Vineet has built a successful career and a family he treasures. But after a frightening illness forces him to pause, he struggles to name what he wants for himself. An old photograph leads him towards forgotten interests, unfinished wishes and a conversation he never thought he would have.

Part 1

The Wishes He Rediscovered

Chapters 1–4

Chapter 1. An Answer He Didn’t Have

On his first evening home, Vineet listened to his children quarrelling and did not ask them to stop.

The argument concerned a charger. Ananya said she had left it on her desk. Aarav maintained that objects left in common areas were available for common use. Neither was prepared to accept the other’s definition of a bedroom.

Usually, Vineet would have settled the matter without looking away from his screen. Now he sat in the armchair beside the open window, listening until their voices moved down the passage.

Shreya placed a glass of water on the table.

“Don’t encourage them,” she said. “They’ve been practising for your return.”

He smiled. It tired him more than he expected.

Their home looked almost exactly as he had left it. A half-finished model occupied one end of the dining table. A plant needed turning towards the light. His reading glasses lay beside a magazine he had left unfinished before the ambulance came.

He had been away less than three weeks.

At the hospital, there had been a man in the neighbouring bed who asked every evening whether anyone had spoken to his daughter. One morning the bed was empty. Vineet had asked a nurse, and her brief answer had stayed with him through the remainder of his own treatment.

Now a pressure cooker whistled in the kitchen. Somewhere outside, a delivery rider argued about an address.

Vineet closed his eyes.

“Too much noise?” Shreya asked.

“No,” he said quickly. “Leave the window.”

She stood beside him for a moment before sitting down.

He had seen very little of her during those weeks. Most days, their marriage had been reduced to the length of a telephone call. She had sounded brisk, sometimes almost stern, asking questions and reminding him of things the staff had already told him. Only once had her voice broken, and she had ended the call before he could say anything.

Now he noticed the shadows beneath her eyes.

“You haven’t slept,” he said.

“I was waiting for you to come home and criticise the arrangements.”

He reached for her hand. She held it too tightly, then loosened her fingers.

---

Recovery made the house larger.

The distance from the bedroom to the balcony required a pause. A shower needed planning. He resented the chair Shreya placed outside the bathroom until the first morning he needed it.

He had built a company whose software was used in countries he had never visited. Now he felt pleased to carry his own empty cup to the kitchen.

One afternoon, he opened his laptop. Familiar messages appeared: a delayed implementation, a staffing decision, questions about a release. He knew what to do with them. Within minutes, he was typing.

Shreya came in and stopped beside his chair.

“Half an hour,” he said before she spoke.

“You’ve already had forty minutes.”

“I’m only answering a few things.”

She looked at the screen, then at him.

“They managed while you were in hospital.”

“That doesn’t mean they should keep managing.”

Shreya pulled up a chair.

“You couldn’t finish your shower this morning, Vineet.”

His hands stopped over the keyboard.

He closed the laptop, although not gracefully.

That night, he woke convinced that he was late for something. It took him a moment to recognise the bedroom. Shreya turned on the bedside lamp.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing. A dream.”

She waited. He looked at the water glass, the book on her side, the small familiar objects he had once feared he would never see again.

“I kept thinking about all the things I hadn’t done,” he said.

“In hospital?”

He nodded.

“What things?” she asked.

He thought of the delayed release. The expansion he had postponed. A meeting he had missed.

None of those was what he meant.

“I don’t know,” he said, surprised by the answer.

Shreya reached across and switched off the lamp.

“You don’t have to explain it tonight. Tell me when you can.”

---

A week later, Ananya needed a family photograph for a school project. Shreya brought out a carton that had survived two house moves without being unpacked.

Vineet sat beside her while she sorted envelopes and albums. A younger version of his father stood in front of a bank branch. There was his sister in a school uniform. Several photographs had apparently been taken by someone who considered people’s feet unimportant.

“What was this hairstyle?” Shreya asked, holding one up.

“Fashion.”

“Did the others know?”

