Monsoon, Early

The monsoon came three weeks early that year and nobody was ready for it. It arrived in the middle of the afternoon, a wall of dark cloud that swallowed the minarets of Badshahi one by one, and then the rain, all at once and without apology.

Zoya was halfway home from the tuition centre when it began. By the time she reached Delhi Gate the gutters had become rivers and the rickshaws were floating more than driving, their drivers shouting cheerful insults at one another through the downpour.

She ducked under the awning of the bindery without thinking. It was only when the door opened behind her that she realised where she was standing.

“You’ll catch a cold,” Armaan said. He was holding a towel, as if he had been waiting with it.

“I never catch colds.”

“Everyone catches colds.” He held out the towel. “My father’s at the mosque. Come inside until it stops. I’ll leave the door open,” he added quickly, “so the whole lane can see how respectable we’re being.”

The shop smelled of paper and paste and old leather. Books lay open on every surface, their spines exposed like the undersides of animals, and on the workbench a stack of pages waited under a heavy iron press.

She dried her hair and pretended not to look at anything, and he pretended not to watch her pretending, and outside the rain went on and on as though it had been saving itself for exactly this afternoon.

“You wrote that you like maps,” he said at last.

“I said I like old maps. The ones that are wrong.”

He smiled, went to a drawer beneath the counter and took out a folded sheet, brown at the edges. It was a map of the walled city from before Partition, every street named in a hand that no longer existed. Their two houses were on it. So was the lane between them, and the old well, and a small courtyard that had been gone for sixty years.

“It’s wrong,” he said. “That’s why I kept it.”