Ira Sen
Part 1
The bus rattled across the endless stretch of Patagonian steppe, its windows clouded with a thin film of dust that the wind seemed to scatter and replace in equal measure. Mira pressed her forehead against the cold glass, staring out at a world that felt larger than any she had known before, a land stripped bare of pretence, where the earth and sky met in an uncompromising line. She had been divorced for six months, though the word still felt sharp on her tongue, and this journey—half impulsive, half deliberate—was meant to be her own form of erasure, or perhaps a re-writing. She carried a neat stack of postcards in her canvas satchel, bought from a kiosk in Buenos Aires before she boarded the southbound bus, each card bearing bright images of glaciers, mountains, condors in mid-flight. They were meant for herself. A diary disguised as correspondence, a way of speaking across time to the woman she would become when the journey ended.
The bus halted at a lonely outpost where the wind bent the signboards until the letters seemed to shiver. A wooden shack painted blue sold coffee in cracked mugs and sandwiches wrapped in greasy paper. Mira stepped down, the air slapping her face with a chill that bit straight through her jacket. She ordered a coffee, sat on a bench outside, and wrote her first postcard. To myself, from the edge of the world. Today the sky is too wide for grief, and I feel like a single grain of dust the wind can claim. She dated it, slipped it into an envelope, and smiled faintly at the small ceremony of sealing a moment inside paper.
When the bus rolled onward, she dozed, woke, dozed again, and finally found herself at El Calafate, a town tucked against the vastness of Lago Argentino. The hostel smelled of damp wool and wood smoke. A corkboard by the front desk displayed layers of faded notes left by travelers: Looking for trekking partner, Left my jacket on the bus, reward if found, Party at 9, room 3. She booked a bed in a dormitory, laid her backpack down, and went for a walk in the evening light. The wind carried the cries of unseen birds. Shops glowed with souvenirs—alpaca scarves, miniature glaciers in glass, postcards like the ones in her satchel. She bought a stamp, mailed her first card to her own apartment in Kolkata, and returned to the hostel with an odd lightness in her step.
The next morning, the tour bus to Perito Moreno Glacier was packed with tourists wielding cameras. Mira found herself pressed beside a Chilean couple who spoke rapidly, their hands describing invisible mountains in the air. She nodded politely, though her Spanish was broken, and focused on the unfolding landscape—the turquoise water, the sudden eruption of ice against sky. When she stepped onto the viewing platform, the glacier loomed like a frozen cathedral, its surface alive with creaks and groans. A piece calved into the lake with a thunder that made her heart jump. She took no photos. Instead, she pulled out a postcard and wrote: You do not need to photograph beauty to remember it. It burns itself into you, like the sound of ice breaking, like the silence that follows.
That night, back at the hostel, she sorted through her small stack of cards, running her fingers over the glossy images. She froze. Tucked between the cards she had written was another, one she did not remember buying or writing. The image showed the very glacier she had seen hours earlier, but the handwriting on the back was unmistakably hers. Don’t look back too often. Someone is walking just ahead of you. The words tilted across the card as if written in haste. A chill deeper than Patagonia’s wind slid into her bones. She reread it under the dim hostel lamp, tracing each letter with disbelief. It was her script—slanted, looping, the way her teachers once told her was too hurried, too careless. But she had not written it.
She slipped the card back into her satchel, her pulse erratic, her thoughts wrestling between imagination and impossibility. Perhaps someone was playing a trick. Perhaps she had picked up another traveler’s note by mistake. She tried to recall every moment she had handled the cards, but the memory blurred with bus rides and hostel chatter. When she finally lay in her bunk, the whispers of other travelers surrounding her, she stared at the ceiling until dawn bled into the curtains.
In the morning, she convinced herself it was nothing. She packed her bag, bought another stamp, and set off toward the bus station. Yet when she opened her satchel again, the strange postcard was gone. In its place was a new one, blank on the front, except for a shadow drawn in pencil, the shape of a figure with no face, only the outline of someone moving forward. On the back, in her own handwriting again, it read: Patagonia is wide, but not empty. Keep walking. Mira folded the card in two, slipped it into her pocket, and walked toward the bus. The steppe stretched out before her, a silence she was no longer sure belonged only to the wind.
Part 2
The bus to El Chaltén wound its way through terrain that looked carved by gods and abandoned mid-gesture, the land cut open by rivers of light and shadow. Mira sat near the back, clutching her satchel as though the postcards within had weight beyond their thin paper. She told herself she should throw the strange one away, but her hand would not obey. The faceless figure drawn in pencil felt alive in her pocket, like a secret heartbeat. She looked around the bus: hikers with bright gear, couples sharing sandwiches, a girl asleep against her father’s shoulder. No one seemed to notice her. And yet, when she shifted in her seat, she thought she glimpsed the reflection of someone watching her in the glass—only when she turned, the seat was empty.
