The world had taken on a strange, muffled quality since graduation. Sounds were duller, colors less vibrant. Dakshin moved through the first week of this new, undefined life with the careful precision of a sleepwalker. He was free—free from exams, from lectures, from the constant, low-grade anxiety of university—and the freedom felt vast and empty.
He was in the kitchen, staring into the depths of his tea, when he heard his mother's voice from the living room. It was the tone that caught him—a specific, hushed, sympathetic cadence she reserved for delivering bad news or receiving tragic gossip.
"Yes, I understand," she was saying, her voice low. "No, of course. Thank you for telling me, sister. Yes, I'll... I'll manage it here."
The call ended. The silence that followed was heavier, charged. Dakshin didn't move, his spoon still suspended in the mug. He heard his mother's soft, hesitant footsteps approach the kitchen. He could feel her standing in the doorway, gathering herself.
"Dakshin?" Her voice was a gentle probe in the quiet room.
He finally looked up. Her face was a portrait of maternal anxiety, etched with lines of a worry she could no longer contain.
"That was your aunt," she began, wringing her hands slightly in a nervous gesture. "She... she thought we should hear it from family first. Before it becomes... public."
He said nothing. He just waited, his heart a cold, hard stone in his chest.
"She said... the date is set." Clara's voice dropped to a near-whisper, as if saying it too loudly would make it more real. "For Anaya's wedding. To that boy, Ahaan. It's in two months. At the Grand Victoria."
The words did not land with a sharp, searing pain. They settled. They seeped into the silence of the kitchen, into the worn linoleum floor, into the very air he breathed. A date. A venue. It was no longer a specter of a possibility; it was a scheduled event. A fact.
He looked back into his tea. The liquid was lukewarm now, unappealing. "I see," he said, his voice remarkably flat, even to his own ears.
His mother hovered for a moment, her presence a desperate, wordless offer of comfort he knew he could not accept. When he didn't speak again, she retreated, her footsteps fading down the hall.
Dakshin sat there for a long time. He looked around the familiar kitchen—the chipped tile near the sink, the calendar with its outdated picture, the faint smell of yesterday's spices. This was his world. And now, with the confirmation of a date and a place, the other world—the one where Anaya was building a life, trying on a white dress, smiling for a different future—had never felt more solid, or more permanently closed to him. The chasm between them was no longer just emotional; it was now a matter of official record.