He took it from her, laughing, and a smaller photograph slipped from behind it.

Four young men stood on a rocky slope. One held a cheap camera’s case, another had tied a shirt around his head. Vineet wore a faded T-shirt and an expression of uncomplicated delight.

The thick hair had thinned since then, and grey now showed at his temples. He had grown used to seeing himself in formal photographs, shoulders squared, face arranged for confidence. In this one, his mouth was open in laughter. He could almost hear it.

Shreya leaned closer.

“Where was that?”

“Outside Pune. College trip.”

“You look pleased with yourself.”

Vineet turned the photograph over. Someone had written a date and a rude description of Sandeep’s navigation.

He smiled.

“We hadn’t realised we were lost yet.”

Chapter 2. The Boy in the Photograph

By eleven that morning, the hillside had stopped resembling a place four engineering students should have entered with six bread rolls and somebody else’s directions.

The grass was dry. Heat rose from the stones. Somewhere below, a goat bell rang with a confidence none of them possessed.

“You said there was a fort,” Vineet said.

Sandeep shaded his eyes and surveyed the slope.

“There is a fort.”

“Where?” asked Rakesh.

“My cousin came here.”

Vineet looked at him. “Does your cousin know we’re following him?”

They found a tree and sat beneath it. Rakesh announced that he would remain there until graduation. Sandeep maintained that the longer path had been Vineet’s suggestion.

It had. That was the inconvenient part.

Vineet passed his remaining water to Rakesh and opened the food.

“Next time, you choose,” he told Sandeep.

“I did choose.”

“Then next time we’ll listen to someone else.”

They returned to the hostel after dark, dusty from a ride in a vegetable tempo and hungry enough to eat the mess dinner without discussing it.

For weeks afterwards, Sandeep could not cross the hostel dining hall without someone asking whether the bathroom required a guide.

Vineet loved those days: the early buses, the places they could afford to reach, the long conversations that made the journey seem shorter. His father, a bank employee, sent a carefully calculated monthly allowance. Vineet saved small amounts for excursions and defended the expenditure as though the finance ministry had questioned it.

On quieter nights, they climbed to the hostel terrace with borrowed binoculars and a star chart from a magazine.

“Tea’s downstairs,” Sandeep called one evening.

“Wait. I’ve found something,” Vineet said, refusing to lower the binoculars.

“You found it yesterday.”

“Yesterday it was in the wrong place.”

They spent another twenty minutes arguing about the chart. The tea was cold when they remembered it. Vineet didn’t mind.

---

Naina met him during preparations for the college festival. She was quick with numbers, impatient with inflated budgets, and unimpressed by his ability to argue for something he had already decided to do.

They became friends. Others noticed that she often found a reason to sit beside him. Vineet noticed too, although he pretended not to understand the teasing.

One evening, after a rehearsal, Naina walked with him towards the canteen. Most of the stalls had closed. Someone was stacking chairs nearby.

“Do you always avoid this subject?” she asked.

“Which subject?” Vineet said.

“That answers my question.”

He smiled uneasily. She stopped beside a table.

“You like talking to me, don’t you?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Then why do you behave as though someone will misunderstand if we have tea?”

He looked at the empty counter.

“There’s someone,” he said eventually.

Naina sat down. “Are you together?”

“No. We were at school together. I’ve never told her myself.”

He sat opposite her and began telling her about the school where he and Mahira had studied together.

---

At twelve, Vineet had known Mahira mainly from two rows behind her in a classroom at Navchetan Vidyalaya.

Afternoon light fell across wooden desks. The ceiling fan rattled whenever anyone increased its speed. Mahira would look up from her notebook when a question interested her, her brows drawing together before she raised her hand.

She had sharp features and a strong, athletic bearing. When she disagreed, she looked straight at the person she was answering. He found her beautiful; increasingly, he wanted to hear what she would say.

Once, a teacher punished the class for a broken window. Mahira pointed out that several pupils had been elsewhere.

“Then tell me who was here,” the teacher said.

