Every story has two versions.
This is the one Chinmaya never knew.
Chapter II
The Story Heer Never Told
If someone had asked Heer how she was doing, she would have given the same answer she had been giving for months.
“I’m fine.”
She had repeated it often enough that the words no longer felt dishonest. They were simply convenient. Most people accepted them without another question, and that suited her. Explaining what she couldn’t fully understand herself always seemed harder than carrying it quietly.
So she smiled when someone smiled at her.
She reached the office on time, replied to emails, attended meetings, and laughed at the right moments. By evening, another day had slipped past looking almost identical to the one before it.
Anyone watching casually would have seen nothing unusual.
Someone paying closer attention might have noticed that she was rarely still.
There was always another task waiting, another errand to run, another call to return. Keeping herself occupied had stopped being about productivity a long time ago. It had become a way of avoiding the empty spaces between one distraction and the next.
The problem was that evenings couldn’t be hurried forever.
When she finally returned to her house and the last notification faded from her phone, silence settled in without asking permission. She would make herself a cup of tea, curl up on the sofa with a book, and promise herself she would read for a while.
An hour later, the tea would be cold.
The book would still be open to the same page.
She would blink, realizing she’d spent most of that hour somewhere else entirely.
More often than not, that somewhere was Chinmaya.
It wasn’t deliberate.
She never sat down intending to think about him.
His memories had an odd way of appearing on their own, slipping into moments when her mind wasn’t occupied by anything else.
Sometimes she remembered something he’d said months ago and found herself smiling before she even knew why. Other times it was a conversation that returned unexpectedly, complete with details she hadn’t thought about since it happened.
Occasionally, what she missed wasn’t a particular memory at all.
It was the ease she had always felt after talking to him.
The realization never stayed for long.
Almost instinctively, she reached for another distraction.
A few more pages.
An unanswered email.
Mindless scrolling through her phone.
Anything that asked less of her than her own thoughts.
More than once, her thumb found its way to their chat.
She would type a message without thinking too much about it.
A question.
A joke.
Sometimes nothing more than, How’s your day been?
She always paused before sending it.
She read the words once.
Then again.
Eventually, she deleted them one letter at a time until the conversation was empty again.
The phone ended up face down beside her.
It wasn’t his response she feared.
If anything unsettled her, it was something much smaller and much harder to explain.
Without noticing when it had happened, Chinmaya had become the first person she wanted to tell about the ordinary things.
A frustrating meeting.
A funny conversation.
A cafĂ© she’d discovered.
A book she’d finished.
The kind of moments that usually seemed too insignificant to mention, yet somehow felt incomplete if she couldn’t share them with him.
She never admitted that to anyone.
Least of all herself.
Instead, she found practical reasons to call him.
Sometimes she wanted his opinion before making a decision she’d already made.
Sometimes she genuinely needed advice.
And sometimes she called for no reason she could have defended if anyone had asked.
The conversations themselves were never extraordinary.
They drifted from work to family, from books they meant to read to places they hoped to visit someday. They wandered without urgency, taking small detours that neither of them seemed to mind.
Nothing remarkable.
Nothing dramatic.
Yet after every call, she lingered for a few extra moments before putting her phone away, as though some part of the conversation hadn’t quite finished.
She never asked herself why every excuse seemed to lead back to the same person.
Perhaps she wasn’t ready to hear whatever answer waited on the other side of that question.
So she slipped her phone into her bag, turned back to whatever the day required, and told herself tomorrow would feel different.
Tomorrow never did.
The weeks passed quietly.
Work filled the weekdays.
Weekends disappeared into grocery shopping, family lunches, unfinished chores, and the countless little responsibilities that somehow occupied entire afternoons.
Life continued with such steady predictability that, now and then, she almost believed she had moved on.
Then one evening, while searching for an old document on her phone, she opened her conversation with Chinmaya by accident.
Her first instinct was to close it.
Instead, she scrolled.
The messages stretched back months.
At first, there was nothing remarkable about them.
No confessions.
No promises.
No conversations that belonged in films.
Just two people talking the way they always had.
A question about work would drift into an argument over books.
A song recommendation would somehow become a story from childhood.
One conversation ended with, We’ll continue this tomorrow, only to resume three days later as though neither of them had noticed the gap.
She smiled.
The expression arrived so naturally that she only became aware of it when the dark screen reflected her face between messages.
She kept scrolling.
Some jokes still made her laugh, even though she couldn’t remember what had made them funny the first time.
Other conversations slowed her down.
They reminded her of opinions she’d forgotten she’d held, dreams she’d stopped mentioning, and versions of herself she hadn’t visited in a long while.
One thought returned again and again.
She had never worried about choosing the right words with him.
With Chinmaya, there had been no rehearsing before pressing send.
No wondering whether she sounded too emotional, too stubborn, or too opinionated.
She could disagree with him, disappear for days, and return as though nothing unusual had happened.
The conversation always found its rhythm again.
She couldn’t remember the last time talking to someone had felt that effortless.
For a while, she simply sat there.