El Chaltén announced itself with a sudden row of wooden buildings huddled against the shoulders of mountains, their peaks hidden under clouds. The town called itself the trekking capital of Argentina, though it looked more like a secret village stitched together with trails. The air carried the raw scent of pine and damp stone. Mira checked into a small inn, quieter than the hostels, and her room overlooked the Río de las Vueltas curling through the valley. She stood at the window for a long time, trying to breathe in the quiet, but the wind kept pressing against the glass as if it had something urgent to say.
That evening, she sat at a café lined with shelves of old guidebooks and handwritten notes from travelers. She ordered lentil soup and a glass of Malbec, her notebook open before her, but instead of writing, she kept glancing at the door. Every time it opened, she expected someone to enter—the figure from the card, faceless yet familiar. The waiter, a man with deep lines around his eyes, noticed her distraction and asked in careful English, “First time here?” She nodded, grateful for the sound of another voice. “The mountains are good company,” he added, smiling as he placed her drink. She wanted to believe him, but when she looked at the postcards in her satchel, she wasn’t sure anymore.
The next day she joined a trail leading toward Laguna Capri, a hike said to offer views of the elusive Mount Fitz Roy. The path climbed through lenga forests where the leaves whispered secrets in the wind. Other trekkers passed her, some in groups, others alone, but Mira kept to herself, stopping often to scribble quick lines on postcards: The trail is a spine, and I am a vertebra trying to fit back into the body of the world. By the time she reached the lake, the clouds refused to lift, hiding the great mountain, but the silence there was thick, and the water mirrored her face with unsettling clarity. She wrote another card: Sometimes absence is a kind of presence. The mountain is here, even when unseen.
As she packed up to return, she found a postcard tucked into the side pocket of her bag. She hadn’t put it there. The front showed a painting of Fitz Roy glowing in sunlight. On the back, her own hurried script: You will see it when you are ready. Don’t be afraid of who walks ahead. Her hands shook. She looked around—the other hikers were scattered, absorbed in their own worlds. No one seemed close enough to slip something into her bag. She tried to laugh it off, to tell herself she was overtired, but the edges of the card cut sharply against her fingers as if insisting on its reality.
That night she returned to the inn with aching legs and an unsettled mind. She laid all the postcards on her bed, the ones she had written and the ones that had appeared. Together, they looked like a conversation, as if two versions of herself were speaking across the miles, one a step ahead, one trailing behind. She tried to remember if she had ever written these words before—perhaps in another notebook, perhaps in another life—but memory is a slippery thing. The more she searched, the less she trusted her own timeline.
At dawn, she awoke to the sound of knocking. She stumbled to the door, expecting the innkeeper, but the hallway was empty. On the floor lay another postcard. She picked it up with trembling hands. This one showed the bus station at Río Gallegos, hundreds of kilometers south, a place she had not yet been. On the back, in her looping script: Don’t stay too long in El Chaltén. Keep moving south.
Her first instinct was to burn it, but instead she slid it into her journal and sat at the desk until her breathing steadied. If someone was following her, they knew her movements before she made them. If it was her own doing, then some part of her was reaching ahead, scattering breadcrumbs in reverse. Either way, she couldn’t stop.
She boarded a southbound bus two days later, telling herself it was just part of the plan, that Patagonia was too vast to linger in one place. But as the bus pulled away, she caught sight of a man standing near the station wall. He was tall, wearing a gray coat, his face hidden by the brim of his hat. For a second, he raised his head, and though the distance was too great, she felt sure he was looking directly at her. She clutched the postcards to her chest, and the bus rolled on into the wilderness.
Part 3
The bus journey to Río Gallegos felt endless, the world outside flattening into a monotony of wind-lashed plains and low, stubborn shrubs. Mira pressed her palms against the windowpane as if to anchor herself, but the glass only vibrated with the relentless hum of wheels on asphalt. Around her, passengers dozed, read, or stared at their phones, cocooned in their private distances. She had no one to lean against, no voice to distract her. Only the weight of the postcards in her satchel kept her tethered, their thinness absurd against the immensity of the land. She wondered if loneliness had a sound, and if it did, it would be the moaning of Patagonian wind.
At a roadside station, she stepped out for air. The building was little more than a metal box painted white, its walls pockmarked with rust. Inside, a counter offered empanadas that smelled faintly of reheated oil. Mira bought one, ate half, then tucked the other half into a napkin. She wrote on another postcard, her handwriting quick and uneven: Sometimes I think the land is testing me. To see if I will keep moving when all it offers is silence. She mailed it at a rusted box by the door, the slot swallowing her words whole.
Back on the bus, she noticed him again—the tall man in the gray coat, now seated two rows ahead. She couldn’t see his face clearly, only the slope of his shoulders and the tilt of his head as he stared out at the plains. She told herself it was coincidence, that Patagonia’s roads were few, its buses fewer. And yet her throat tightened with every mile. She tried to write another postcard, but her hand stalled, the words curdling before they reached the page. Instead, she watched his silhouette and counted the stops until Río Gallegos.