“But being here doesn’t mean they broke it, sir,” she replied.

Later, Vineet saw her beside a friend, twisting the corner of a handkerchief. He had assumed courage would look less frightened.

At a school exhibition, she helped his younger sister find the stall she wanted while everyone else hurried towards the prizes. She listened seriously to the child’s plans to become a doctor. He remembered that too.

Their conversations remained brief. A homework question. A borrowed notebook. Something said in a group outside the classroom. He noticed when she was absent before attendance was taken.

Then his father was transferred, and Vineet joined a school in another city. They lost touch. Over the years, he sometimes wondered about her.

By college, he had begun calling that feeling love, although he had never spoken to her about it. Priya, their common school friend, now attended the same college as Mahira. Vineet remained in touch with her. She knew him well enough to scold him freely; with Mahira, she was more cautious.

When he finally asked her to convey his feelings, she fell quiet at the other end of the telephone.

“Vineet, I know her,” Priya said. “She won’t welcome this.”

“Will you ask her?”

“I can tell her. I can’t change her answer.”

“I’m only asking you to tell her.”

Priya sighed. She cared for them both and disliked being placed between them. He waited.

“I’ll speak to her,” she said eventually. “And you’ll listen to whatever she says.”

The answer returned days later. Mahira said she didn’t believe in love. Priya repeated the words carefully. Vineet understood them as a refusal.

There was no letter to reread and no voice whose tone he could examine. He accepted the words, but continued to imagine that time might make a difference.

---

A chair scraped across the canteen floor. Vineet looked up. The man closing the counter was waiting for them to leave.

Across the table, Naina was still holding a folded paper napkin. She had listened without interrupting.

“So you haven’t met her since you changed schools?” Naina asked.

“No,” Vineet replied.

Naina pressed the napkin flat against the table.

“You know I wasn’t asking only about tea.”

He nodded.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“Then don’t pretend not to understand me next time.”

Their friendship became awkward, then recovered some of its ease.

By his final year, Naina no longer asked about Mahira. Vineet still spoke to Priya occasionally. Nothing had changed, but he had begun preparing applications to study abroad.

He asked a trusted family acquaintance to approach Mahira’s parents with a marriage proposal. He had no salary, only plans for further study. Still, he hoped a formal proposal might be understood more readily than a message through a friend.

Before the acquaintance could speak to her parents, he learned that she was already engaged. The proposal never reached them.

He asked whether the news was definite. The man answering was kind enough not to comment on the question.

For several weeks, Vineet’s days lost their shape. One evening, Sandeep found the meal he had brought him still covered on the desk. An application form lay beneath it, stained at one corner.

“You said you’d come downstairs,” Sandeep said.

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“You weren’t hungry at lunch either.”

Vineet snapped at him to stop keeping an account. Sandeep stayed. What frightened Vineet later was how quickly one disappointment had begun to seem like the whole future.

One night, he told Sandeep that he did not want to be alive.

Sandeep stopped attempting to cheer him up. He stayed in the room and, the next morning, helped him make an appointment with the college counsellor. Vineet resisted, went, and returned. Getting better was less dramatic than getting worse: meals with friends, conversations he did not enjoy having, work resumed in small pieces.

Naina checked on him without making herself responsible for his recovery. Months later, when he seemed more settled, she asked whether his answer to her had changed.

“Do you think we could try?” she said. “Now?”

He considered before replying.

“I’m not ready to begin something with you,” Vineet said. “You shouldn’t have to wait for me.”

“Because you’re waiting for her?” Naina asked.

“No. I know there’s nothing to wait for.”

For himself, he had decided that his next commitment would be towards marriage. He did not want to ask Naina to build a relationship around his recovery from another attachment.

Naina nodded. She did not tell him she admired his decision. It hurt her, and she needed distance. He respected it.

By the end of the year, he could think about a future without feeling that he was betraying the past.

Then the admission letter arrived.

Chapter 3. The Life They Built

His mother read the university’s name twice. His father took out a notebook and began calculating the scholarship, the loan, and what remained.

