The moment the train started moving, fear caught up with me.
Leaving my job had felt deliberate. Leaving the city had felt necessary. But as the distance from home increased, the reality of living alone again, in a big, unfamiliar city, hit me all at once.
My heart raced in ways logic couldn't slow down.
At that point in my life, I wasn't even in a position to book a proper ticket. I bought a general ticket, found a small space in the crowded compartment, and confined myself there for the next few hundred miles.
Surrounded by people, I felt completely alone.
My chest tightened. My thoughts spiralled. Survival suddenly felt heavier than ambition.
That's when I did something I hadn't planned.
I took out my phone and called my best friend from college. The one I hadn't spoken to in nearly two years. When he answered, I didn't explain the silence or apologise for disappearing. I just told him the truth.
I had left my job.
I was coming to Hyderabad.
I planned to join a coaching program, look for work, and start over.
He didn't ask why I vanished for two years.
He just shared his location.
He picked me up at the busstop near his hostel and took me to where he stayed. He found me a bed in the same building, him on the second floor, me on the third. It wasn't much, but it mattered. Knowing someone was just one floor below gave me the confidence I hadn't realised I was missing.
__________
Life settled into routine, almost mechanical.
I joined multiple coaching centres for the same course.
Mornings from six to seven.
Seven to eight, another class.
Ten to eleven. Eleven to twelve.
Practice at the hostel from two to four.
Five to six. Six to seven more classes.
Days blurred into weeks.
Weeks collapsed into seconds.
Three months passed like that.
Every class took place in the same large hall, nearly six hundred students packed into rows that stretched farther than my attention ever could.
At first, she was just another face.
But routines have a way of shrinking crowds.
We arrived around the same time most mornings. Sat in different rows, but always within sight. I began to recognise the way she looked up when the lecturer changed slides, the brief pause before she took notes. Without trying, my eyes started finding her before I found my seat.
Some days, I noticed her first.
Other days, I felt it, her gaze already there when I looked up.
It wasn't dramatic.
Just quick glances. A second too long. Then nothing.
In a hall of six hundred, you don't notice everyone. But you do notice the ones who keep appearing in the same frame of your day.
After a few weeks, she wasn't part of the crowd anymore.
She was a constant.
We never spoke. Never sat together. Never crossed the distance between our seats. But recognition built itself quietly, through repetition.
By the time interviews were announced, she was no longer a stranger.
She was someone my eyes searched for without permission.
__________
Six written exams followed.
My name never appeared on the shortlist. Not once.
The same story repeated, including hers.
Then one day, the institute announced that a small company was hiring.
The interview would be held at the company itself. They asked if anyone was interested.
I said yes.
That was it.
I got selected the same day and joined the very next day.
The salary is 60% lower than in my previous job, but the way the interview went with the CEO and the software architect gave me some hope, which I never found in Chennai.
__________
The following Sunday, I returned to the institute one last time.
I wanted to tell her I wouldn't be coming anymore.
She walked out of class at eight in the morning, surrounded by her friends. When she saw me, she said something to them in a language I didn't recognise, not Hindi, not anything I knew.
I pulled one of my classmates along with me. He couldn't speak Telugu. I couldn't speak Hindi at all.
We communicated in broken English sentences, following a silence neither of us acknowledged.
I walked two feet behind her group.
After a few minutes, she turned back and noticed me.
She said something again. Her friends looked back. I had no idea what any of it meant.
I asked him if he could understand what they were talking about, he replied he didn't know.
I spoke a little louder to my classmate, not to her.
I said I had gotten a job.
I said I wouldn't be attending advanced classes anymore.
I hoped she would hear.
I hoped she would turn.
I hoped she would do what I couldn't.
Such cowardice, expecting someone else to cross a distance I refused to.
She looked back when I said I wouldn't be coming anymore. Her expression shifted, just slightly. She turned forward. Then turned back again.
And she smiled.
I don't know what that smile meant. And don't know what that first expression meant.
Sadness. Congratulations. Politeness. Closure.
I chose to believe it was kind.
My classmate congratulated me and asked why we were following those girls.
"I'm not sure," I said. "I think I'll miss that girl, the one in the white sweater and blue jeans."
He asked her name.
I smiled.
"How could I know? There are six hundred of us. This is the first time I've ever followed her. And that too, only because I got a job and never gonna come here again."
They entered a narrow street filled with women's hostels. We stopped near a small shop at the entrance. The group split, some went left, some crossed the road.
She walked into the sixth building with another girl.
I wanted her to look back one last time before she entered the building. If she looked back at least for a second, I might have stayed the whole day there.
I waited.
Thirty minutes.
I told myself that if she was interested, she might come back.
How funny, expecting a girl to turn around for someone who never spoke to her.
She didn't.
That was the last time I saw her.
__________
I returned to my hostel, rested for a while, and the next day, began my real office life.
At the time, I didn't know that within a month, someone would enter my life who would see through my silence and begin breaking the cowardice I had learned to live with.
_________