Subhakeerthana

I was on a girivalam, nearing the end of a long 15-kilometre walk. It was 1.10 am, and the road was almost deserted—the kind of silence that makes each footstep feel impossibly loud. Out of that stillness, a woman appeared beside me and started talking. She asked if I wasn’t afraid to be walking alone at this hour. I said no. And so, we walked together. She told me she was 42. Conversation flowed easily, as if we had known each other far longer than the few minutes we had been walking. She spoke of her daughter, praying for her future, and of her husband, who was battling cancer yet surviving, inch by inch, against the odds. We spoke of ordinary things—nothing dramatic, nothing extraordinary—but in that shared midnight space, a strange closeness formed. Two strangers, opening up without expectation, without pretence, with no reason to ever meet again. She asked why I hadn’t “brought my family.” I told her I was unmarried. “Even an average-looking woman like me found someone,” she jokin...