Nayantara Das
The House on the Ridge
The first time Leela Varman saw Rudra Kaul’s house, it reminded her of her mother’s eyes—quiet, pale, and full of something that stayed just out of reach. Perched like a ghost on the ridge, the stone cottage didn’t greet visitors. It waited. And as she stepped out of the rickety taxi with her sketchbooks and a single duffel bag, the Kumaon wind wrapped around her as if testing who she had become.
She had lied to get here.
Well, not lied. Curated. She had submitted her portfolio anonymously to the prestigious Kaul Residency, omitting her surname from the application. If he had known she was Aarohi Varman’s daughter, she wouldn’t have been invited. She was sure of it. But Rudra Kaul had chosen her—her lines, her shadows, her silence. That meant something.
The wooden door creaked open before she could knock.
He stood there, taller than she remembered from grainy interviews and art magazine clippings. His hair, streaked with silver, was tied back in a low knot. He wore a black wool sweater, paint smudged near the wrists. His face—chiselled, unreadable, beautiful in that dangerous, distant way—bore no trace of recognition.
“Leela,” he said. “You’re early.”
“You don’t like early?”
“I don’t like surprises.”
She swallowed. “I won’t be one.”
He stepped aside without a smile. “Follow me.”
The house smelled of linseed oil, turpentine, and something older—dust, perhaps, or the breath of a thousand unfinished dreams. Large windows framed the valley below, where mist clung to treetops like forgotten poetry. Books lined the walls. Canvases leaned against furniture. And in the center of it all stood a single covered easel, draped in white like a corpse.
Rudra walked with the silence of someone used to his own company.
“This is your studio now,” he said, gesturing to the eastern corner where sunlight pooled like warm milk. “Don’t move the light. And don’t ask questions you don’t want answered.”
She turned to him. “And if I do?”
His gaze lingered a second too long. “Then paint something that earns the right.”
Leela unpacked slowly after he left, each item chosen with purpose—graphite pencils, charcoal sticks, a flask of her mother’s old perfume. She hadn’t used it in years, but bringing it here felt necessary. Her mother had spent two months in this very house. Two months before dying of a fall down the marble stairs back in Calcutta. Officially an accident. Unofficially—unresolved.
By dusk, the hills glowed gold. Leela wandered the house, memorizing the curves of hallways, the cracks in the floorboards, the way one particular window frame had been carved with the word “Asha”. Hope.
Dinner was a shared silence. Rudra poured her a glass of red wine and served soup without asking if she ate meat. She didn’t say much. Neither did he. But between them, the unspoken curled like steam rising off the table.
“Why do you want to paint?” he asked suddenly, his voice like gravel over silk.
“To see.”
“What?”
“What I’m afraid of seeing.”
He didn’t respond, but she felt it—an invisible shift in the room, like the canvas he kept covered had just flinched.
Later that night, unable to sleep, Leela tiptoed into the main studio. Moonlight flooded the room. The covered easel beckoned. She approached it the way one might approach a memory—slowly, without blinking.
She reached out, hesitated, then pulled back the cloth.
It wasn’t finished.
But she knew the face.
Her mother, Aarohi, painted with the reverence of obsession. Her eyes closed, mouth parted, body half-turned, naked from the waist up, as if caught between desire and departure. But the expression—God, that expression—wasn’t hers. It was… hers. Leela’s.
Because it wasn’t just a portrait.
It was a reflection.
The air behind her stirred. She didn’t need to turn around to know Rudra was standing there.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” he said, his voice unreadable.
“I had to,” she whispered.
His footsteps were slow, deliberate, until he stood beside her.
“She came to me broken,” he murmured. “She left even more so.”
Leela’s fingers clenched into fists.
“Did you love her?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he turned to her, his eyes darker than the mountain night.
“I don’t paint people I don’t love.”
Their eyes locked. Something shifted. Not warmth. Not tenderness. But recognition. A thread pulled too tight. She wanted to slap him. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to ask what her mother looked like when she cried in his arms.