The room hadn’t changed. The lamp still cast the same warm pool of light across the floor. Outside, traffic drifted by in its usual rhythm.
Yet something felt different.
Not because she had uncovered a forgotten memory.
Because she’d stumbled upon a version of herself she hadn’t noticed disappearing.
A few days later, she met one of her closest friends for coffee. The café was busy enough that conversations blended into a comfortable hum. They spoke the way old friends always did—without needing to decide where to begin.
Work.
Family.
People they hadn’t seen in years.
Plans that would probably never make it beyond conversation.
Time slipped past unnoticed.
Then, while absent-mindedly stirring her coffee, her friend asked,”So… whatever happened to that friend you used to talk to all the time?”
Heer looked up.
“What friend?”
“You know… Chinmaya.”
The answer came almost automatically.
“Oh… nothing really. We still talk once in a while.”
“That’s good,” her friend said with an easy smile before moving on to another story.
The moment passed.
At least for her friend.
For Heer, it lingered.
The question stayed with her long after they had left the café.
Driving home, she replayed those few seconds again and again.
It had been such an ordinary question.
So why had she answered before she’d even thought about it?
At a traffic signal, the light turned green.
She didn’t notice.
A sharp honk from the car behind startled her back to the present.
“Sorry,” she murmured under her breath, easing her foot onto the accelerator.
The apology wasn’t really for the driver behind her.
She wasn’t sure who it was for.
The following weeks brought the usual introductions.
New colleagues.
Friends of friends.
People she met over dinners, office events, birthdays, and weekend gatherings.
Some conversations were genuinely enjoyable.
A few even stayed with her after they ended.
But every now and then she caught herself measuring them against something she couldn’t quite name.
It wasn’t Chinmaya she compared them to.
Not really.
It was the ease.
The feeling that she didn’t have to choose her words carefully.
That silence didn’t need filling.
That disagreement wasn’t something to be avoided.
She hadn’t gone looking for that kind of comfort.
She only noticed its absence once it was gone.
The realization settled somewhere she couldn’t ignore.
For months she had wondered whether Chinmaya had mistaken friendship for something more.
Now another question had quietly taken its place.
Why had no one else ever felt this easy to be around?
She didn’t try to answer it.Not yet.
Life resumed its familiar pace.
Nothing looked different from the outside.
She still left home at the same time each morning.
Work filled the weekdays.
Sunday evenings disappeared into laundry, meal planning, and phone calls she always meant to return earlier.
Dinner with family remained a ritual.
If anyone had looked at her life from a distance, they would have found nothing worth questioning.
Sometimes she convinced herself that was proof enough. Maybe she was only holding on to old conversations because they belonged to a happier time.
Maybe memory had polished them into something they had never actually been.
On certain mornings, that explanation seemed perfectly reasonable.
By night, it rarely survived.
Whenever Chinmaya wandered into her thoughts, she found something else to occupy herself.
She volunteered for work that wasn’t urgent.
She accepted invitations she would once have declined.
She switched on the television as soon as she got home, not because she cared what was playing but because an empty room had become harder to sit with.
It worked. Until it didn’t.
One afternoon she found herself waiting outside a meeting room.
With nothing else to do, she unlocked her phone.
Her thumb moved almost on its own.
Before she’d fully realized what she was doing, Chinmaya’s name was already on the screen.
She tapped the call button.
The phone began to ring.
Only then did it occur to her that she hadn’t decided what she wanted to say.
She listened to the ringtone.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then it stopped.
No answer.
She looked at the screen for another second before slipping the phone back into her handbag.
“He must be busy.”
The explanation came naturally.
She accepted it without argument.
Or perhaps she simply wanted to.
The afternoon disappeared into meetings and emails.
Still, every vibration from her phone drew her attention.
A message from work.
A delivery update.
The family group discussing weekend plans.
Every notification made her glance at the screen before quietly putting the phone away again.
By evening she smiled at herself.
She hadn’t realized waiting could be so subtle.
It wasn’t disappointment she felt.
Not exactly.
It was expectation.
There was a difference.
She just wasn’t sure she could explain what it was.
Late that night, her phone lit up.
Chinmaya Calling…
She answered before the second ring.
“Hey… I’m really sorry,” he said. “Work got a little hectic. I saw your call only now. Is everything alright? Sab khairiyat?”
His voice was exactly as she remembered.
Steady.
Unhurried.
Comfortingly familiar.
Without realizing it, she smiled.
“Everything’s fine,” she said. “I just thought I’d call.”
“Good,” he replied. “For a second I thought something had happened.”
She laughed softly.
“No. Nothing like that.”
The conversation unfolded the way it always had.
One subject led naturally into another.
Work.
Family.
A film he had recently watched.
A book she’d started but hadn’t finished.
The conversation wandered without purpose, and somehow that was what made it enjoyable.
Neither of them seemed in a hurry to reach a conclusion.
When they finally said goodbye, Heer remained by the window with the phone still in her hand.
The city below had grown quiet.
She watched a few distant headlights disappear around a corner before slipping the phone into her pocket.
One thought stayed with her.
