Anika Rao
Part 1: The Taste of Irani Chai
The clock struck six as Meher adjusted the silver jhumkas dangling from her ears, their soft chime blending into the evening azaan that echoed from the nearby Mecca Masjid. She stood by the rusted iron railings of the Charminar terrace, inhaling the scent of kebabs, rose attar, and the sharp, dusty wind that always carried whispers of stories untold. Hyderabad in December was always like this—cool, crowded, humming with history. And Meher, a 26-year-old calligraphy artist, found herself here every Thursday, sketchbook in hand, waiting to draw strangers and perhaps meet fate halfway.
Below, in the clamorous lanes of Laad Bazaar, Noor Cafe stood quietly at the corner, lit with a gentle yellow glow. Its walls bore photos of cricket legends, old Urdu poetry, and newspaper clippings from the 70s. And inside, seated near the back under a squeaky fan, was Ayaan Rahman—tall, spectacled, and completely immersed in a battered copy of Kafka on the Shore. He came here often, always ordering the same thing: bun maska and Irani chai, no sugar. A software architect by day, he kept his evenings reserved for words—books, scribbled notes on paper napkins, and lately, Meher.
She had noticed him first two months ago, the same week she’d received her third wedding proposal from her mother’s friend’s cousin’s son. Ayaan had glanced up, met her eyes briefly, then looked back down like nothing had happened. That disinterest, oddly, had pulled her in.
Tonight, she descended the steps of Charminar with a rush of purpose and turned into Noor Cafe. He was there, as expected, his glasses slipping slightly down his nose. She hesitated for a second and then walked over.
“Excuse me,” she said, “Is that Murakami?”
Ayaan looked up slowly, taking in her almond-shaped eyes, smudged with kohl, and the spiral notebook she clutched like armour. “It is,” he said. “Kafka. Lost and complicated.”
“Just like us,” she smiled, and sat opposite him without asking.
There was a pause—awkward, delicate, like the silence before the first raindrop. And then they began to talk. About books and biryani, about being the only child of overbearing parents, about how it felt to not belong to the world your family built for you. The waiter brought their chai, and neither noticed it had gone cold.
Hours passed. The city dimmed. But the light between them sparked gently, unexpectedly.
He finally asked, “Do you come to the Charminar every Thursday?”
She nodded. “To watch people fall in love with the city.”
“And today?”
“I came to see if someone would fall in love with me instead.”
Ayaan looked at her—really looked—and smiled. “Maybe he already has.”
Outside, the moon hung low over the minarets, and the pearls of Hyderabad sparkled quietly in the streetlights. But the real glimmer was on her face as she looked at him, wondering if this, finally, was the beginning.
Part 2: The Memory of Rain in Banjara Hills
A week had passed since the evening at Noor Cafe, but Meher could still hear the clink of their tea cups and the quiet cadence of Ayaan’s voice, like an Urdu sher whispered in the folds of her dupatta. She replayed their conversation in her head during the most mundane tasks—while dipping her brushes in ink, while adding flour to her mother’s shikampuri kabab mix, even while brushing her teeth. His laugh. His silences. The way he never tried too hard to impress her. It had been a long time since she had met a man who didn’t feel like a project.
He hadn’t texted.
Not that she had given him her number. Not directly. But she’d left her business card inside the copy of Kafka on the Shore when he wasn’t looking. It was a small risk. But all art was, wasn’t it?
Meher lived in a modest independent house in Banjara Hills, painted pale blue with a mango tree growing wild in the courtyard. Her father had passed away when she was in college, leaving her and her mother to run the home on a combination of pension, workshop earnings, and dignity. They didn’t entertain many visitors. Especially not men.
So when the doorbell rang on Sunday afternoon and Meher opened the gate to find Ayaan standing with a small brown envelope and a confused smile, her first reaction was disbelief.
“I wasn’t sure if this was your actual address,” he said, holding up the card. “Or a Murakami-style riddle.”
Meher grinned. “You thought I might be imaginary?”
“No. Just elusive. Like a page torn from the middle of a story.”
She stepped aside to let him in, brushing down her kurta quickly, suddenly conscious of her bare feet and the faint paint stain on her chin. Her mother peeked from the kitchen, and her eyebrows climbed slightly. A man. Handsome. Unannounced.
“This is Ayaan,” Meher said quickly. “He’s… a reader.”
Her mother looked amused. “Beta, come inside. Readers are always welcome. At least they don’t talk too much.”
Ayaan laughed and greeted her politely, then turned to Meher with the envelope. “I brought something for you.”