Instead, she said, “Then paint me.”
A pause. A breath. A battlefield forming.
“Why?”
She met his gaze head-on. “Because I want to know if I’m her daughter… or just her echo.”
He walked away without answering. But in the morning, there would be a new canvas. And a chair. And a single note taped to the frame:
“Sit. And don’t lie.”
First Layer
The canvas waited like an invitation and a threat.
When Leela stepped into the studio the next morning, the sun hadn’t fully risen. Mist crawled in through the windows like a secret. The chair placed before the blank canvas looked ceremonial — as if it belonged not to a living girl, but a myth about to be rewritten.
Rudra was already there, barefoot, black kurta streaked with ochre and ash grey. He didn’t greet her. Instead, he adjusted the stool behind the easel and said, “Take off your jacket.”
Leela hesitated. She wore a white cotton kurti under it, modest and loose. Still, her fingers paused at the zip.
“You asked to be painted,” he said, without looking at her. “Don’t waste my time.”
She slipped it off, folded it, placed it on the side table. The air was cold against her skin. But her face burned. She sat down, back straight, eyes steady.
He glanced up at her then — the painter’s stare, ruthless and unblinking. “You’re not her,” he said.
“I didn’t ask to be.”
“No. But you brought her with you.”
Leela said nothing. She wouldn’t give him the pleasure of defensiveness. She wouldn’t be the girl in the shadows of a woman she barely knew.
“Look slightly to your left. Chin tilted up.”
She moved.
He picked up the charcoal.
The first sound was a soft scrape — line against canvas. Her eyes stayed open, fixed on a point on the window frame. But she could feel his gaze like a touch. She imagined the movement of his fingers, rough, practiced. She imagined the way he’d once looked at Aarohi — not just with lust, but with the cruel tenderness of someone who wanted to possess a soul.
The silence thickened.
“Why art?” he asked, eyes still on the canvas.
She exhaled. “Because it’s the only language I don’t lie in.”
“You think you lie in words?”
“I know I do. We all do. Especially women. We lie to survive.”
His hand paused mid-air.
“And what do you survive, Leela?”
She turned her eyes to meet his.
“The silence of things I’ll never know.”
His jaw tightened. He didn’t like being mirrored. He liked power. That much was clear. But something in her response seemed to disarm him.
He set down the charcoal and reached for oil pencils.
“You know she hated being painted?” he said after a moment. “She thought I made her too still. That I turned her into a monument instead of a woman.”
“But you kept painting her.”
“She asked me to stop.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
Leela’s hands curled around the arms of the chair. “Did she love you?”
“She said she did.”
“But did you love her?”
He looked up, and this time his eyes didn’t flinch. “I don’t know. Maybe I loved what she let me see.”
“And what did she let you see?”
He took a moment. “Someone who wasn’t meant to be loved. Only worshipped.”
Leela felt a tremor move through her. Not fear. Not anger. Something deeper — the shame of wanting to be seen that way. To be someone’s undoing.
“Do you still love her?” she asked, softly.
“I’m painting you now,” he replied.
It wasn’t an answer. But it wasn’t a denial either.
He reached for sienna, then a bruised violet. His strokes were long, decisive. She didn’t need to look to know what he was seeing — the tired stubbornness in her posture, the way her lower lip was fuller than it should be, the left eye that always seemed slightly more awake than the right.
“Did she know about the painting?” Leela asked.
“The one you saw?”
“Yes.”
“No. It was the last one I started. After she left.”
“Left?”
He didn’t reply.
“Did she run?” Leela pushed.
His brush halted. “She fell.”
“But you didn’t go after her.”
He stood up abruptly, walked to the window, lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. The smoke curled into the cold morning air.
“She was like light through a cracked mirror,” he said. “Beautiful. Fractured. You reach for it, you bleed.”
“And I?” Leela asked, standing now.
“You haven’t shattered yet,” he said.
