The morning sun kissed the city awake as the old man lit his first cigarette of the day. He sat on the cracked stone bench just outside the iconic Deccan Herald office on MG Road, Bengaluru. His wrinkled hands, sturdy and scarred with time, held the folded newspaper like a relic—a habit passed down through decades of dawns and deadlines.

The smoke curled around him like a ghost of forgotten tales, swirling and mingling with the faint scent of ink and newsprint. Each puff seemed to carry a memory—of the days when headlines were hand-set and when this road bore tram tracks instead of honking chaos.

He wasn’t just reading the news. He was living it, reliving it. Every column was a portal to stories he once wrote, heard, or witnessed. A retired journalist, they said. Or maybe a poet who had lost his rhyme. The truth was no one really knew, and he never told.

But if you lingered long enough, you’d notice the faint smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. A smirk not at the absurdity of politics or the state of the world, but at the irony of life itself—that while he once shaped the narratives others read, today he found solace in stories written by strangers.

The smoke danced in the golden morning light, framing his face like a timeless portrait. It wasn’t just a man smoking and reading a newspaper; it was Bengaluru breathing its stories through him—a living archive of a city that had changed but somehow stayed the same.