The Dream
He was driving.
Except he wasn't.
She was.
In a jeep, somewhere outside a city he didn't recognize, on roads that had turned to mud. She knew the route. He didn't need to. That was the thing about being beside her. The destination had never been the point.
The road steepened. Without thinking, he offered his right hand toward hers on the wheel.
She didn't take it.
But she turned her face towards him. Just enough. And smiled.
Not a polite smile. Not a deflecting smile. The kind that arrives from somewhere deeper than the lips. The kind that means “I see you. Not yet. But I see you.”
He understood, in the way only you understand things in dreams, that this moment was everything. That he had been waiting for this specific smile for longer than made any rational sense.
Then he woke up.
It was early morning in Chennai. March 2026.
And she was still in Shanghai. As she had always been, after returning from Singapore. Or that’s what he thinks.
The Afternoon That Started Everything
Go back more than eighteen years.
July 2007. Singapore.
A 23-year-old from Chennai had recently arrived at the National University of Singapore to pursue a postgraduate degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering. He believed, with the particular confidence of someone who hadn't yet been properly tested, that his life was about to expand.
He had volunteered to work for the Academic and Research Committee of the Graduate Students’ Society (GSS). Not for strategic reasons. Not to network. Because it genuinely interested him.
He didn't know that someone else had made the same choice. For her own genuine reasons.
That afternoon, in a meeting room at the Yusof Ishak House, he was already seated when she arrived.
She came in slightly late.
Their eyes met.
He pointed to an empty chair.
Her eyes said “thank you”.
No words. No introduction. Just that exchange.
And something in him, something below thought, below intention, below anything he could have named or defended or explained recognized her.
Not her name. Not her story. Not her life.
Just her.
He didn't know it then.
But that was the beginning of an eighteen-year conversation that only one of them was having.
She
Her name was Sandra.
It was her western name, the one she used in the international corridors of a global university where names travelled more easily without their full weight of origin.
She was from Shanghai. Composed without being cold. Precise without being rigid. There was a quality of stillness about her that didn't feel like absence, it felt like depth. Like someone who processed the world carefully before offering it back.
She wore glasses then.
He noticed.
More than noticed.
He would tell her, at a barbecue months later, standing briefly alone with her beside a grill, “you looked better with glasses”. She had been wearing contact lenses that day. A small tinge of something crossed her face. Disappointment perhaps. Or surprise. Oh. Is it?
He panicked. Walked away swiftly while trying to appear cool.
He would cringe about that moment for years to come.
What he couldn't articulate then, what he couldn't articulate for a long time was that the comment wasn't vanity. It was evidence. He had been looking at her closely enough, consistently enough, to have developed a preference. The glasses comment was the involuntary confession of someone paying a particular kind of attention.
She may have understood that.
He wouldn't know. He walked away before finding out.
The Surviving and The Longing Running Simultaneously
Here is what the story looked like from the outside.
Two international students. Young. Same volunteer committee. Occasional late night Skype chats. Some shared moments at group events.
Here is what the story looked like from the inside.
He was slowly drowning.
Not because of her. The world was drowning him.
2008 arrived and brought the Global Financial Crisis with it. Singapore, methodical and unsentimental about such things, began prioritising its own. Hiring slowed. His applications disappeared into silence. Months passed. His savings, the money his mother had once refused, saying “keep it for your expenses” drained quietly into rent and transport and 80 cent sweet buns that replaced breakfast.
He survived on an SGD 750 monthly budget wired from his parents in India. He ate subsidised canteen food at the university long after he had stopped being a student there. He planned bus rides like a general plans troop movements, carefully, conservatively, only when necessary.
One evening, hunger overruled the last of his pride. That moment would stay with him longer than most.
This was the hidden architecture of those Singapore years. This was what was running underneath every GSS meeting, every Skype conversation, every manufactured opportunity to be near her.
A man in survival mode has no agency.