By the time they arrived, dusk had thickened into a bruise across the horizon. The town sprawled low and unadorned, its streets lined with windblown dust and flickering neon. Mira walked quickly from the station, her backpack heavy, her ears tuned for footsteps behind her. She checked into a modest hotel with faded curtains and a lobby that smelled of polish. The receptionist, a woman with kind eyes and slow Spanish, handed her a brass key and told her breakfast would be served at seven. Mira climbed the narrow stairs, each creak announcing her presence.
Her room was small, its single window rattling with wind. She set her bag down, pulled out the postcards, and spread them on the bed. The newest among them made her breath catch. She hadn’t placed it there. The front showed Río Gallegos station—the very building she had arrived at hours earlier. On the back, in her handwriting: You are still behind. Keep moving. Tomorrow the ferry. Don’t wait.
Mira sank onto the bed, the card trembling in her hand. Her skin prickled with the sensation of being both observed and guided. She whispered aloud, “Who are you?” as though the paper itself might answer. But the room remained indifferent, its only reply the rattle of wind against glass.
She tried to sleep but her dreams were thick with water and shadow. She dreamed she stood on a dock, ferries leaving one after another, and each time she tried to board, someone ahead of her slipped in first, faceless, holding a stack of postcards that bled ink into the sea. When she woke, dawn had painted the sky a dull gray, and her body ached as if she had truly been running.
At breakfast, the receptionist mentioned the ferry to Tierra del Fuego. “It leaves in the afternoon. The weather, maybe bad, but you can go.” Mira nodded, though the word ferry made her stomach churn with dread and inevitability. She spent the morning wandering the streets, their emptiness magnified by the wind that tore through alleys and rattled shop signs. She ducked into a bookstore, its shelves crowded with guidebooks and secondhand novels in Spanish and English. She picked up a slim volume on Patagonia’s myths: spirits of the plains, voices carried in the wind, shadows that guided travelers away from danger—or toward it. The stories felt too familiar, as if she had stumbled into one and could no longer tell where it ended.
Back in her room, she found yet another postcard slipped under her door. This one bore no picture, only blank white. On the back, her writing again: The ferry is waiting. Don’t miss it. He will not wait either. Her hands clenched until the card bent. She opened her door quickly, peered down the hall, but it was empty. No sound of retreating steps. No shadow. She closed it again, locking it twice.
That afternoon she boarded the ferry at Punta Loyola, the wind so fierce it nearly pushed her sideways. The water of the Strait of Magellan churned dark and wild, the ferry groaning as it cut through waves. Mira stood at the deck rail, clutching her coat tight, the salt spray stinging her face. She scanned the passengers: truck drivers heading to Tierra del Fuego, families huddled inside the cabin, a group of tourists snapping photos. And there—near the stern—stood the man in the gray coat. He leaned against the rail, head bowed, hands gloved. She thought for an instant he was writing something, his hand moving across paper. Her breath snagged. She wanted to march up to him, demand answers, but her legs felt anchored. Instead she slipped a postcard from her satchel and wrote with frantic urgency: If you are real, speak to me. If you are me, then tell me how this ends. She left it on the deck, weighted by a stone, hoping the wind would deliver it to him—or to herself.
The ferry shuddered across the water, the land of Tierra del Fuego slowly rising in jagged silhouette. Mira gripped the railing, her heart unsteady, as if the very earth beneath her feet was shifting into something she could no longer name. When she looked back toward the stern, the man was gone. Only a scrap of paper remained on the railing where he had stood, fluttering in the wind. She rushed to it, catching it just before it lifted into the sea. It was a postcard. On the front, a picture of Ushuaia—the southernmost city, the end of the world. On the back, in her own handwriting: I am not ahead anymore. I am beside you.
Part 4
The ferry docked at Puerto Santa Cruz under a bruised sky, the land of Tierra del Fuego rising low and rugged as though scraped bare by the hand of time. Mira stepped off with the others, her backpack heavy, her heart heavier still with the weight of the postcard she had found on the railing. I am not ahead anymore. I am beside you. The words pulsed in her mind with every step, reshaping the rhythm of her breath. She tucked the card deep into her jacket, unwilling to part with it and yet terrified of its presence.
The town was small, a cluster of low houses leaning against the wind, streets nearly deserted except for stray dogs and the occasional truck roaring past. Mira found a guesthouse painted faded green, its door creaking like a question as she entered. The woman at the counter gave her a room upstairs, simple but clean, the window facing the restless water. Mira dropped her bag, sat on the bed, and spread the postcards across the blanket. Her own words stared back at her like fragments of a life lived in advance. She tried to arrange them chronologically, to force some sense of order, but the handwriting blurred together until she couldn’t tell which lines were hers and which belonged to the other presence.
