting to Ishq.

That's what I kept thinking, lying there paralysed.

Not about her. Not about the person whose name was on the card beside hers, I hadn't even looked. I was thinking about the name I had saved. The word I had chosen. Ittefaq. How I had thought I was being clever and light and appropriately unserious about the whole thing.

How I had not understood, apparently, that I wasn't.

Ittefaq se ishq hua hai.

Okay.

Aur kya chahiye.

By the time my body came back to me, it was almost 3.

I sat up slowly. Drank some water. Looked at the phone again.

Congratulations, I typed.

Deleted it.

Typed it again.

Sent it.

She replied almost instantly, which meant she was awake too, at 3 a.m., the night before or after or somewhere around her own wedding card. Thank you, she said. A small emoji. The one with the folded hands.

I put the phone face-down on the bed.

Outside, Chandigarh was quiet. The kind of quiet that only exists past 2 a.m., when even the stray dogs have given up on the night.

I lay back down.

Didn't sleep.

Didn't not sleep either.

Just existed in that underwater place again, that space between sleep and whatever comes after, except this time I wasn't trying to wake up.

Ittefaq had always been a temporary name. I see that now.

Everything is, I think.

You just don't notice until the world hands you evidence.