Inside was a postcard. Not printed. Handwritten. A line of calligraphy in flowing Urdu that Meher traced with her eyes like fingertips across skin.
“Tumhe dekhkar jee nahi bharta… magar dekhne ko jee chaahta hai.”
(“My heart never fills just by seeing you… and yet, it longs to see you again.”)
She looked up. “Faiz?”
Ayaan nodded. “Thought I’d return the favour. You sketch strangers. I write for them.”
Meher clutched the card, suddenly speechless. No one had ever given her poetry as a gift before. Chocolates, sure. Perfumes. Even one awkwardly aggressive teddy bear. But never words meant just for her.
After lunch, they sat under the mango tree, sipping cold Rooh Afza and talking about Hyderabad’s lost corners. Ayaan told her about the abandoned observatory near Begumpet, where time once stood still for stars. She told him about her dream of opening a calligraphy studio in the old city, where people could walk in and write letters again. Real ones. Not WhatsApp apologies.
Rain arrived unannounced, as it always did in December. A light drizzle at first, then heavier, until the air was thick with the scent of wet cement, mango leaves, and red earth. They didn’t move. Just sat there, drenched and laughing.
“Shouldn’t we run inside?” Ayaan asked.
Meher shook her head. “The rain here doesn’t ruin anything. It only remembers.”
“Remembers what?”
“Everything we forget. The people, the pain, the promises. It’s why I love Hyderabad so much. This city never forgets.”
He looked at her then, not as a woman he might be interested in, but as someone he might already be building a life around. Slowly. Quietly. Without realizing it.
That evening, after he left, her mother asked, “Is he going to marry you?”
Meher smiled. “He hasn’t even asked for my last name.”
Her mother clicked her tongue. “These days, names don’t matter. Intentions do.”
But Meher didn’t want to name this just yet. It was too soon, too new. Still forming like the slow curl of ink on paper. Let it be unnamed, she thought. Let it grow like monsoon moss—delicate, unclaimed, and deeply rooted.
The next few weeks became a rhythm neither of them spoke about but both followed. Wednesday walks near Hussain Sagar. Friday book hunts in Abids. Sunday visits to Noor Cafe. Sometimes they held hands. Sometimes they argued about poetry. Sometimes they just sat in silence, watching the pigeons fly in loose formations above Chowmahalla Palace, and said nothing at all.
And always, always, Meher wondered: What do you call this thing between two people when it’s not love, not yet, but more than friendship?
Perhaps Hyderabad had a word for it. Or maybe, it didn’t need one.
Part 3: Letters in a Lockbox
It was mid-January when Meher received her first letter from Ayaan—not a message, not a note, but a proper letter written on thick handmade paper, folded precisely, and placed inside a small brass box delivered to her studio.
She was alone that morning, seated on the floor of her narrow workspace above an antique shop in the lanes of Sultan Bazaar. Sunlight poured through the half-curtained window, painting golden slants on the terracotta floor as the sounds of cycle bells and distant hawkers spilled into the air. The lockbox was heavy, warm, and carried his initials on the side: AR, engraved so faintly it looked like a whisper.
She opened it slowly.
“Dear Meher,
This is an experiment in silence.
I wanted to see how much of myself I could put into words when you’re not in front of me, distracting me with your eyes, your way of holding a pen like it’s a wand, your silence that’s more eloquent than my entire vocabulary.
I’ve started keeping a list—of all the things I notice about you. Number 1: You never eat the last bite of anything. Even if you love it. Why?
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it feels like you’re always saving a little piece of joy for someone else.
That’s rare. And maybe that’s why I’m writing to you today. To say thank you. For being rare.
Yours in ink and possibility,
Ayaan”
Meher held the paper close to her chest, unsure whether to laugh, cry, or run into the street shouting his name. Instead, she wrote back.
Her letter was brief but full of Meher-ness:
“Dear Reader-of-Me,
You ask why I leave the last bite. I think it’s because I don’t believe in finishing anything completely. I love lingering. Like how you pause before every answer. Like how this letter, maybe, is the beginning of many.
Also, you spelled ‘possibility’ wrong. Just once. I circled it in red ink. You’re welcome.
Meh.”
She placed it inside the same brass box and handed it over to Yusuf, the 11-year-old delivery boy from the antique store below. “To be given to the man who smells faintly of ink and rain,” she instructed. Yusuf grinned and saluted dramatically.
Over the next few weeks, the lockbox became their ritual. They never spoke about it during their meetings at the cafe or on walks through KBR Park, but every three days, a new letter would arrive—some long and meandering, others just one-line jokes. Once Ayaan sent her a pressed marigold with a note that said, “Proof I can give flowers without being a cliché.” Another time, she sent him a tiny hand-drawn comic of two squirrels arguing over biryani.
