In most families, if a son works the night shift, everyone treats his daytime sleep like a national emergency. They tiptoe around the house, whisper instead of talking, and guard his bedroom door like it's holding a sleeping king.
My story, unfortunately, belongs to a different genre.
After dragging myself home from work, I still have to go for prayer. Only after that am I officially allowed to think about my bed. But wait — there's one final boss standing between me and sleep: Umaizha, my cat.
The second I step into my room, Umaizha demands a minimum two-hour playtime tax. Skip the session, and the tiny drama queen acts like I've personally ruined her entire life — sulking on the floor, ignoring her food, making sure I know exactly whose fault this is. Apparently, in this house, my sleep is optional, but my cat's emotional well-being is not.
After surviving all of that, I finally crawl into bed around 10:00 a.m., hoping to catch some real sleep. But just as I'm drifting off, my mom storms in.
"Wake up! Eat your breakfast first, then sleep!"
Seriously... what?
The second she wakes me, my sleep has already packed its bags and left the building. How am I supposed to fall back asleep right after eating? Somehow, after wrestling with my own brain, I manage to scrape together six to eight hours anyway. Calling it "sleep" is generous — it's more like negotiating a peace treaty with my own eyelids.
On the way to the office, I saw her again — the same girl, bargaining hard with some customer who clearly had no plans to pay her extra for the ride. Somewhere in my head, that voice — the one I'd started calling Kattapa — piped up: Why is it always her? Why does trouble follow this one girl around like a stray dog?
"Shut up," I told myself, before the thought could even finish. It was 5:55. I had four minutes to get to the office by six, and yet here I was, already walking toward her instead of away.
By the time I reached her, the customer had already spotted me coming and bolted — didn't even stick around to argue. Guess my face does the job even when I'm not trying: rugged, a little worn out, and a build that's less "muscle" and more "average guy who skipped the gym a few too many times." Whatever it was, it worked.
I walked up and asked straight out: "It's you, right? From that night. Why'd you run off? You just left the letter behind."
She said nothing. Just stood there. So I let it go too, and kept quiet myself.
That night, I'd never actually seen her face — not even her eyes clearly. But today, with the hijab framing them, her eyes looked guarded, careful, like a pearl still shut tight inside its oyster.
She started introducing herself, apologizing for what happened the night before. Her name was Mosina. I told her mine — Vidar Ahmed.
No time to think twice, I booked a bike taxi on the spot and got dropped at the office at exactly 6:00 PM. On the ride, she asked about the two men from that night — were they dead? Right around the same moment, the office TV was running the news: one man found dead, the other unconscious. Police had already closed it as a drunken fight between the two. The reporter said the dead man was a young drug dealer, wanted for years.
After the news ended, she looked at me and smiled — and something about it felt off, strange, like it didn't quite belong on her face. But all she said was that we'd personally taken down society's most wanted termite. I let it go, still talking to her, when Kumar, one of the day-shift guys from my office, walked up. "Bro, today's Saturday," he said.
Saturday. My off day. I'd completely forgotten.
That's the thing about night shifts — they don't just wreck your sleep, they wreck your sense of time itself. Days blur into each other until even something as basic as "what day is it" needs someone else to remind you.
Mosina laughed, just slightly. And that's when it hit me — it wasn't only her look that carried weight. Her voice had the same boldness in it. Not loud, not showy, just certain of itself. I was impressed, and I didn't try too hard to hide it.
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