“Maybe I want to.”
Their eyes met. And in that pause, everything sharpened — the line between truth and manipulation, between longing and danger. She stepped toward him, slowly.
“You don’t get to decide what I become,” she said.
He didn’t move. “No. But I’ll see it before you do.”
She leaned in close, so close that their breath almost touched.
“Then keep painting,” she whispered.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. Again. The room smelled like linseed and rain. She walked barefoot through the corridor and stopped outside his studio. The door was ajar.
Inside, he was painting. Shirtless. Lost in the act like a man possessed.
And there — on the canvas — was a version of her she didn’t yet recognize. Mouth open slightly, hair loose, hands crossed over her lap like secrets. But what startled her was not the posture or the exposure.
It was the eyes.
They looked exactly like her mother’s.
She stepped back, breath shallow.
Suddenly, he turned.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” he said, echoing last night.
She held her ground. “I had to.”
Rudra put down his brush and walked toward her.
“You’re playing a dangerous game.”
“So are you.”
“I’m not sure who you’re trying to seduce,” he said. “Me… or her ghost.”
Leela’s voice dropped. “Does it matter? If it feels real?”
Rudra raised a hand — not to touch her, but to pause her.
“You don’t know what you’re doing.”
She stepped into him. “And you do?”
His breath hitched.
Their mouths were inches apart.
But he turned away.
“Go to sleep,” he said, almost begging.
She walked away. But as she climbed the stairs, she knew something had already shifted. Not love. Not yet. But something far more dangerous.
A mirror had cracked.
And they were both bleeding.
The Paint Beneath Her Skin
The next morning arrived wrapped in thunderclouds and the kind of humidity that makes secrets stick to skin. Leela woke early, her dreams muddied by flashes of paint-smeared hands, glimpses of her mother’s smile from photographs, and a whisper that might have been her own voice asking, “Am I still yours?”
She stood in front of the mirror for a long time. Studied her bare collarbone, the faint mole beneath her ear, the dip between her ribs. She wondered how many of those parts Rudra had already memorized with his brush — without ever touching her.
Downstairs, the house was quiet. The easel in the main studio was covered again. A ritual. A boundary. But she knew now what waited beneath it. She wondered if he repainted her each night or merely stared, lost in shadows.
He wasn’t there.
She found him outside, in the rain.
Rudra stood barefoot on the stone courtyard, shirt soaked, cigarette forgotten between his fingers. He didn’t look up when she approached, only exhaled a breath that disappeared into mist.
“You paint in the rain now?” she asked.
“I wait in the rain.”
“For what?”
He turned then. His eyes were bloodshot, haunted.
“For something to feel worth painting.”
She stepped closer, raindrops threading through her hair.
“You already are,” she said, voice low.
He laughed, bitter. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know exactly what I’m saying.”
“No,” Rudra snapped. “You think this is art? You think what’s happening is some sacred reincarnation of your mother’s unfinished story? This isn’t myth, Leela. This is flesh. Guilt. Rot.”
She didn’t flinch. “And yet you keep painting me.”
He looked away.
“I see her in you,” he admitted.
“I know.”
“But I also see you.”
That stilled her.
He stepped toward her now. Slow. Measured.
“I see the way you watch me when you think I’m not looking. I see the way your hands tremble when you pose. I see the hunger you try to hide under all that intellect.”
She said nothing.
“I should ask you to leave,” he said. “Before this becomes something neither of us can return from.”
“But you won’t.”
“No.”
Their silence hummed with rainfall.
Then she did something reckless.
She reached for his hand.
It was cold, calloused, streaked with blue. He didn’t pull away.
“Paint me again,” she whispered. “But this time, I won’t be still.”
He looked at her.
And the air cracked open.
The studio was dim, the only light coming from a single lamp. She undressed without instruction, letting each piece fall like shed skin. Her body wasn’t statuesque — it was soft, human, real. She had always hidden it beneath words, sarcasm, and oversized clothes.