The letters became more intimate with each exchange. Ayaan wrote about his childhood in Tolichowki, about his estranged sister who moved to London and never called, about his insomnia. Meher shared stories about her father teaching her how to make ink from flower petals, how she once broke a window with a cricket bat and blamed it on a pigeon, how she hated the smell of lavender because it reminded her of hospital corridors.
And still, they never called it love.
One Thursday, after chai and a shared plate of kheema samosas, Ayaan walked her back to her studio. The city was unusually quiet, a light fog settling between the wires and the walls of Old Hyderabad.
At the doorway, he paused.
“Meher, I need to tell you something,” he said.
She leaned against the frame, teasing. “You finally bought that absurd velvet blazer your mom’s been pushing?”
He laughed but didn’t follow her joke. Instead, he pulled out a folded letter from his jacket pocket. No box this time.
“I was going to write this to you, but I thought I should say it aloud.”
Meher stiffened slightly. The air changed. A crow cawed. Far away, a bike revved.
“I’ve been offered a project in Berlin. Six months. Maybe longer.”
She blinked, her mouth half-open.
“Oh,” was all she could say.
“It’s something I’ve dreamed of—data architecture in historical preservation. It’s rare. It’s… big.”
She looked at him and nodded slowly, hiding the ache that was already beginning to spool behind her ribcage.
“You should go.”
“You’re not surprised?”
“I’m Hyderabad born. We don’t cling. We bless and release.”
He smiled sadly. “Do I get a blessing then?”
“No,” she said. “But you’ll get a letter.”
And she went inside before he could see the tears forming behind her kohl-rimmed eyes.
That night, she didn’t write the letter. She just stared at the blank page, waiting for the pain to settle into words.
But it didn’t.
Instead, she traced the old letters he’d sent, over and over, until her fingers smudged the ink.
In her heart, she knew something else: sometimes love doesn’t arrive with declarations or fireworks. Sometimes it’s a lockbox, exchanged quietly in the chaos of an old city, filled with half-said truths and all the things they never had the courage to name.
Part 4: The Space Between Departures
The night before Ayaan’s flight to Berlin, Hyderabad glistened with a rare stillness. There was no rain, no festival, no particular reason for the city to be so hushed—yet it was. As if the very walls of the old quarters knew someone was leaving, and they held their breath in solidarity.
Meher sat in her courtyard, cross-legged, a shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders. The mango tree above her had begun to shed its leaves for the season, and a few dry ones floated down, brushing her hair like old memories. She hadn’t seen Ayaan in four days. Not since that letterless confession on her doorstep. Not since she had told him to go.
There was no lockbox delivered. No text. No update.
She told herself it was good. Clean breaks. No dragging of emotions like luggage through an airport. No promises made in haste. But that was a lie. She wanted a message. Even a blank envelope would’ve done. Anything to prove that what they had wasn’t a figment of monsoon madness.
The door creaked behind her. Her mother stepped out, holding two cups of warm saffron milk.
“He’s leaving tomorrow, right?” she asked, placing one cup near Meher.
Meher nodded, sipping slowly.
“You could go to the airport. Say goodbye properly.”
“I don’t want a goodbye.”
“What do you want then?”
Meher looked up at the sky. “I want… an echo. Something that stays after the voice is gone.”
Her mother didn’t respond. She didn’t need to. She just sat beside her, in the stillness, letting her daughter be silent in a language only mothers understood.
The next morning, Meher took the Metro to the airport. She hadn’t planned to. She told herself she was going to buy sketch pens from the store at the terminal entrance. She even carried a list. But as the escalator hummed upward and the terminal glass glistened with morning light, she saw him.
Ayaan.
Standing near Gate 2, dressed in a navy blue jacket, one bag over his shoulder, passport in hand, headphones around his neck. He looked the same and yet entirely different. Like a dream that had learned how to walk.
She hesitated. Hid behind a pillar. Watched.
He was staring out toward the runway. Not checking his phone. Not fidgeting. Just waiting. Like he always did—with quiet intensity.
Suddenly, he turned. His eyes scanned the terminal. For a second, she thought he saw her. But he didn’t.
Meher knew what this moment was. It was the kind of moment that lived in songs and poems, in short films that made people cry in five minutes. But in real life, it felt messy. Fragile.
She turned around and walked away.
On the ride home, she cried quietly into her dupatta. Not because he left. But because she didn’t call out to stop him.