He cannot also be a man in pursuit.
You cannot stand at a grill beside someone whose smile rearranges something in your chest and also be simultaneously calculating the bus fare home.
You cannot find the words to tell someone what they mean to you when the primary sentence your nervous system is composing, every waking hour, is a simpler and more desperate one.
Will I be okay?
He was never going to be able to fight for her.
Not then. Not there. Not while survival was using everything he had.
Finally
There was a Skype call. It was well past 10 PM. Singapore.
Several attempts had failed before it connected.
He typed one word before anything else, after the customary “hi”.
“Finally.”
She replied immediately with the same word.
“Finally.”
And they smiled. It was not a video call.
Two people. Same word. Same moment. The laughter of recognition ‘You felt this too. This mattered to you. We were both trying to get here.’
He didn't examine it then. He was too relieved to examine it.
Later, much later, he would understand what that exchange contained. Two people reaching for the same word simultaneously don't do so by accident. Not giving up despite the failed attempts. And then, the relief of arrival.
They were both waiting.
Neither of them was ready to say that out loud. So, they smiled instead.
And the moment passed.
The way moments did, between them, with a consistency that would define the entire story.
The Quiet Evidence
He was not someone who acted without thinking.
He thought too much. Felt too much. Moved too carefully around things that mattered too much. He didn't realize that silence, however careful, was working against him.
But the evidence of what he felt leaked out anyway. In the only ways available to an introverted man in survival mode who couldn't afford the emotional cost of full exposure.
A feedback form.
She had attended an Oktoberfest event that the GSS had organized. He had been there. He had watched her arrive in a university polo shirt and glasses, her smile unguarded in a way that it wasn't always, and something in him had shifted beyond attraction, beyond admiration, into something quieter and more permanent.
The following Sunday morning, at 7 AM, he created a feedback form for the event. And sent it to her asking for her thoughts.
Four pages. It was structured, methodical, thorough.
She responded.
Engaged with the form seriously. Questioned the methodology. Noted the sampling bias.
Neither of them acknowledged what the feedback form actually was.
A manufactured reason to reach her. Created at 7 AM on a Sunday morning by someone who had run out of natural opportunities and was building artificial ones from scratch.
She questioned the methodology.
He had been using her as the methodology all along.
The Coffee That Never Happened
At some point he asked her out for coffee.
She said “maybe”.
The ‘maybe’ was her language. Three dots on Skype chat. She never said ‘maybe’. The three dots conveyed that. A pause before answering. He had learned this about her. The holding of things in the space between yes and no. He shuddered to call it an ellipsis.
The coffee never happened.
He told himself it was timing. The semester ending. The GFC tightening its grip. The survival mode consuming every spare hour.
He was not wrong.
But he was also not entirely right.
Because a free man, a man not consumed by the question of his own survival finds a way to a coffee with someone whose maybe contains the possibility of ‘yes’.
He was not free.
And the coffee remained like so many things between them, something that almost happened. There was another 'almost' much earlier to the coffee. The GSS had planned a cultural trip to Desaru, Malaysia in 2008. He called her on her phone, directly to ask if she would join him to enquire with tour companies about the trip. He did most of the talking. Explaining. Justifying. Making the case for a visit she probably already understood. She listened. Then, in a tone that was neither eager nor reluctant, measured, calm, the verbal equivalent of three dots, she had said something like "okay, we can go." He still remembers her voice on that call. He cannot remember why the visit never happened. Only that it didn't. Like so many things between them.
In a city full of almost.
October 2009. The Quiet Return
He left Singapore in October 2009.
Not because he had succeeded. Not because the dream had worked.
Because he didn't want to dig further into his parents' savings.
He came home carrying shame he wouldn't fully examine for years.
And he came home carrying her. Unknown to him.
Not visibly. Not in any way anyone would have noticed.