But tonight, she let it exist.
He didn’t touch her.
Not yet.
He circled her like she was a ritual. Lit candles. Adjusted her pose with the gentlest of gestures — a hand grazing her chin, a whisper behind her spine. And then, he began.
His brush moved like a lover’s hand. Down the curve of her neck, the swell of her breast, the shadow beneath her hipbone. She felt him sketching her not with desire, but with knowledge. Every stroke said: I see you.
“I used to think,” he said softly, “that painting her would preserve her.”
Leela’s breath hitched.
“But it didn’t. It only froze the moment I lost her.”
“You haven’t lost me,” she said, not knowing if it was a promise or a threat.
He stopped painting.
Stepped back.
Then walked to her.
She felt it before he touched her — the pull of two people who had tiptoed around a storm for too long.
His lips met hers without warning.
The kiss was not gentle. It was not soft. It was five years of longing that had never belonged to her and five weeks of hunger that belonged only to her now. His hands moved down her back, hers tangled in his hair, mouths breathing the same fire.
He lifted her onto the table without breaking the kiss, knocking over brushes and jars. Turpentine spilled. She didn’t care. Her legs wrapped around his hips like instinct. Their bodies fit — not perfectly, but precisely.
As if this wasn’t fate.
It was choice.
And consequence.
When he entered her, there was no poetry. Only breath. Collision. Silence shattered by soft gasps. Her nails dug into his shoulders, his mouth on her collarbone. The scent of rain, sweat, and linseed oil fused into something primitive.
For the first time in years, Leela felt entirely unfragmented.
Seen.
Claimed.
Alive.
After, they lay side by side on the studio floor, limbs tangled, hearts pounding. He looked at her like he was trying to remember a name he’d never dared say aloud.
“You’re nothing like her,” he said.
“I know.”
And yet, in the dim glow, she saw his eyes flicker — not with regret, but with something far more dangerous.
Possession.
She sat up, pulled the white sheet around her, and walked to the canvas.
It was unfinished — again.
But it was different.
This version of her was not still. Not composed. Her mouth was open, eyes wild, hair loose. The kind of beauty that ruined men. The kind of truth that destroyed memory.
She touched the edge of the frame.
“I want you to finish it,” she said.
He stood behind her, arms circling her waist.
“I don’t think I can,” he murmured.
“Why?”
“Because it’s not you anymore.”
“Then who is it?”
He leaned down, lips grazing her ear.
“It’s the part of you you’ll leave behind. Just like she did.”
She turned, gripped his face in her hands.
“Then paint me again. Every version. Until I know who I am.”
Their kiss this time was softer.
But the storm had only begun.
The Ghost Between Us
The days that followed blurred like the smudge of charcoal across skin. Leela moved through the house barefoot, clothed in half-silence, half-longing. Rudra painted her at odd hours—never announcing it, never inviting, simply setting up the easel and expecting her to know. And she always did.
They didn’t talk much.
The talking had shifted to bodies. To stolen touches in the kitchen. To fingers sliding beneath shirts in the hallway. To quick, breathless moments in corners soaked with turpentine and longing. Their passion was messy, urgent, unapologetic—as if each time might be the last.
But underneath it, something darker simmered. Not regret. Not yet. But recognition.
One morning, she awoke to find the studio door locked. A note was slipped beneath it:
“Don’t knock. Not today.”
She sat outside the door, wrapped in a shawl, listening to the erratic scrape of brush on canvas. Hours passed. The light changed. She waited.
When the door finally opened, he looked different—sleepless, shaken. His eyes avoided hers.
“You painted her again,” she said.
He nodded.
“I need to,” he muttered, voice brittle. “There are parts of her still inside me. Rotting.”
Leela clenched her jaw. “Then cut her out.”
He looked at her then, sharply. “It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
“Because you remind me of her in ways I can’t unsee. And I don’t know if I’m loving you… or looking for her in your bones.”
