The train was already leaving when she reached the platform.
For a few seconds she stood still, suitcase tilted behind her, watching the last carriage disappear into the evening. The next train was forty minutes away. Long enough to be inconvenient, not long enough to go anywhere.
At the far end of the station, a small kiosk was closing. The man behind the counter had begun stacking cups when she asked, almost apologetically, whether there was any chai left.
He lifted the lid of a steel pot. Steam rose between them.
“One last cup,” he said.
It came in a thin paper cup, too hot to hold properly. The chai was sweet, strong and heavy with cardamom. Not the careful kind served in a café, but the kind that seemed to understand exactly what the moment needed.
She sat on a cold bench and watched people hurry past. Messages arrived asking where she was. The departures board clicked forward. Somewhere beyond the station, dinner would be getting cold.
But for ten minutes, none of it mattered.
She drank slowly. The missed train stopped feeling like a mistake and became, instead, a pause she had not known how to ask for.
Years later, she would forget the name of the station. She would forget where she was travelling and why she had been in such a hurry. But she would remember that final cup waiting at the bottom of a steel pot - and how, for a moment, it made an unfamiliar place feel kind.
