Soma Sen
Chapter 1: The Ink That Blurs
Souvik Khurana hated the sound of pens scratching against paper. To most people, it was nothing more than a background noise—a classroom lullaby of sorts—but to him, it was a cruel reminder of how far behind he always was. The letters on the page swam before his eyes, shifting, twisting, smudging themselves into shapes that looked like words but refused to be read. The old classroom in North Campus smelled of musty books, spilled coffee, and ambition. Dust danced in the afternoon light pouring in through the broken blinds of the Arts Faculty building. Souvik sat in the last row, sketchbook open, pen uncapped, head lowered—not in surrender, but in stubborn rebellion. Words failed him, but lines and curves didn’t. While the rest of the students jotted down the day’s writing prompt, he drew a boy sitting under a streetlamp, writing poems into the void. This wasn’t supposed to be part of his coursework. Creative Writing was an optional workshop, one he hadn’t wanted but needed for his credit tally. It wasn’t even listed under his core modules—just a “recommended” elective. But somehow, here he was, in a room of overly enthusiastic writers, sitting across from a girl who was already halfway through her second poem on the word “cinder.” Her name—Meher Arora—was printed neatly in black ink on her journal. Her bangles clinked every time she moved her hand, and her sentences—when she read them aloud—sounded like monsoon songs dipped in metaphors. Souvik didn’t know how to deal with people who were fluent in metaphor. He thought in pictures, not poetry. She, it seemed, could turn silence into syllables. And that both intrigued and unnerved him.
Meher had noticed him the moment he walked in—quiet, lanky, tired-eyed, with an old canvas bag and a notebook filled not with words but with worlds. She didn’t know his name yet, but his art caught her before his voice ever could. She’d seen him sketch an entire corridor of Miranda House in three minutes flat while the instructor spoke about the difference between narrative and exposition. Most people in the class spoke too much, wrote too little. Souvik didn’t speak at all. It fascinated her. In her world of literary excess, he was economy. Crisp. Still. And that silence made her itch. When the instructor, Tashi Dey—a non-binary poet with a flair for drama and a nose ring that glinted under tube lights—announced that students would be paired for a semester-long collaborative writing project, Meher had hoped for someone bold, experimental, quirky. Not a boy who hadn’t spoken a single word since the workshop began. Naturally, fate had other plans. “Meher Arora and Souvik Khurana,” Tashi announced with theatrical pause, and Meher groaned inwardly. He didn’t react. No eye contact. No smile. Nothing. He simply nodded once and resumed drawing a pair of scissors cutting through clouds. She approached him after class, notebook in hand, unsure whether to say something literary or casual. “Hi,” she said finally, “I’m Meher. Looks like we’re story partners now.” Souvik looked up, blinked twice, and said, “Okay.” That was it. No flourish, no polite curiosity. Just okay. The girl who lived in similes had just met the boy who edited emotions with silence.
That first week of partnership was an exercise in miscommunication. She sent him voice notes filled with ideas—stories about love letters lost in libraries, dream sequences involving trains to nowhere, and characters who spoke in borrowed dialogues. He sent back sketches. No words, no context—just scenes drawn in charcoal and pen. One picture showed a paper boat floating in a cracked teacup. Another had a boy standing before a bookshelf where the books were windows, each revealing a different sky. Meher was frustrated but intrigued. What was she supposed to do with images? Write over them? Around them? Or just feel them? On Thursday, after their third awkward meeting at the café outside campus, she finally asked, “Why don’t you write back?” He shrugged. “Words get stuck,” he said. That was the longest sentence he had spoken so far. She stared at him, eyes softening. “Maybe I can unstick them.” That made him look up, the corner of his mouth twitching into what might have been the beginning of a smile. They sat in silence, their tea going cold. The world bustled outside—auto horns, protesting students, lovers arguing under neem trees—but inside that small moment, something shifted. Not quite a friendship, not quite trust—but the earliest, quietest version of both. Somewhere between her metaphors and his sketches, a story had already begun.
Chapter 2: Butterflies in the Margins
By the second week, the strangeness between them had softened into a kind of rhythm—tentative, unspoken, but undeniably there. Meher would speak; Souvik would listen. Meher would ramble about possible themes for their story—fading childhoods, unspoken griefs, or lovers trapped in separate timelines—and Souvik would quietly nod, occasionally scribbling or sketching while she spoke, his pencil gliding across paper like he was tracing emotion itself. He rarely interrupted, never contradicted, and almost always handed her something unexpected at the end—a drawing, a phrase written in jagged capital letters, or once, just a scribble of blue that looked like a sky in mourning. Meher found herself leaning into his quietude. In a campus filled with people who vied for attention, Souvik made stillness feel like a rare language, something almost holy. She didn’t understand all of him yet—but she no longer felt the need to. Her writing began to shift, too. Sentences grew leaner. Similes surrendered. The girl who once compared heartbreak to thunderstorms now found poetry in ellipses and unfinished lines. Souvik, in turn, began to listen to her with less tension. He still didn’t write much, but he began bringing drawings that matched her metaphors—a house with doors that never opened, a train with no driver, a moth circling a flame shaped like a typewriter. It was as if he’d begun to read her, not through words, but through energy. Through mood. Through quiet.