Leela stepped forward, voice shaking. “And you think I don’t know that? You think I haven’t felt her between us every time you look at me like I’m both the fire and the ghost?”
His breath caught.
“I came here,” she continued, “to find her. To hate her. To understand why she left me behind and why you, of all people, were the last one she wanted to see.”
“She didn’t—” He stopped.
Leela’s eyes narrowed. “Didn’t what?”
He turned away.
“She didn’t fall,” he whispered.
The room collapsed in silence.
Leela stepped closer. “What are you saying?”
Rudra walked to the covered canvas in the corner. The one she had seen on the first night. The unfinished portrait. Her mother, half-turned, eyes shut.
He pulled the cloth back again.
This time, it was different.
He had added something.
Red.
At her temple.
A smear that wasn’t paint.
Leela’s knees buckled. “No…”
“She came here to end things,” Rudra said quietly. “With me. With everything. I told her I wouldn’t let her go. She said I’d already taken too much. That I’d immortalized her in ways she couldn’t undo.”
Leela stared at him, horror blooming. “You pushed her?”
“No.”
“She jumped?”
“She let go. And I didn’t stop her.”
Silence howled through the room.
“I loved her, Leela,” he said. “But I also resented her. For choosing death over me. Over you.”
Leela’s voice was ice. “You watched my mother die. And now you’re—what? Screwing her daughter to atone?”
“No.” His voice cracked. “I’m loving her daughter to survive.”
She slapped him.
Not out of rage. But out of grief.
She left the room, the house, the ridge. Walked into the forest path that curved downward into silence. The trees didn’t judge. The wind didn’t question.
She found a fallen log and sat.
The weight in her chest wasn’t just her mother’s memory.
It was her own shame. Her own hunger.
Because even now, even after that confession, she wanted him.
Not as a substitute.
Not as redemption.
But as the only man who had ever truly seen her.
When she returned hours later, the studio lights were off. The house was quiet. He was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, an untouched bottle of whiskey by his side.
“I thought you left,” he said without looking up.
“I wanted to,” she said.
“Why didn’t you?”
Leela walked to him, crouched. Touched his cheek.
“Because I’m not done being her daughter yet. And you’re not done painting me.”
He looked up. There were tears. Real ones.
“I’m afraid of what you’ll become if I finish.”
She kissed him gently.
“Then don’t finish,” she whispered. “Just keep seeing me.”
They stayed like that—two broken people held together by color and sin, by longing and memory.
In the morning, she would sit again.
And he would paint not her mother.
But her.
Piece by dangerous piece.
What the Canvas Knew First
The morning air tasted different. Not clean. Not fresh. But honest. Like something that had stopped pretending to be pure.
Leela stood in front of the easel once again, this time not waiting for instruction. She pulled her shawl off slowly, like shedding skin. Rudra didn’t speak. He sat behind the canvas, brush in hand, eyes hollow from the night, but steadier than they’d been in days.
“You look older today,” he said finally.
She didn’t blink. “Maybe I aged in the forest.”
He dipped the brush into crimson. Not for blood this time, but for breath. For the kind of red that lives between ribs.
“I dreamt of her last night,” he said. “Your mother. She was standing in that corner, smiling like I never knew she could.”
Leela held her pose. “Was I in the dream too?”
He nodded. “You were painting me.”
She let that linger. “And was I good?”
“You were brutal.”
A pause.
She said, “Good.”
The brush moved. Across canvas. Across time. Across guilt.
He spoke again, but softer. “Did you ever hate her?”
Leela looked out the window, where the mist hung like a withheld truth.
“Yes,” she said. “For loving the world more than me. For leaving me to become her echo. For making me feel like I’d never be enough unless I bled art.”
Rudra’s hand slowed. “You are more than enough.”
Leela looked back at him. “Then show me.”
And he did.
