The Rule

The rule was Zoya's idea, which Arjun would later say was the most Zoya thing about the whole story.

It was the second night they found themselves at the same chai stall on Platform 7 at the same impossible hour, and the stall owner, Pappu bhaiya, a round man with a towel over one shoulder and a transistor radio that played only old songs, had looked from one to the other and said, "Aap dono ek saath ho?" You two together?

"No," they both said.

Then they both laughed, because they had said it at exactly the same time, in exactly the same tone of offended dignity, and there is no way to take yourself seriously after that.

Zoya was twenty-eight. She had a husky voice that she had been told all her life was too deep for a girl, until a radio station in Noida discovered it was the perfect voice for midnight. From eleven to two, five nights a week, she hosted a show called Neend Nahi Aati — Can't Sleep — on which insomniacs, heartbroken students, night-shift nurses and truck drivers on the Yamuna Expressway called in to talk to her. She was very good at it. She was the kind of person strangers told their secrets to within four minutes. She lived alone in a one-room flat in Paharganj and she had not been on a second date in two years.

After her show, she could never sleep. So she walked. And the walk always ended at the station, because the station at two in the morning was the only place in Delhi that was as awake as she was.

Arjun was thirty-one, and he drove trains. Not the famous ones — the late-night passenger trains that crawled out to Rewari and Panipat and Moradabad, stopping at stations nobody had heard of, carrying labourers and students and soldiers and people who could not afford to be anywhere at a sensible hour. He had a quiet, careful face and hands that were never quite still, and he drank his chai standing up, as if he might be called away any second. He had been driving the night roster for six years. He did not talk about why.

On that second night, after the laugh, Zoya had turned to him and said, "Okay. Let's make this very clear. I don't want to know your name."

He had raised his eyebrows. "Okay."

"I'm serious. I talk to people all night. I know their names and their ex-girlfriends' names and what their mothers said to them in 2011. I don't want to know anything about anybody for one hour. Can we just — drink chai?"

Arjun had considered this. Then he had nodded slowly, and held out his hand as if they were signing a treaty. "No names," he said. "No jobs. No sad stories."

"No sad stories," she agreed, and shook it.

Pappu bhaiya, watching, had turned up his radio and said nothing, which was how Zoya knew he was the wisest man in Delhi.

That was eight months ago.

In eight months, she had learned that the man with no name took two sugars but pretended to take one, and asked Pappu bhaiya to add the second one when he thought she wasn't looking. That he could name every train on the departure board by its engine sound before it came into view. That he laughed with his whole face, suddenly, like a light switched on in a dark room, and then looked surprised at himself, as if he had forgotten he could. That he always stood so the wind from the tracks hit him first and not her.

In eight months, he had learned that the woman with no name had a voice that made the stray dogs on Platform 7 come and sit at her feet. That she hated rusk but always ate one to be polite to Pappu bhaiya. That she hummed when she was thinking, and that she was very bad at hiding when she was sad, and that on the nights she was sad she talked more, not less, about stupid things — the best samosa in Old Delhi, the correct way to pronounce "croissant", whether pigeons had feelings.

He never asked why she was sad. That was the rule.

She never asked why he had not slept a full night in six years. That was also the rule.

On a Thursday night in late January, the fog came down over Delhi so thick that the station lights turned into fuzzy yellow moons. Every train on the board was delayed. The platforms were full of sleeping families wrapped in shawls, bundles for pillows. Zoya walked out of the fog at 1:58 a.m. and stopped at Pappu bhaiya's stall, and blew on her hands, and waited.

At 2:10, the man with no name had not come.

At 2:30, he had not come.

At 3:00, Pappu bhaiya poured her a third chai she had not asked for and set it down on the counter with more care than usual.

"He always comes," Zoya said. She was surprised by how thin her voice sounded. "Eight months. He's never missed."

"He missed once," said Pappu bhaiya. "Before you started coming. Six years ago." He turned his radio down, which he never did. "The night of the accident at Palwal."

Zoya looked at him.

"No sad stories," she said faintly. "That's the rule."

"Your rule, beti," said Pappu bhaiya gently. "Not mine."

Behind her, on the departure board, the letters clicked and rearranged themselves, and the announcer's tired voice floated out of the fog: The 01:40 passenger to Moradabad is cancelled. We regret the inconvenience.

It was his train. She knew it was his train. She had never asked, and she knew.