One afternoon, their workshop session got canceled, and Meher, on a whim, asked Souvik if he wanted to walk. He surprised her by saying yes. They walked through Kamla Nagar as the October sun slanted like old gold against the redbrick buildings. They stopped by a secondhand bookstore, where Meher ran her fingers along the cracked spines of forgotten paperbacks. “This is my idea of heaven,” she said. Souvik gave her a look and muttered, “Too many words.” She laughed, and for the first time, he did too—a short, surprised laugh like a song he didn’t expect to know the tune of. They bought chai from a roadside stall, sat on a low boundary wall, and talked—or rather, she talked while he occasionally nodded or smiled in half-agreements. She told him about her mother, Professor Madhavi Arora, who thought creative writing was just a hobby for people who couldn’t make it in academia. She shared how even her best lines were often met with cold silence at home, how her journals were read more by her friends than her own family. Souvik, in return, told her about his father’s business in Lajpat Nagar, his older brother Veer who lived in Singapore and set the golden benchmark for everything from GPA to bank balance. He didn’t go into details, but Meher didn’t need them. She could tell. The disappointment in his voice was not anger—it was inheritance. A weight passed down. “They think I’m wasting time drawing things that don’t exist,” he said. “But those are the only things that feel real to me.” Meher looked at him then, truly looked, and said, “That’s because the invisible things last longer.”
By the time they returned to campus, the lights had come on across the lawns, and the jamun trees cast long shadows on the pavement. Something about that walk lingered—like a page half-turned, like a word almost remembered. Over the next few days, their collaborative story began to take shape. It wasn’t linear. It wasn’t even conventional. But it was theirs. They decided to work on a story about two strangers who communicated only through found objects and scribbled messages left in books at a forgotten library. He would illustrate; she would narrate. The plot didn’t matter as much as the feeling—of reaching out, of being seen, of not being fluent in the world’s language and yet finding a way to speak. As they pieced it together, their own lives slowly began to echo the tale. Meher started waiting for his sketches. Souvik began expecting her voice notes. Even the silences between them began to feel intentional, comforting. But under the surface, something unnamed stirred. A hesitation. A tension. Because while the story they created offered them a safe space to explore vulnerability, in real life, vulnerability still came with risk. And neither of them—writer or artist—was ready to confess just how much of themselves they’d already handed over to the other. Butterflies had begun to stir, delicate and tremulous. But in the margins of their hearts, doubt still scribbled in pencil.
Chapter 3: Grammar of Silence
The library became their refuge. Not the new, glass-paneled one near the admin block, but the old Humanities Reading Room with wooden shutters and shelves that creaked when you walked past. No one visited much except the occasional research scholar or lost fresher, which made it perfect. They’d take the back corner table by the tall, dust-covered French windows and work in their strange, shared silence. Meher would write by hand, the tip of her pen always paused mid-sentence, as if waiting for her thoughts to become brave enough to land. Souvik would sketch beside her—rarely asking questions, never seeking explanations. Sometimes he drew what she was writing. Other times, he seemed to draw what she wasn’t saying. A boy running after a letter that kept flying away. A girl reading books with no titles. A door that opened into a sky full of paper cranes. Their project, still officially untitled, began to carry the scent of something larger—something that wasn’t just about words or illustrations or grades. Tashi noticed it too. During the next workshop, they were asked to present an early draft. While other pairs read clichéd romances or vague experimental poems, Meher and Souvik’s piece was oddly resonant. She read in measured pauses while he projected his illustrations in sequence. The room was quiet by the end—not out of confusion, but reverence. “It doesn’t follow structure,” one student said. “But it feels like someone whispered it to me in a dream.” Tashi smiled knowingly and said, “Then it’s doing exactly what writing is meant to do.”