That evening, the lockbox returned.
She found it on her studio desk, placed neatly with a small label: For later.
Inside was a single letter.
“Dear Meher,
If you’re reading this, it means I left. It also means I didn’t have the courage to ask you to wait for me. Because I never wanted to be someone you waited for.
I wanted to be someone who stayed.
But dreams have their own selfish weight. And mine have been gathering dust for too long.
I don’t know what Berlin will bring. I don’t know what will become of us.
But here’s what I do know—this city was never just mine until I met you. You’re the sketch between its domes and clouds. The missing word in every poem I couldn’t finish.
I am taking your letters with me. Every single one.
If you ever come to Berlin, look for a small box under the third stone bench in Tiergarten Park. Leave a letter there. I’ll find it.
And if you never come… that’s okay too.
Some loves are meant to live in lockboxes.
Yours, always,
Ayaan”
Meher didn’t cry this time. She placed the letter inside her journal, gently, like placing a flower between its final pages.
Weeks passed.
Then months.
Hyderabad turned warmer, then hotter. Sankranthi passed. Her cousin got married. She rejected two more proposals. She opened her calligraphy studio in a restored haveli near Purani Haveli—called it “Nazm.” Clients came slowly. Tourists wandered in. She began teaching schoolkids how to write their names in Urdu. One foreign journalist even featured her in a travel documentary.
Sometimes, when the evening light struck just right, she thought she saw Ayaan in the crowd. A man walking with a crooked smile, a book under his arm, not looking back. But it was never him.
Still, she wrote letters.
One every Sunday. She kept them in a new lockbox. Wrote about politics, pigeons, poems, everything. None of them were sent. But she wrote anyway. Because that’s what lovers without direction do. They send their love into the world like radio signals, hoping someone out there tunes in.
Then one day, in June, a little girl wandered into her studio holding a map. Her accent was foreign, her hair in two plaits.
“Are you Miss Meher?” the girl asked.
Meher smiled. “Yes.”
The girl handed her a folded note. No envelope.
“Found this near a bench in Berlin,” it read. “It had your name on the corner. I’m just the messenger.”
Meher opened it, her fingers trembling.
“Dear Meher,
I read all your letters. Every one.
I thought you’d stop after the fifth.
You didn’t.
I thought I would forget the way your eyes hold things in.
I didn’t.
This isn’t a request. Or a proposal.
Just a promise.
I’ll be back. When you least expect it.
Till then, save me the last bite.
Yours,
Still yours,
Ayaan”
The studio blurred.
The street outside glowed under the weight of an impending monsoon.
And for the first time in months, Meher let the ink fall freely on her palm. No words. Just a blot of joy that spread like poetry under her skin.
Some cities remember you.
Some people do too.
Part 5: Things That Bloom in the Waiting
The monsoon returned like an old friend knocking at a familiar door—unannounced, unapologetic, and heavy with emotion. Meher stood at the window of her studio, watching raindrops slide down the pane like slow sentences, incomplete and beautiful. Her fingers hovered above a blank page, ink swirling in the well beside her, but no lines appeared. Not yet. Not today.
It had been seventeen days since the letter arrived from Berlin.
Seventeen days since her name, written in Ayaan’s unmistakable hand, had travelled continents to find its place again between breath and belief.
Seventeen days since she’d felt, once more, like someone’s present instead of someone’s past.
But he hadn’t written again.
There was no date, no “See you in July,” no flight number. Just a promise. Vague. Floating. A thread suspended between two hearts, stretched across skies and time zones. And Meher—ever the cautious optimist—didn’t know whether to pull on it or let it dangle.
So she waited.
She kept teaching at the studio. A batch of teenagers from St. George’s came every Thursday. One of them, Aadvik, always wrote poetry on the back of his worksheets. Another, Reeva, insisted on writing her boyfriend’s name in fourteen different fonts. Meher didn’t mind. She encouraged all of it—because words, like love, need practice.
One evening, while packing up, she noticed a familiar script on a sheet of student paper. It was a verse from Ghalib:
“Hazaaron khwaishein aisi, ke har khwaish pe dam nikle…”
(“Thousands of desires, each so intense they could take my breath away.”)
She smiled, remembering Ayaan quoting the same line once, mispronouncing it slightly. “Khwahish,” she had corrected gently. “Not khwaishein. You’re swallowing the moon.”
“How can I not,” he had grinned, “when you look like you’re made of it?”
She’d hit him with a pillow after that.
But even her anger had been soft, amused.
Now everything was a memory—alive, echoing, but distant.
Then came Sunday.
