The immediate consequence of Monday morning was that the medieval spice duties became, once again, the most pressing crisis in Shaan's life.

He spent the better part of the afternoon staring at a sixteenth-century Portuguese ledger, trying to calculate the exact weight of a black pepper shipment that had been lost off the coast of Goa in 1584.

It was clean work, really. The dead do not leave their shirts on your sofa, nor do they run down your stairwell at five in the morning after crushing the oxygen out of your lungs.

But by Thursday, things had... changed.

The first text arrived during the post-lunch slump when the Delhi heat makes the brain feel like it has been left out in the sun to dry. It came from the same unsaved ten digits that Shaan had deliberately refused to assign a name to.

Reached campus super late. The professor didn't say anything about the lab margin though 🤔

Shaan looked at the screen, his thumb hovering over the glass. He let the notification sit there until the screen timed out and went black. He didn't reply. He didn't even open the chat. He just slid the phone under a stack of library receipts and went back to his Portuguese sailors.

If Krish wanted to send updates to a void, Shaan was perfectly content to act as the vacuum.

Two days later, another one dropped.

The mess keeps serving paneer that tastes like nothing.

Shaan read it through the lock screen while waiting for his kettle to boil and thought, I think paneer always tastes like nothing, to himself. He left it on seen.

A pattern began to emerge over the next two weeks, a slow rhythm of mundane data that Krish seemed determined to dump into Shaa's general perimeter. There were no more apologies or any references to the Hauz Khas club, or the forty-degree market queue, or the tight, suffocating weight of the doorway goodbye.

It was an ongoing log of minor 'inconveniences' instead: a broken hostel geyser, a delayed library book, a stray dog that had taken up residence outside the fluid mechanics lab...

It was textbook Krish: forever lacking the vocabulary to ask are we okay?, and opting to report on the weather in Kanpur.

By the third week, Shaan was tired of looking at the unsaved string of numbers. It looked untidy on his interface.

The 'breakthrough' happened over a dispute regarding an old TV show they had watched when they were teens.

The guy from that detective show died in season four, right??? The one with the dog?

Shaan stared at the text with his thumb twitching. It was a factual error so offensive to his memory of their shared school nights that his defense mechanisms simply buckled under the weight of his irritation.

he died in s5, he texted back. in an explosion. you sat on my bed and left crumbs of those gross chocolate biscuits all over my sheets. how do you manage to pass engineering exams with a memory like this?

The response was instantaneous, the typing bubbles appearing before Shaan could even lock his screen.

Ohhhhh, right. And only evil people hate bourbons, BTW.

Shaan let out a sharp breath through his nose that was dangerously close to a chuckle. He swiped back to his contact list, tapped the edit button on the unsaved number, and typed Krish into the first-name box.

The shift from total silence to dull bullshit was subtle.

They did not talk about the fourteen months of silence. They talked about the fact that the Kanpur monkeys had learned how to open the hostel balcony doors. They talked about the absolute absurdity of Shaan's freelance clients who wanted three-thousand-word research papers by tomorrow morning.

Shaan kept his replies short and blunt. In his head, he was just keeping a casual, low-effort line open with someone he used to know. That was the story he stuck to, anyway.

"Holy shit, you're doing it again," Tanvi says.

They are sitting on the floor of Shaan's living room on a Saturday evening, surrounded by three empty cardboard boxes of takeout and a half-empty bottle of cheap gin that was rapidly losing its chill. The ceiling fan is doing its usual clack-clack-clack routine above them, barely doing anything to chop the humid air around them.

Shaan doesn't look up from his screen. "Doing what?"

"The corners of your lips are twitching, loser," Tanvi says , leaning her head back against the edge of the sofa. She points a greasy french fry at his face. "Who are you texting?"

"A client," Shaan says smoothly, his thumb scrolling through a paragraph about a broken water cooler in the Kanpur civil block.

"Nah-uh, no client has ever made you make that face," Tanvi counter-attacks, reaching over to poke his knee with the fry. "Let me see."

"Dude, gross, get away from me," Shaan grumbles, sliding the phone into his pocket with a defensive motion that's entirely too fast to look natural. "It's just logistical stuff."

"Logistical stuff." Tanvi squints at him. "You're such a terrible liar." She pops the fry into her mouth and leans back. "Look, all I'm saying is, if you're going to let him back in, don't do that thing where you pretend you don't care until you lose your mind. It's annoying to watch."

Shaan takes a sip of the warm gin, letting the burn cut off the conversation.

"Piss off, okay? I'm not losing my mind," he says, setting the cup down. "It's literally just texts."

Tanvi, of course, does not drop it. She sits up, crossing her legs on the floor and pulling the half-empty bottle of gin closer to her. "Okay, look," she says, her tone losing the teasing edge. "Be real with me for like, one second. Yes or no question, okay?" She watches him closely. "Did you ever like him?"

Shaan tips his head back and stares at the ceiling for a solid five seconds. Then he reaches out, grabs the plastic cup, and carefully pours more gin into it until the liquid is almost sloshing over the brim.

"Shaan, this isn't truth or drink!" Tanvi says, rolling her eyes but not reaching out to stop him. She chuckles when he continues to exaggeratedly drink from his cup. "You can't just chug your way out of a question, you drama queen."

"I'm thirsty," he mutters.

It was a stupid question, mostly because the answer was too heavy to put into words over lukewarm takeout boxes.

He had spent years—long before the fourteen months of silence, long before Krish packed his bags for Kanpur—pretending that the tight, protective feeling in his chest when Krish was around was just old habit. It was easier to call it an old habit. It was easier to look at Krish's big, uncoordinated frame and think of him as a permanent fixture, like a sibling or an annoying neighbor you couldn't get rid of.

But that was the real reason the ghosting had ruined him so completely. It's not any easier when a friend stops texting, but it is especially awful when it's the person you spent a whole summer secretly watching from across a dark room while pretending to listen to a music track.

He has never been able to stay fully angry at Krish because a part of him always felt like he was the one carrying a secret he shouldn't have had in the first place.

"Doesn't matter," he says eventually, taking another sip of his gin. "He's in Kanpur, anyway. He's doing his thing."

"That's not an answer either," Tanvi singsongs, jutting a foot out and poking Shaan's knee with her toe.

"It's the only one you're getting," Shaan says, batting her foot away with his free hand.

"Coward. I said it was a yes or no question. I know your answer from your reaction though." She takes a small sip, looking at him over the plastic rim with that annoying expression that means she was actually paying attention. "I'm serious, Shaan. If he's still the same guy who freaks out every time someone looks too hard at the two of you, I mean..."

Shaan glares down at the ice melting into his gin, the cubes shrinking into tiny, uneven chips. He doesn't want to recount the absolute pathetic state of his bedroom last winter.

"He's just texting me about monkeys, Tanvi. Like I said... it doesn't mean anything."

"For now," she says, setting her cup down with a sharp clack against the floor tiles. "Just keep your guard up." She points at him with her pinkie. "I don't have the energy to sit through another six months of you listening to depressing indie music and pretending your internet connection is down."

"I don't listen to depressing indie music," Shaan mutters, though they both knew his Spotify wrapped from last year was a complete disaster.

In his pocket, the phone buzzes again.

Tanvi rolls her eyes, stretching her arms over her head with a loud groan that signals she is officially too drunk to care about his emotional life anymore.