Meher began to look forward to his silences. Not the awkward, defensive kind—but the ones that were heavy with meaning, like a page left blank on purpose. Souvik wasn’t unreadable; he was just layered. She started noticing things—how he rubbed his fingers against the corner of the table when he was anxious, how he never looked directly at people while speaking, how he flinched slightly whenever someone praised his work. It was as if compliments felt like burdens, like expectations he hadn’t asked for. One day, she gently asked, “Did you always know about the dyslexia?” Souvik nodded, then said slowly, “No one did until I was sixteen. Until then, I just thought I was broken.” That word—broken—hung in the air like an unclaimed coat. Meher didn’t rush to fill the silence. She just placed her hand gently on the edge of his notebook. “You’re not broken,” she said. “You just think in a language this world hasn’t bothered to learn.” For a moment, neither of them breathed. Outside, a squirrel darted across the windowsill. Inside, something melted and something solidified at once. That evening, he gave her a sketch she didn’t quite understand at first—two people sitting back to back on either side of a wall, connected by a thread that passed through both of their hearts. On the thread was tied a tiny, flickering paper lantern. “That’s us?” she asked. Souvik hesitated, then replied, “Maybe. If you want it to be.” She kept the drawing folded in her journal. A bookmark. A memory. A maybe.
But real life wasn’t a story—at least not one with predictable chapters. Outside the quiet world they were building, the pressure of their separate lives began to seep back in. Meher’s mother, Madhavi, had found her creative journal and leafed through it without permission. “This isn’t writing, Meher,” she had said sharply. “It’s pretty nonsense. No structure. No academic intent. You used to write essays with purpose.” That night, Meher didn’t sleep. The next day, she barely looked at Souvik. He noticed. But didn’t ask. He never pushed. Instead, he left her a new drawing—a girl underwater, floating peacefully, eyes closed, surrounded by ink droplets shaped like stars. Below it, just one line: “You’re allowed to breathe different.” It broke her. Not loudly. Not with sobs. But quietly, in the corner of the library, behind the stacks, where no one but the dust and forgotten books could see her. She folded the sketch, held it to her chest, and whispered, “You’re the first person who ever saw me.” That evening, she didn’t send him any voice notes. She walked to his PG instead, unannounced, unsure, barefoot in her chappals, heart in her throat. When he opened the door, surprised and silent, she said, “Let’s write something messy. Something that doesn’t need to be understood by anyone but us.” Souvik blinked, then smiled—wide and rare—and stepped aside to let her in. The sky outside, unnoticed by both, had turned the exact color of their shared story—stormy, aching, unfinished.
Chapter 4: Rewrite Me Gently
The workshop retreat was held at an old heritage guesthouse on the edge of Mehrauli, tucked behind the Qutub ruins and wrapped in wild bougainvillea. The idea was to unplug, to reconnect with writing away from the syllabus and into something more raw. Tashi called it a “creative purge,” though most students treated it like a picnic with poetry. Meher and Souvik arrived separately, their bags small but their hearts heavier than either would admit. It had been a strange week—half-sketches, half-sentences, missed calls, and the kind of silence that grows roots. Still, when they saw each other across the garden courtyard, something softened. He wore a worn-out grey hoodie with ink stains on the sleeve. She wore her grandmother’s kurta with a safety pin where the hem had come loose. Somehow, the unfinished pieces of them looked more fitting that day. They were scheduled to co-lead a breakout session called “Writing in Translation: Visuals to Verse.” It sounded ambitious—and felt like a risk. Meher was nervous. Souvik was unreadable. But when they stood before the group, something clicked. Meher read fragments of anonymous diary entries. Souvik drew scenes in real-time on a whiteboard beside her—translating pain, joy, regret into imagery. The class was stunned into stillness. Someone whispered, “Are you two…together?” Meher looked at Souvik. He didn’t flinch. He just drew a heart, carefully cracked down the middle, then stitched shut with a thread. Not perfect. Not broken. Just healing.
That evening, after dinner and badly-sung ghazals around a bonfire, Meher and Souvik wandered past the crumbling stone arches behind the property. There was a carved jharokha that overlooked the city’s faded skyline and centuries of forgotten stories. They sat there quietly, back to back, their shoulders barely touching. Meher spoke first. “I write like I’m bleeding out. It’s exhausting sometimes.” Souvik nodded, chin tilted toward the darkening sky. “I draw so I don’t have to talk.” She smiled sadly. “You’re talking now.” He paused, then whispered, “Because you don’t ask for loud.” That was it. A sentence that cracked something inside her. She told him about her father—how he had left when she was twelve, how the silence of that departure still filled the corridors of her home. She told him about the letters she never sent, the poems she hid in shoe boxes. Souvik listened the way a person listens to music with their eyes closed. Then, after a long silence, he said, “When I was younger, I used to pretend I was just slow. Not different. Just… slow. It was easier than explaining why the letters refused to behave.” She reached for his hand, not as a romantic gesture, but a reflex—as if touching him would remind her that people like him existed. People who didn’t fit cleanly into lines. Who refused to be corrected by red pens. His fingers twitched but didn’t pull away. In that unlit corner of the garden, with only history and rustling leaves as witness, two young people who had never quite belonged found, in each other, something dangerously close to home.
