A text from Kohinoor’s father flashes on the mobile screen ‘Happy Diwali, hope you are enjoying in Mumbai with your colleagues. We miss you.’
The pasta is boiling on the stove as she cuts vegetables for fried rice.
From the kitchen window, the lighted mountain sparkles under the moonlight. ‘What a perfect night’ she says as she watches fireworks dancing in the sky, in colours of red, orange, and green interspersed into one, over the dark sky, a rooftop over the mountains.
She gazes at the sky and thinks of how firecrackers brew a love cocktail which she got drunk on, on the night they met. It was her company’s celebration of being awarded the best luxury fashion brand in India.
They formed circles, people talking to people they knew in a lush green garden bejewelled with lights.
A waft of numbers entered her ears. She raised her eyes to follow the scent of numbers. There was a young man with a mop of jet-black hair wearing grey specs over his brown face.
His black eyes sparkled as his mouth crafted sugar-coated words about Euclid's algorithm. Something which Kohinoor studied years ago but remembered clearly.
‘Why have we never met before?’ she asks with a chuckle adjusting the satin pink ribbon tied to her waist.
‘That’s because as an AI scientist, I can work from anywhere. For most of the year, I work from Bir’
‘You can also check my online tutorials if you are interested, but I guess a fashionista like you would prefer staying away’ his dimples created a lovely dent as he smiled.
The glittery night quietened under the moonlight, undressing its glamour slowly after the show was over. The sparkle in their eyes crackled into a burst of energy as they slowly drifted into a discussion about number patterns till the time they were forced to leave.
To quench her thirst, she followed his tutorials diligently. They would often meet for lunch during the time Mr. Z was in the city.
It was Kohinoor’s birthday when she expressed her wish to visit his cottage in the hills. His brown lips with a tint of pink, turned into a wide smile.
That was the last time they met, a year ago. The unanswered messages sent to him made Kohinoor’s mind run a marathon of questions. She heard later that he left for the US to be with his partner.
A stack of books is piled neatly on a table in a tiny room, besides the kitchen in a cottage in Bir, a village in Himachal Pradesh, where Kohinoor has been living for the past few months on the pretext of a fake work assignment.
She and her twin brother Karthik used to spend hours together trying to unfold numerical mysteries. But, after Karthik died in a car crash, Kohinoor barely scored passing marks in her favourite subject and resorted to doing something unrelated to numbers.
After almost a decade, these equations invite her again into their world as they rub balm on her scars.
The moonlight seeps through the window, as she listens to a video being played on her laptop. The voice that rained punches on her heart.
She glances at the invitation letter from New York University for a 2-year program in applied mathematics resting beside her laptop and murmurs ‘Thank you for making me fall in love all over again.’
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