Seven days.
That's how long it took for Arjun Malhotra to restructure his entire life around a cup of tea.
He didn't admit this to himself, of course. Arjun was a man of logic, discipline, and carefully maintained denial. He told himself he went to the courtyard early because the Engineering Block was stuffy and the fresh air helped him focus. He told himself he brought two cups of tea from Ramu's stall because the old man gave a discount for doubles. He told himself he sat on the steps of the Arts Building because the stone was cooler there, better for his aching back.
He told himself many things.
None of them were true.
The truth was this: every evening at six-fifteen, Arjun Malhotra walked into that courtyard carrying two cups of too-sweet tea, and every evening at six-fifteen, Meera Sharma was already sitting on those steps with a book in her lap and a smile that undid him completely.
Seven days. Seven cups of tea. Seven conversations that started with literature and ended somewhere dangerously close to the heart.
Day One, she read him Tagore. Her voice turned the words into rivers — flowing, unhurried, finding their own path. He listened without interrupting, which surprised her. Most people interrupted.
"You're quiet," she observed.
"I'm listening."
"People don't usually listen. They wait for their turn to talk."
"I don't have anything more important to say than Tagore."
She tilted her head. "That's either very humble or very lazy."
"Can it be both?"
She laughed. He memorized the sound.
Day Two, he told her about his engineering project — a low-cost water purification system designed for rural communities. He explained it badly, stumbling over the technical details, because her eyes were doing the gold-in-brown thing again and his brain was short-circuiting like Banerjee's ancient forklift.
"So basically," she said, "you're trying to save the world with a filter?"
"It's more complex than —"
"I love it."
He blinked. "You don't even understand the mechanism."
"I don't need to understand the mechanism. I understand the intention." She leaned forward. "You want to give clean water to people who can't afford it. That's not engineering. That's poetry."
He stared at her for a long moment.
"You call everything poetry."
"Everything is poetry, Arjun. You just have to read it right."
He looked away because if he kept looking at her, he was going to say something irreversible.
Day Three, it rained again.
They sat under the awning, shoulders almost touching — almost, that terrible, electric word — and watched the courtyard transform into a silver mirror. Neither suggested going inside. The rain was theirs now. It had introduced them. It had rights.
"Do you believe in fate?" she asked.
"No."
"Liar."
"I believe in hard work."
"That's not what I asked." She turned to face him. Rainwater dripped from the awning's edge between them like a beaded curtain. "Do you believe that some people are meant to find each other?"
His throat tightened. "That's a literature student's question."
"And that's an engineer's evasion." She waited. Patient. Relentless.
"I believe," he said carefully, choosing each word like a man crossing a river on stepping stones, "that if fate exists, it has a cruel sense of humor. It gives you things you never asked for and takes away things you'd die to keep."
The playfulness faded from her face. What replaced it was something raw — an understanding that went beyond words, beyond their seven days of tea and Tagore, into something ancient and aching.
"Maybe," she whispered, "fate gives you things because you'd die to keep them. Maybe that's the test."
The rain fell harder.
Their shoulders touched.
Neither moved away.
Day Four, she brought him food.
This was a violation of every unspoken rule Arjun had built around himself. He could accept tea — tea was casual, informal, meaningless. But food was different. Food was care. Food was I see that you're hungry and I refuse to pretend I don't.
She pulled a steel tiffin from her bag and placed it between them on the step. Inside: rice, dal, aloo bhaja, and two pieces of fish fry that glistened with mustard oil and spices.
"My Baba sent too much," she said casually. "I can't finish it alone."
It was a lie. Arjun knew it was a lie. The tiffin was packed for two — the portions deliberate, the fish arranged carefully, a small container of kasundi tucked into the corner like an afterthought that was anything but.
His pride reared up — tall, sharp, familiar. He had never accepted charity. Not from the neighbors who offered rice after his father's death. Not from the warehouse workers who tried to share their lunch when they saw him eating plain roti with salt. Not from anyone. Pride was the only expensive thing Arjun Malhotra owned, and he guarded it fiercely.
But Meera wasn't offering charity.
She was offering herself. Her care. Her attention. Her quiet, stubborn refusal to let him starve while she watched.
"The fish will get cold," she said, not looking at him. Giving him space to accept without losing face. Giving him the gift of pretending it didn't matter.
He picked up the fish.
It was the best thing he had ever tasted.
"Your father cooks well," he said.
"He does." She paused. "He also asks about you."
Arjun's hand froze midway to his mouth. "You told your father about me?"
"I told him I met an engineering student who quotes Tagore and walks in the rain." She shrugged. "He wants to meet you. He said anyone who quotes Tagore and isn't a literature student is either a genius or completely insane, and both are worth meeting."
Arjun chewed slowly. The fish was seasoned with more than mustard oil. It was seasoned with something terrifying.
Belonging.
"Tell your father," he said, "that I'm definitely the insane one."
"He'll like that. He's insane too." She smiled. "Runs in the family."
Day Five, they argued.
It started with Neruda. Meera had been reading Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and insisted that Neruda understood love better than any poet in history. Arjun — who had read Neruda once, at seventeen, in a stolen library book — disagreed.