The next morning, Meher awoke to find a folded page tucked into her notebook. It wasn’t a sketch this time. It was writing. Slanted, messy, uneven—but unmistakably his. The letter was short. “I don’t know how to write like you. But when you read my drawings, it feels like I’m being heard for the first time. That’s enough. Maybe that’s love. — S.” Her throat tightened. She didn’t know whether to cry or write back. Instead, she sat in a patch of sunlight near the terrace and began a new story. Not for class. Not for submission. But for him. It was about a boy who used to hide under desks during spelling bees, and a girl who carried broken clocks because she liked things that didn’t tick perfectly. She didn’t know where it would end, but she knew it had begun. That evening, they took the bus back to campus together, seated side by side. They didn’t speak much, but their elbows brushed once, twice, and then stayed there—touching gently. Delhi’s traffic whirred past in layers of red, orange, and dust. But inside the bus, two hearts were rewriting themselves—slowly, shyly, like drafts that no longer feared deletion.
Chapter 5: Ink-Stained Confessions
The air in Delhi had started to change—the sharp edge of winter whispered through the trees on North Campus, making sweaters necessary and evenings shorter. Meher and Souvik’s story—both the fictional one they were creating and the invisible one they were living—had entered that strange, weightless middle where nothing is declared but everything is felt. They spent hours in the library, sometimes speaking in unfinished sentences, sometimes not at all. Souvik would slide illustrations across the table: a character pacing on a tightrope of blank paper; a library that rearranged itself at night; a pair of eyes that wept clouds instead of tears. Meher would take these images and spin stories around them, writing not just what they saw but what they felt between those lines. They were no longer just collaborating—they were bleeding into each other’s spaces. One Thursday, as the sky turned a deep coral and the peepal leaves rustled like old pages, Meher found herself watching him—not just his hand as it sketched, but the furrow of his brows, the way he pushed his glasses back when he was thinking, the way he avoided eye contact when nervous. She wanted to reach out, to say something reckless like, “I think I’m writing for you now, not just with you.” But she didn’t. Instead, she handed him a folded paper—their story’s next scene, one she had poured her own unnamed longing into. It described two fictional characters sitting at opposite ends of a table, pretending not to notice they were in love. Souvik read it slowly, lips moving with each word, and when he finished, he looked up. Just for a second. Their eyes met. And for that single, unguarded moment, silence wasn’t awkward—it was true.
Later that evening, they found themselves outside campus, in a little chai shop near Hudson Lane that served masala chai in chipped clay cups. It wasn’t planned—just one of those spontaneous post-workshop detours that now felt like ritual. The city buzzed around them—horns, laughter, neon signs blinking promises—but inside that moment, it was just them. Meher sipped her tea, heart ticking like a metronome, and finally asked, “Do you ever… imagine a different version of your life? Like one where you weren’t afraid all the time?” Souvik didn’t answer at first. Then he said, “Yes. But the version I imagine always has you in it.” It came out quieter than he intended, but the words landed, sharp and certain, in the space between them. Meher blinked, startled—but not unhappy. Her hand found his across the plastic table. It wasn’t romantic. Not yet. But it was real. And it shook something loose inside both of them. They talked more that night—about fear, about their fathers, about the stories they never wrote. But when Meher leaned forward and whispered, “I think I like you,” Souvik’s face changed. Not with joy. With panic. “Don’t,” he said. Not unkindly. But with the terror of someone who has just stepped too close to the edge of something vast. “I don’t know how to be that person. I can’t…” His voice cracked. Meher pulled back, stung. “You don’t have to be anything,” she said softly. But the damage was done. He was already retreating, his shoulders folding into themselves, his hand slipping from hers. The wall they’d spent weeks dismantling had returned with a single breath.
