When I was told about the bullets that pierced him last year, my first thought was, “They got you in the heart, where I lived.” From then on, I’ve been trying to find my way back home. I’ve wandered in a daze through familiar haunts: ‘It’s a Saturday. Were you not meant to be here at 7 pm...?’u00a0I have rushed to the train door between stations, befuddled; even boarded the wrong trains, when it’s hit me between the eyes: ‘He won’t be waiting near the station anymore.’ I’ve wanted to run away when I’ve seen people laugh, hold hands and shop with their beloveds. The simplest things, like rustling up some tea, which he so loved, or walking past a motorcycle, stir a deep wound within. There is not a square inch of this city that we haven’t covered on his beloved bike. Yes, he often loved “her”, I suspected, more than he loved me — she had barely to sputter and off he would go, sometimes in the dead of night, to his trusted mechanic in Dharavi. I couldn’t even murmur resistance, for I knew his “Rani” was his life. Before every journey, he would whisper sweet nothings to her, lovingly pat her, and take off with a flourish — it was a language only the two of them understood. And she reciprocated in equal measure, faithfully standing by him when the end came.

Those wereu00a0the days: Shubha and J Dey during a trip to Bhutan