NOT YET
A Queer Psychological Horror
A short story of grief, obligation,
possession, and the ghosts we refuse to
let go.
“Some promises do not die.
They learn new ways to collect.”
NOT YET
A QUEER PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
2
Kabir Anand loved by remembering.
Two years with Arjun had taught him the shape of every
need before it was spoken. He knew the exact coffee
order, the tablets that unsettled Arjun’s stomach, the
excuses he used when his mother asked why he was late.
He remembered forgotten bills, repaired cracked screens,
waited outside recording studios after midnight, and
crossed half the city through monsoon rain whenever
Arjun called.
At first, Arjun mistook that attention for safety.
Over time, it began to feel like debt.
Every favour left behind an invisible thread, and Kabir
never seemed to let go of the spool. Even kindness had
weight when it was remembered forever.
Their relationship ended one rainy night inside Kabir’s
parked car outside a bakery in Mahim. Arjun had spent
weeks searching for gentler words, but eventually used
the only one that felt true.
He felt suffocated.
Kabir listened without interrupting. His hurt appeared less
like anger than disbelief, as though Arjun were trying to
resign from an arrangement neither of them had agreed
could end.
Before Arjun left, Kabir told him that walking away also
meant giving up the right to call whenever life became
difficult.
NOT YET
A QUEER PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
3
Arjun agreed.
The promise lasted less than two weeks.
A pipe burst in his kitchen. Then came an overdue tax
notice. Later, a dying stray cat appeared in the stairwell.
Kabir came every time.
Their friends praised the maturity of their friendship after
the breakup. Arjun understood it differently. Kabir had
become easier to accept when Arjun no longer had to call
the arrangement love.
Then Nikhil entered his life.
Nikhil was a history lecturer who spoke quietly and
accepted boundaries without treating them as
negotiations. With him, Arjun discovered how unfamiliar it
felt to say no and have the word remain intact.
He kept the relationship hidden from Kabir.
He told himself it was an act of kindness. In truth, secrecy
allowed him to continue taking Kabir’s help without
confronting what that help still meant.
The truth surfaced through a photograph.
Kabir was crossing the city on his motorcycle when an
image appeared on his phone. Nikhil’s hand rested over
Arjun’s across a rooftop table. Nothing about the picture
was dramatic, which perhaps made it worse. It looked
ordinary. Comfortable. Permanent enough to hurt.
NOT YET
A QUEER PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
4
Kabir called.
Arjun watched the screen ring until it went dark.
Then he sent an apology and asked him not to make a
scene.
Kabir read the message while waiting near the Jogeshwari
flyover.
A horn sounded behind him.
He lowered his eyes toward the screen for a second.
A second was enough.
◆
At the crematorium, most people referred to Arjun as
Kabir’s close friend.
Only Kabir’s sister, Rhea, seemed to understand how
inadequate the description was.
Three nights after the funeral, Arjun woke at 2:13 in the
morning.
An old phone was glowing on the kitchen counter.
It had no SIM card. Its battery had been dead for months.
Kabir’s name appeared on the screen.
Before Arjun could move, the phone began playing a voice
recording.
NOT YET
A QUEER PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
5
Rain. Traffic. The dull pulse of a city at night.
Then Kabir’s voice.
It reminded Arjun of the sentence he had heard hundreds
of times while Kabir was alive: ask me for anything; you
know I can never say no to you.
The recording stopped.
The phone went dark.
After that, small problems began solving themselves.
When Arjun complained about a dripping tap, the entire
building lost water, while the drops in his own sink
appeared to climb backward into the faucet.
When he cursed the neighbours upstairs for making noise,
they woke to find their own furniture pressed against the
front door from inside.
When Arjun mentioned missing the studio microphone
Kabir had once given him, someone knocked at the
apartment.
The microphone case lay outside.
Wrapped around it was Kabir’s riding jacket.
The same jacket that should have been sealed in police
evidence.
Arjun and Nikhil left immediately.
At Nikhil’s apartment, the buzzer sounded at exactly 2:13.
NOT YET
A QUEER PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
6
The intercom screen flickered.
Kabir stood outside in his torn jacket, rain passing through
his shoulders.
Minutes later, steam gathered across the bathroom
mirror.
Invisible fingers wrote two words into the glass:
YOU CALLED.
From then on, the presence followed a pattern.
It became gentle whenever Arjun slipped back into the
habits of their old relationship. The moment he tried to
pull away, the apartment turned hostile.
Mirrors cracked. Doors slammed. Rooms filled with the
smell of petrol and wet earth.
