# Nine Neither Love Nor Hate He never kept anything in his pockets. This was the first thing Asha noticed about him—that and the way he walked as if the ground beneath him were somehow temporary, as if he might dissolve into the air at any moment. She had known him for three years by then, three years of passing him in corridors, of sitting across from him in meetings, of exchanging pleasantries that meant nothing and everything at once. "You never carry anything," she said one afternoon. They were in the office pantry, and he was making tea in the way he always did—with such deliberate slowness that it seemed like a form of prayer. He turned to her with that peculiar smile of his, the one that didn't quite reach his eyes. "What would I carry?" he asked. She had no answer. He had no wallet that she'd ever seen, no keys, no phone hanging from his pocket like a talisman. He came to the office, did his work with meticulous precision, and left. That was all. "Don't you need things?" she pressed. "Do I look like I need things?" The question hung in the steam rising from his cup. Asha found she couldn't answer this either. Years later—or perhaps it was only months, time had become strange around him—she would wonder if this was the moment she should have walked away. But she didn't. Instead, she began to notice more. The way he never complained, never laughed outright, never seemed to want anything from anyone. He existed like a shadow that had learned to wear a suit and tie. A shadow that filed reports and attended meetings and occasionally bought coffee for colleagues without being asked. "Why do you do that?" she asked once, after he'd brought her a cappuccino she hadn't requested. "Do what?" "Help. Without being asked. Without expecting anything back." He considered this with the same thoughtfulness he applied to everything. "Perhaps," he said, "because it makes no difference whether I do or don't, and since it makes no difference, I might as well." It was the most honest thing she'd heard him say, and it disturbed her more than any confession could have. His name was Rohan. She learned this on her first day at the office, had known it all along, but it felt like a discovery she made only when she began to truly see him. Rohan who brought tea to the pantry without milk for himself. Rohan who helped the cleaning staff carry supplies. Rohan who never spoke of his family, his past, his hopes, his dreams. Rohan who seemed, in every way that mattered, to have never quite arrived at life. "Do you believe in anything?" she asked him once, recklessly, the way you might ask a stranger on a train. "No," he said. Then, after a pause: "And you?" "I believe in love," she said, though even as the words left her mouth, they felt thin, insufficient. "That must be exhausting," he replied, without mockery. Something shifted that day. Perhaps it was the day he stopped being invisible to her, or perhaps it was the day she stopped being visible to herself. She couldn't determine which. She began to engineer meetings with him. She would linger near his desk, find excuses to include him in conversations, volunteer for projects he was assigned to. Her colleagues noticed and smiled knowingly, but Rohan seemed not to notice at all. This, oddly, made her persist. "What did you do today?" she asked him once. "What I always do." "Which is?" "The things that needed doing." It was a kind of cipher, his way of speaking. He never quite answered, yet somehow you felt he had told you everything. She found herself drawn to the opacity of it, the way his words seemed to contain more darkness than light. One evening, after a particularly tedious meeting, she found him sitting alone in the office, the rest of the staff having departed hours ago. The fluorescent lights made everything look unreal, like a photograph of an office rather than an actual office. "Why are you here?" she asked. "Same reason as you, I imagine." "I have nowhere else to be." He looked at her then, really looked at her, and for the first time she felt the full weight of his attention. It was neither warm nor cold. It was indifferent in a way that felt almost like tenderness. "Neither do I," he said. She sat down across from him. They didn't speak. The silence between them was not uncomfortable. It felt, instead, like the only true thing that had ever existed between two people. Not love—no, she was careful not to call it that. Not hate either. It was something else, something for which language had no name. It was the space between two people who had both learned, in their own ways, that wanting was a form of suffering, and that perhaps it was possible to exist alongside someone without wanting anything from them at all. "Do you ever think about leaving?" she asked. "From here?" "From here. From everything." He stood then and walked to the window. The city spread beneath them in a constellation of lights, and she wondered what he saw when he looked at it. Did he see possibility, or merely the endless repetition of human desire? "No," he said finally. "But not because I'm afraid to. Because there's no place better or worse than any other place. Because leaving and staying are the same thing in the end." She understood, in that moment, that she loved him. Not in the way she had imagined love—with passion and urgency and the need to possess. But in a quieter way, the way you might love a stone for its smoothness, a river for its indifference. It was a love that required nothing of him and everything of her. "I think you might be the saddest person I've ever known," she said. "I'm not sad," he replied. "Sadness is for people who expected something different." "And you never did?" "Never." She wanted to ask him how it was possible to live like that, to move through the world as if you were already dead. But she thought she knew the answer. It was the same way she was learning to live—by surrendering each small hope, each tender expectation, until there was nothing left but the bare fact of existing. Until love and hate became indistinguishable, and the space between them was the only place where truth resided. The next day she came to work as usual. She didn't seek him out. She waited. At lunch, he appeared at her desk with two cups of coffee. "For me?" she asked. "For you." "Do you love me?" The question came out before she could stop it. He placed the coffee on her desk and looked at her with eyes that had seen the bottom of everything and found it empty. "No," he said. "But neither do I hate you. And in a world where everything is a choice between love and hate, between wanting and rejecting, perhaps that's the only honest thing two people can offer each other." She picked up her coffee and drank it slowly, letting the heat burn her tongue, letting the bitterness coat her mouth. It wasn't an answer she had wanted. But it was the only answer worth having. Outside, the city continued its relentless motion, filled with millions who loved and hated, who wanted and feared. And here, in this small corner of an office building, two people sat in the space between all those things, neither reaching for each other nor turning away. Neither love nor hate, she thought. Just this. Just the quiet acknowledgment of two people who had both learned that the world could not save them, and that somehow, impossibly, that was enough.