Meher spent the morning rearranging her old sketchbooks, brushing off the dust of years. In one, she found a charcoal drawing of Charminar, done long before she met Ayaan. It was incomplete. She smiled. Typical.
By afternoon, the power went out. Monsoon tantrums. The fans slowed to a halt, and the air turned sticky. She opened all the windows, lit candles, and brewed chai on the gas stove the way her father had taught her—slow boil, three cardamom pods, and always a pinch of salt.
The doorbell rang.
Not a loud knock. Just one ding. Like an afterthought.
She padded barefoot to the door, not expecting anything but perhaps a courier or Yusuf from the antique store.
When she opened it, the brass lockbox sat on the doorstep.
Her heart stilled.
The box was the same—the same faint scratches, the same weight, the same initials: AR.
But it couldn’t be.
She looked around. No one. Just the falling rain and the wet silence of Banjara Hills. No shadow, no car, no figure under an umbrella.
She picked up the box.
Inside: one letter.
“Dear Meher,
This is not a return.
This is an arrival.
I’m home.
No airport scenes, no last-minute calls. Just a doorbell. Because some doors don’t need to be broken down—they just need to be found.
I’m here for three weeks. But I didn’t want to come straight to you. Not until you decided what this was.
So I left the box. One last time.
If you open it and don’t write back, I’ll leave quietly. I won’t disturb what you’ve built.
But if you still want echoes, I’ll be waiting under the clock tower at Mozamjahi Market. Same as always.
Sunday. 6:30 PM.
Let it rain.
Ayaan”
Meher read it three times. She held the paper so tight it crumpled into her palm. Her heart was thudding like temple bells during Ramzan nights. She looked at the wall clock.
6:01 PM.
She didn’t think. She just ran.
Through the rain-soaked streets, dupatta flying behind her, water splashing at her ankles. She didn’t stop to fix her eyeliner. Didn’t carry an umbrella. The world had waited long enough.
When she reached Mozamjahi Market, the sky was a bruised lilac, and the clock tower stood like a sentinel over the old bakery stalls and hawkers pulling down their tarps. The rain was a gentle drizzle now, washing everything in silver.
And there he was.
Standing under the tower, hands in pockets, drenched, head tilted slightly as if listening for her footsteps.
She froze. Her breath caught in her throat. For a second, she thought maybe she had imagined the whole thing. That grief had conjured this vision out of longing.
But then he saw her.
And smiled.
The kind of smile that collapses all time.
She walked up to him slowly.
They didn’t speak right away. Didn’t touch. Just stood there, inches apart, the rain like music on their shoulders.
Finally, Ayaan whispered, “You came.”
She nodded. “I always come to the endings.”
“This isn’t an ending.”
“No?”
He stepped closer. “No. It’s a comma. A pause. Maybe a stanza break. But never a full stop.”
She laughed softly, tears blending with the rain. “So what is it then?”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a single slip of paper.
On it, in her handwriting, was the line she’d once written to him: “I don’t believe in finishing anything completely.”
He folded it and slipped it into her palm. “Then let’s keep it unfinished. Together.”
And there, under the tower, in the rain-washed city that remembered every secret, they kissed.
It wasn’t dramatic. No violins. No spinning cameras. Just lips meeting softly, like two pages closing over the same story.
Hyderabad didn’t cheer or sigh.
But the city, somehow, felt full again.
Part 6: Mangoes and Moonlight
The days that followed were sticky with heat and honey. June in Hyderabad was a moody affair—rain in the morning, blazing sun by afternoon, fireflies by evening. And now, nestled somewhere in that shimmer, were Meher and Ayaan. Back in the same city. Back where their sentences had started but never ended.
Ayaan had rented a small Airbnb near Domalguda—a rooftop flat with a half-dead cactus, creaky wooden furniture, and a view of the Musi River that looked more poetic at dusk than in daylight. He called it “our hideout.” Meher preferred “the pause room.” Either way, it became their bubble—where time stilled and the world grew quiet.
On his second evening back, Ayaan brought over two dozen mangoes from the Moazzam Jahi Market—Himam Pasand, Banginapalli, and one lone Alphonso wrapped like treasure.
“For you,” he said, presenting the Alphonso with mock solemnity.
She narrowed her eyes. “Only one?”
“They were five hundred rupees a kilo,” he grinned. “I’m not in Berlin anymore.”
They spent the evening slicing mangoes with their fingers, juice running down their wrists, laughing as they watched an old Satyajit Ray film on his laptop. Between bites, he read her poetry, old letters, bits of conversations they’d once had and stored away.