For weeks, the house filled with forms and advice. An uncle recommended carrying enough food to survive an international shortage of spices. His mother stitched his name inside a bag. At the airport, his father reminded him to keep copies of the documents, although Vineet had already made three sets.

He boarded the flight with more excitement than he had felt in months, and enough fear to remain awake through most of it.

America began with a missed bus and a room he shared with two other students. On his first walk to campus, he kept stopping to check the building numbers against the address in his hand. There was coursework, a campus job, and a first winter that required purchases he had never considered. Converting every grocery price into rupees made shopping exhausting.

When he learned to make dal properly, he called home to report it. His mother asked what he had been eating until then.

After graduation, he joined a software company. His first full-time salary brought a pleasure he could still recall precisely. He sent money home, paid an instalment of the loan, and checked the balance twice.

Work interested him. He stayed late to understand a problem. Later, he stayed because people expected him to solve it.

During a visit to India, his parents arranged for him to meet Shreya at a family friend’s home. He sat in the living room while the relatives discussed his flight, the traffic and everything except why they were there.

She arrived slightly late and apologised. Her face was expressive, her eyes lively; she smiled as though she had noticed something amusing but was deciding whether the room was ready for it.

An uncle remarked that an architect would soon begin improving everybody’s house.

“Only if they ask,” Shreya said. “And occasionally if they pay.”

The room laughed. She worked with a small architecture practice, and a site visit had delayed her.

Left to speak on the balcony, he asked whether she would be comfortable moving abroad.

“Possibly,” Shreya said. “Would you be comfortable moving back?”

He looked up.

“Eventually, yes,” Vineet replied.

“Good. Then neither of us has to make a permanent promise in the first ten minutes.”

They spoke about work, parents, and the difficulty of discussing marriage while relatives waited behind a door.

When the tea arrived, Shreya cleared the little table so the woman carrying it could set down the tray. She thanked her by name and waited for her to finish speaking before returning to their conversation.

At their next meeting, Shreya asked what would happen when they disagreed about something important.

“I suppose we’d have to talk about it,” Vineet said.

“And if talking didn’t make me agree with you?”

“I’m fairly reasonable,” Vineet said.

“That wasn’t quite my question.”

His smile faded a little. “No. It wasn’t.”

He considered it.

“Then I couldn’t keep calling it a discussion until you agreed with me.”

This time, Shreya smiled.

They spoke by telephone after he returned to the US. Vineet looked forward to those conversations, including the disagreements. When his parents asked, he said yes because he wanted a life with her. Shreya chose him too.

The familiarity took longer, and was better for it.

Shreya joined him in the US. Finding her first job took longer than she expected. She prepared her portfolio and attended interviews while acquaintances advised her to enjoy the break.

“I’d enjoy being paid too,” she told Vineet.

On evenings when her interviews went badly, he learned to leave two cups on the kitchen counter and wait. Sometimes she talked. Sometimes she stood beside him until the tea went cold.

When she finally received an offer, they celebrated at a restaurant whose bill both secretly recalculated in rupees.

Her first job led to another. Their small apartment filled with drawings, borrowed furniture, and arguments about whose turn it was to buy groceries. At gatherings, Shreya drew quiet guests into the conversation and announced plans before anyone had agreed to join. Vineet sometimes mistook her confidence for certainty. Alone with him after a difficult day, she could worry over a careless remark or ask why he had been so quiet. She slipped her hand into his and waited for an answer.

---

Nearly three years into their marriage, they drove to the coast for a weekend.

After dinner, they sat above the beach with their shoes beside them. A child nearby was trying to persuade his father that the tide could be stopped with a bucket.

Shreya had been describing a childhood scheme to run away from home after being refused a school trip.

“How far did you get?” Vineet asked.

“The gate. Then I realised dinner was nearly ready.”

He laughed. They talked about teachers, embarrassing ambitions, and the people they had been certain they would become.

“And school romances?” Shreya asked eventually.