That evening, she wandered the waterfront, the wind tugging at her hair, the sea a restless mirror of gray. Fishing boats bobbed against the pier, their ropes straining, their lights glowing weakly in the gloom. She thought of Kolkata, the humid air of Howrah station, the weight of voices always pressing in. Patagonia was the opposite, silence stretched so wide it echoed. And yet, even here, she was not alone. She felt the press of someone walking a half-step behind, always near, never visible.
She stopped at a small café lit by a single bulb, its walls lined with faded photos of storms and ships. The only other customer was a man in a corner, his face shadowed, his hands moving slowly as if writing. Mira ordered tea, sat at a table near the window, and forced herself not to glance at him. She pulled out a postcard, began to write: I no longer know if I am chasing myself or being chased. If you are me, why hide? If you are not, why write in my hand? She set down her pen, and when she looked up, the corner was empty. The cup he had used still steamed. On the table lay another postcard. She crossed the room, her hand trembling as she picked it up. The front showed the lighthouse at the end of the world, Faro Les Eclaireurs, its red-and-white stripes stark against sea and sky. On the back: Tomorrow, Ushuaia. The road narrows. Don’t turn back.
Mira barely slept. The walls of her room seemed to close in, the wind outside scratching like fingernails. She woke at dawn, packed her bag, and boarded the bus south. The journey to Ushuaia cut through valleys and along the Beagle Channel, mountains rising sharp as knives on either side. The landscape grew more dramatic, as though Patagonia itself was tightening its grip. Mira pressed her face against the glass, watching peaks dissolve into mist.
By the time the bus rolled into Ushuaia, the “city at the end of the world,” twilight was already draped across the streets. The place felt both alive and ghostly—cruise ships docked in the harbor, tourists moving in clumps, but behind them a silence that seemed older than human presence. Mira checked into a hostel perched on a hill, its windows overlooking the channel where the water glowed faintly under the moon. Her dormitory was crowded, but she felt no comfort in proximity.
She left her bag and walked into the night, the streets humming with distant music and the clatter of glasses in bars. She climbed the hill toward the old prison, now a museum, its walls looming with the weight of history. Here, in the early 20th century, prisoners had been shipped to the edge of the world to vanish from memory. Mira walked past the gates, closed for the night, but their iron shadows seemed to reach for her. She thought of her marriage, the way love had once been a room she could not escape, and how divorce had left her wandering corridors just as cold. She pulled a postcard from her pocket, scribbled: This city knows endings. Perhaps that is why I am here.
When she returned to the hostel, her bed was waiting, sheets folded neatly, a lamp casting weak light. On the pillow lay another postcard. Her throat tightened as she turned it over. The front showed a snow-covered peak above Ushuaia, the back written in her hand: One more step. The lighthouse. Don’t be afraid.
The next morning, she joined a boat tour on the Beagle Channel. The vessel was small, filled with tourists in bright jackets, cameras slung around their necks. The water rippled silver beneath a sky streaked with clouds. Sea lions sprawled across rocks, birds wheeled in the wind, and far ahead, the lighthouse rose like a sentinel—Faro Les Eclaireurs, “the Lighthouse at the End of the World.” Mira’s breath caught. It was the image on the card.
As the boat drew near, she stood at the rail, the spray cold against her skin. The lighthouse glowed red and white against the gray, unwavering. She reached into her satchel for her postcards, but her fingers brushed only one—the one she had not written, the one that had told her to come. She looked around the boat. Passengers were laughing, taking photos, speaking in languages she could not catch. Yet among them, she saw him again—the man in the gray coat. He stood at the opposite rail, head turned toward the lighthouse. For the first time, his face was clear, and it was her own.
Mira’s knees weakened. She gripped the rail, the world tilting. The man—her double—lifted a postcard, slipped it into his coat pocket, and turned away. When the boat docked back in Ushuaia, he was gone. Only the lighthouse remained, steady in the distance, as though it had been watching all along.
That night, in her hostel bed, Mira laid out all the postcards once more. Together they told a story, but the ending was missing. She held her pen above a blank card, her hand shaking. At last she wrote: I am not alone. The shadow is mine, and I am hers. At the end of the world, perhaps we meet. She dated it, sealed it, and slipped it under her pillow, waiting to see if it would vanish by morning.
Part 5
Mira woke before dawn, her heart already pounding as though it had been running ahead of her in dreams. She reached under her pillow for the postcard she had written the night before, half expecting it to be gone. It was still there. But something was different—the words had changed. Her original line remained, but beneath it, in the same familiar hand, someone had added: At the end of the world, we do not just meet. We merge. She dropped the card as if it burned. The room was dark, only the sound of the wind pressing against the glass, but she felt watched, her own skin too tight, as though she had become her own witness.
