Chapter Text
Abhay
June in Amritsar had a way of slowing everything down. By afternoon the heat sat heavy on the city, the fan whirring lazily above the dining table while Abhishek scrolled through his phone, pretending he wasn’t checking for anything specific.
IPL had ended weeks ago, and so had the noise around it. The celebrations, the criticism, the post-match analysis, all of it had dissolved into the background. His team’s early exit had left a dull sting, but it wasn’t something he carried with shame. They’d been touted as a powerhouse, a guaranteed qualifier, yet cricket had its own sense of humour, sometimes brutal, sometimes humbling.
But even with the disappointment, the world hadn’t forgotten him. His 141, the highest ever by an Indian he had made sure of that. June became a parade of ad shoots: morning call times, lights in his eyes, people touching up his face every five minutes, directors asking for “just one more shot” even when he’d done twenty. He didn’t mind it; the money was good, the brands bigger than anything he’d imagined two years ago, and he could feel the shift in how people looked at him when he entered a room.He’d earned that.
But a strange restlessness followed him everywhere to the sets, to his bedroom, to the balcony where he usually sat with his evening chai.
It wasn’t burnout.
It wasn’t boredom.
It was something else.
Someone else.
He shook the thought away and focused on the notification glowing on his screen.
A reminder from his manager: Kapil Sharma Show shoot, Tomorrow 8 PM. Don’t be late for your flight this evening from Amritsar to Mumbai.
A smile tugged at his lips despite the heat. The show was his childhood comfort, the thing he watched after school, the thing he quoted endlessly with friends. He still remembered sitting in his living room at age twelve, watching international cricketers sit on that same stage, laughing like kids. He had imagined himself there one day. He just hadn’t expected it to happen this soon. And especially not with them. Rishabh bhai, Yuzi bhai. And Coach, Gambhir sir. The one man he genuinely feared, even when the mood was light. They were big people, had careers spanning years, and he was a mere newbie who had two seasons of luck on his side in the IPL, and some fortunate runs in his one-year-old T20I career, which had already shown its ups and downs.
He’d practiced smiling in the mirror, just to make sure he didn’t look terrified. But it wasn’t the show that had made his stomach twist that day. It was the news he read an hour before leaving for Mumbai.
He had opened Twitter casually.
He had blinked twice.
He had re-read the headline.
SHUBMAN GILL ANNOUNCED AS INDIA’S NEW TEST CAPTAIN
His phone had slipped from his hand, bounced on the bed, and landed face-down.
It wasn’t that he was shocked, Shubman had been the golden boy of Indian cricket for years now. Talent, temperament, discipline. It made perfect sense.
But hearing it like everyone else, through a tweet, stung in a place he didn’t like acknowledging.
He wasn’t stupid.
He knew why things were the way they were.
Shubman had been in the national team nonstop since 2019/20, hopping formats like they were stepping stones. Abhishek’s career was taking baby steps from domestic matches, IPL, brief sparks of spotlight, but nothing consistent. Their paths had drifted the way rivers did, silently, naturally, without malice. How could he ever have malice for him? How stupid to even think of it.
From 2022 onwards, they mostly saw each other at the IPL. Training sessions together were rare.
Calls rarer.
Texts? Oh yes, once-in-a-month kind. Sporadic, polite, affectionate, but not what they used to be.
And woven quietly between those years was something else too, Shubman and Ishan. A friendship everyone in the cricket world knew about, fans loved them together, they were loud, easy, effortless. He didn’t begrudge it. Nah, he used to be happy seeing him happy even if it wasn’t him anymore. It was only that… he didn’t know where he fit anymore.
He closed Twitter that day, got into the car for the show taping, and tried to smile through the knot in his chest. He had smiled, actually. Laughed even. Kapil Sharma had made sure of that.
But the moment the cameras stopped and the evening wound down, he found himself scrolling again, re-reading the announcement, re-reading the comments praising Shubman’s leadership, his maturity, his destiny. Not all were praises though , he knew there was a barrage of trolls who were after him, thinking he was taking their favourite’s place as captain.
Ignoring all negativity, quietly he had whispered a small, simple truth to himself:
“I should be happier than this. It’s my friend of 14 years who’s been made the captain of the biggest cricketing nation. It was his childhood dream, the one he saw while playing those Under-14, Under-16 matches and then the Under-19 World Cup.”
But emotions rarely listened to logic. He did feel a lot of happiness for Shubman, but still, a part of him felt empty.
For a couple of hours, Abhishek forgot the knot in his chest. But when he returned to the hotel and the makeup was washed off, the silence of the room pressed in around him. His thoughts went straight back to the headline. To Shubman.
He stared at his phone for a long moment before giving in and pressing the call button. A stupid part of him hoped Shubman would pick up, even for a second, even just to say, “I know, I was going to tell you.”
But the call rang out.
No answer.
He swallowed, thumb hovering for a few seconds before he finally typed:
“Congratulations, Kaptaan saab. Proud of you. All the best for England.”
He stared at the screen for a long time before hitting send. He had deleted the words “proud of you” twice, convinced they sounded too personal, too revealing, too much like the way he felt. But both times, his thumb hovered, hesitated… and restored them. Some truths refused to stay deleted.
The message delivered instantly.
No reply.
He exhaled slowly and placed the phone face-down on the bedside table, convincing himself he knew exactly why.
He must be getting hundreds of those messages, he told himself. How many can he even reply to? It’s fine. It doesn’t matter. It’s not a big deal.
But it was.
More than he wished it was.
More than he wanted to admit to himself in a hotel room still echoing with laughter from two hours ago.
He tried to distract himself, showered, ordered room service, even scrolled through a script for an ad shoot the next morning but his mind kept circling back to that one unread message. A small, stupid part of him kept checking the phone, pretending he wasn’t.
Hours passed.
Then a night.
Then another.
By the time the reply finally came two days later, arriving as casually as a weather update he was sitting with his family in the living room.
“Tnx Abhay”
Two words.
Short. Warm enough. Polite.
But distant in a way that made something inside him tighten.
He stared at the screen longer than necessary, the room buzzing faintly around him, his sister laughing at something on TV, his mother calling him for dinner. He locked the phone and forced a smile. At least he replied. At least that was something.
He didn’t know why that small consolation hurt more than the silence itself.
July drifted in like a sigh. More ad shoots. More days at home. More evenings with his parents, his sister teasing him about his newfound fame, neighbours dropping by with sweets because “beta news vich aaya si.”
He played along, smiled, posed for photos when asked.
And every night, without meaning to, he checked if Shubman had posted anything.
A story.
A reel.
A picture from England camp.
Just something.
Nothing personal.
Nothing directed at him.
Just something.
He told himself it wasn’t longing.
Just curiosity.
But even that felt like a lie.
By mid-July, the silence between them felt familiar.
Comfortable in the wrong way.
Like two people standing on opposite ends of a bridge, waiting for the other to take the first step.
And Abhishek… he wasn’t sure if he still remembered how to.