twenty-three The Next Station Is … #2
I knew in my bones that she wasn’t lying.
It’d be so much easier if she was … if she’d done all this to me out of malice.
At least then I’d know where to place all this anger.
I wiped the tears that had begun to roll down my cheeks with the back of my sleeve.
‘I’m not ready to forgive you yet,’ I said, feeling drained. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be.’
‘I’ll give you space,’ she whispered. ‘And time. Whatever you need.’
I didn’t know if either would heal the wound she’d inflicted, but as I walked back inside, I could only hope that someday, it wouldn’t sting quite as much.
The days leading up to the launch blurred into a fever dream of deadlines and caffeine.
Even though the agency was handling all the design creatives so I could focus on the bigger picture, I was drowning in work.
Every hour of every day was a relay race between the editors, the design team, sales and me.
I ate most of my meals at my workstation and stayed glued to my email well into the night.
But even in the middle of the madness, my mind kept circling back to Neil.
I’d caught myself staring at my phone and refreshing our chat more times than I’d like to admit.
I’d called him four times, texted twice and left a voice note that was so manic I was sure he was going to respond, if only to tell me to leave him the hell alone.
But no, there was no reply. God, he must really hate me, I kept thinking.
And why wouldn’t he? Now that I knew the truth, the fact that I’d snapped at him, pushed him away, blocked him … it all felt unforgivably unfair.
By the time launch day rolled around, I had given up all hope that I’d ever hear back from him.
As I uploaded the final cut onto the website, the credits rolled at the bottom of the screen.
Conceptualized by Kavya Mehra and Neil Desai.
Seeing our names together like that made me wince.
Everyone around me had been showering me with praise all morning.
I knew this launch was going to change things for me, even though Swati from HR had informed me that my move into my new role would be subject to a formal compliance review.
But what about Neil? He’d been shoved out halfway and made to end his internship early, while I stood here soaking in the spotlight we were supposed to share.
Varun had mentioned in passing that he never even came to collect his internship certificate.
What had he gained from any of this, except for heartache and humiliation?
And then it hit me. The recommendation letter. The only thing he’d wanted in return for everything he’d poured into this project. Lost as I had been in my own mess, I hadn’t even paused to think about it. The realization made me feel small and selfish. If nothing else, I owed him that.
But once I sat down in front of my system to write it, a very real problem presented itself.
Where was I supposed to send it? His Jharokha email was already deactivated and he clearly wasn’t reading my messages.
I didn’t have his personal email ID and showing up at his house with a printout felt awfully stalkerish.
That’s when the obvious but ridiculous thought crossed my mind. I could send it directly to his father.
It was borderline psychotic, sure, but the letter was meant for him anyway.
Neil had wanted his father to see that he hadn’t wasted his internship.
He’d asked me for this letter to prove to his dad that he was capable and that his startup idea was worth putting money behind.
So, if there was any way that a recommendation letter from me would help him with his dream, I was going to suck it up and draft the hell out of it.
I opened a new tab and got to work. Jatin Desai was easy enough to find—he was a well-known businessman and an early stage venture capitalist. I found two email IDs on his website, one for business enquiries and the other for media, and decided to send the letter to both, just to be safe.
Urgent: A note about your son & his time at Jharokha
K 11/07/25 10:30am
to Jatin Desai, Team Jatin Desai
Dear Mr. Desai,
I realize this email is unusual, and I apologize in advance for the unexpected intrusion. You don’t know me, but I’m writing because I believe it’s important that you hear this from someone who worked closely with your son.
My name is Kavya Mehra, and Neil was assigned to work under me during his internship at Jharokha.
When I first met him, I’ll be honest, I assumed he was a privileged, spoiled brat.
I didn’t expect him to pull his own weight, let alone shoulder that of this year’s biggest campaign launch.
I’ll be the first to admit that I was terribly wrong.
Instead of wasting his time like most interns do, he stepped up and helped me conceptualize the winning idea for a pitch-off that the founder of our company had held.
