Chapter 1: The Comeback Nobody Asked For

Exactly five years after Arjun and I broke up, my phone started blowing up—everyone from my old tuition group to random Twitter handles was suddenly obsessed with our ancient love story.

The rain had just stopped, leaving that sticky Mumbai humidity everywhere. Somewhere downstairs, a vendor’s bell clanged, and the smell of wet earth mixed with frying vadas drifted up through my window. The memory of Arjun—once so sharp, now faded to the faint ache of an old wound—suddenly flooded every screen in the city, like the time the Bandra creek overflowed and seeped into everyone’s ground-floor flats. My phone wouldn’t stop buzzing; WhatsApp forwards, Twitter DMs, even an old school friend from Indore pinged: “Arrey, you and Arjun trending again? Kaise?”

In the trending video, my twenty-three-year-old self was dressed in a heavy mascot costume, drenched in sweat but still grinning at the camera:

"Hi, Ritu at thirty-three—did you go on a honeymoon with Arjun? Work is so tiring, you must, must get this debt back from Arjun, understand?"

My face, so much younger, glowing even though I looked one step from fainting. That line—half joke, half wish—cracked through my chest. I pressed my palm to my heart, as if I could hold the ache in place. Only someone who’d lived through the struggle could speak like that.

No.

I never got it back.

By thirty-three, Ritu had long been left behind by Arjun.

Aaj kal toh, even my neighbours hardly remembered Arjun’s name. But the internet, it seems, has a longer memory than any old aunty sipping chai on the balcony.