They were walking together, holding each other's hands,

along the beautiful seaside promenade with metal railings. As

they looked up at the sky, they saw the sun setting, adding

strokes of twilight hues all over the sky. The colors fused into

the dusky horizon, and then the sun slowly disappeared,

seemingly buried beneath the unfathomable ocean. The

merging of the ocean and the sky at the horizontal line made

it difficult to differentiate between the two.


"Ritom, do you think our walk will ever end?" she said,

turning to him. Then she looked up at the sky. "Look, it has

become so dusky."

"Yes, we can't even separate the sky and the ocean from each

other, just like us," said Ritom, wrapping his arm around

Monoshini's shoulders.

"Be reasonable, Ritom."

"This is where we are now, a public place."


"Please stop this nonsense. I request you," she said, trying

hard to free herself from his arms. She struggled for a moment

to extricate herself from his grasp but failed, as usual.


In that very moment, an idea came to her mind. She began to

tickle him, her fingers dancing across his T-shirt aimlessly like

a carefree melody. She became engrossed in the color of his T-

shirt, maroon, her favorite one. She nodded and chuckled as

she remembered that she had gifted him that shirt on his

twenty-fourth birthday this year. Soon after, his laughter

filled the air, and she slipped away from his grasp.


She ran towards the railing and came to a sudden stop, her

hands gripping its rods as she braced herself upon it. A gentle
...