The dead, Arjun began to understand, were sometimes no
different from the living. They too could confuse devotion
with permission.
Nikhil eventually refused to become part of the
arrangement.
His withdrawal left Arjun alone with something he had
spent months refusing to name.
Kabir had not returned because he hated him.
He had returned because some part of their relationship
had never learned how to end.
NOT YET
A QUEER PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
7
◆
One evening, Arjun entered his kitchen and found Kabir
sitting at the table.
For the first few seconds, he looked almost alive.
The familiar green shirt was damp from rain. His posture
was relaxed. Only when he turned slightly did the ruined
side of his temple become visible.
A plate of food waited across from him.
Kabir began recounting everything he had done for Arjun.
The deposits. The repairs. The late-night journeys. The
favours remembered long after Arjun himself had
forgotten them.
The list contained no accusations. That made it worse.
Kabir spoke as though his devotion were evidence in a
case whose verdict should have been obvious.
Arjun finally understood what had frightened him even
before the breakup.
Kabir had rarely demanded repayment directly.
He had demanded something harder to refuse.
Continuity.
The right to remain necessary.
NOT YET
A QUEER PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
8
When Arjun admitted that Kabir’s endless giving had
become a form of control, the kitchen reacted before Kabir
did.
Plates rose from the shelves. Glass trembled. Then
everything crashed to the floor at once.
Kabir disappeared.
◆
The following morning, Arjun visited Rhea.
She gave him a page torn from Kabir’s therapy journal.
Most of the writing was ordinary: unfinished thoughts,
anger, guilt, lists of things he wanted to change.
One sentence had been pressed so deeply into the paper
that the pen had nearly torn through it.
Being needed was the only time Kabir felt real.
Below it, in darker ink, he had written that he needed to
stop running every time Arjun called.
The entry was dated three days before the accident.
For the first time since Kabir’s death, Arjun felt something
other than fear.
Kabir had known.
Some part of him had already recognised the prison he
had built around both of them.
NOT YET
A QUEER PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
9
He had simply run out of time before learning how to leave
it.
◆
That evening, Arjun returned home alone.
Every gift Kabir had ever given him had been arranged
across the floor in a perfect circle.
The headphones. The watch. The microphone. The desk
chair. The spare apartment key.
At the centre lay Kabir’s cracked motorcycle helmet.
Kabir stood behind it.
The room smelled of rain and burnt petrol.
Arjun no longer tried to escape.
He admitted what he had avoided admitting even to
himself: he had used Kabir too. He had accepted the help
because it was convenient, even after knowing that every
favour kept hope alive.
He had allowed Kabir to remain necessary because
necessity was easier than honesty.
The walls groaned around them.
What remained of Kabir wanted only one thing.
Proof that all the giving had meant ownership.
NOT YET
A QUEER PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
10
Arjun could have lied.
A single sentence might have quietened the apartment.
Instead, he placed the spare key beside the helmet.
He acknowledged that he had loved Kabir.
He also acknowledged that love did not give either of them
the right to possess the other.
For several seconds, nothing happened.
Then the damaged face softened.
Kabir looked as he had before the accident: tired,
ordinary, wearing the faded green shirt Arjun
remembered from countless evenings together.
For the first time since returning, he looked less like a
ghost than a man who had been interrupted halfway
through becoming better.
He had been trying to stop.
Arjun knew.
The lights shattered.
Somewhere beneath the floor, the sound of a motorcycle
engine screamed through the apartment and suddenly
died.
The dead phone flashed once.
Then everything went silent.
NOT YET
A QUEER PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
11
◆
The haunting ended.
Grief did not.
Arjun spent the following months learning the difference.
He apologised to Rhea without expecting forgiveness. He
gave away the recording equipment Kabir had bought him.
He stopped preserving objects merely because guilt had
made them sacred.
Nikhil eventually returned to his life, cautiously.
Nothing resumed where it had left off.
That, Arjun slowly realised, was the point.
Months later, during another Mumbai monsoon, he was
travelling past Jogeshwari in a taxi.
Rain blurred the traffic lights across the rear window.
When Arjun looked into the mirror, Kabir was sitting in the
back seat.
There was no blood. No broken skin. No ruined jacket.
Only the faded green shirt.
Kabir looked toward the road rather than at him.
Arjun did not turn around.
He did not ask him to stay.
NOT YET
A QUEER PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
12
At the next red light, Kabir stepped from the taxi and
walked into the rain.
He disappeared into the crowd without looking back.
When Arjun checked the mirror again, the seat was empty.
For once, the absence did not feel like abandonment.
It felt like peace.
END