We grow up believing that tragedy belongs to cinema screens and television serials, neatly packaged with background music and closing credits. Real life, we assume, will be gentler. Yet life, too, knows how to dramatize its moments—quietly, intimately, without warning.
My mind was weaving scenes of its own. I felt happy and confused at once, as if my heart was standing at a crossroads, unsure of which direction to choose. That fleeting happiness, however, began to soften into disappointment, then into a familiar ache of frustration. I wish I weren’t here, I thought. But this was life, and life follows its own script—one already written. Still, I wondered where the chapter called happiness had gone missing. Why did joy arrive only as a brief whisper, born of my thoughts rather than reality, only to be followed by long passages of longing and quiet sorrow?
The person standing before me was not Sanvi.
It was Saira Majeed.
A colleague from another federal department—someone I had never truly seen until this moment. Her presence gently pulled me back from my thoughts.
“I suppose you were waiting for someone else?” she asked, her voice soft, almost teasing.
Yes, my heart replied. Always.
“No,” I said instead, forcing a faint smile. “That’s not the case.”
She laughed—a warm, unguarded sound. “I never knew the chit was from you.”
Before I could respond, she continued, “You didn’t notice me at the ghazal night. Not at the Golf Club, not even at Nadia’s Restaurant. But I noticed you.” She paused, her gaze steady. “I always did.”
Her words unsettled me, not with fear, but with tenderness. “I felt you today,” she added quietly. “During the tea break, in the ballroom. There was something… warm.”
I stayed silent, unsure of how to respond. My thoughts drifted to Ghalib, rising uninvited from the depths of memory:
Jannat mein sattar hooron ka tasavvur laakh sahi, Ghalib, Hum aik shakhs ke sehar se niklein to wahan tak pohnchein.
Yet even poetry failed me. My heart was still tethered to Sanvi, even as another presence stood before me, real and breathing.
Then I felt it—a warmth that was no longer imagined.
Saira gently took my hands into hers. Her touch was careful, almost reverent, as if she feared I might disappear. She stepped closer, close enough for me to sense her breath, close enough for silence to speak.