He had never tried to make her feel guilty for choosing differently.
He had never reminded her of the answer she’d once given him.
Never withdrawn his kindness because things hadn’t gone the way he’d hoped.
He had simply accepted her decision.
And when she reached out, he answered with the same warmth he always had.
She wondered how many people could do that without expecting something in return.
The question followed her long after she switched off the lights.
A few days later, Heer ran into a mutual friend outside the office.
Neither of them had planned to stop, but casual conversations have a way of stretching longer than expected.
They exchanged the usual updates.
People they had lost touch with.
Eventually, as naturally as if he had always been part of the conversation, Chinmaya’s name came up.
“How’s he doing these days?” Heer asked, trying to sound casual.
“Pretty well, I think,” the friend replied. “He’s always busy with something.”
He laughed.
“I honestly don’t know how he manages it. Work keeps him occupied, he’s travelling whenever he gets the chance, and apparently he’s enrolled in another course.”
“That sounds like him,” Heer said.
“It really does.”
They spoke for another few minutes before heading their separate ways.
The conversation itself wasn’t remarkable.
What stayed with her was something else.
Somewhere along the way, she had quietly imagined that her decision might have left him standing where she had left him.
It hadn’t.
Life hadn’t paused for him.
He had kept moving.
Not because he was trying to prove anything.
Not because he wanted anyone to notice.
Simply because life keeps asking things of people, and most of them eventually answer.
For reasons she couldn’t fully explain, she found that comforting.
There was something reassuring about knowing he hadn’t built his life around what might have been.That evening, after dinner, Heer carried her laptop out to the balcony.
The city had settled into one of those quiet nights that never felt completely silent.
A scooter passed somewhere below.
Someone laughed in another building.
A dog barked once and then gave up.
She opened her laptop.
Not because she had work left to finish.
Not because she wanted another distraction.
She simply opened a blank document.
For several minutes she stared at the empty page.
It wasn’t writer’s block.
She wasn’t trying to write anything in particular.She just wasn’t used to putting certain thoughts into words.
Eventually she typed a sentence.
She read it.
Changed one word.
Deleted another.
Then she wrote the next sentence.
After that, the pauses became shorter.
She wrote about the first evening she and Chinmaya had spoken for hours without either of them noticing how late it had become.
About conversations that had quietly settled into the background of her everyday life until they no longer felt unusual.
About how easily she had trusted him without ever deciding to.
None of it had happened all at once.
That was the strange part.
Feelings rarely arrived with dramatic announcements.
Sometimes they accumulated so gradually that by the time you noticed them, they had already become part of your life.
She kept writing.
Eventually the page stopped being about Chinmaya.
It became about herself.
About the explanations she had repeated often enough that she’d stopped questioning them.
Timing.
Distance.
Practicality.
Responsibilities.
For a long time they had sounded solid, almost undeniable.
Tonight, seeing them written down, they looked different.
Not false.
Just… smaller.
As though they belonged to someone who had been trying very hard to make the simplest answer seem like the safest one.
She leaned back in her chair.
The breeze shifted a loose strand of hair across her face.
She tucked it behind her ear and looked at the page again.
One sentence caught her attention.
She hadn’t written it deliberately.
It had appeared somewhere between one paragraph and the next.
I was never afraid of him.
She stared at it for a long time.
Then she understood why it unsettled her.
It wasn’t him she had been protecting herself from.
It had always been the possibility that choosing differently would change everything she already knew about her life.
That fear had worn many disguises.
Logic.
Good timing.
Common sense.
Being realistic.
She had called it different names over the months.
Tonight, none of them felt quite convincing.
She smiled despite herself.
Not because the realization solved anything.
It didn’t.
If anything, it complicated matters.
But there was relief in finally naming something honestly.
The page didn’t offer answers.
It didn’t tell her what she should do next.
It simply reflected back thoughts she had spent months trying not to think.
Sometimes that was enough.
She saved the document.
For a moment the cursor blinked beside the empty space where a title belonged.
She considered naming it.
Instead, she closed the window.
Some things didn’t need titles yet.
She remained on the balcony a little longer.
The air had cooled.
Lights flickered on and off across neighbouring buildings as people finished their evenings.
A child somewhere downstairs protested bedtime with remarkable determination.
A few minutes later, everything grew quiet again.
Life continued around her with the same ordinary rhythm it always had.
Only now she wasn’t trying so hard to drown out her own thoughts.
She let them come.
She let them stay.
They weren’t nearly as frightening as she had imagined.
When she finally went inside, she realized she hadn’t checked her phone in over an hour.
That, more than anything else, surprised her.
She switched off the lights and lay down.
Sleep came without the familiar negotiations.
Without replaying conversations.
Without searching for hidden meanings.
Without rehearsing things she would never say.
The questions were still there.
She hadn’t answered them.
But they no longer felt like something she needed to run from.
For now, that was enough.
She closed her eyes.
And somewhere, without either of them knowing it, life had already begun arranging another chance for their paths to cross.
Stay tuned for … Chapter III.
Cosmic Casanova 