The Last Autograph

I first saw him from the balcony of my grandmother’s Bandra bungalow—a pale sun slanting across peeling walls, the sea breeze carrying the faint smell of fried fish and monsoon dust. He was rehearsing in the courtyard below, guitar slung low, singing something I only half recognized: the kind of song that seeps under your skin. I was thirteen. My diary hidden beneath my mattress, the pages crammed with his name, his films, the tiny details no one else cared about: the curve of his smile, the exact way his eyes crinkled when he laughed. That afternoon, the world shrank to him, to the flash of his white shirt under the sun, to the small shadow he cast over the terracotta tiles. Years later, I returned. The bungalow was empty, windows like eyes watching me. He was gone, of course, vanished into studio lights and magazine covers. But the scent of jasmine and old teak lingered. I wandered the hallways, imagining his laughter, the echo of his chords bouncing off the walls. Then I saw it: a folded scrap of paper on the staircase. My name, in his loopy handwriting, an autograph I had never received. My heart thudded. I smiled. And then the whisper came from the corridor: “I never left.” I froze. Shadows coiled along the ceiling, and the faint strum of guitar strings tickled the air. The bungalow had remembered me, or perhaps it had remembered him—and now it was waiting, hungry, for someone to believe. I never stayed long after that. But every time I walk past those rusted gates in Bandra, I swear the walls hum, softly, with a voice I know. And I remember that even the brightest stars leave traces… and sometimes, those traces bite.