She left the hostel while the town still slept, the streets lit by pale lamps, the harbor quiet. The Beagle Channel shimmered under the last stars. She walked without direction, her breath clouding the air, her boots striking the pavement in rhythm with a second set of footsteps she could not hear but could feel. At the edge of town, the road curved upward, leading toward the trailheads into the mountains. Mira followed it, the cold slicing into her lungs. She did not stop until the first blush of dawn touched the peaks.
On a boulder overlooking the water, she sat and pulled out her satchel. She laid the postcards one by one, the pile growing like a deck of fate. She tried to order them again, but each card seemed to resist placement, as if they belonged to a sequence she had not yet lived. The ones she had written blurred into the ones that had appeared, until she could no longer separate intention from intrusion. She whispered aloud, “Who are you?” but the only answer was the gulls circling overhead.
When she looked up, she saw him—herself—standing at the far end of the trail. The figure was no longer faceless. It was her own body, her own face, but older, eyes lined with fatigue, lips pressed with determination. The double raised a hand, not in greeting but in warning. Then, as Mira blinked, the figure vanished, leaving only the sway of branches. She stumbled to her feet, heart hammering, the postcards scattering across the ground. She gathered them quickly, but one was missing. She searched the rocks, the grass, but it was gone, as though the wind had swallowed it.
Back in Ushuaia, she wandered the streets like someone seeking an exit from her own reflection. Tourists thronged the shops, buying penguin souvenirs and mugs stamped Fin del Mundo, End of the World. Mira felt both inside and outside the scene, a ghost trailing the living. At a post office painted bright blue, she mailed the remaining cards to herself, each envelope carrying fragments of confusion across oceans. As she slipped the last into the slot, she noticed one already waiting in her pocket. She hadn’t put it there. Its front showed a ship bound for Antarctica, its hull cutting through ice. On the back: One journey remains. South of south. Don’t resist.
That night, unable to rest, she sat in the hostel’s common room, listening to the low murmur of travelers swapping stories. A German couple recounted hikes, an American student showed photos, a Chilean guide spoke of storms that had swallowed boats whole. Mira stayed silent, her gaze fixed on the fire flickering in the hearth. She felt the postcards shifting in her bag, alive like restless animals. When she finally returned to her room, another lay waiting on her bed. This one bore no image, only white, and on the back: Tomorrow the ship leaves. We cannot stay divided forever.
She tried to fight the pull. She told herself she had come to Patagonia only to forget, to dissolve into landscapes vast enough to contain her grief. But now the journey had become something else—an unraveling. She walked to the harbor at dawn, the ships looming, their masts shivering against the sky. Among them, one vessel prepared for the Antarctic voyage, crew shouting, ropes tightening. She stood at the dock, watching as passengers boarded with heavy coats and bright eyes. She told herself she would turn back, return north, leave the postcards to their silence.
And then she saw it. A postcard pinned under a stone on the dock. She picked it up with numb fingers. The front showed a map of the Drake Passage, the treacherous waters leading south. The back read: If you turn back now, you lose me. If you go forward, we become whole. Her knees nearly gave way. She looked up, and among the boarding passengers she saw the man in the gray coat—herself again, but this time younger, not older, the lines softened, the eyes brighter. He—she—turned, meeting her gaze across the distance. No smile, no wave. Just recognition, like a mirror tilted toward her.
Mira found herself walking forward before she had decided. The crewman checked her ticket—she had none—but when she opened her satchel, a slip of paper was waiting there, stamped and dated as though it had always belonged. He waved her aboard. The ship groaned under her feet as she crossed the deck, the cold biting sharper now, as if the world itself were narrowing to a point.
In her cabin that night, she spread the postcards once more. They formed a circle now, not a line. Each card answered another, words folding into echoes. She realized they had not been guiding her toward a destination but toward herself, toward the moment when past, present, and future would collapse into one. She picked up a blank card, stared at it, and felt her hand move without her will. The words appeared in her script: South of south, there is no division. Only the self that survives.
She dropped the card, her chest tight, her vision swimming. Outside, the ship creaked into the passage, waves rising like walls. Mira lay on her bunk, the stack of postcards pulsing like a heart beside her. She closed her eyes, whispering into the dark, “If you are me, then take me whole.”
Part 6
The ship heaved as it entered the Drake Passage, the world’s most violent stretch of water, where two oceans collided in restless fury. Mira clutched the railing, her knuckles raw against the cold, the spray stinging her face. Waves rose like mountains, crashing against the bow, and every creak of the vessel sounded like a warning. Around her, passengers retreated indoors, their laughter swallowed by seasickness and fear. But Mira stayed outside, pinned to the deck by a force she could not name. South of south, the sea itself seemed alive, a mouth swallowing her old self whole.