His instinct for fashion is brilliant. If it wasn’t for him, I would’ve never been able to come up with such an insightful idea for our new fashion vertical.
He was indispensable to the entire project and I can’t praise him enough for his many contributions.
I’m sharing the link of the final ad film here, if you’d like to see the magic he helped create.
I won’t pretend his time at Jharokha was without any missteps—no learning experience worth its salt ever is. But what I deeply admired about Neil is how he never shied away from taking accountability for his faults. His integrity is a large part of why I believe he will go far.
You should also know that Neil spoke often about his dream of starting his own streetwear label.
I believe he has the passion, the marketing chops and, more importantly, the discipline to turn it into a huge success.
I don’t say this lightly—in my career at Jharokha, I’ve seen many interns come and go.
Neil is one of the rare few I would bet on.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Yours sincerely,
Kavya
Sr. Graphic Designer
Jharokha
Even though I had no way of knowing if Neil’s father would even read the email, the act of sending it helped loosen the knot in my stomach a tiny bit.
Now all you need to do is survive this launch day, a voice in my head instructed.
Thankfully, the day moved fast—too fast. Meetings turned into presentations and presentations turned into congratulations.
The campaign went live to numbers that we could’ve never imagined.
In fact, there was so much engagement that the website temporarily crashed.
When I left the office in the evening, despite everything that had happened, I was giddy with joy.
I rode the high as I headed to the station to catch my usual train home, slipping back into the rhythm of Bombay evenings.
I was on the platform, waiting for the Borivali Fast when my phone began to ring in the pocket of my cotton dress.
I almost dropped it when I saw who was calling. Neil.
I pressed it to my ear just as the train screeched into the platform and a wave of people rushed forward to board. ‘Neil, hello?’
‘Kavya, where are you?’ His voice sounded urgent.
‘Uh,’ I said as a woman nudged me from behind. ‘Lower Parel station?’
I could hear him breathing hard on the other end of the line. Was he running? ‘Which compartment?’
‘Move your legs,’ someone barked at me. Hands pushed me along, even as I resisted and tried to turn and look back.
He was here? At the station? The crowd folded around me like a tide, carrying me with it.
‘Ladies first class,’ I barely managed to say before I was swept up into the train by the swarm of women struggling to board behind me.
‘I’m coming,’ he breathed into the phone just as I saw his head bobbing up on the platform.
Despite my best attempts to walk back towards the entrance of the compartment, I was carried deeper and deeper inside. ‘I can’t get off,’ I said, panic rising into my voice.
‘Then I’ll come to you,’ he said just as the train lurched forward. Shit. He was still on the platform.
But then, through the bars of the train window, I saw him running—no, sprinting—along with the train, way faster than Kajol did in DDLJ, might I add.
I watched helplessly as he dodged commuters on the platform and got closer and closer to me.
And then in one impossibly smooth move, he grabbed the door handles and hopped onto the footboard of the ladies first-class compartment.
A chorus of aunties let out gasps of horror.
‘Neil!’ I yelled into the phone. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ he panted. I could hear a woman screaming at him to get off, and another one reasoning that the train had already left the station so they’d have to wait until the next stop to chuck him out.
I craned my neck, trying to find him through the sea of people. ‘Why are you here? I thought you were avoiding me,’ I said, trying and failing to get closer to him. ‘I called so many times …’
‘I know,’ he said, still somewhere at the far end, his eyes scanning the crowd until they finally landed on me. ‘I wasn’t avoiding you. I was at this silent Vipassana thing with my mom all week. No phones allowed. No talking. It was hell. I couldn’t even complain about it, that’s how rough it was.’
Something in my chest shifted as my heart sprang back to life.
He hadn’t been ignoring me. He hadn’t disappeared.
He’d just been offline. And now he was here, in front of me.
Slowly, as the women realized what was happening, they started parting to let him through.
He walked towards me slowly, still holding the phone to his ear.
‘The first thing I saw when I got out this afternoon was an email from my dad … that you had sent.’