“I’ve missed you,” she said softly, mouth sticky with fruit.
“I missed you before I even left.”
She paused, then asked, “What happens when you leave again?”
He turned to her, serious now. “I don’t want to plan another goodbye.”
“But Berlin—”
“Can wait,” he interrupted. “Or maybe it can exist with you in it.”
Meher blinked. “You’re asking me to move?”
“I’m asking you to imagine.”
She didn’t respond. Not immediately. Instead, she got up and began washing the plates. He followed, dried them, stood behind her, watching her hands. How careful they were. How practiced.
Later, as they sat on the steps of her courtyard watching moonlight dance on mango leaves, she spoke.
“I’m not afraid of distance,” she said. “I’m afraid of becoming an afterthought.”
“You were never that.”
“People always say that—until life gets busy.”
Ayaan reached into his bag and pulled out the old brass lockbox.
“I kept it,” he said. “Took it with me on flights, trains, hotel rooms. I never opened it in Berlin. Just… kept it close.”
She ran her fingers across the lid.
“What’s inside?”
He smiled. “Hope. Unsentences. And a chocolate wrapper you gave me.”
She laughed.
Then silence. Again.
But it wasn’t awkward this time. It was shared. Sacred. The kind of silence that says: I see you. I hear everything you’re not saying.
The next few days they spent wandering the city as if they were tourists in their own love story.
One morning, they rode the ferry across the Hussain Sagar Lake, seagulls chasing reflections of sunlight on the water. Meher sketched him absentmindedly, capturing the curve of his wrist as he flipped pages of a book. He tried to draw her too but ended up with a lopsided face and a stick figure holding a mango.
“You’ve insulted me,” she declared, tossing the sketch into the breeze.
“That was modern art,” he defended. “You just don’t get it.”
They ate steaming idlis at Pragati Canteen, climbed Golconda Fort at sunset, and once, under the excuse of “adventure,” broke into an abandoned library in Malakpet. Ayaan read her the first line of every forgotten book they found. She laughed until her cheeks hurt.
But in the quiet moments, she still wondered: What are we becoming?
One evening, after they’d returned from an old vinyl shop in Abids, Ayaan said, “You know, I never really liked Hyderabad before.”
She looked up from her tea. “Really?”
“Yeah. It always felt like a city too full of memories. Like walking into a house where every photo frame stares at you.”
“And now?”
He paused. “Now, it feels like home.”
She stirred her tea slowly. “And when you go?”
“I’ll carry it with me. Not in my suitcase. In me.”
She nodded. “I’m still not coming. Not yet.”
“I know.”
“There’s work. My mother. This studio. This city… it needs me.”
“I need you too,” he whispered. “But I won’t ask again.”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “If it’s meant to grow, it will grow where it is planted.”
That night, he kissed her forehead gently before leaving. There was no lockbox exchanged, no grand declarations. Just the soft thud of his footsteps disappearing down the lane and the distant hum of the prayer call from a nearby mosque.
Inside, Meher sat at her desk and opened a fresh notebook.
She wrote:
“There is a kind of love that does not uproot. It waits. It waters. It learns the language of seasons.”
She didn’t know what came next.
But for the first time, she wasn’t afraid of not knowing.
Ayaan would leave again. Maybe for months. Maybe for good. Or maybe he’d return again, just as unexpectedly.
But now, they had learned something more valuable than permanence.
They had learned to pause.
To speak through letters.
To taste mangoes in the rain.
To believe that some stories don’t need an ending—only a return.
And Hyderabad, the city of pearls and pauses, would always keep their chapters safe between minarets and monsoon.
Part 7: Calligraphy of the Heart
The lockbox stayed on Meher’s desk, unopened, untouched, like a sacred relic from a love that refused to fade. Two weeks had passed since Ayaan’s return and departure once again. He had left without drama, without tears. Just one last evening at Noor Cafe, two bun maskas split between them, and a single sentence:
“I’ll write again.”
Meher had smiled and said, “I know.”
And now, she lived in the space between sentences.
Her studio, Nazm, had grown. Word had spread. An old poet from Abids donated his antique ink set. A school in Jubilee Hills commissioned her to handwrite their annual awards in Devanagari and Urdu. Even the bazaar ladies, the ones who never noticed her before, had begun calling her “Meher baji” and asking for birthday cards in “fancy writing.”
But inside, something tugged. A soft ache, a gentle unrest—like a verse that refuses to settle.
That Sunday, she hosted a calligraphy circle on the terrace. The evening breeze was warm and jasmine-scented. Eight people came—students, artists, even one shy techie who whispered that he used to trace Urdu alphabets in his notebook in high school because “they looked like music.”