She pulled a postcard from her satchel, though the paper trembled in her grip. She wanted to write, to anchor herself in words, but the wind tore at her hand, ripping the pen’s ink across the card. When she finally looked down, she froze. She hadn’t written the words. They were already there, scrawled in her hurried script: This is the passage. Survive it, and the mirror will not hold. Her breath caught. She shoved the card into her coat, turned toward the dark horizon, and whispered, “Then let it break.”
For three days the ship battled storms. Mira barely slept, her body tossed on the bunk as if she were no more substantial than driftwood. Sometimes she dreamed of Kolkata, her old apartment filled with the ghost of a marriage that had collapsed in silence. Other times she dreamed of herself standing at the edge of ice cliffs, postcards fluttering around her like birds. Each time she woke, another card appeared on her pillow. One showed a glacier taller than any building, another the silhouette of penguins on a beach. Each message was more insistent: Almost there. Don’t resist. The self is two only until it is one.
By the time the sea calmed, the air had turned sharper, crystalline, as though filtered through centuries of cold. Mira stood on deck and saw it—the first jagged spires of the Antarctic Peninsula, black rock and white ice thrust together like bones of an ancient creature. Passengers cheered, cameras clicked, but Mira felt something deeper, a pull like gravity. Her hand brushed the postcards again, and she thought of all the words waiting to be written, all the versions of herself speaking across time. She no longer asked who was writing. She began to wonder why.
The ship anchored near a bay where blue icebergs drifted like cathedrals. Zodiacs ferried passengers ashore, boots crunching on snow. Mira stepped onto the continent, her breath stolen not just by cold but by awe. The silence here was not emptiness but fullness, a weight pressing from all sides. She wandered away from the group, her steps leading her toward a ridge overlooking the sea. At its crest, she saw him—her double again, the man in the gray coat. Only this time he was not watching. He was writing on a postcard, his hand steady despite the wind.
Mira’s chest tightened. She climbed toward him, snow groaning beneath her boots. When she reached the top, the figure turned, and it was her face again, neither younger nor older now, but exactly hers, eyes dark with recognition. He—she—offered the postcard. Mira took it with trembling fingers. The front showed nothing, only white, like the ice beneath their feet. On the back: The journey ends here. Write the last card, and we are no longer divided.
Her throat closed. She wanted to speak, to ask what it meant, but when she looked up, the figure was gone. Only her footprints remained, circling back into her own. She collapsed onto the snow, the card pressed to her chest, tears burning against the cold.
That night on the ship, she sat in her cabin with the entire stack spread before her. The cards formed a circle again, messages intertwining, each answering another like a dialogue between mirrors. She felt dizzy, the lines between her selves blurring. She picked up a blank card, her hand moving before thought: I am here. I have always been here. At the end of the world, the only companion is myself. She dropped the pen, breathing ragged, as though the words had drained her blood.
The next morning, the crew announced a landing near a research station. Mira joined the group but lingered behind as they explored. She found a small chapel built of wood, its door creaking as she entered. Inside, candles flickered against icons, their light warm against the endless cold. On the altar lay another postcard. She approached slowly, already knowing what it would say. The front showed nothing but a horizon line of white and blue. The back: When you leave this place, you leave as one.
Mira closed her eyes, the card trembling in her hand. She felt the presence settle into her chest, no longer outside but within, her own breath answering back. She whispered, “Then let it be so.”
When she stepped back onto the snow, the air felt different, sharper, as though the landscape itself acknowledged her choice. The double was gone. Only her shadow stretched across the ice, long and solitary, yet whole.
That evening, back in her cabin, she wrote the final card: I am no longer afraid. The journey was mine, the shadow mine, the silence mine. Patagonia led me here, and here I remain, even when I return. She sealed it, slipped it under her pillow, and lay down. She did not check if it vanished. She no longer needed to.
The ship turned north the next day, its bow cutting once more through the treacherous waters. Mira stood at the railing, watching the ice recede. The postcards were gone now—all of them—but she felt them inside her, a chorus folded into one voice. The journey had not ended. It had only narrowed to a point where there was no division, no shadow, no double. Only Mira, carrying the end of the world within her, walking always beside herself.
Part 7
The ship’s return through the Drake Passage felt calmer than before, though Mira could not tell if the sea had changed or if it was she herself who had. The waves still rose in dark walls, the vessel still groaned under the assault of currents, yet she felt steady, as though some weight inside her had shifted and found its center. She no longer searched the deck for her double, no longer startled at the thought of eyes following her. She stood at the railing each morning, breathing in the cold salt air, and thought: I am here. Only me. But not only me.
When the ship finally docked again at Ushuaia, the city seemed different, though she knew its streets and harbor had not altered in the weeks she had been gone. The mountains were the same, the Beagle Channel shimmered with the same restless light, yet Mira walked through it as though she had been reborn. She checked into a small inn instead of a hostel this time, a room to herself with wooden walls that smelled of pine. She unpacked, half-expecting the postcards to tumble out, but her satchel was empty. She lay on the bed, hands folded on her chest, and felt a strange grief at their absence, as if a chorus had gone silent.