That day, he painted not her curves, not her posture, but her ache. The small ache in her left shoulder from sleeping curled up. The sadness in the way her fingers gripped the chair when she forgot she was being watched. The flicker of her smile when she remembered a childhood before art had become a wound.
He painted the version of her she had never dared sketch herself.
By evening, she stood behind the canvas and saw it.
It was her.
And it wasn’t.
She stepped forward, touched the edge of the painting. “You saw me.”
“I always did,” Rudra said.
And then he kissed her. Not hungrily. Not like before. But like a man writing his last letter. A kiss with punctuation.
She kissed him back like a woman who didn’t know if tomorrow would carry the same shape.
They made love that night without sound. Slow. Bare. Every inch mapped like memory, not possession. He didn’t undress her. She did it herself. He didn’t lead. She didn’t follow. They met, middle of the floor, middle of their grief.
After, she lay against his chest, listening to the beat of a heart that had once belonged to someone else.
“I want to leave,” she said.
Rudra stirred. “Now?”
“Not forever,” she said. “Just… away. A week. A month. Time.”
He didn’t argue.
“You won’t finish the painting?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Let her remain incomplete. Like all daughters do.”
Silence.
“And us?” he asked.
“We’ve already been more than we were allowed to be.”
He nodded.
“I’ll wait,” he said.
“No,” she said. “You’ll paint.”
They didn’t say goodbye. They didn’t need to.
When she left the next morning, the canvas remained uncovered. The light hit it just right — casting a golden bruise across the brushstrokes. A woman mid-turn. Eyes half open. Lips almost smiling.
Neither daughter.
Nor ghost.
Just herself.
The Absence of Touch
The train hummed like a low thought as it cut through the Kumaon hills, carrying Leela away from the ridge, away from Rudra, away from the house where her mother’s perfume still clung to the window curtains. She sat by the window, cheek pressed to glass, watching the trees blur into brushstrokes of green.
She hadn’t cried.
Not when she packed her sketchbooks. Not when Rudra watched her silently from the porch, arms folded, a cup of untouched black coffee growing cold beside him. Not even when she crossed the narrow bridge that marked the edge of his world.
But now, in the soft jolt of a second-class compartment, surrounded by strangers, she felt the grief uncoil—not like a storm, but like a slow fog under her skin.
In her lap sat a box.
Inside it: the unfinished sketch Rudra had given her before she left.
“Draw the rest,” he’d said. “Draw what I can’t.”
But she hadn’t opened it since.
She was heading toward Delhi. To the house her mother had left behind. To the studio she had locked up after the funeral. To the mirror she hadn’t dared look into in years.
When she arrived, everything was dustier than she remembered.
The keys still hung on the hook by the door. The house had the same silence, but it was heavier now—like it knew something she didn’t.
She opened the studio.
Inside: a lone easel, a jar of dried-up brushes, and a broken ballerina figurine that had belonged to her mother. The walls were lined with early paintings—Aarohi in movement, Aarohi in stillness, Aarohi laughing into a blur of oil.
Leela sat in the middle of the room and cried for the first time.
Not for her mother.
But for herself.
She cried for the girl who had loved too quietly. For the woman who had tried to carry a legacy she didn’t ask for. For the lover who wasn’t sure if her body was her own, or just another canvas someone else needed to bleed on.
And then, finally, she opened the box.
Inside: the sketch. Her face, unfinished. Only the jawline, a sliver of collarbone, and the beginning of a gaze. Rudra had started with the part of her that held silence.
She picked up a pencil.
At first, her hand shook. The paper resisted her.
But then she remembered his voice: “You lie in words. But not in line.”
She drew.
Not the version he would’ve completed. Not the erotic myth or the ghost of Aarohi Varman.
She drew herself waking up at 3 a.m. from a bad dream. She drew the mole on her thigh. The curve of her belly when she sat curled with a book. She drew her eyes how they really looked—tired, hungry, still hoping.
It took days.
When it was done, she mailed it back.
No note.
Just the drawing.
Weeks passed. No reply.
