Aisha Deshmukh's phone buzzed at 11:47 pm, and she was awake in a second, thumb already unlocking the screen before her eyes had properly opened.
Forty-one likes on the reel she'd posted three hours ago. Yesterday's beach shot at Juhu had crossed two hundred by this point. She lay back against her pillow and typed the caption again in her head, wondering what word she'd gotten wrong.
By morning she'd checked it nine more times.
Mumbai moved around her the way it always did — the 8:15 fast local packed elbow to elbow, the chai seller at the Andheri platform calling out over the announcement system, a woman beside her adjusting her dupatta with one hand while scrolling with the other. Aisha barely noticed any of it. She was filming the crowd through the train door for a story titled "Mumbai Mornings 🚆✨," angling her phone so the sunlight caught right.
The video got eighty-six likes. She checked at every red signal on her way to college, at the water cooler between lectures, twice during a lab she was supposed to be attending. Her thumb had a permanent groove where the phone case sat.
That evening she went to Bandra Bandstand for "content" — the sea wall at sunset was reliable, always did well. She found a spot near the rocks, tilted her chin the way she'd practiced, and pressed record.
An old man sat a few feet away on the same wall, a bansuri resting across his knees. He wasn't playing it. He was just watching the tide come in, the way people used to before phones gave them somewhere else to look. A peacock feather was tucked into the frayed cap beside him, its edge bent from years of being carried in someone's pocket.
"You have taken forty pictures of the same water," he said, not turning to look at her. His voice was easy, almost amused, like he already knew the answer.
"I need the right one," Aisha said, without thinking about why she was explaining herself to a stranger.
"Right for whom?" He picked up the flute now, turned it over once in his hands, set it down again. "Your eyes have seen this sunset. But your mind is already at your phone, waiting to see how many others agree it was beautiful. Tell me — whose approval makes the sun set?"
Aisha didn't have an answer for that. She looked at her screen instead, at the video paused mid-recording, at her own reflection faint in the black glass.
"The senses pull the mind toward whatever glitters," he said. "A number on a screen, a sweet, a stranger's opinion — the mind runs after all of it like a horse that has slipped its reins. This is not new, beta. Arjuna asked this very question once, on a battlefield, of a friend he trusted. He said the mind is restless, impossible to hold — like trying to catch the wind in your hands."
"And what did his friend say?"
"That the wind can still be tamed. Not by force, all at once — no one masters a wild horse in a single afternoon. Little by little. Practice, and the will to let go of what doesn't serve you. Not never enjoying the world — just not being ruled by it. A man in control of his senses can sit in the middle of every pleasure and every insult this city offers, and remain the same person underneath. That one is called steady."
He stood then, tucking the flute under his arm. "Haan, achha sunset today," he said, glancing once at the orange water, and walked off toward the rocks without waiting for her to reply.
Aisha sat there a long moment, phone still open to the unfinished video. She didn't delete her account. She didn't throw the phone into the sea, the way she might have written it in her head five minutes ago, dramatic and clean.
She turned off the notification sound instead — just the sound, nothing else — and slid the phone into the bottom of her bag for the walk back to the station. Marine Drive was busy with the same evening crowd, the same tapri sellers calling out for tea, and for the length of that walk, she didn't know how many people had liked anything at all.
It felt strange. Not bad. Just strange, like a room after the fan is switched off.
She didn't check until she was home. Forty-one likes had waited for her the whole time, patient as anything, not going anywhere.
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The Pothole — A different kind of obstacle, a different kind of patience — Krishna's quiet reminder that not every bump in the road needs an immediate reaction.
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