The next few days were quiet in the most painful way. Meher still showed up at the library, still worked on their story, but her metaphors were sharper now, her tone less playful. Souvik still drew—but the drawings were darker: cracked windows, flooded pages, a paper boat sinking in a teacup. They didn’t speak of that night. They didn’t speak much at all. Around them, the campus moved on—festivals, deadlines, winter exhibitions—but they were stuck in the stillness of something unfinished. Zoya noticed, of course. “You broke it before it even bloomed,” she told Meher one night, not unkindly. “Some boys don’t know how to hold what they’ve never been given.” Meher nodded, biting her lip until it hurt. She knew Souvik wasn’t cruel—just scared. But knowing didn’t make it hurt less. Meanwhile, Souvik buried himself in sketches, ignoring Meher’s voice notes, erasing more than he drew. He hated himself for it. For pulling away just when it mattered. For being unable to believe that someone could actually stay. That someone could choose him, even with the broken grammar of his emotions. One night, alone in his room, he tried writing again. Just one line. “I want to be brave, but I don’t know where to begin.” Then he ripped the page out, crushed it, and tossed it in the bin. He didn’t know Meher had written the same sentence, in almost the same words, that same night—on a page she tore out and folded into a paper butterfly. They were, once again, on opposite ends of the same page. And neither of them knew how to turn it.
Chapter 6: Between the Lines
There was something cruelly quiet about the winter mornings that followed—the kind where the fog clung to the walls like unfinished sentences and every breath felt like an apology left unsaid. Souvik had stopped sitting in their usual library corner. Instead, he hid in the visual arts wing, where he could draw in solitude, surrounded by charcoal dust and the smell of turpentine. Meher, too, avoided the familiar routes. She carried her notebook but filled it with half-poems and unsent letters. Their story—the one about the two strangers communicating through scribbles in books—was now at a standstill. The fictional characters, much like their creators, had grown quiet, unsure, emotionally stranded. Tashi, who had always sensed more than they spoke, called Souvik aside one day after workshop and asked gently, “Is the story stuck or are you stuck?” Souvik didn’t answer. He just looked away, ashamed of the walls he kept rebuilding. Tashi told him about their own childhood—how language had once betrayed them, how art had become refuge and rebellion in equal parts. “You think the world needs polished sentences,” they said. “But the world actually needs your broken truths.” That night, Souvik didn’t sleep. He sat at his desk with Meher’s old story drafts spread around him. He reread the pages slowly, letting her metaphors cut into him like winter wind. One line stayed with him: “We only build walls when we think no one is coming.” He opened his sketchbook, and instead of drawing, he wrote. Hesitant, flawed, but his. “You came. And I pushed you away. But I still see you in everything I draw.”
Meanwhile, Meher had started pretending everything was fine. At least on the outside. She went to her classes, laughed too loudly at Zoya’s jokes, and even flirted briefly with a theatre student named Kabir who quoted Neruda too often. But inside, she was unraveling slowly, painfully. Every place on campus reminded her of Souvik—the jamun tree they used to sit under, the notice board where he once silently pointed to a poster that made her laugh, even the creaking gate outside the chai stall that always squeaked at the same spot. She hated that he had occupied so much space without saying much. One evening, Zoya found her in their dorm room surrounded by torn pages and crumpled tissues. “You’re in love with someone who doesn’t know how to receive love,” Zoya said, holding her gently. “But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel it.” Meher shook her head. “Then why did he leave the moment I offered it?” Zoya didn’t have an answer. But the question echoed inside Meher long after. The next day, while cleaning her bag, Meher found the folded sketch Souvik had once given her—the one of the two people connected by a thread. She stared at it for a long time, then picked up her pen and wrote a letter—not to him, but to the version of him who had stayed. It was poetic, clumsy, kind, and filled with everything she wished she had said when it mattered. She didn’t send it. Instead, she slipped it into the back of their shared project file, tucked between the last illustration and a blank page. Maybe he would find it. Maybe he wouldn’t. But it was her way of saying: I still see you too.
A week later, Tashi surprised the class with an impromptu assignment: a solo piece exploring one’s deepest creative fear. It was meant to be read aloud. Meher volunteered first. Her voice trembled, but her words didn’t. She spoke of writing as excavation, of how metaphors had become shields, and how sometimes, the most honest stories are the ones we are too afraid to finish. When she ended, there was silence. Then soft applause. Souvik hadn’t planned to read. He had barely even written. But something about her words unlocked something inside him—something raw, something trembling with need. When his turn came, he stood slowly. No sketchbook. Just a wrinkled sheet of notebook paper. His hands shook as he read. “I am afraid of not being understood. Of people reading my pauses as disinterest, my silence as absence. I am afraid that I will never find a language that forgives me for how late I arrived at my own voice.” His eyes met Meher’s then, and for the first time in weeks, she smiled. Not the kind of smile that says I forgive you, but the one that says I never stopped listening. When the class ended, they didn’t speak. But later that night, she found a message from him. No voice note. No long explanations. Just a photo of her paper butterfly, still unfolded, resting on his desk. Below it, three words: “Found it. Still here.”
