In the bustling city of Mumbai, Vihaan Malhotra, a charismatic rockstar known for his soulful music and rebellious spirit, captivates audiences with his performances.
Meanwhile, in the serene landscapes of Jaipur, Dr. Arpita Virani, a compassionate...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Vihaan's Tour Life – Somewhere in Europe
The lounge lights flickered in a lazy rhythm as the bus hummed down some anonymous highway, city lights blurring like watercolor through tinted windows. My bandmates had long gone to bed or buried themselves in noise-canceling headphones. The world around me moved on autopilot—venues, setlists, encore requests. But I sat on the cracked leather couch near the back of the bus, hunched over my guitar, fingers moving over the strings without sound.
I wasn't playing. I was remembering.
The crowd tonight had been electric. A sold-out arena in Barcelona—tens of thousands of voices chanting my name in perfect harmony. There were signs with my lyrics, hands reaching out like I was something holy. A girl in the front row wept during Echoes of Silence, mouthing every word as if it were written from her soul.
They called me a healer. A savior.
But when I left the stage and the adrenaline drained from my veins, I wasn't anything close to that.
I was just... empty.
The applause rang in my ears, but it couldn't drown out the quiet inside me. That strange, aching kind of quiet—the kind that used to be filled by Arpita's laugh echoing from the other side of a phone, or her sleepy voice reading the names off a research paper just to see if I was still listening.
"The stage lights are bright," I admitted to myself, watching the strings under my fingertips tremble, "but they can't fill the void Arpita left behind."
So I did the only thing I knew how to do when I couldn't breathe.
I wrote.
Every lyric, every chord progression bled out of me like confessionals I couldn't say aloud. I wrote until my fingers blistered and my voice cracked. I turned pain into poetry. I carved her name into melodies, into bridges and verses, hoping that if I played it loud enough, the distance might shrink.
The album "Echoes of Silence" became a sensation. Critics called it "raw," "visceral," "unapologetically vulnerable." Fans said it sounded like heartbreak translated into music. They told me I'd saved them. That I understood them in ways no one else did.
But they didn't know that the songs weren't written for them.
They were written because of her.
Because I didn't know how to mourn a woman who was still alive. A woman who had once held my hand under Jaipur stars and whispered, "We'll figure this out."
What they heard as art, I heard as loss.
And when the lights dimmed after every performance, when the cameras stopped clicking and the hotel room doors shut behind me, the loneliness crept back in. The kind that had her outline but none of her warmth.