But she was there. In the unfinished quality of everything he hadn't been able to say. In the coffee that never happened. In the Oktoberfest feedback form that was really a love letter that didn't know its own name. In the ‘finally’ that both of them had smiled at and then let dissolve back into ordinary conversation.
He returned to India. Chennai.
She remained in Singapore, presumably, and eventually returned to Shanghai.
The distance between them which had always been emotional became geographic too.
The Letter That Arrived Too Late
A year passed.
He rebuilt. Slowly. The career reassembled itself. The shame began to metabolise into something harder and more useful. He found solid ground beneath his feet for the first time since the GFC had taken it away.
And from that solid ground, for the first time, he had something he hadn't had in Singapore.
Agency.
The terrible irony was not lost on him.
In October 2010, from Chennai, with his feet finally on solid ground, he wrote her an email letter.
A long one. Honest in the way that only becomes possible when survival is no longer the primary question. He catalogued the missed moments. He named what he had felt. He apologised for the unkept coffee date. He wrote without performance, without strategy, without anything except the simple intention of finally saying the true thing.
He added a postscript at the end.
“Did I say that you are the first girl I ever asked out?”
She replied on a Friday during work hours. A single line of genuine impact. “wow..(his name). Thank you for such a long email. Will reply tonight or tomorrow morning”. She copied herself on the reply, taking him home to read privately, on her own time, in her own space.
Her full reply came on a Sunday.
At 11:45 PM. Her time zone.
Her most private hour. The hour after the day is done and the roles are set aside and what remains is just the person underneath everything.
She wrote that she was really touched by his honesty and his courage. She wrote that she had been with someone for three years and was not looking for a change. She used a philosophy he would remember ‘right person, right place, right time’.
He read ‘three years’ and felt the floor leave.
He missed the timestamp entirely.
He replied in three lines. Congratulations. Thank you. Goodbye.
Clean. Dignified. Completely concealing the cost of those three lines.
Then silence.
Sixteen years of it.
What The Silence Contained
Silence is not the absence of feeling.
He learned this slowly, across years that filled themselves with the ordinary architecture of a life rebuilt. Career, marriage, children, leadership roles he hadn't planned on, business trips to countries he had once only read about, a transit through Changi Airport in 2023 as a country manager representing India, walking through the city that had once broken him without bitterness, without triumph, just distance.
From the outside, the story looked normal.
Underneath, she remained.
Not as an obsession. Not as damage. As something quieter and more permanent. A frequency that his nervous system had recognized in a room at Yusof Ishak House on an afternoon in 2007 and had never fully stopped receiving.
She appeared in his dreams. Not always. But enough. Always just out of his reach. Always in the geography of almost. Almost alone together, almost the conversation that needed to happen, almost the moment that kept not arriving. The dreams kept pulling him back. He always woke up yearning.
He searched for her digital footprints occasionally. The moments when the ordinary weight of carrying something alone became briefly heavier than usual.
He found her. A professional profile. A career that had grown into something serious and substantial. An Associate Director title at a major financial institution in Shanghai. Evidence of a life fully and capably lived.
He was glad.
He prayed for her happiness. Not dramatically. Not with expectation. Just quietly, consistently, the way you pray for something when you have accepted that prayer is the only form of contact available to you.
He prayed for her happiness before his own.
March 2026, Chennai
Then something shifted.
He played a webinar on YouTube, something that he had already played a few times in the past. He pressed play. Not for the content, which was professional and precise. He pressed play. To see her. To hear her. To confirm, in the most private possible way, that she was still there. Still real. Still the specific person his nervous system had recognized in 2007 and never quite released.
She was.
The face on the screen was older, composed, professionally assured. But underneath the Associate Director and the conference presentation and the years, she was still recognizably her. The quality of stillness. The precision. Something in the eyes that hadn't changed.
He found her office email addresses incidentally in the webinar, something he had not noticed at all previously. He sent a LinkedIn connection request. Then, on March 4th 2026, he wrote an email.
