Chapter 4 – Lost and Found
1209 Words
The sky hung low and gray, bruised with clouds that promised another evening of rain. The city’s usual rhythm — the honking cars, vendors shouting, the shuffle of shoes — blurred into the background hum of Mira Kapoor’s life.
She walked fast, sketchbook clutched against her chest like a shield. Her boss wanted new concept drawings for the Riverside Cultural Center by Monday; her parents wanted her to meet a man named Kabir at seven; and Mira just wanted a moment to breathe.
Her phone buzzed again. MOM: Don’t be late tonight. Wear something pastel.
Mira sighed, thumb hovering over the reply, but before she could type I’ll try, someone collided with her shoulder. Papers slipped from under her arm, floating down like wounded birds.
“Hey, watch—”
The man was already gone, swallowed by the crossing crowd. She crouched, gathering her things. Her portfolio, her notebook, her sketchbook—
Her sketchbook was gone.
She turned, scanning the wet pavement, but the light turned green and a swarm of vehicles pushed forward. A horn blared inches from her knee. Startled, she jumped back to the curb. When the chaos cleared, the sketchbook was nowhere.
The drizzle began again, soft and cruel. Mira swallowed the sting in her throat and forced herself forward. She’d redrawn worse things. But as she walked, her fingers twitched, remembering the feel of its rough pages, the faint scent of graphite and coffee that lived between them.
Across the same intersection, hours later, Aarav Mehta lifted his camera and framed the world through his lens. The drizzle painted halos around the streetlights. His shutter clicked — once, twice — catching moments that would vanish before anyone noticed: a boy chasing his kite, a woman sheltering her child with a torn newspaper, a stray dog shaking rain from its fur.
Then something caught his eye.
A sketchbook lay half-submerged near the drain, its cover soaked and smeared with gray mud. He bent down, hesitated, then picked it up. The leather cover had softened from the rain, but the faint initials were still visible: M.K.
He should have left it on a bench. But something about the weight of it made him pause. It wasn’t just paper. It felt… lived in.
He ducked into a corner café, shaking rain from his jacket. The bell above the door chimed softly. He ordered black coffee and opened the sketchbook.
The first page stopped him.
An unfinished line drawing of an old bridge arched across the paper, but the river beneath wasn’t water — it was chaos. Spirals, scribbles, shadows of people with no faces. In the corner, written in quick, slanted ink: “Find order in disorder.”
He turned more pages. A woman sketching at a window. A child looking up at cranes. A quote penciled in the margin: “Design for peace. Don’t let them tell you it’s impossible.”
He couldn’t remember the last time something had moved him.
The waitress set down his coffee. “You draw?” she asked, noticing the open book.
He shook his head. “Someone else’s work.”
“Pretty,” she said, peering closer. “You gonna return it?”
Aarav looked down at the delicate pencil lines, at the initials again. “Maybe.”
He closed it carefully, as though afraid the drawings might crumble, and tucked it into his bag.
That night, Mira sat at her desk, her apartment quiet except for the soft ticking of a clock. Blank pages stared back at her. She tried to sketch from memory — the bridge, the skyline, the play of light on glass — but her hand refused to obey.
That sketchbook had been with her since college. It held not just drawings but confessions — doodles made in tears, notes written after fights with her parents, fragments of ideas she wasn’t brave enough to show anyone.
Her phone buzzed again.
ANANYA: Kabir’s nice. You’ll survive dinner. Breathe.
Mira didn’t reply. She closed her eyes, picturing the book lying somewhere on the street, pages dissolving under rain. The loss felt heavier than it should have. As if the city had stolen a piece of her voice.
Aarav couldn’t sleep. The rain had turned into a steady downpour, drumming on the metal roof of his small apartment. He sat by the window, the sketchbook open on his lap, light from the streetlamp spilling across the pages.
He tried to imagine the person who drew them.
Someone who saw beauty in brokenness, who believed in peace while surrounded by noise. Maybe she’d stood at the same crossings he’d photographed, watching life rush past but never stop.
His phone pinged. A message from his brother, Raghav.
Mom wants you to come to dinner tomorrow. Stop hiding.
He typed back, Busy. Then deleted it. He wasn’t ready for that world again — the questions, the pity. Not yet.
Instead, he turned another page. A sketch of a woman standing in the rain, umbrella half-closed, eyes closed as if listening to the storm. Below it, a date. Yesterday.
It felt absurd, the sense of connection, but he couldn’t help it. After years of photographing wars and grief, of capturing loss from behind a lens, this — these soft pencil strokes — were the first signs of hope he’d seen.
He promised himself he’d return it. Tomorrow.
Morning arrived washed in silver. Mira left early, determined to distract herself with work. At the office, her assistant greeted her with a nervous smile.
“Ma’am, the site manager’s waiting. He says the measurements don’t align.”
Mira forced a professional tone. “I’ll check it.”
But all day, her mind drifted back to the missing sketchbook. By noon, she’d redrawn three sheets and torn them all. She couldn’t capture the same pulse her old lines had.
At lunch, she stood by the window of a café near her building, coffee cooling in her hands. And then—she froze.
Across the street, through the rain-streaked glass, sat a man with dark hair and tired eyes, flipping through something brown and familiar.
Her sketchbook.
She almost spilled her coffee. By the time she pushed through the door and stepped outside, the crowd thickened, and the light turned red again. The man looked up briefly, as if sensing her gaze. Their eyes met for a split second.
Then the signal changed, and he vanished into the sea of umbrellas.
Mira stood on the sidewalk, soaked, heart pounding. Whoever he was, he had her work — and maybe, she thought with a strange tremor, she had just glimpsed the first twist of something she couldn’t name.
That evening, Aarav sat again by his window, the sketchbook resting on his knees. He should have felt guilty for keeping it, but instead he felt… protective.
He flipped to the last page, half-ruined by rain. A single unfinished drawing: a city skyline shaped like a heartbeat. Beneath it, one line written faintly in pencil:
“When everything falls apart, draw anyway.”
Aarav closed the book slowly. For the first time in years, the chaos outside didn’t feel empty. It felt alive.
He smiled, just barely, and whispered to the quiet room, “Who are you, M.K.?”
- Writer
