Book Excerpt: Eighteen Inches Apart by Sonia Bahl

An exclusive excerpt from Eighteen Inches Apart by Sonia Bahl (Fingerprints! Publishing, 2026)

Twelve Years Ago

Homeward Bound

There’s a plaque at the Widnes railway station in England that states Paul Simon wrote the lyrics of “Homeward Bound” while waiting there for a delayed train.

She read the plaque, looked at the snow piling up on the tracks and realized it would be hours before she’d be on a train that was bound for anywhere. The man behind the ticket counter was of no help, and his body language clearly suggested he’d rather be in bed sipping hot chocolate. “Snow delay. Can’t say when,” he’d said, when she inquired what time the train for London would arrive.

Her favorite professor, giving out that week’s assignment, had tossed them a one-word brief: Forgotten. As they were leaving class, he reminded them he would grade their photo essays on unique interpretations, not gimmicks. She had decided to take her seven photographs across seven small, unbusy railway stations. But now, she was beginning to question her own decision of venturing to such an obscure one in the middle of a particularly snowy January. That’s what you get for being a ridiculously eager college fresher, she reprimanded herself.

To be fair, when she arrived two hours earlier, she’d loved what she saw. A single platform, a small red-brick building with twin A-roofs and a forgotten beauty: a carved, weather-worn, disused drinking fountain. But when you’re stranded, what once looked artsy just feels desolate.

The light was already fading, and she remembered reading that the station wasn’t staffed after 2.25 p.m. It was 3.58 p.m. She was, quite literally, the only person on the platform . . . no, in the entire station!

Fifteen minutes later, she saw him. He was sitting on one of the two benches under a ledge, reading a book. Having run out of photographs to take, she walked across and settled on the only other bench next to his. He looked up, nodded politely and was about to go back to reading when he said, “No indoor waiting area, no staff, no hot beverages. It’s not a station, it’s an endurance test.”

“Turning into an ice sculpture is not how I imagined my final moments to be,” she replied.

He told her he was waiting for the train to Cambridge, and she told him she was waiting for the one to London.

“Awkward and clunky, small talk always reminds me of two people trying to dance with a balloon between them. Please keep reading,” she said with blunt candor.

He smiled with the eyes of a prematurely enlightened monk, then went back to his book.

Until a sudden lash of ice-cold wind swept through them, sharp enough to make him look up—and, with irony, offer exactly the small talk she’d pardoned him from.

“I can feel the frostbite setting in.” He tucked his book and his hands into his coat pockets. “The only way to save yourself from small talk is to be brutally honest,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, looking at her. “So, where would you most like to be right now?”

“With the person I love, but he’s in another country.”

“Long distance? Always the worst,” he said.

“And you? Where would you rather be?”

“With someone I can’t be with anymore.”

“Long distance and heartbreak, even worse.”

“Long distance is somewhat bearable when there’s the possibility of seeing the person again.”

“And you won’t?”

He paused briefly. “Science fiction gives me hope.”

“So, yours is a love story across time and space?” she asked.

“Well, yeah. Love is the only thing we can perceive that transcends the dimensions of time and space. I didn’t make that up. It’s a quote from Interstellar. I’ve seen it twice.”

Excerpted with permissions from the author and the publisher of Eighteen Inches Apart by Sonia Bahl (Fingerprints! Publishing, 2026)

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About the Book

One afternoon in Calcutta, Leela—a photographer—steps out of a café and catches sight of a man who seems both regal and ruined: dirt-streaked face, broken slippers, and eyes that carry the weight of centuries. Before she can lift her camera, he disappears, leaving her haunted by questions she cannot let go.
Meanwhile in London, Neel, long dismissed as a drifting heir, is grieving for a love that slipped through his fingers. When he encounters a young street musician whose harmonica playing stops him in his tracks, the moment awakens something unexpected—a fragile sense of purpose and the beginning of a dream.

Moving between cities, perspectives, and years, Eighteen Inches Apart explores love in its many forms—romantic, familial, and platonic—and the invisible ways brief encounters and unlikely strangers begin to draw two distant lives quietly toward the same orbit.

About the Author

Sonia Bahl is a novelist and screenwriter whose work explores human connection, memory, and emotional truth. She made her literary debut with The Spectacular Miss, a coming-of-age novel that was optioned by a leading Bollywood studio, and followed it with A Year of Wednesdays in 2019, a contemporary story about two strangers whose brief encounter leaves a lasting imprint on their lives. Bahl’s writing draws on her global experiences and creative career in advertising and film, and she lives and writes in Singapore.