“There wasn’t a romance,” Vineet said.

She turned towards him.

“That’s a very carefully worded answer.”

He told her about Mahira: the classroom, the message, the engagement news. He told her about Naina too. By then, Shreya knew when to let his silence continue and when to ask another question.

“Did Mahira know how much it meant to you?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. I never spoke to her myself.”

“And you never knew what she felt?”

“No.”

Shreya watched the water.

“She must have mattered to you.”

“She did.”

He looked at his wife.

“With you, I didn’t have to imagine what loving someone might be like,” Vineet said.

Shreya looked at him. “Even when I’m arguing with you?”

“Especially then. You leave very little to the imagination.”

She laughed and leaned against him. For a while, they watched the child carrying his bucket away from the water.

“When I was little, I wanted a house with a swing in the courtyard,” Shreya said. “And a room nobody could tell me to tidy.”

“Ambitious,” Vineet said.

“There was more. I’d travel, draw beautiful houses, and come home whenever I pleased.”

“No husband?”

“The swing was definite. The husband was negotiable.”

Vineet laughed.

“Does our life look anything like you imagined?” he asked.

“Some of it,” Shreya said. “I thought being independent meant never needing anyone. Then I grew up.”

“And now?”

“Now I’d like to be allowed to have a bad day without everyone looking surprised.”

He turned towards her.

“Even you,” she added softly. “Sometimes you start finding solutions before I’ve finished being upset.”

Vineet nodded. “I do.”

She looked towards the houses beyond the beach.

“Three days in an old town by the sea would be nice. Walking around, looking at the houses. No site visit, no measurements. Nobody asking when the drawing will be ready.”

“Only three days?”

“I’m trying to sound reasonable.”

She brushed sand from her ankle and moved her shoes out of the breeze.

“The swing is still pending, by the way.”

“Let’s not rush these important decisions.”

She laughed, and he put his arm around her.

---

Returning to India began as a conversation they kept postponing.

Vineet and Sid, a former colleague, had been discussing a software product. Shreya wanted to work more closely with older buildings and local materials, and both missed being within reach of their parents.

One Sunday, they opened two notebooks and made separate lists of what returning would mean.

His included a company. Hers included a practice. Both included uncertain incomes.

“We could wait another two years,” Vineet said.

“We could,” Shreya replied. “Would anything be certain then?”

They moved back before certainty arrived.

The software company began in a rented Bengaluru office where the lift worked only when nobody was carrying equipment. Shreya’s practice began at their dining table.

One evening, a client postponed a payment that Vineet had counted on for the month’s salaries. The work had been delivered, but the company had little cash in reserve. He sat at the dining table, checking the figures again.

Shreya listened, then showed him the advance she had received for her first independent commission.

“We can use this for now,” she said. “But I’ll need it back before my project bills arrive.”

He looked at her. “I know.”

“Good. Next month, you’ll have to become a successful businessman.”

He laughed, then asked her about the commission. They stayed up looking at her drawings after the calculation was finished.

The company grew around a cloud platform adapted from a tool they had built for one client. Turning down custom work to develop it had once seemed an expensive mistake; renewals and overseas contracts eventually justified the decision. A later funding round valued the company at around US$50 million. Vineet sold a small portion of his shares, giving the family financial security far beyond anything he had known growing up.

Shreya’s practice grew too. There were children, school forms, clients, employees, parents needing help.

They enjoyed their life. They bought a spacious home, travelled comfortably, and could help their parents without calculation. His father still checked bank charges Vineet would not have noticed.

But somewhere among those full years, Vineet stopped asking what he wanted to do with an unclaimed afternoon. He postponed exercise, slept irregularly, and arrived at dinner carrying the next day’s work in his head.

Then the pandemic entered their home.

---

Beside him, Shreya slid another photograph into its envelope. Vineet was still holding the one from the hillside.

“Did you go often?” she asked.

“Whenever we could afford the bus fare.”

“You never told me much about it.”

“I suppose it stopped seeming important.”

