Omkar had pored over various articles online about the things that homeless people need. He had searched the landscape of his conscience for an argument against taking items from the family shop and giving them to the girl he was in love with, but in the end, he couldn’t find one that was good enough. During his next shift, he collected the items in a little plastic bag and waited until he could find a perfect time to drive back to the car lot, hoping that she would still be there. Omkar had never intended to walk up to her and give her the items. He knew she would probably be embarrassed. He had always planned to put them somewhere for her to find.

Sneaking into the car lot made him nervous. To him, the people who occupied these kinds of places seemed like animals. He was afraid of them. But he pushed through the fear, willing to take the risk that one of them might attack if they saw him. He had watched the lot for long enough to see that the girl wasn’t there. He lined up the items on the car that he had seen her get into, and ran back the same way he had come.

Omkar knew there was a risk that one of the other people living in the lot might take them. But he justified the risk by telling himself that even if they did, it was because they needed it. He crouched behind the trees for so long he was almost ready to leave before he saw her walking down the road with two men beside her. He watched her tell them to wait and walk over to the car. He watched her look around and stuff the items he had placed there into her backpack. It reminded him of scenes he had seen in nature documentaries on television – those scenes where a wild animal finally takes the food that someone is offering, and the relief of knowing that the animal might then be OK.

As he watched her, it occurred to Omkar that a man could stab a girl without making her bleed. He could break her heart without hearing it shatter. It was clear to him that she had been both stabbed and shattered, but that the affliction had not weathered the lily of her face. Unlike those men, he both saw and heard that pain.

The assault of the worry that he felt for her was pacified by her immediate acceptance of the things that he had given her. To be a man, taking care of a woman, even to this small degree that she would currently let him, made him feel a strength that until this point had been unknown to him. He felt that strength spill through his muscles. He felt it fortify his spine.