Warm on the surface. Professional. He mentioned where he was working now. That the organization had a manufacturing facility in Suzhou. That he had visited Shanghai several times for business. He congratulated her on the career he had glimpsed in the webinar and imagined it had only grown further since then. The webinar itself was easily 3 years old.
And then, asking her “How are you? How's life?”
Underneath the surface, those two questions contained everything.
He pressed send.
For the first time in sixteen years, the door was no longer closed. Whether it would open from the other side? He didn't know.
The Final Dream
A few days after the email, he dreamed of her again. It was an early morning in Chennai. March 2026.
But this dream was different from all the others.
For the first time in eighteen years of dreaming about her, they were alone together.
In a jeep. Mud roads. A steep slope outside a city. She was driving. He was beside her. She knew the route. He didn't need to.
On a steep slope he offered his right hand toward hers.
She kept both hands on the wheel.
But she turned her face towards him. Just enough. And smiled.
Not a decline. Not a yes. Something in between that was more honest than either.
‘I see you. Not yet. But I see you'.
He tried to stay inside the dream. Couldn't. He woke up. This time, he was not yearning for more.
It was 6:27 AM, the alarm was set to go in another 3 minutes. Thanked God and the Universe for the dream. Meant it sincerely.
Then he got up, got ready and went to work.
Carried her quietly.
As he always had.
The Prayer
There is a small calendar in a room he uses for late night work in his home.
Krishna and Radha on the cover.
The eternal lovers. Separated by circumstance and obligation and the particular cruelty of a universe that understands irony. Whose love is considered the highest form precisely because it transcended what was possible. Who loved completely across every obstacle without the conventional happy ending.
One night in March 2026 he stood before that calendar.
And he asked them to take it away.
Every memory. Every dream. Every trace of her in his system.
He told them he didn't want to be pulled back again. That the asymmetry was no longer bearable, him carrying eighteen years while she lived her life in Shanghai, oblivious perhaps, unburdened certainly, building something full and real and entirely her own.
He told them he was tired.
He was.
He asked for peace the only way that felt available, through removal. Through forgetting. Through the merciful erasure of something that had cost him more than he had ever planned to spend.
It was the most honest prayer he had ever made.
It was also, he understood later, not quite the prayer underneath the prayer.
Because the prayer underneath the prayer was older and quieter and had been running continuously for eighteen years without interruption.
Let her be happy.
Wherever she is.
Whatever her life looks like.
Let her be happy.
You cannot pray for someone's happiness and also pray to forget them.
The two prayers cannot coexist.
He knew this.
He chose the older one anyway.
What Was Lost in Singapore
He did not lose her because he wasn't enough.
He lost her because survival asked everything of him.
And love, real love, the kind that requires agency and freedom and the ability to show up fully cannot be sustained on what survival leaves behind.
Which is almost nothing.
The Singapore years forged him. He knows this now. The young man who came home in October 2009 carrying shame became, slowly and through considerable effort, someone he can look in the mirror and be at peace with. Someone who punched his way back. Who built something real from the rubble of a dream that didn't work out the way he planned.
He is proud of that young man.
He wishes he could tell him.
But he also knows something that pride cannot entirely soften.
That young man was present in Singapore at the same time as the most remarkable person his nervous system had ever recognised. Sandra.
And he was never free enough to find out what that recognition meant.
Not really.
Not fully.
The Global Financial Crisis took many things from many people.
Most of those things were material.
His was different.
His was a person.
A specific, irreplaceable person from Shanghai with the English name ‘Sandra’ which he still can't hear without feeling something he has no adequate word for.
That is what survival cost him.
Not a job.
Not a career.
Not money.
Her.
End of Catharsis. Possibly.
Author's Note
This blog was never meant to be written. The prayer that concludes it asked for these memories to be erased. But somewhere between the prayer and the page, the writer in him understood something the man in him couldn't. You cannot erase what shaped you. You can only find it a better home.