Chapter 7: Broken Drafts
Winter descended fully now, cloaking Delhi University in fog and nostalgia. The trees stood bare in the mornings, their skeletal branches outlined like charcoal sketches in the grey mist. Meher had started wearing her grandfather’s oversized muffler, and Souvik had swapped his hoodie for a faded corduroy jacket that still smelled faintly of turpentine and ink. Everything looked colder—except the way their eyes met again, cautiously, like rewinding an old tape and hoping the music still played. After the reading, something had shifted between them. No big confrontations. No dramatic confessions. Just presence. Small things. Souvik began sitting at their old table again, sketching beside her without needing to explain. Meher, in return, brought him ginger chai in paper cups and didn’t ask questions when he didn’t speak. Their project resumed like a river thawing—uneven, hesitant, but moving. They still avoided the word “love.” It hung between them like a window left slightly open. Neither was ready to close it. But they leaned toward it now, cautiously letting the cold truth in. Meher rewrote the middle of their story. The two fictional strangers now missed each other in the library by moments, each leaving behind clues the other couldn’t quite catch. Souvik illustrated those scenes in watercolors, the colors bleeding into one another. “It’s not perfect,” he said. Meher smiled and replied, “Neither are we. But it’s the truest thing we’ve made.”
Yet even as their collaboration healed, outside forces began tugging again—subtly, relentlessly. Meher’s mother had grown more vocal about her “wasted potential,” especially after reading the story draft and dismissing it as “artful but aimless.” “You used to write like an academic,” she had said. “Now you write like you’re trying to impress someone.” The words stung, not because they were cruel, but because they held a truth Meher couldn’t yet deny. She was writing for someone. For someone who had made her believe that voice was not the same as volume. Meanwhile, Souvik faced his own quiet reckoning. His father had called him back for a winter internship at the family office, gently reminding him that “art doesn’t pay the rent” and “everyone eventually grows up.” Souvik didn’t argue. He never did. But something in him ached as he listened. He had tasted freedom—the kind that came not from rebellion, but from being seen. And now, the thought of trading that for spreadsheets and balance sheets felt like betrayal. One evening, after yet another cold call from home, he showed Meher a new drawing—two birds chained to different windows, looking at the same moon. She stared at it for a long time, then quietly tore a page from her journal and began writing the next scene. It was the first time they had co-written a section without speaking. A story unfolding in silence. A partnership too fragile for labels, yet too alive to deny.
Then came the campus winter fest—the one Meher used to love for its chaos and colour, for its dim-lit poetry readings and impromptu rooftop performances. She had agreed to read an excerpt from their story at the closing event, though Souvik had declined the stage. “You should read it,” he had said, simply. “You wrote it with your blood.” The auditorium was dimly lit, her palms cold, the audience distracted until her voice began. She read softly, each sentence deliberate. “Sometimes we fall in love with people who show us the language we forgot to speak. Sometimes, we meet someone who doesn’t fill our silences, but holds space for them.” There was no applause when she paused—just breathlessness. Then she read the final scene—where the two characters finally meet not through words, but through a shared silence beneath a flickering lantern. A hand held. A nod. A maybe. She closed the notebook. In the audience, Souvik watched from the last row. He didn’t clap. He couldn’t. He just stood there, still, heart full of something too complex to name. That night, they didn’t speak. But when Meher returned to her hostel room, she found an envelope slipped under her door. Inside, a single sketch—of her, reading under the stage lights, the shadow of her voice curled like smoke around her. On the back, in Souvik’s awkward scrawl: “You didn’t just read it. You became it.” And just like that, the broken draft of them didn’t feel so broken anymore. Just… in progress.
Chapter 8: Drafts That Choose You Back
The days after the festival blurred into the golden lull before final semester deadlines—half-finished term papers, rushed project reviews, tea cups forgotten on windowsills. But for Meher and Souvik, time took on a strange elasticity. They met more often now, not always to write, sometimes not even to speak. There were quiet afternoons spent on the college terrace wrapped in shawls, watching pigeons and sharing stolen oranges. There were mornings in the art block, where Souvik would paint in silence while Meher read her latest pages aloud, pausing only when her voice cracked on a particularly fragile metaphor. She had started folding little messages into her paragraphs now—not addressed to him directly, but unmistakably meant for him. Phrases like “You taught me to stay still without feeling stuck” or “Some people are whole even when they don’t speak in paragraphs.” Souvik heard them all. And though he rarely replied with words, he began sketching Meher more often—side profiles in ink, eyes that looked skyward, hair always windswept, mouth half-open as if mid-thought. When she caught him once, he blushed and mumbled, “I draw what I can’t say.” Meher reached across the desk, traced the outline of her drawn self with her fingertip, and whispered, “You say more than most people ever do.”