She tried to return to routine. Joined an artist’s collective. Taught part-time at a college. Painted children’s feet dipped in blue paint for a festival mural.
But Rudra lived in her brushstrokes.
And her mother?
Her mother lived in the silence before Leela began painting.
One day, a letter arrived.
No return address. No name.
Just her drawing. The one she had sent. But now—altered.
He had added one detail.
A mirror behind her.
In it: not Aarohi’s reflection.
Not his.
Just light.
A glimmer.
Possibility.
Beneath it, in a single scribbled line:
“You are more than what made you.”
She smiled.
And that night, for the first time in years, she painted without pain.
Love Without Echoes
It began with spilled coffee.
At a bookstore tucked inside Hauz Khas Village, Leela was browsing through an old edition of Letters to a Young Poet when a man turned too quickly and knocked over his cappuccino, drenching her skirt in a sepia smear.
“Oh my God, I’m—shit—so sorry,” he stammered, reaching for tissues, panic flashing across his face.
She waved him off, amused. “It’s fine. I’ve worn paint worse than this.”
He blinked. “Are you… an artist?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
He extended his hand, tentative. “Kabir Malhotra. I teach comparative literature across the street.”
She shook it. “Leela.”
The apology turned into coffee. The coffee turned into conversation. And before she realized it, three hours had passed, and they were sitting on the bookstore floor, legs crisscrossed, arguing about whether Virginia Woolf was overrated.
Kabir was nothing like Rudra.
Where Rudra was all sharp edges and silence, Kabir was laughter and sunlight. He listened with his whole face. He didn’t interrupt. And when he looked at her, she didn’t feel exposed.
She felt… chosen.
They began meeting often. At first, by accident. Then by design. Weekend walks through Lodhi Garden. Shared samosas under monsoon clouds. A gallery show where he stood beside her and whispered that her paintings made him feel like he was remembering someone he hadn’t met yet.
He never asked about her past. Not directly.
But one evening, when they sat on her balcony sipping tea, she said, “There was someone before. He taught me how to be seen. And how to disappear.”
Kabir didn’t flinch. “Did he hurt you?”
She thought for a long time.
“Yes,” she said. “But I let him.”
“Do you still love him?”
She looked up at the sky. The stars were diffused tonight, like they couldn’t decide how brightly to shine.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “Maybe I love what he helped me leave behind.”
Kabir nodded.
Then, gently, he asked, “And what are you hoping to find now?”
She smiled. “A version of myself that doesn’t need to be painted to exist.”
He reached across, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
“You already are,” he said.
And just like that, something new began.
Not loud. Not aching. But healing.
Weeks passed. Her paintings changed.
They became softer. Not less honest—but warmer. Less obsession, more presence. Less mother, more self.
At her next exhibit, critics said her work had “shifted from haunting to human.” That it “breathed instead of brooded.”
She didn’t explain the change.
Didn’t say that once, she had been painted by a man whose hands had known her mother before they knew her.
Didn’t say that she had walked out of that house not broken, but unfinished.
And now, slowly, she was finishing herself.
One evening, after a gallery show, Kabir walked her home. They didn’t speak much. Just silence, comfortable and full.
Before leaving, he kissed her—softly, without hunger.
The kind of kiss that asked nothing but gave everything.
She stood there long after he’d gone, touching her lips, wondering how something could feel so complete without echo.
That night, she opened her old sketchbook—the one from Rudra’s ridge. She tore out the final page. The sketch he’d made of her. The one that had once made her feel real.
And she burned it.
Not in anger.
But in gratitude.
Because some versions of us are meant to be shed.
Not mourned.
Two days later, a package arrived.
From Nainital.
No letter. No explanation.
Inside: a single photograph.
The painting. Finished.
But not of her.
Of himself.
Rudra Kaul, standing alone on the ridge, holding his brush like a confession. In the background: a window with light pouring through.
She stared at it for a long time.
And then, smiling softly, she slid the photo into her drawer.
