This is a small book about a large thing.

It is about a girl who wanted to cook the whole world, and a quiet man who baked bread in the snow, and a place in the mountains that may or may not have been there at all. It is about five summers that may have been only fifteen minutes. It is about the kind of love that does not need a lifetime to be whole.

I wanted to write a love story that was quiet. We are used to love that shouts  love that runs through airports, that says everything out loud. I wanted to write the other kind. The kind that lives in small things. A cup kept washed. An old song left playing. Bread pulled warm from the oven before the world wakes up. I have always believed that the deepest things are the ones we do not say, and that a story can hold a person the way a warm room holds out the cold  gently, and without explaining itself.

This book asks a question and does not answer it. I want to say that clearly, here at the start, so that no reader feels cheated at the end. What happened to Sushi on that mountain is never explained. I tried, many times, to explain it. Every time, the story grew smaller. So I stopped. Some things are truer when they are left open. A memory does not come with proof. Love does not come with proof. We carry them anyway.

I wrote it in simple words on purpose. I did not want clever sentences standing between the reader and the feeling. I wanted the language to be like good bread  plain, warm, and easy to take in, with something underneath that stays with you long after the meal is over.

If you have ever loved someone you could not keep, or lost a place you could not return to, or stood at a window in the snow and felt sure, for one moment, that the past was looking back at you  then this book already belongs to you. I only wrote it down.

Read it slowly. It is a slow book. It is meant to be.

Deepak Singh Bhati