But not all truths live in poetry and sketches. Real life, as it always does, began making louder demands. Souvik was offered a spring internship in Singapore—with Veer, his brother, at a design firm that was more corporate than creative. It would be good for his résumé, his family said. Good for “discipline.” Meher heard it secondhand from Zoya, not from him. The betrayal wasn’t in the offer—it was in his silence. She confronted him on the steps outside the library, her eyes wild, voice trembling. “When were you going to tell me?” He looked away, fingers clenching the strap of his bag. “I didn’t know how. I still don’t.” She wanted to scream. Instead, she whispered, “You spent months helping me find my voice. Why are you still afraid of using yours?” He flinched, the way he always did when she peeled back too many layers. “Because I don’t know what staying means,” he said, low and honest. “I’ve never learned how to choose something without also preparing to lose it.” That broke something in her—not out of anger, but grief. Grief for the boy who still lived like a guest in his own story. She stepped back. “Then maybe you should learn. Because I’m not a sentence you get to erase when the page turns.” And with that, she walked away—leaving behind a story that had grown too real to be fictional anymore.
The next few days felt like winter without memory—cold, detached, going through the motions. Meher poured herself into their manuscript draft, finishing the last scene alone. In it, the two characters stand before a mirror that reflects not their faces, but every version of themselves they had once been too afraid to become. She printed it, placed it on Tashi’s desk, and walked away. Meanwhile, Souvik stood in his room, suitcase half-packed, staring at a blank sketchpad. He had told everyone he was leaving in three days. He had told no one he wasn’t sure anymore. That night, he returned to the place where their story first began—the broken bench near the Arts building. It was empty. But under it, taped carefully in Meher’s messy handwriting, was a folded note. It read: “Sometimes, love doesn’t ask you to stay. It just asks you to stop running.” Souvik sat down. Opened his sketchpad. And for the first time, drew something not for the project, not for class, not even for her—but for himself. A boy sitting on a bench under a sky full of unfinished stories. And in his lap, a butterfly made of paper. Waiting. Not fluttering. Just waiting. The next morning, when Meher opened her dorm window, she found a small parcel on her sill—no label. Inside was that same sketch. On the back, scrawled in barely-legible ink: “I’m not going. Not unless you’re in the story too.” And just like that, love became a line they both were brave enough to write.
Chapter 9: Paper Wings, Real Flight
When Meher saw the sketch and those five words—“Not unless you’re in the story too”—she didn’t cry. Not at first. She just stared at it, hands trembling, breath caught between disbelief and relief. It wasn’t grand. It wasn’t dramatic. But it was true. Later that afternoon, she stood under the jamun tree where they used to sit, and this time, he came. No hesitation. No sketchpad to shield him. No metaphors to speak through. Just Souvik, jacket wrinkled, eyes raw with something he hadn’t named yet. “I was scared,” he said, without prompt. “Still am. But maybe I’m tired of letting fear write everything for me.” Meher smiled—not the soft, unsure kind, but one that cracked open like sunlight through frost. “Then let’s write this one together,” she said. “No edits. No outlines. Just… us.” And for the first time, they didn’t need to speak in code. He reached for her hand, and this time, she didn’t flinch. Their palms fit together imperfectly—one calloused with graphite, the other ink-stained with poems—and yet, it felt like the most honest draft they’d ever held. That evening, they sat cross-legged in the old library corner, finishing the final scene of their story side by side. She wrote in her looping script: “The best stories don’t ask to be understood. They ask to be believed.” He added an illustration—two silhouettes sitting in silence, surrounded by fluttering pages that formed wings behind them.
The campus began to hum with the hush of approaching farewells. Fourth-years wore the look of people counting down days in invisible chalk, while juniors walked with the swagger of soon-to-be seniors. But Meher and Souvik were somewhere else entirely—caught in that rare, golden in-between, where everything felt possible and nothing was promised. They began submitting their project to lit fests and small zines—sometimes getting rejected, sometimes getting published, but always doing it together. For the first time, Souvik introduced himself as an artist without mumbling. Meher, too, stopped apologizing for not writing “for academia.” Instead, she wrote about kitchen sinks, heartbreaks, mango pickle jars, and the quiet ache of not being enough for your parents. Tashi noticed the shift. “You two found something the rest of us spend years searching for,” they said, handing them a final workshop certificate with a smile. “And no, I don’t mean publication.” On their last workshop day, Souvik gifted Meher a hand-bound notebook, the cover made of recycled sketches from their early days—the tightrope walker, the paper cranes, the scribbled metaphors. Inside, on the first page, he had written: “For the girl who taught me to read silence and rewrite fear.” Meher looked up, teary-eyed. “You were always writing. You just didn’t know it yet.” He smiled. “I just needed someone to believe the words would come.”
