You can call me Professor Malik, but if we're being honest, I'd rather you just call me Ishan." The man at the front of the lecture hall shrugged out of his black coat, draping it over the back of his chair with the casual ease of someone who had done this hundreds of times before. At six feet tall, he didn’t need the raised podium to command attention; his sharp eyes did that just fine, scanning the room like he was already memorising faces.
The morning light from the high windows caught the edges of his jawline as he leaned against the desk, one hand tapping absently against the folded newspaper he’d brought in. He hadn’t even glanced at it since entering. A few students exchanged glances,most professors didn’t start with disarming honesty, much less with a smile that suggested they might actually mean it.
The silence in the lecture hall thickened, the kind that usually followed a joke no one was sure they were allowed to laugh at. Ishan Malik let it linger for a heartbeat longer than comfortable before rolling up the sleeves of his crisp white shirt, revealing forearms dusted with faint scars,the kind left by years of fieldwork rather than accidents. "Oxford," he said, the word effortless, like he was mentioning a café down the street. "Though if you’re expecting tales of punting and pretentious debates over sherry, I’ll disappoint you." His mouth quirked. "Mostly I remember the rain. And the library fines."
A few students huffed quiet laughs, shoulders loosening. He didn’t sound like he was bragging, just stating facts,the way someone might say they’d grown up near a river or learned to cook from their grandpa. The overhead lights caught the silver threading through his black hair, though he couldn’t have been older than twenty-eight. It made him seem like he’d borrowed time from somewhere else.
The murmurs started like rustling paper,soft, scattered, then clustering near the back rows where a group of girls had tucked themselves between the lecture hall’s steeply tiered seats. Ishan Malik heard it, the way one hears the distant hum of a refrigerator: present, irrelevant, easy to tune out. He uncapped a marker with his teeth, the sound sharp in the quiet, and turned to the whiteboard. Behind him, the whispers curled around words like "those forearms" and "is he single?"
phrases he’d long since learned to let slide off him like rain off his old Oxford trench coat.
He wrote "Anthropology 302: Myth & Memory" in clean, slanting letters, the marker squeaking just enough to make a few students wince. The girls’ murmurs dipped, then resurged, this time with giggles threaded through. Ishan didn’t turn. Instead, he tapped the newspaper against his thigh, yesterday’s edition, dog-eared at the corners, and pretended to study the board as if he hadn’t written the same title every semester for three years. His reflection in the whiteboard’s glossy surface showed the girls leaning together, phones half-hidden in laps. He exhaled through his nose, amused. At twenty-eight, he was young enough to recognise the game, old enough not to play.
The lecture hall doors burst open with a clatter, startling the room into silence. Mariyam stood in the doorway, breathless, her curls escaping from a haphazard bun, cheeks flushed as she'd sprinted across campus. "I got it!" she announced, loud enough that the students in the back row jumped. "The Smithsonian internship—they just emailed!" Her voice ricocheted off the high ceilings, scattering the last remnants of the morning’s quiet tension.
For a heartbeat, the room held its breath. Mariyam’s eyes locked onto Ishan Malik’s, wide with triumph and something else, something unguarded, electric. Then she froze, as if suddenly realising where she was. The newspaper in Ishan’s hand stilled mid-tap. His expression didn’t change, but his shoulders straightened imperceptibly, the way a cat’s tail might twitch at a sudden noise. "Mariyam," he said, and the word was a soft blade, not unkind, but precise. "Behave yourself." A pause. Then, quieter: "Go have your seat."
The room exhaled. Mariyam’s grin didn’t falter, but her shoulders dropped an inch, the adrenaline of her news momentarily checked. She sidestepped down the aisle, murmuring apologies to the students whose toes she nearly crushed, her bag knocking against knees. Ishan watched her for half a second longer than necessary before turning back to the whiteboard, his grip on the newspaper tightening just enough to crease the edges. Behind him, the whispers reignited, this time with a new edge. "Did you see how she looked at him?" "They definitely know each other."
The overhead lights buzzed faintly as Deepa leaned in, her notebook held up like a shield. “Okay, spill,” she whispered, eyes darting to where Mariyam was still fumbling with her bag. “You definitely know him.”
Mariyam’s fingers froze on her zipper. “I don’t,” she said, too quickly. The lie tasted like the stale coffee she’d chugged before sprinting across campus.
Deepa snorted. “Bullshit. You looked at him like—” She waggled her eyebrows, the universal shorthand for unhinged longing.
Mariyam groaned, thunking her forehead against the desk. “Fine. I don’t know him. But I want to.” She peeked up, gaze skidding to the front where Ishan Malik was now drawing a timeline on the board, his sleeves rolled past his elbows. “Look at him. He’s like… a Victorian ghost who stepped out of a painting to teach anthropology.”
Deepa followed her stare. “So your type is ‘grad school Casanova’?”
“My type is ‘could ruin my life and I’d say thank you.’” Mariyam grinned, then dropped her voice to a whisper. “What’s his full name again?”
“Ishan Malik,” Deepa said slowly, eyes narrowing. “Why?”
Mariyam tapped her chin, lips quirking. “Mariyam Malik. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”
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