Far from your stall, in a different corner of the same city, a poet named Isha runs a tiny bookstore that sells only second-hand books written by people who vanished from timelines that never came to be. It wasn't there before the Merge Masala.
She once drowned in a riot of silence — her words lost in a world where no one listened. But after your timeline merged, she found herself alive again... aware she'd lived another ending.
She writes now every morning and always leaves one seat at her poetry readings empty — for the version of herself that never got to speak.
She doesn't know your name, but one of her poems begins like this:
> Some girl brewed time near Marine Drive > And now the monsoon writes backwards.