The night before graduation, the two sat on the Arts Faculty rooftop, wrapped in a shared shawl, watching the city lights flicker like half-spoken dreams. “Do you think this will last?” Meher asked—not desperate, just honest. Souvik didn’t answer immediately. He looked at the skyline, then at her, and said, “It already has.” They talked about the future in soft tones—of writing residencies, of maybe moving to Pune or Bangalore, of finding a flat with sunlit corners where art and tea could spill across floors without apology. But mostly, they talked about staying—with each other, not for each other. As dawn broke, Meher pulled out the very first page they had ever worked on together—the one with smudged ink and crossed-out metaphors. She read it aloud, laughing at the clumsy prose, then folded it carefully and tucked it into her bag. “Proof,” she said. “That beautiful things can start messy.” Souvik leaned his head on her shoulder, eyes closed. “You make me believe I can be more than a footnote.” She kissed his temple gently and replied, “You were never a footnote. You were the part that made the whole story make sense.” And beneath that pale blue sky, where pigeons flapped overhead like punctuation marks at the end of a sentence, two once-broken drafts became a real, breathing story. Unpolished. Unfinished. Unforgettable.
Chapter 10: Full Stops & Flight
Graduation came not with fanfare, but with a strange hush—like the final page of a beloved book you don’t want to turn. Convocation gowns rustled in the wind like unfinished poems, and families clapped too loudly in the amphitheatre under a bleached summer sun. Meher stood with Zoya and a few classmates, clutching her certificate like it was a paper boat—meaningful, fragile, and soaked in years of quiet battles. From the distance, she could see Souvik talking to his mother, who had flown in from Kolkata wearing a soft blue sari and eyes full of caution. They hadn’t met properly before—just exchanged polite nods on calls—but today she smiled when Meher approached, tilting her head the way Souvik did when unsure. “You must be the girl who writes my son into courage,” she said, surprising them both. Later, when the speeches were over and everyone scattered for selfies and nostalgia, Meher and Souvik slipped away to the steps outside the Humanities building, the place where their first real silence had lived. There, he handed her a final drawing: a paper butterfly, mid-flight, with a quote written beneath in scratchy pencil—“Love doesn’t need neat endings. It just needs room to grow.” She traced the lines with her thumb and asked softly, “So, what now?” Souvik didn’t answer. Instead, he opened his sketchpad to a blank page and held out a pen. “You tell me.”
They didn’t leave Delhi immediately. Instead, they found a tiny rooftop flat near Majnu Ka Tilla—a place with leaky faucets, loud pigeons, and sunspots that moved across the floor like shy pets. Meher began freelancing for a digital magazine, writing essays that made strangers cry in comment sections. Souvik took up part-time design work and started an Instagram account for his sketches—never posting selfies, just fragments of stories drawn in charcoal, captioned with Meher’s words. Sometimes, they argued—about laundry, about deadlines, about the weight of wanting too much from each other. But the arguments were never door-slamming or name-calling. They were pauses. Deep breaths. Rewrite points. Their home slowly filled with books and mugs and notes taped to walls. “Be soft with yourself today.” “Don’t edit the feeling out.” “Make tea. Not drama.” They didn’t always feel magical. Some days were dull. Some days were lonely. But there was a rhythm to it now—like a long sentence that never rushed toward its end. On Meher’s birthday, Souvik gave her a self-published zine—just ten pages, hand-stitched, titled “Drafts of You.” Inside were his earliest sketches of her. At the end, a note: “You gave me back my language. And then taught me to love the silence too.” She cried. He didn’t look away this time.
Years passed the way they do in real life—not in montages, but in deadlines, in weekend markets, in slow cups of tea during power cuts. They didn’t become famous. They didn’t become rich. But their story—the original one, the one born in that cramped workshop room with Tashi watching quietly—ended up being published. Not by a big house, but by a small independent press that printed it on recycled paper with crooked bindings and a hand-painted cover. They called it Backspace and Butterflies. It sold modestly, but it found its readers. People wrote to them saying, “This feels like someone finally wrote my inside voice.” And every time Meher read those messages, she’d look at Souvik and whisper, “We did that. Us.” On their fifth anniversary, they returned to campus—now different, shinier, but still humming with metaphors. They stood by the old library window, fingers intertwined. “Do you think we’ll ever stop rewriting each other?” Meher asked. Souvik grinned, older now but still slightly boyish, and said, “Not if we keep writing like this.” She nodded. Then opened a fresh notebook. First page, blank. And wrote: “Once upon a maybe…” And beside her, Souvik added, in careful block letters: “…that chose to stay.”
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The End