Meher smiled and welcomed them all.
They wrote on rice paper with wooden nibs, dipping into inkpots made from coconut shells. Meher floated between them, adjusting fingers, correcting posture, suggesting verses from Faiz and Amrita Pritam. But her eyes kept drifting toward the empty chair in the far corner.
Ayaan had sat there once, scribbling nonsense into a corner of his napkin, claiming to be “too left-brained” for art.
“You’re not left-brained,” she had told him. “You’re just scared of mess.”
“Isn’t everyone?” he had replied.
After the session ended, as the group left with stained hands and glowing eyes, she sat at the empty chair and pulled out a sheet for herself.
She wrote in large, bold strokes:
“Mohabbat sirf milna nahi hoti… kabhi kabhi sirf likhna kaafi hota hai.”
(Love is not always about being together… sometimes, writing is enough.)
And for a moment, that truth filled the space around her like lamplight.
Later that night, her mother sat across from her, sipping milk, reading aloud from a dog-eared issue of Reader’s Digest.
“Did you know,” she said, “that the scent of rain has a word? Petrichor.”
Meher smiled. “Of course. Ayaan told me that once. He said it smells like memories coming up for air.”
Her mother paused. “Will he come back again?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you go?”
Meher looked at her hands, stained with ink and mango-yellow. “Maybe. When the time writes itself.”
That night, she dreamt of letters flying like pigeons across the Musi River. Some got lost in the clouds. Some landed softly in courtyards. One found its way into her lap.
When she opened it, it had no words—just the scent of cardamom, and the warmth of his hand.
She woke up with tears on her pillow and a strange lightness in her chest.
The next day, something shifted.
She found herself walking toward the post office on her way to the studio. She hadn’t been there in years. Inside, it smelled of dust and glue and a time when waiting was a virtue. She asked for international airmail paper, paid for ten envelopes, and sat down at the long wooden table near the window.
Then, slowly, she began to write:
“Dear Ayaan,
This isn’t a letter of longing.
This is a letter of living.
I want to tell you about the things you’re missing—about how Nazm smells of sandalwood and ink these days, how a schoolkid named Zoya writes her father’s name in Urdu every day as if it’s a prayer, how an old woman gifted me her husband’s pen saying, ‘He would’ve liked you.’
I want to tell you that the mango tree is full again. That the city hasn’t forgotten you. That neither have I.
But I’m not writing for answers.
I’m writing because that’s how I remember you best—not in phone calls or video chats—but in ink.
Yours in pause and poetry,
Meher”
She posted it.
Didn’t tell him.
Didn’t check the tracking number.
And then came the surprise.
One Thursday afternoon, while teaching a group of girls how to design wedding invites using calligraphy motifs, Yusuf from the antique store ran up the stairs, out of breath.
“Baji!” he shouted. “A parcel!”
She raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t order anything.”
“No, no—someone left it. Said it was from… ‘the second verse.’”
She froze. That was what Ayaan once called their future. Not a sequel. Not part two. Just the next verse in the same poem.
She opened the brown paper carefully. Inside was a small cloth-bound journal. Handmade. The cover painted with a skyline—Charminar, Tank Bund, Golconda, and what looked like a scribbled Berlin tower in the corner.
The first page had one sentence.
“This is where we write the second verse. Together.”
The remaining pages were blank.
Meher clutched it to her chest, eyes closed, heart thudding.
He hadn’t asked her to come.
He hadn’t promised to return.
He had given her something better—a shared canvas.
A beginning, without pressure.
An invitation, not a demand.
And she knew then, in that quiet studio above a dusty lane in Hyderabad, that some loves don’t demand answers. They just ask the right questions.
That some cities don’t trap you.
They wait.
Like rainclouds.
Like calligraphy strokes yet to be drawn.
Like the next page in a poem written by two hearts beating continents apart.
Part 8: Pearls Before the Moon
The envelope arrived on a windless Tuesday, delivered not by post but by an old man who sold kulfi outside the school gates. He shuffled into Meher’s studio, wiping sweat from his brow, holding out the envelope like it was sacred.
“This is for you, beti,” he said. “Someone gave it to me near the lake. Told me you’d understand.”
She took it with trembling fingers. No name. No return address. Just a blue wax seal with the imprint of a fountain pen nib.
She knew the handwriting before she even opened it.
Inside was a letter folded into fourths, and tucked within it, a one-way flight ticket to Berlin.
The letter read:
“Dear Meher,
You once said you don’t believe in finishing things completely.