He looked again at the delighted young man on the hillside.

The next morning, he asked Shreya for a notebook.

Chapter 4. A Page of His Own

Shreya found the notebook in a cupboard beside an unopened packet of drawing pencils. She moved a roll of drawings from the table beside his armchair and handed him the notebook.

“Will this do?” she asked.

Vineet took it from her. “You haven’t used it?”

“The first page has an estimate for a kitchen renovation. You can begin after that.”

He opened it. There were dimensions, a calculation, and a figure circled twice.

“Was it expensive?” Vineet asked.

“The client thought so,” Shreya replied.

He turned the page. Usually, when he made a list, other people were waiting for it. Now he sat with the pen in his hand before writing:

Things I want to do.

It looked strangely childish. He nearly changed it to Personal Goals, then left it alone.

Beside the notebook lay the photograph from the college trek. Somewhere between that hillside and this armchair, mountains had become places he admired through hotel windows or from an aircraft.

As a boy, he had stared at photographs of Everest, tracing the white ridge with a finger. He wrote:

Go to Everest.

Shreya returned carrying tea and read the page before he could cover it.

“Ambitious morning,” she said.

“I haven’t booked anything.”

“I’m relieved. Do you mean climbing it?”

Vineet looked at the sentence.

“I don’t know. Getting close enough to see it properly. Walking there.”

Shreya glanced at his slippers. “Let’s begin with that.”

She placed his cup within reach and went back to her drawings. He opened his laptop. This time, he did not open his email.

---

The photographs led him from one place to another: a trail edged with prayer flags, tents beneath a wall of snow, a walker so small against a mountain that he first mistook the person for a mark on the screen.

He read about the walk to Everest Base Camp. The summit belonged to a different undertaking altogether. Even the journey to its foot demanded preparation he could barely imagine from his chair.

One photograph had been taken after dark. Above the tents, the sky seemed crowded with stars.

He enlarged it.

On the hostel terrace, they had once argued over a faint patch of light through borrowed binoculars. He could no longer remember what they decided it was. He remembered wanting to look again.

He searched for photographs from Ladakh, then followed links to places he had never considered visiting. For years, travel had begun with a gap between meetings. Now he was looking at a place and wondering how to make room for it.

Below the first entry, he wrote:

See the night sky from somewhere truly dark. Know what I’m looking at.

By the time Shreya called him for lunch, his tea was cold.

“What have you found?” she asked.

“Too much,” Vineet replied.

“You sound pleased about it.”

He was.

---

The list grew over several days. Some things he crossed out. Others returned to him when the notebook was closed.

One afternoon, the hospital called to confirm an appointment. Afterwards, he remained holding the phone.

He remembered a nurse staying beside him during a frightening night. She had checked what needed checking, called someone, and remained until help arrived.

He wrote:

Learn what to do in an emergency. Be useful when someone needs help.

As a boy, he had imagined saving someone in a moment of danger. He thought again of the nurse, remaining beside his bed.

Near the bottom of the page, he added one final entry.

Meet Mahira once. Tell her myself.

There were routes to research for the mountains, dates to consider, strength to rebuild. He did not know where Mahira lived.

For a moment, he considered whether the sentence belonged there. Then he closed the notebook without crossing it out.

---

A few mornings later, Shreya found him comparing trekking itineraries. His walking shoes stood untouched beside the armchair.

“You’ve reached the Himalayas?” she asked.

“Only researching.”

She glanced at the shoes. “Shall we reach the gate first?”

He almost said he was tired. Then he looked at the time. He had been sitting there for nearly an hour.

“All right.”

Outside, sunlight warmed the compound wall. At the gate, he stopped to catch his breath.

“Back?” Shreya asked.

He looked at the closed shop a little farther down the lane.

“To there. Then back.”

She walked beside him without quickening her pace.

At home, he opened the notebook and wrote beneath Everest: Start walking.

His pen hovered over the final entry.

Meet Mahira once. Tell her myself.

For that one, he still had no first step.

---

The next part is coming soon.