Aarav Pillai shares a poignant story about chanced encounters, the nature of mystery, and what happens when one follows it too closely.
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There is a particular glamour to mystery. I am not talking about Agatha Christie’s whodunnits, or that new product from Coca-Cola I haven’t tasted yet. Mystery is something that runs much deeper. It is that overgrown pathway that no-one ever talks about, leading away from the high streets to a forgotten spot of natural beauty. It is the unfamiliar book title which rings no bell except for a chime in its lyrical phrasing. Mystery is that quiet, distant person who, merely through the subtlety of her movements or the delicacy of his words, hints of a special individual concealed within.
I have always felt drawn to mysterious people; the kind who seem to contain more than they are willing to declare. There is a particular pleasure in sensing that someone has an interior life that does not arrive pre-summarised; that they might, if handled incorrectly, reveal nothing at all.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that I noticed him immediately. One early morning in Bombay, while running past half-open shutters and tea stalls, I saw him approaching from a distance; long-haired; self-contained; moving with a kind of quiet certainty that suggested he was not in a hurry to be somewhere.
As we passed, I caught a clearer glimpse; blue jeans; a white t-shirt; black Converse; an arrangement so ordinary it felt almost curated. I, on the other hand, felt visibly unfinished; a little too thin; a little too uncertain; not yet convincing in my own body. Still, something about him held my attention longer than it should have.
About a week later, I saw him again—this time on a BEST bus, three seats ahead of me, as if the city had decided to reintroduce him with slightly better lighting. Everyone else was occupied in predictable ways; conversations that went nowhere, headphones that suggested interiority but mostly contained remixes of the same three emotions. He, however, remained curiously unoccupied. Not idle, never that, but arranged in such a way that his stillness felt intentional.
There was something theatrical about the way shadows seemed to follow him. Wherever he turned his head, the light appeared to hesitate, as though unsure whether it had permission to touch him. And then, occasionally, it would succeed: catching in his hair for a fraction of a second, deepening it to a burnished brown, almost copper at the edges, before withdrawing again as if embarrassed by its own boldness.
It is a strange thing to begin recognising someone you do not know. Stranger still, to feel as though they are recognising you back, not through acknowledgment, but through recurrence. After that afternoon, he began to appear with a persistence that felt less like coincidence and more like a scheduling error in the city’s system. Public transport, of course: buses, trains, the slow choreography of shared inconvenience. But also clubs, where he stood at the edge of noise with the composure of someone who had no intention of participating in it. Libraries, where he occupied corners with the quiet authority of a man who did not read so much as observe others reading.
It is difficult to say when observation becomes attachment. There is a point, subtle but irreversible, at which noticing acquires intention. I began to look for him: not actively, not with urgency, but with a curiosity that had acquired structure. Would he be there? And if he was, would he be the same?
He always was.
And that, perhaps, was the most unsettling part.
I didn’t introduce myself. That would have required a different kind of courage, one I was not yet prepared to perform. Instead, I allowed him to exist at a distance; a recurring figure in the periphery of my routines, a presence that was neither intrusive nor entirely benign.
And yet, he altered the way I moved through the city.
Three months later, in a development that would have surprised no one but me, I found myself having lunch with him.
His name, it turned out, was Ravi Patel, a name so decisively ordinary it felt almost like a disguise. As for his sexuality, he was as straight as a Hula Hoop; a geometry that, while theoretically unstable, worked out quite conveniently for me. He knew about my crush on him, and he seemed unbothered by it. There was no drama, no awkward recalibration. If anything, it seemed to amuse him, though never quite enough to acknowledge directly.
What he did not relinquish, however, was his mystery. If anything, proximity seemed only to refine it.
We were seated at a café that took itself just seriously enough to be forgiven for it. The kind of place where cutlery arrives with intention and the menu assumes you have opinions about butter. Ravi approached his rotis with the same composure he brought to everything else; not eating so much as completing a quiet, private ritual.
And then, without preamble, he looked up and said to the waiter, in a tone so polite it bordered on ceremonial:
“Would you please give me some salt? I’d like to put it in my tea.”
There are moments in life when time does not stop so much as reorganise itself around a single, inexplicable detail. This was one of them.
The waiter blinked. I blinked. The room did not fall silent (this was not that kind of establishment) but it leaned, perceptibly, in our direction.
The salt arrived.
Ravi accepted it with a small nod of gratitude and, with complete composure, added a measured amount to his tea. He stirred it once, perhaps twice, as though calibrating memory.
I watched him with the kind of attention usually reserved for minor accidents.
“Is this a Bombay thing?” I asked, trying to sound more sophisticated than I felt. “Or is it just you?”
He did not answer immediately. Instead, he took a sip slowly, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere just above the waiter’s head.
“It’s a matter of buoyancy,” he said finally. His voice was low, devoid of the practiced sentimentality of a storyteller. “My father worked the docks in Mangalore. Everything there, the air, the laundry, the morning newspapers, was cured in salt. If you grew up there, plain water tasted like a lie. It was too thin. It didn’t have any grip.”