That evening she wandered down to the pier. Tourists laughed as they boarded evening cruises, children ran after dogs along the quay, couples leaned against the railings whispering promises. Mira leaned beside them, alone but not lonely, her reflection broken in the water. She pulled out her notebook, wrote in steady hand: I am the postcard now. Every step, every sight, every breath is a message to myself. She closed the book gently, as though sealing an envelope.
The days that followed she spent hiking into the mountains above Ushuaia, pushing her body further than before. The trails wound through lenga forests, opened to ridges where the wind roared like an animal, then dipped again into valleys of silence. Each time she reached a summit, she stood still, closed her eyes, and felt the presence of herself—no longer outside, no longer ahead, but fully within. Once she thought she heard footsteps behind her, but when she turned, there was only her shadow stretching long on the rocks. She smiled, whispered, “I know you,” and continued walking.
After a week, she booked a bus northward. As the vehicle rattled across the endless plains, she watched the land unfold, barren and wild, the same as before, yet her gaze was new. The emptiness no longer frightened her. Instead it felt like possibility, each horizon line an unwritten card. She no longer mailed notes to Kolkata. She no longer needed proof that she existed in a place. She had learned that being here, breathing, was proof enough.
At Río Gallegos, she checked into the same hotel as before. The receptionist did not recognize her, or perhaps pretended not to. The brass key was the same, the curtains the same faded pattern, but when she entered her room, her chest did not tighten as it once had. She placed her bag down calmly, looked at the bed, half-expecting a postcard to be waiting. There was none. Instead she took one from the hotel’s tourist rack by the lobby—a bright image of penguins lined on a beach—and wrote simply: I made it through. She did not sign it. She left it on the desk and walked out, letting the wind take it if it wished.
The journey continued, north across the steppe, buses and border crossings, long stretches of silence interrupted by the sudden flight of birds. Mira wrote in her notebook often, not postcards now but longer letters, not to herself but to no one, to the air perhaps, to the road itself. She wrote of glaciers collapsing with thunder, of the faceless figure that had become her, of the weight of silence that had both crushed and freed her. She wrote of her marriage without bitterness, of the woman she had been before and the woman she was now becoming. Each page felt like a folding, a sealing, but without the need for stamps or destinations.
In El Calafate, she returned to the corkboard at the hostel where her journey had first sharpened. New notes had been pinned: invitations, jokes, scrawled maps. She stood before them, remembering the first card she had mailed, the one where she had written, Today the sky is too wide for grief. She touched the board lightly, not adding anything this time, just acknowledging the thread that had led her here.
That night, in the dormitory light, she dreamed again. In the dream, she stood in front of a wall covered in postcards, hundreds, maybe thousands, each one written in her hand. They fluttered in the wind, voices whispering, but none of them frightened her. She stepped forward, placed her palm against one, and it dissolved into her skin. When she woke, she smiled, touched her chest, and whispered, “Yes.”
By the time she boarded the bus back toward Buenos Aires, Patagonia lay behind her like a vast silence she carried inside. She looked out at the plains one last time, the horizon endless, and felt no urge to chase it. She opened her notebook, wrote: The end of the world was not an ending. It was where I began again. She closed the book, leaned her head against the glass, and let herself drift into sleep.
Part 8
Buenos Aires unfolded around her in sound before sight—the hum of traffic, the pulse of voices spilling from cafés, the rhythm of music rising from open doorways. After weeks of wind and silence, the city felt like a storm of noise. Mira stepped off the bus and was swallowed at once by its current, the sidewalks crowded, the air heavy with exhaust and roasted meat. For a moment she panicked, clutching her satchel tight as if it still held the postcards, but then she remembered: they were gone, dissolved into her. She closed her eyes, took a breath, and allowed the city to flow around her.
She found a small pension in San Telmo, its courtyard tiled, vines curling against old brick walls. Her room smelled faintly of oranges, sunlight streaming through half-broken shutters. She lay on the bed, listening to the rise and fall of voices outside, and wondered if this was the true test—not the storms of Patagonia, not the icy silence of Antarctica, but this, the return to ordinary life. To walk through a city with herself intact, whole, no longer searching for shadows.
The next morning, she set out into the streets. San Telmo was alive with markets: stalls spilling antiques, tango dancers twisting on cobblestones, children weaving through the crowd with balloons. Mira walked slowly, her fingers brushing over old postcards stacked on a vendor’s table. The images showed Buenos Aires of another era—horse-drawn carriages, women in wide skirts, men in hats tilted against the sun. She picked one up, felt the weight of the paper, then set it back down. She did not need it anymore. She carried enough postcards in memory.