"Neruda is obsession dressed as romance," he said.
"That's the most ignorant thing you've ever said."
"He writes about women like they're landscapes. Mountains. Rivers. Things to be explored. That's not love. That's colonialism with metaphors."
Her mouth fell open. Then closed. Then opened again.
"Colonialism with — what?"
"You heard me."
"I heard you commit literary murder. That's what I heard."
They argued for forty-five minutes. Their voices rose. Students walking past stared. A professor from the History Department paused, listened for a moment, shook his head, and kept walking.
Arjun quoted Faiz Ahmed Faiz in rebuttal — "Mujhse pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang" — and Meera's argument collapsed mid-sentence because his Urdu pronunciation was unexpectedly perfect and her brain refused to function while processing both the poetry and the way his voice dropped when he recited it.
"That's cheating," she said breathlessly.
"That's Faiz."
"Same thing."
They stared at each other. The argument was over. Something else had begun — something quieter, deeper, more dangerous.
"I hate you," she said.
"I know," he replied.
Neither of them meant it. Both of them knew.
Day Six, she was late.
Arjun sat on the steps for forty minutes. The tea grew cold. The sun set. Shadows lengthened across the courtyard like reaching fingers. Students passed in groups, their laughter sharp and alien. The Engineering Block glowed with fluorescent light.
He waited.
At seven o'clock, she appeared. Running. Breathless. Her dupatta flying behind her like a flag.
"Sorry — sorry — the bus broke down on Gariahat Road — I ran from the crossing — sorry —"
She stopped in front of him, bent double, gasping. Her face was flushed. Her braid had come completely undone. Her eyes were wild with apology and something else — something that looked like relief. Like she had been afraid he would leave.
"You waited," she said, still breathing hard.
"The tea waited," he corrected. "I was just keeping it company."
She straightened. Looked at him. Looked at the two cups — cold now, useless — sitting on the step where he'd placed them fifty minutes ago.
"Arjun."
"Hmm?"
"Thank you. For waiting."
The way she said it — quietly, seriously, like it mattered more than a cup of tea, more than a missed conversation, more than an hour on stone steps — made him understand that she wasn't talking about today.
She was talking about everything.
About a girl who had lost her mother at eleven and learned that people leave. About a girl who laughed in the rain because crying in the sunshine was harder. About a girl who read Tagore like a prayer because prayers were the only conversations where the other person had to listen.
She was thanking him for being someone who stayed.
"I'll always wait," he said.
The words came out before he could stop them. Unfiltered. Unguarded. True.
Her eyes glistened. She blinked rapidly, turned away, wiped her face with the edge of her dupatta.
"The tea is cold," she said, her voice slightly thick.
"I'll get new ones."
"No." She sat down beside him. Close. Closer than before. Their arms pressed together — not almost this time, but fully, deliberately, warmly. "Cold tea is fine. Cold tea is honest."
They drank cold tea in silence.
It tasted like a promise.
Day Seven, nothing happened.
And everything happened.
They sat on the steps. They drank tea. They talked about nothing — the weather, a stray cat that had adopted the Arts Building, a professor who sneezed exactly fourteen times during every lecture.
But between the words, in the spaces where language failed, something was being built. Brick by invisible brick. A structure without a name. Not friendship — too charged. Not love — too soon. Something in between. Something almost.
At seven-thirty, Arjun stood to leave for class. Meera stood too. They faced each other in the fading light, the courtyard empty around them, the world reduced to the space between two heartbeats.
"Same time tomorrow?" she asked. The same question she asked every evening. Casual. Practiced. Safe.
But today her voice trembled.
Just slightly. Just enough.
And Arjun heard it — the tremble of almost. The sound of a woman standing at the edge of a cliff, waiting for someone to either pull her back or jump with her.
He reached out.
His fingers brushed her hand. Not holding. Not grasping. Just touching. A whisper of skin against skin. A question asked without words.
Her breath caught.
His heart stopped.
The moment stretched — elastic, infinite, terrifying — and in that stretched second, Arjun Malhotra understood with absolute, devastating clarity that he was in love with Meera Sharma.
Not falling. Not almost.
In.
Completely. Irreversibly. Catastrophically.
He pulled his hand back.
"Tomorrow," he said. His voice was steady. His hands were not.
"Tomorrow," she whispered.
He walked away. Across the courtyard. Through the door. Into the fluorescent hell of the Engineering Block where professors droned about thermodynamics and circuit design and things that could be measured, calculated, controlled.
He didn't hear a word.
All he heard was the tremble in her voice.
All he felt was the ghost of her hand beneath his fingers.
Tomorrow.
Three weeks later, Vikram Singh Rathore's private jet would land at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport.
Fourteen days after that, Arjun Malhotra's world would be covered in blood.
But tonight — this one, fragile, beautiful tonight — the boy who loved rain sat in a classroom full of equations and thought only of a girl who read storms.
And the girl who read storms sat on cold stone steps, her hand pressed against her chest, feeling the echo of fingers that had touched her for exactly one second and changed everything forever.
One second.
That's all it took.
One second to build a universe.
One second — later — to destroy it.