They did not kiss that night, which Zoya's best friend Tanvi, when she heard the story, declared to be a criminal waste of fog.
"It was a memorial, Tanvi."
"It was a memorial in the fog at dawn with a train driver who listens to your show every night and cried in front of you. Do you know how many women in Delhi would kill for that?"
"It wasn't like that."
"It is exactly like that," said Tanvi, "and you know it, which is why you're blushing into your Maggi."
Zoya was blushing into her Maggi. She had been blushing, on and off, for four days.
Nothing had happened since, in the sense that Tanvi meant. Every night at 2 a.m., she walked to Platform 7, and every night he was there. They drank chai. Pappu bhaiya played his radio. They talked — more than before, and differently. He told her about the old driver, Chacha, who used to sing Mukesh songs in the cab and bring him parathas his wife made. She told him about her father, who had left when she was eleven, and how she had started talking to the radio at night because it was the only voice in the house that did not shout. They broke all the rules they had made, one by one, carefully, like two people taking down a wall they had built together, brick by brick, checking each time that the other was all right.
But he never walked her home. And she never asked him to. And at four o'clock, every night, he still went to his train, and she still went to her flat, and she lay awake until the sun came up and told herself this was fine.
It was Pappu bhaiya, again, who changed things.
On the Monday night, Zoya arrived at 1:58 and found the stall shuttered. A handwritten cardboard sign was taped to the metal: CLOSED TONIGHT. GONE TO MY DAUGHTER'S WEDDING IN BAREILLY. SORRY. — PAPPU. And underneath, in a different pen, in smaller, much more crooked letters: Zoya beti — he is on Platform 16. Go.
Platform 16 was at the far end of the station, where the long-distance trains left. At 2 a.m., it was nearly empty. Under the yellow lights stood one train, its engine humming, its doors closed, its departure board glowing: NEW DELHI TO KALKA — SHATABDI EXPRESS — 06:00.
Arjun was standing at the foot of the engine, in a clean uniform she had never seen before, holding two paper cups.
"Pappu bhaiya's cousin runs the stall on this platform," he said, handing her one. His hands were shaking slightly. "It is not as good. Don't tell him I said so."
"Why are you on Platform 16?"
He looked up at the engine. It was new and blue and gleaming, a long way from the grimy passenger trains that crawled to Moradabad.
"I asked for a transfer," he said. "Day roster. The Kalka Shatabdi. Delhi to the mountains and back. Six a.m. start." He took a deep breath. "I haven't driven in daylight in six years. I didn't think I could. I told myself somebody had to drive the night trains." He looked at her. "But I think I was just scared of the day. Of having — a normal life. Where things can happen that you can't see coming."
Zoya didn't say anything. She couldn't.
"The fog was my fault, in my head," Arjun said. "For six years. Chacha threw himself on me and I thought — I have to earn that. I have to be awake every night so it means something. Then a woman on the radio kept telling truck drivers and nurses and heartbroken engineering students that they were allowed to stop. That they were allowed to rest. Every night. For seven months." He smiled, a little helplessly. "I think I finally heard it."
"Arjun—"
"My first day run is on Friday." He held out something: a printed ticket. Chair car, window seat, New Delhi to Kalka Shatabdi, 06:00. "I don't know what you're doing on Friday morning. I know you don't sleep either. But I thought — if you wanted to see the mountains. With somebody who'll be very nervous for the first hour and then probably okay." His ears had gone red. "The fog should be gone by then."
Zoya looked at the ticket. Then at him. Then at the long blue train humming under the yellow lights, waiting for morning.
She thought about her one-room flat and her microphone and three years of telling strangers they deserved good things. She thought about the rule, and how afraid she had been of anybody knowing anything about her. She thought about her father's voice shouting, and the radio's voice not shouting, and how long she had been choosing the radio.
"I have one condition," she said.
"Anything."
"You have to let me do the announcement." She took the ticket. "On the show. Thursday night, last segment. I'm going to tell a million strangers who can't sleep that I'm going to the mountains with a train driver who drinks two sugars and pretends it's one."
Arjun laughed — the light switch, full and sudden and bright — and in the empty station at two in the morning, it echoed off the high roof like something coming home.
But on Thursday night, twenty minutes before the end of her show, Zoya's studio phone lit up with a caller whose number she knew by heart, because she had seen it on her mother's old phone a hundred times when she was a child and had never, ever called it back.
"Zoya," said her father's voice, on air, in front of a million strangers. "Please don't hang up. I can't sleep either."
(Does she hang up? Does she make the train on Friday morning? Every ending is yours to write — continue Zoya and Arjun's story, or tell it from Pappu bhaiya's stall.)
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