Canada was cold in a way Malnad never was, and lonely in a way that, oddly, gave her room to grow. She began small: an English conversation club on weekends, a library card she used every Friday, a habit of reading one book a month that slowly became one a week. She enrolled in a part-time master's program in the evenings.
She learned to eat well, not to punish her body but to care for it. She learned, through trial and awkward mistakes and a few kind strangers, how colours and cuts could work with her frame instead of against it — not to become someone else, but to finally look like herself. She learned to walk into a room without shrinking at its edges.
None of it happened overnight, and none of it happened because of anger. It happened the way a coffee plant blooms in Malnad — quietly, on its own season, needing only patience and the right conditions.
Four years passed this way. She finished her degree with distinction, and by the time she began her job search, three offers arrived within the same fortnight — one in Toronto, one in Singapore, and one back home in Bangalore, at a well-known firm expanding its analytics division. She compared them the way she now approached everything — calmly, on paper, weighing growth and role and the pull of home. The Bangalore offer simply read best on every count. She never thought to check who else worked there; it was, after all, a large company with thousands of employees, and Karthik's name hadn't crossed her mind in a long while. She accepted it without a second glance at the company directory, packed four years of quiet becoming into two suitcases, and boarded a flight home.
It was only weeks later, after she'd settled into her new role, that she'd learn — quite by accident, from an offhand mention in a team meeting — that Karthik worked two floors above her.