Aadhya woke up in a trice, to the sound of breathing.
Not her own. Not anyone’s around her. Not human.
A blurry vision. Movement above. She reached for her spectacles.
The ceiling was gently rising and falling, like the chest of one in deep sleep. Its surface bore hairline cracks like wrinkles. When she reached out to touch it, it felt warm.
It felt alive.
She sat up slowly. The room was familiar in size but strange in temperament. The walls were curved, soft at the edges, and they groaned faintly, as if stretching after a long nap.
Wary but curious, she stood up nonetheless.
A chill ran through her.
The floor pulsed. Not stone or tile, but a surface pulsing like skin. Something vast, breathing below. She blinked, the morning light bending and folding through the walls surrounding her.
She stepped outside.
It wasn’t like any street she’d known. No honking. No symmetry. No sharp corners.
The buildings here were… human.
Some leaned toward each other, whispering in rustling leaves and cracked tiles. Others slumped in solitude, vines covering their sunken frames. Some looked young, surfaces taut and doors confident. Others were old, chipped, slow but dignified.
The entire city looked like it had lived many lives and acknowledged them all.
It didn’t rise in steel and glass. It stretched in all directions, undulating like a forest. Buildings leaned into each other like old friends. Some slouched under the weight of memory. Others lifted themselves joyfully, vines climbing their ribs.
Nothing here was new. Everything was becoming.
Aadhya wandered, her senses spinning. She walked for what seemed like hours, stunned by what she was witnessing. The structures murmured and shifted subtly as she passed. They weren’t static. They were responding.
Buildings weren’t decaying. They were aging.
Windows drooped like eyelids. Balconies sagged like tired shoulders. Facades laughed in cracked mosaics. Some structures stood tall in their youth, still experimenting with colors and materials, like teenagers discovering style.
Aadhya was an architect, or at least, she used to be one. Nothing in her practice had prepared her for this.
She had designed skyscrapers meant to last ‘forever’, always under pressure to make things bigger, sleeker and stronger.
This place though, had no obsession with eternity.
Here, buildings didn’t resist change. They welcomed it. They aged without shame.
Permanence seemed like a myth.
She turned an edge and saw a structure folding gently into the ground, its columns softening, walls thinning into air and materials returning to soil. Flowers grew from its rooftop as it disappeared, not with ferocity, but with grace.
“Is it... dying?” she mumbled.
A voice answered behind her. “It’s retiring.”
She turned to see an older woman, eyes kind, clothes simple, hands stained with what looked like clay and moss.
“I’m sorry. I…who are…. WHERE AM I?”
The woman smiled. “A place where buildings choose how long they want to live. A place where we listen.”
“And you are…?”
“A caretaker.”
After a pause, she continued “We don’t build here. We tend. We cohabit. We heal.”
“But what if a structure breaks?”
“We don’t fix it. We ask. We listen. Sometimes a wall wants to lean. Sometimes a roof wants to rest.”
Aadhya felt something shift inside her.
She had spent her life commanding form, drawing control. In her world, design was something you imposed. But here? Here, it was something you heard.
She walked with the woman through a garden that once used to be a school. The tiled chalkboards still whispered lessons in the wind. A banyan tree had grown through an old classroom, its roots hugging the remnants of learning.
Aadhya turned.
“What do I do here? Why have I woken up in this place?”
The woman smiled, a twinkle in her eye. “You tell me.”
That night, Aadhya couldn’t sleep. She lay beneath a ceiling that sighed again, this time, knowingly. For once, she had no urge to redesign it.
The next morning, she began again.
She found a house on the city’s edge. A shy, crooked structure with a rusted tin roof and walls that gently trembled in the breeze.
It didn’t open its doors to her.
So, she sat outside. Every day. With sheets and ink. For a week.
She hummed as she drew, not blueprints, not details but portraits. She sketched how the house slouched. How the balcony lowered its gaze when people walked by.
She realized it didn’t want to be seen. It wanted quiet. It wanted moss. It wanted shade.
So she gave it a garden.
She planted around it, weaving softness into its sightline. She placed stones that absorbed heat so the house could stay cool. She didn’t add anything. She didn’t impose anything. She was responding.
Days passed.
One morning, the door creaked open.
A welcome.
At that moment, Aadhya understood what she was meant to do.
She became a listener of structures. She wandered the city, feeling surfaces with her palms, watching how shadows behaved, how walls tilted to listen to trees. She helped homes retire, helped others be reborn. She stopped designing for permanence and began caring for presence.
She recorded in her journal:
“Today, a window wanted to face the wind again. So I helped it turn.”
“A temple remembered a song. I hummed it back to life.”
“I no longer build structures. I help them remember who they are.”
Years passed. Or maybe none did. Time here was like plaster mixed without a ruler.
One evening, she stood before a tall structure. It seemed familiar yet foreign.
It had sharp corners. A glass face. Steel bones.
It didn’t breathe.
It was hers. A building she had once designed.
Somehow, it had followed her here.
She walked up to it. Touching the cold surface. Whispered, "Are you tired?"
For a moment, nothing.
Then, a crack. Not from weakness, from willingness.
Aadhya smiled.
She knew where to sketch portraits the next morning.
React
