Tap…Tap…Tap…

My day started early, the way so many of my days do when work pulls me to Mumbai. The alarm went off in Kolkata while the sky was still dark. I woke groggy, half human, half spreadsheet, washed my face, pulled on my work clothes, and let routine take over. At the back of my mind sat the deal I had been trying to crack for months. March, with its annual appraisal gala, was not far off. I needed this one to land.

The car ride to the airport vanished in snatches. A streetlight. A dozing driver’s radio. The airport lounge was too bright for that hour, the breakfast forgettable. By the time I boarded the 6:05 am IndiGo flight, my mind was already in Lower Parel, already arguing with the client team. I read my notes. I underlined figures I had underlined before. I was meant to finish the work and fly back to Kolkata the same day.

Soon I was in a taxi cutting through Mumbai towards One Globe Centre. My meeting was at 1:30 pm, but I arrived early in deference to Mumbai traffic. I reached the building, sank into a sofa, and opened my phone to check mail for last minute notes. Music drifted from the café, soft and persistent. The elevators arrived, opened, swallowed groups, and closed again.

That was when I noticed the elderly woman crossing the lobby.

White shirt. Black skirt. Bags and packets looped over her arms. Hair cut into a neat bob. What made me notice first were her pencil heels. The sound cut through the lobby noise. I watched her cross the floor and found myself thinking, absurdly, don’t trip.

She passed my sofa with her head slightly down, concentrating on balance. The muscles in her jaw worked—neither grimace nor smile. Something about her was wrong in a way I could not name, and my mind reached for explanations. Illness. Grief. Age.

Then my phone rang. My boss.

His voice snapped me back into figures, slides, strategy. We ran through the points I needed to hammer home. I listened, took notes, reassured him I had it under control. Fifteen minutes later, the call ended. The lobby noise rushed back in, and when I lifted my eyes, she was still there… walking.

In front of my sofa, across the same patch of marble, over and over, as though the floor in that spot was a loop. Tap. Tap. Tap. I could have sworn the rhythm was familiar, almost like a tennis ball struck by racquets. The bags swung with each pass, never shifting, never slipping.

Her face was pale, drained. There was a mark on her forehead, like a fresh bruise. Her eyes were sunken, and when they landed on me, it felt as though she was not looking at my face, but through it. I watched for a moment, then looked away, embarrassed.

A group of girls walked towards the elevator, chattering and laughing. For a moment I expected one of them to bump into the woman. But there was no collision, no brush of fabric, no muttered sorry. One girl passed so close that, for an instant, my mind insisted her shoulder had gone right through the elderly woman’s arm.

I blinked hard. My stomach tightened.

I dropped my gaze to my phone and forced myself back into email. That was when the notifications began.

A soft chime. A banner at the top of the screen.

From: Miss L Brown

Subject: How are you?

Spam, I thought.

Another chime.

From: Miss L Brown

Subject: I miss you Tina

My mouth went dry. Tina was my childhood nickname. It did not appear on any official document. It did not exist on LinkedIn. It should not exist in a stranger’s subject line. My body reacted before my mind could argue—an old sting behind the eyes, as if someone had called me from far away.

The messages kept coming, one after another, the same chime, each one landing like a tap on the skull.

From: Miss L Brown

Subject: I am sorry

From: Miss L Brown

Subject: I looked for you

From: Miss L Brown

Subject: Please forgive me

From: Miss L Brown

Subject: I want to meet you

My pulse picked up. I told myself it was phishing. I hit delete. The inbox refreshed.

The messages were still there.

More arrived, faster, crowding the screen until the subject lines blurred. My thumb moved frantically, swiping, deleting. The phone warmed in my hand.

I looked up before I could stop myself. The elderly woman was no longer walking. She was standing still, facing me. No one else had paused. No one else was watching.

I remembered my meeting. I needed to go upstairs. I needed to get away from this lobby, this loop of marble, this woman looking at me.

When the elevator doors opened, I almost ran. I pressed the button for the 20th floor with a hand that had begun to shake. The elevator rose smoothly. The mirrored walls threw my face back at me: someone who had not slept. Someone who had imagined too much.

The 20th floor was bright, clean, normal. A receptionist led me to a meeting room. “They’ll be with you in ten minutes,” she said.

Ten minutes became twenty. Twenty became forty.

After an hour, irritation rose to join my anxiety. Pressure tactic? A deliberate move? The deal had been hard enough without theatre.

When Mr Iyengar finally arrived with his team, apologetic and slightly flushed, I forced my smile into place. He explained the delay: a remembrance ceremony for a colleague who had recently passed away.

I offered condolences and asked what had happened.

Mr Iyengar hesitated, then said the elderly secretary of their CEO—Lily Brown—had had an accident in the lobby the previous week. She had been on her way out, carrying a lot, wearing heels. One heel had caught, or slipped, and she had fallen hard. She hit her head. There had been blood. They had tried to get her to hospital, but she had died in the ambulance.

The room tilted slightly.

Mr Iyengar kept talking, filling silence. He said Lily’s last coherent words had been that she had sent an email to someone named Tina. Nobody knew who Tina was.

Impulsively, I opened Gmail and went straight to the junk folder. There were at least a hundred emails from Miss L Brown.

I tapped one. The screen loaded, spun, and displayed nothing at all. A blank white body, like a page ripped out of a notebook. For a second I felt relieved—see, nothing—until I noticed the cursor blinking in the empty space, as if the email expected me to type.

Then the error arrived, late and calm:

Google: the message cannot be displayed.

I tried another. The same. Another. The same.

