When My World Paused for a Stranger - Austin Shivaji Kumar

I remember the exact platform.

Dadar station. The financial and chaos capital of Mumbai. The kind of place where the air feels thick with movement, where a thousand footsteps stomp through your silence. You don’t get a second to think. Or feel.

And yet, inside me, everything was still.

Still and strange.

I wasn’t anxious.

I wasn’t at peace.

I just felt... nothing.

There’s a kind of numbness that doesn’t announce itself loudly. It creeps into your bones, day by day. My mornings had turned into mechanical scripts.

• Wake up
• Scroll aimlessly
• Go to work
• Nod at people
• Come home
• Have dinner
• Lie down
• Repeat

I wasn’t really living. Just surviving on autopilot. Conversations felt hollow. Laughter was muscle memory. I didn’t even notice when days blurred into each other. The city screamed around me but inside, it felt like someone had muted life.

And then, I saw her. My lifeline.

It was an ordinary day, probably Thursday. I was waiting for the 10:46 train. It was late, or maybe I was early. Hard to say. My thoughts were swirling, but not going anywhere. Like trains inside my head, crashing into each other without tracks, without brakes, without warning.

The crowd pushed and moved around me, commuters swayed with tiredness, vendors shouted, the smell of roasted peanuts tangled with sweat and dampness.

Then, without effort, without any drama, she was just there.

Shabnam.

(I didn’t know her name, so I started calling her this.)

She stood exactly two feet from me. Not facing me. Not looking at anyone. Just standing still in that same chaos. Calm. A breeze in a burning day. Her innocence didn't feel like something she wore, it felt like something she was.

And just like that, time played a trick.

The sound of the world softened, like someone turned the volume down on everything else. I remember looking at her and realizing...

• She wasn’t performing.
• She wasn’t hiding.
• She wasn’t even aware of being watched.

She simply existed.

And in that existence, she did something I didn’t expect.

She mirrored something in me I didn’t know was still alive.

Her eyes, soft and steady, reminded me of my most beloved and sweet royal mother, Parvati Devi. Not the tired version I saw before me today. But the young one. The one from an old black-and-white photograph in our archived album. The one who held me like the world depended on it.

Shabnam had that same kind of stillness, and innocence. Pure. Raw. Real.

I didn’t speak. I didn’t move. I just watched.

It was in that moment when, without even realizing it, I wanted to dedicate my whole life to making hers better.

People were brushing past each other. Bags knocking against shoulders. Voices rising and falling like waves. But she remained untouched. Her outline remained sharp while everything else turned to smoke.

She stood like silence in a city of horns.

And suddenly, I was feeling something again.

Not joy. Not pain. Something far more powerful.

Hope.

A hope that whispers maybe, just maybe, my pain can soften, and I can feel life brush against my skin again, like sunlight after a long monsoon.

The moment didn’t feel fleeting. It felt infinite. Like those slow-motion dreams where nothing makes sense, yet everything does. I kept thinking...

What is this?

• Am I falling in love with a stranger?
• Is this madness?
• Is this real?
• Or just a reflection of what I needed?

My heart, which had been silent for years, now pulsed with questions.

I was in love with her and with everything she seemed to represent.

• Peace in noise
• Innocence in corruption
• Vulnerability in a world of masks
• Truth in a world of filters
• Kindness without agenda
• A soul unarmed in a battlefield of egos
• Grace in the middle of chaos
• Silence that spoke louder than words
• Tenderness in a time of toughness
• A reminder that softness still survives

I felt her like a breath, unnoticed but essential

• Even without knowing her name
• Without expectation, without condition, without demands
• Like a prayer whispered into the dark
• She didn’t ask for it. She didn’t even see it.

My goal was:

• Not to possess her
• Not to be loved back
• But just to love
• Fully. Freely. Fiercely.
• More than myself
• More than the story I wanted us to be
• More than the need to ever see her again
• She became my lifeline
• My softest truth
• My most sacred secret

She was everything I forgot to believe in.

Her presence whispered to the part of me I had buried under layers of concrete, deadlines, missed calls, and dusty shelves of forgotten dreams.

We stood there for what couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. But time had folded in on itself. It felt like I lived an entire lifetime in those minutes. A quiet lifetime. One without answers. But full of feeling.

I just wanted to hold her quietly, fully, and forget the world ever existed.

And then, like all beautiful moments, it ended.

She turned slightly. Stepped forward. And boarded a different train.

That was it.

She didn’t look back.

I didn’t follow.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be a story that begins.

It was a story that reminded me I still had a heart.

For weeks after, her face visited me in quiet moments.

In forgotten corners of the office. In dreams. During long elevator rides. While brushing my teeth. On crowded trains. In the middle of conversations. During the client calls. While waiting for water to boil. In songs I wasn’t trying to hear. In the silence between thoughts.

And every time I passed Dadar station, I slowed down, hoping lightning would strike the same place twice.

It never did.

But what she left behind was more than enough.

She shook something free in me. Gently. Without force.

• I started noticing colors again
• I paid attention to strangers’ faces
• I stopped skipping sad songs on my playlist
• I started writing again
• I started feeling again

And yet, with all that came a quiet ache.

Because I didn’t know her.

She didn’t know me.

We didn’t even exchange words.

But in that brief pause, we knew something deeper. Something wordless. A kind of human recognition that can’t be translated.

Some nights, I’d lie awake and wonder…

Was she even real?

Or had my mind, starved of beauty, created her?

Maybe she was a stranger.

Maybe she was a mirror.

Or maybe... she was both.

Sometimes, I think we cross paths with people not to change our lives, but to change our direction. Shabnam didn’t enter my story to stay. She entered to interrupt. To break the pattern. To pull the emergency brake on a train running nowhere.

And in that sudden stop, I realized:

• I wasn’t okay
• I didn’t have to pretend
• Feeling something, even for a stranger, is still a gift

Shabnam became more than a girl at a train station.

She became a symbol of everything I thought I had lost.

Innocence. Warmth. Stillness. And the courage to feel again.

Now, every time I pass through Dadar, I pause.

To remember that even in a city built on speed, there is room for silence.

Even in numbness, there is room for ache.

And even in strangers, there is room for something sacred.

If you're wondering what happened next between me and Shabnam…

well, that story hasn’t ended.

Not yet.

Because maybe, just maybe, it’s only beginning.

Maybe one day, fate will circle back.

Maybe I’ll find her again on another platform, in another lifetime, or even tomorrow.

And this time, I won’t let her board a different train.

Maybe someday, we’ll sit side by side,

holding hands and telling our kids about the time I fell in love with a stranger at Dadar station.

Maybe we’ll laugh at how unlikely it all sounds.

Maybe that quiet moment in the chaos was the start of something much louder.

A life. A love. A journey.

And if that never happens, that’s okay too.

Because now, I carry her with me.

• Not as a memory, but as a reminder.
• That the world is still capable of magic.
• That hope can be sparked in seconds.
• That strangers can be turning points.

So here’s to the journeys yet to come.

To unexpected pauses and beautiful detours.

And to everyone who’s ever felt something shift in their soul from a single passing glance.

Because this story hasn’t ended.

In fact,

this story has just begun.

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