And I’ve come to believe that maybe, neither do I.
This story of ours—it doesn’t need a grand climax. It’s not a film. It’s not a page-turner. It’s a slow, growing tree. A poem written in the margins of everyday life.
I don’t want to write without you anymore.
There’s a little apartment here on Kantstraße, next to a bookstore where the owner greets me with ‘Salaam’ every morning. The tea is weak, but the sky is very wide.
I think your words would fit here.
So would your silences.
If you come, don’t bring everything. Just your brushes, some courage, and the memory of the mango tree.
We’ll plant something new.
And if you choose not to… that’s okay too.
Then I will return. As many times as I need.
Because I’ve learned something from Hyderabad—from you.
Love doesn’t stay in one place.
It follows the rain.
It finds its way.
Always.
Yours under every moon,
Ayaan”
Meher read the letter again. And again. The words blurred, then cleared, then blurred again. She sat on the floor, barefoot, hair uncombed, heart wide open.
What do you do when the thing you’ve been afraid to hope for finally stands at your door?
You don’t run. You don’t hide.
You decide.
That night, Meher didn’t sleep. She packed a suitcase and unpacked it twice. She stood in front of her mother’s room, uncertain, and then knocked.
Her mother looked up from her knitting. “He’s back?”
“No,” Meher whispered. “He’s waiting.”
Her mother smiled. “Go.”
“What about the studio?”
“It will wait. Your students will wait. Hyderabad has waited before. It knows how.”
“What if it doesn’t work out?”
“Then come back. We’ll still have the mango tree.”
And that was all Meher needed.
She booked a cab for 4 a.m.
Before leaving, she went to the terrace one last time. The sky was a smoky velvet, stars like faded sequins. She carried the brass lockbox with her. Inside, she placed two things: the first letter Ayaan had ever written to her, and the final line she’d written in her notebook earlier that day:
“Some stories don’t need an ending. They need a continuation.”
She hid the box under the mango tree, right where the roots forked into the earth.
As the cab pulled away from Banjara Hills, Meher looked back only once. The tree waved softly in the breeze, as if saying: Go. You’ve written enough in this chapter.
The flight to Berlin was long. Meher didn’t sleep. She sketched strangers, drank terrible coffee, and stared out the window at a sky so large it almost frightened her.
When she landed, the city smelled unfamiliar—like metal, pavement, and cold ambition. But she held onto the letter in her coat pocket, fingers tracing the words even through fabric.
Outside the airport, Ayaan was waiting.
No flowers.
No speech.
Just him.
In a grey coat too big for his frame, holding a thermos of chai.
“You came,” he said, voice rough with disbelief.
She nodded. “I brought your lockbox.”
His eyes widened.
“You didn’t open it?”
“No. Not yet. We’ll open it together someday.”
They stood in silence for a moment, two dots on a map finally meeting.
He opened the thermos, poured her chai into the lid. It was sweet. Too sweet.
“I still don’t know how much sugar you take,” he admitted.
“You’ll learn.”
They walked out of the airport hand in hand. No plans. No promises. Just the quiet belief that this, whatever it was, could be shaped gently.
Weeks passed.
Meher set up a corner in Ayaan’s apartment with her ink, her brushes, and a secondhand desk they found at a flea market. She began teaching calligraphy online. She mailed hand-written Urdu verses to her old students in Hyderabad, who responded with crayon drawings and smiley faces.
On Sundays, she and Ayaan explored the Turkish market, cooked biryani that always tasted a little wrong, and argued over poetry translations in German cafes.
It wasn’t perfect.
There were days they didn’t talk. Days they disagreed. Days she missed the sound of the azaan or the smell of rain on Banjara dust.
But every night, they wrote a line in the shared journal. One sentence each.
No matter what happened.
Even on tired days.
Even on angry days.
And slowly, they built something from those lines—not a story, but a life.
One evening in early autumn, they sat on the balcony, sipping lukewarm tea, wrapped in a shared shawl.
Ayaan asked, “Do you miss Hyderabad?”
“All the time,” she replied.
“Would you ever go back?”
She looked up at the moon above the Berlin skyline. It was different—colder, more distant—but still familiar.
“I think… I carry it with me,” she said.
He smiled.
“Then so do I.”
They clinked their mugs together softly.
And below them, the city continued its quiet rhythm.
Somewhere across continents, a mango tree stood tall under the monsoon.
And hidden beneath it, a lockbox waited—not for endings, but for the kind of love that lingers.
Not loud.
Not flawless.
But full.
Like pearls before the moon.
– End –