The subject lines were there in full, stacked like demands.

How are you?

I miss you Tina

I am sorry

I looked for you

Please forgive me

I want to meet you

Then I noticed the dates. The emails had arrived today, but each one carried the date of the previous week.

I stared until the words blurred. It could be a technical failure. Server delays. Malware. Anything. Except this has never happened before. It chose this name, my nickname, this week.

I pushed my chair back. I told Mr Iyengar I was unwell. I mumbled something about rescheduling and walked out before anyone could respond. Behind my ribs, my heart had found the same rhythm as her heels: tap, tap, tap.

When the elevator doors opened, I stepped inside and pressed the button for the ground floor. The doors slid shut. I exhaled, relieved by the small box of privacy. Then the air changed.

A cold draft brushed the back of my neck. The temperature became uneven, cold in patches, like walking past an open freezer. I told myself I would be out in minutes. Daylight. A cab. The airport. Kolkata. Relief.

The elevator jerked. Not a normal stop. The lights flickered once, and the doors slid open with a soft sigh. She walked in. The elderly woman from the lobby—Miss Lily Brown—dead a week ago—who had emailed Tina.

Her shirt was now torn at the shoulder and stained dark. Her black skirt hung unevenly, as though ripped in the fall. The bags were gone. Her hands were empty. Her forehead bruise was fresh and swollen, the skin split. A thin line of blood had dried down her temple, and beneath the dried streak, a wet shine suggested it was starting again.

Her heels clicked once, twice, on the elevator’s metal floor. The sound settled inside my bones. The doors closed behind her.

Her voice, when it came, was low and rough, like a whisper forced through a damaged throat.

“Did you get my mail?”

The words were so ordinary my mind tried to find logic. A phishing attempt. A confused old woman. A misunderstanding.

“I… I can’t open it,” I managed, and my voice sounded far away.

“I am sorry, Tina,” she said.

The elevator began to descend.

“I don’t know you,” I whispered.

Her lips twitched. “You do,” she said.

The lights flickered again and this time they stayed dim.

“Say you forgive me.”

The words landed with a weight far heavier than they should have. Forgive me. The phrase did not belong to a stranger. It belonged to someone with a history with me.

“I don’t understand,” I blurted.

Her hand lifted. It moved slowly, as though wading through thick water, and reached towards me. When her fingers touched my shoulder, I flinched at the cold, but it felt as though she had put her hand on the part of me that held a long-forgotten memory.

The elevator shook violently. The lights went out. In the darkness, I could still feel her close, too close, her breath on my cheek like cold damp air.

“Tina,” she whispered, so softly I almost missed it.

My chest tightened. My heart hammered in an uneven rhythm that turned into pain.

“Tina,” she said again, pleading now. “Please.”

I slid down the wall, unable to keep standing. The floor met me with a hard shock.

But the hand on my shoulder did not feel like imagination.

“After our tennis match,” she whispered.

The lights flickered back on.

She was gone.

The elevator was empty except for me, crumpled on the floor, shaking hard. The doors opened.

The lobby lights flooded in, too bright, too normal.

I stumbled out and collapsed on the marble floor. People rushed towards me, voices overlapping, hands on my arms, asking what happened. Someone called security. Someone called for water. Someone said ambulance.

I could not explain myself.

At the

hospital, doctors called it panic attack. Stress. They told me to slow down. My husband brought me home from Mumbai. I tried to forget the episode.

But the memories did not fade.

Two weeks later, Mr Iyengar called. He told me to rest, and when I mentioned the deal, he brushed it aside. “Work can wait,” he said. “Just concentrate on your health for now.” It felt like he had more to say.

I asked what was it.

There was a pause. Then he asked if I remembered Lily.

My pulse leapt.

He said Lily had lived alone and had no known close relations. The office had cleared out her flat and donated her belongings. Among her things, they had found a box with photographs and letters.

One letter was addressed to someone called Tina. From it, Mr Iyengar gathered Tina had been a school friend from Lily’s childhood. They’d had one of those small fights after a school tennis match that hardened into permanence. Years later, Lily heard Tina was terminally ill. She had written to apologise.

But the letter had been returned unopened.

“Maybe Tina died before she received it,” Mr Iyengar said quietly. “Maybe she never knew Lily wanted to make peace.”

I pressed my fingers into my palm until it hurt.

I asked him why he was telling me this.

He inhaled, as if preparing to say something he did not quite believe.

“That is the strange part,” he said. “We found a photograph with the letter. Lily and Tina, school days. Taken after a tennis match. I do not know how to tell you this without sounding mad, but Tina looked exactly like a younger version of you.”

For a moment, I could not breathe.

The elevator. Her whisper. “After our match!”

I heard myself say, too sharply, that I was feeling unwell, and hung up. I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, as if that could make the world rearrange itself into something sensible.

Someone who died before I was probably born could not look exactly like me. It was impossible.

And yet impossibility had been standing in a lobby wearing pencil heels.

The story tried to assemble itself in my mind, piece by piece. Maybe I was Tina in an earlier life. Maybe the universe, in its quiet indifference, had allowed a quarrel between two friends to become permanent, then allowed death to arrive before forgiveness, and something in that unfinished moment had remained lodged in Lily like a splinter.

Maybe she had reached out to me, not to harm me, but to be seen, to be heard, to seek forgiveness one last time.

After weeks of turmoil, the thought brought me comfort at last.

“I accept your apology, Lily…we are friends again.” I said into the night’s stillness.

Somewhere beyond my bedroom door, I heard the faintest sound again.

Click.