Unframed.
Unburdened.
Unwritten.
Because not all loves become stories.
Some become stillness.
And she had finally learned to live with that.
Frame Without Glass
The gallery was quiet. Too quiet for a launch night, Leela thought.
But she had asked for it that way.
No champagne. No velvet ropes. No critics with sharpened pens. Just a room, white and honest, with her latest works on the walls, and an open door. Anyone could walk in. Or walk away.
She stood near the farthest canvas, a piece titled Self, Unfinished. It was abstract — not a face, not a body, not a confession. Just color. Deep ochre, soft crimson, the kind of slate-blue that reminded her of her mother’s old shawl. Nothing in it screamed pain. But if you stood long enough, you could feel it murmuring.
A soft footstep behind her.
She turned.
Kabir.
He smiled, one hand behind his back, the other holding a small wrapped package.
“For the artist,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow. “Is it another book about dead poets?”
“No,” he said. “This time it’s about you.”
He handed her the gift. Inside was a frame. Wood, raw-edged, slightly imperfect. But there was no glass. No backing. Just the bare frame.
“I wanted to give you something,” Kabir said, “to remind you that not everything needs protection to survive. Some things are better without barriers.”
She ran her fingers over the frame. “It’s beautiful.”
“So is what’s inside,” he said.
“There’s nothing inside,” she smiled.
“Exactly.”
They stood in silence, and she realized: this was love without distortion. Without a past hanging over it like a shadow. A love not desperate to be epic. Just present.
“Walk with me?” she asked.
The streets were slow that night. Delhi in early winter still hadn’t committed to the cold. Trees whispered above them as they passed through old lanes near Humayun’s Tomb, and she held Kabir’s hand without thinking.
“I’ve been painting my mother,” she said suddenly.
He looked at her, patient.
“Not from memory,” she continued. “From silence. I’ve painted her without her face. Just pieces. Her dancing feet. Her spine curved mid-movement. Her hands holding a cigarette, the way I saw in a photo once.”
“Is it helping?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s changing me.”
Kabir stopped. “And the other paintings?”
She met his gaze.
“Gone,” she said. “I sent them back.”
“To him?”
She nodded.
“I don’t need them anymore,” she added. “What he gave me… what I took… it’s over.”
Kabir didn’t ask for details. He never had. He didn’t need the whole story. He could read the spaces between her words like a poem.
As they walked back, she felt something rise inside her — a thought that didn’t belong to grief. Not desire either.
Peace.
The next morning, she returned to her own studio.
She opened her drawer — the one with the photograph Rudra had sent.
For a moment, she just looked at it. His eyes were tired. His brush still. But there was light behind him, real light. And that mattered.
She took out the empty frame Kabir had gifted her.
And placed it around the photo.
No glass.
No cover.
Just a memory allowed to breathe.
Then she nailed it to the wall behind her desk.
Not front and center.
But present.
Leela stepped back, wiped her hands, and smiled.
Then she began a new canvas.
Not a portrait.
Not a ghost.
Just light.
A few months later, a letter arrived.
No name.
Just handwriting she now knew as well as her own.
Leela,
I’ve left the house on the ridge.
Someone else is painting in the east-facing room now. Young boy. Quiet. I think he might break the silence better than I did.
I have stopped painting women I loved.
And started painting the places they left behind in me.
You were never her shadow.
You were the mirror.
I hope the light is enough.
—R
She folded the letter once.
And burned it.
Not in anger.
But because the story had finally written its last line.
Later that year, her solo exhibition — Brushstrokes of Her Shadow — opened in Mumbai.
The critics called it “the softest scream ever put on canvas.”
Kabir stood beside her as people wept in front of the painting Untitled No. 5, the one with a chair, a window, and no one sitting.
And Leela?
She smiled.
Because for the first time, she wasn’t inside the painting.
She was outside it.
Whole.
Unframed.
And finally—
free.
[End of Story]