He looked down at his cup, the steam catching the copper light in his hair.
“People think sugar is for comfort,” he continued, stirring again. “But sugar just masks the bitterness. Salt… salt actually changes the texture of the heat. It makes the tea feel heavier. Like it has a history.”
He didn’t look at me to see if I was moved. He wasn’t performing a memory; he was simply justifying a preference.
“Every time I have it,” he said, almost to himself, “I can feel the humidity of the coast. The way the salt stays on your skin even after you’ve walked miles inland. It’s not about the taste, Dhruv. It’s about the weight of the water.”
Then, with a composure that returned almost too quickly, he pushed the salt cellar toward me.
“Would you like to add some weight to yours?”
I considered it for a moment longer than politeness required, as though weighing not the taste but the implication.
“No,” I said, finally. “I think I’ll preserve my childhood in its original flavour.”
He smiled (very slightly, but enough to register) and returned to his tea, as though the matter had been resolved in precisely the way it was meant to be.
And just like that, the room resumed its previous shape. Conversations reassembled themselves. The waiter, having participated in something he would later describe inaccurately, moved on.
Ravi, meanwhile, remained exactly as he had always been; composed, inexplicable, and entirely unconcerned with being understood.
It struck me then that mystery is not always a lack of information. Sometimes, it is the presence of too much of the wrong kind.
And Ravi, it seemed, had perfected the balance.
Perhaps that was why conversation with him never felt like discovery so much as rearrangement. One Friday night, for instance, we dismantled the idea of an ideal communist society, with the confidence of men who would never have to build one; agreed, with unnecessary enthusiasm, that Modi was less a political figure and more a prolonged misunderstanding; dismissed UFO sightings as the triumph of imagination over evidence, which is to say, the most human outcome possible.
And so we sat there, two people with no particular authority, discussing questions that have outlived empires, convinced (if only for the duration of the evening) that this, too, counted as a kind of participation.
Sometimes, I ask myself what I want to do in life; what, if anything, is the main thing I want to achieve on this planet. The answer that invariably returns is “to love”; it arrives with a kind of quiet certainty, replacing doubt with something that feels less argued than known.
Unfortunately, this does very little to resolve the practicalities. One cannot write a doctoral thesis on “Amorous Studies,” nor earn a stable wage in the position of “Senior Lover.” Love, for all its conviction, remains professionally unhelpful.
And yet, when I look at Ravi, the impracticality of it becomes irrelevant. All I seem to want is to hold him, as firmly as my fragile hands would allow, to look him directly in the eyes, and to tell him that I love him with all my heart.
The mere thought of Ravi seems to bring my whole being into sharper focus, expanding quietly until it outweighs everything else: wealth, power, the usual ambitions one is taught to take seriously. I used to believe those were the only things required for happiness. I am less certain of that now.
And yes, he still remains as mysterious as ever.
Well, at least to me.
I had to leave Bombay after a year. My clerical term had ended, and the city’s lease on my happiness felt like it was being non-renewed. But I wanted to stay. I wanted to find a house with Ravi, to build something small and quiet. I wanted nights that did not end, where I could count the odd-looking black buttons on his turquoise shirt, noticing how the number seemed to change each day, as though the fabric itself refused to remain consistent.
I returned to Bangalore not out of desire, but out of a heavy, rehearsed obligation. I didn’t realize then that the distance I was putting between us was not just geographical; it was the final bit of space his mystery required to fold in on itself.
A few months later, I returned to Bombay for news that did not feel real until I was standing inside the silence of it. The details arrived in fragments, then arranged themselves into a geometry I could not unsee.
There was a pool of crimson spreading slowly across this living room carpet, its surface catching the light just enough to reflect those deep brown eyes with an unbearable clarity. It was, I was told, the second time Ravi had been shot that day. The first was a .44 Magnum through the forehead. The second was through the lens of a Nikon D200; documented, processed, and reduced to a series of pixels. I still do not know which felt colder: the mechanical click of the shutter or the temperature of my own hands when I heard the news.
The case continued in the way such things do: extended, revisited, and eventually exhausted. Years passed without a face or a name held to account. Eventually, it was closed with an explanation that satisfied procedure rather than truth: a probable case of suicide.
But the Ravi I knew did not fit that conclusion. Or perhaps that, too, was the final layer of the arrangement, a composure so absolute that it could mask a total collapse. He died as he lived: a figure in the periphery that I had tried, and failed, to bring into the center.
He was the best thing that had ever happened to this world.
Well, at least to me.
Author’s Bio
Aarav Pillai is a queer trans writer and poet with a background in data science and AI for the creative industries. They have lectured at the University of the Arts London and lead Qinārā AI, a research lab centring queer lives in India. Their work is forthcoming in Muse India and Open Close Magazine.