Chapter 1: The Coffee Loft

Every morning at seven forty-five, Meera Iyer walked into Kaveri's Coffee Loft on Church Street, Bangalore, carrying a novel and the specific, low-grade anxiety of a woman who had spent the previous night reorganising her bookshelves by colour instead of sleeping. The coffee shop occupied the ground floor of a heritage building — the kind that Bangalore was slowly losing to tech parks and glass towers, the kind with high ceilings and original mosaic floors and a wooden staircase that creaked in a way that suggested stories. Kaveri herself — Kaveri Nair, the owner, a sixty-two-year-old woman who wore cotton saris and silver toe rings and who had opened the shop in 1997 with money she'd saved from a government teaching job — was usually behind the counter, grinding beans with the focus of a surgeon.

But Meera did not come for Kaveri. Meera came for Arjun.

Arjun Hegde. The barista. Twenty-seven years old. Tall — the specific, lanky tall of a man who had grown too fast in adolescence and whose body had never quite caught up with itself. Dark hair that fell across his forehead in a way that he clearly did not arrange but that Meera suspected he was aware of. Hands that moved through the coffee-making process with the unhurried precision of someone who believed that rushing a pour-over was a moral failing.

He was making her drink before she reached the counter. He always did. A filter kaapi with a twist — not the traditional steel tumbler version, though he could make that too. This was Arjun's invention: South Indian filter coffee beans, hand-ground, brewed through a ceramic pour-over, served with a centimetre of frothed milk and a dusting of cardamom. He called it the Mysore Morning. It was, objectively, the best coffee Meera had ever tasted. It was also the reason she had restructured her entire morning routine around a seven-forty-five arrival at a coffee shop that was fifteen minutes out of her way.

"Same book?" Arjun asked, setting the cup on the counter.

"Different book. Same genre."

He glanced at the cover. A painted couple in a clinch, the woman's dupatta billowing dramatically, the title in embossed gold: Monsoon Hearts.

"Is it good?"

"It's terrible. The hero calls the heroine 'my jasmine' on page three. Unironically."

"Maybe jasmine is a compliment where he's from."

"He's from Pune. In Pune, jasmine is jasmine. It grows on compound walls and falls into the neighbour's yard and causes property disputes."

Arjun laughed. The laugh was — and Meera had catalogued this with the thoroughness of a woman who worked in data analytics — a full-body event. Not just sound. Movement. The slight tip of the head. The way his eyes crinkled at the corners. The way one hand came up to push the hair back, not because it was in his eyes but because the laugh required the gesture the way a song required a specific note.

She was staring. She was always staring. Arjun either did not notice or was kind enough to pretend he did not notice, which amounted to the same thing when you were a twenty-six-year-old data analyst who had been coming to the same coffee shop every morning for four months and who had not once managed to say anything beyond coffee orders and book reviews.

"Table three?" Arjun asked.

"Table three."

Table three was by the window. The window overlooked Church Street — the morning traffic, the flower sellers setting up outside Shivaji Nagar market, the autorickshaws honking at a frequency that Bangalore had developed as a municipal characteristic. Table three had good light. Table three had a view of the counter. Table three was where Meera sat every morning and pretended to read terrible romance novels while actually watching a barista make coffee with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb.

She sat. She opened Monsoon Hearts. She did not read.

Outside, October was doing what October did in Bangalore: being perfect. Not the dramatic perfect of a hill station — not Ooty mist or Munnar green. The quiet perfect of a city that had figured out the ideal temperature and committed to it. Twenty-four degrees. A breeze that carried the smell of coffee from the shop and jasmine from the flower sellers and petrol from the autorickshaws, and the combination was Bangalore in a single breath.

Meera drank her Mysore Morning. She watched Arjun make a masala chai for the next customer — unnecessary, in her opinion, ordering chai in a coffee shop was like ordering biryani at a pizza place — and she thought about the fact that she had been in love with a barista for four months and had done absolutely nothing about it because doing something about it would require the kind of courage that existed in romance novels and not in data analysts from Jayanagar.

Her phone buzzed. Priya. Her roommate. The message: Did you talk to him today?

Meera typed: I told him about jasmine property disputes in Pune.

Priya: That is not flirting. That is real estate commentary.

Meera: In my defence, the conversation called for it.

Priya: No conversation has ever called for real estate commentary as a flirting strategy. Talk to him properly or I'm coming there myself.

Meera put the phone down. She looked at Arjun. Arjun was wiping the counter with the meditative focus of a man who had nowhere else to be and nothing else to worry about. The opposite of Meera, who had everywhere to be and everything to worry about and who compensated by colour-coding her bookshelves and arriving at coffee shops at exactly seven forty-five.

Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow I'll say something.

She thought this every day. She had been thinking it for four months.

The Mysore Morning was perfect. It was always perfect.