In a café on Avenida de Mayo, she ordered coffee thick as syrup and medialunas glazed with sugar. Around her, men argued politics, students scribbled notes, an old man read a newspaper with shaking hands. Mira opened her notebook and began to write, not a postcard, not a fragment, but a full letter. She wrote of the glaciers that had thundered like gods breaking, of the faceless shadow that had walked ahead until it turned into her, of the ship cutting into ice, of the silence that had filled her until she was no longer afraid. The words poured out faster than she could catch them, and for the first time, she did not pause to wonder who they were meant for. They were meant to exist, and that was enough.
That afternoon, she visited La Boca. The neighborhood blazed with color—houses painted blue, yellow, red, the streets humming with music. Tourists snapped photos, children chased stray footballs, artists displayed canvases of tango dancers frozen mid-spin. Mira stood at the edge of it all, her heart swelling. She thought of how she had once measured herself in absence, in what she had lost, and how now she measured herself in presence. The colors did not overwhelm her. They affirmed her. She whispered, “I am here,” and the words did not echo. They settled.
But nights in the city were harder. In her room, when the courtyard grew quiet, when the street lamps cast long shadows on the walls, Mira sometimes felt the old tug—the urge to reach for a postcard, to wait for one to appear on her pillow. Once, she dreamed she saw her double again, standing in the doorway, but instead of fear, she felt tenderness. The double smiled faintly, as though proud, and then faded into the dark. Mira woke with tears on her cheeks, not of grief but of recognition. She wrote in her notebook: The shadow has become my witness. And I have become hers.
Days turned into a rhythm. She wandered Recoleta cemetery, tracing names carved into stone, wondering about all the letters never written. She walked Palermo’s parks, sitting by lakes where couples rowed boats, children fed ducks, musicians strummed guitars. She bought a bottle of Malbec, drank it slowly at her pension window, watching the city lights glitter like stars scattered across earth. Each act felt like a postcard, not written but lived, and she carried them within her.
One afternoon she received mail at the pension’s desk. A bundle forwarded from her flat in Kolkata, postcards she had sent at the beginning of the journey. The manager handed them over with a smile. Mira carried them to her room, sat on the bed, and turned them over one by one. The first, from that dusty bus stop on the steppe: Today the sky is too wide for grief. Another from El Calafate: You do not need to photograph beauty to remember it. She read them slowly, each word hers, each word already transformed by the journey that had followed. At the bottom of the stack, she froze. There was one she did not remember writing. The image showed Antarctica, white cliffs, blue shadows. On the back: You survived me. Now live me. The script was hers.
Mira closed her eyes, pressing the card to her chest. She did not ask how. She did not ask who. She whispered, “I will.”
That evening she walked to Plaza de Mayo, the heart of the city, where protests and parades had etched themselves into history. The square pulsed with people, voices rising, flags waving. Mira stood among them, anonymous and whole, and felt the strange truth settle: she had come to Patagonia to escape herself, to scatter grief across horizons. Instead, Patagonia had gathered her, stitched her shadows back together, and returned her to the world not emptied but complete.
She walked back through the city streets, the night alive around her, the sound of tango drifting from open doors, the smell of grilled meat clinging to the air. She thought of the lighthouse, of the snow, of the faceless figure who had walked ahead until she caught up. She smiled, not at the memory but at the presence within her. She no longer needed postcards. She was the message now, carried forward in every step, every word, every breath.
Part 9
The plane banked over the sprawl of Kolkata, the Hooghly a ribbon of light beneath, the city spread vast and restless like an unmade bed. Mira pressed her forehead against the window, her chest tightening with a mix of recognition and distance. The air here would be thick with humidity, the streets loud with horns and vendors’ cries. She had left behind the silence of glaciers, the long winds of the steppe, the white immensity of Antarctica. But as the plane descended, she whispered to herself, I carry it still.
At Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose airport, the heat wrapped around her like a hand she had once known too well. Porters shouted, families clustered, taxis honked. Mira moved through it slowly, her satchel against her side, no postcards within, only her notebook heavy with unwritten pages. The city did not wait for her—it surged forward, alive and indifferent. Yet she no longer felt erased by its press. She breathed it in, step by step.
Her flat smelled faintly of dust when she unlocked the door. Curtains drawn, the fan overhead still, the rooms waiting in the hush of absence. On her desk, a pile of mail had gathered: bills, flyers, a letter from her aunt in Darjeeling. She set down her bag, opened the windows to let in air, and for the first time since leaving, allowed herself to look at the walls not as a prison but as a shell she could choose to inhabit.
Later that evening, she boiled tea, sat on the balcony overlooking the lane where children played cricket with a broken bat. Their shouts rose into the dusk, mingling with the call of vendors. Mira sipped slowly, her notebook open. She wrote: The city is no less wild than Patagonia. Its noise is another wind. Its crowds are another ocean. The test is not survival here but presence. She underlined the word. Presence.
The days unfolded unevenly. At the market, bargaining voices pressed into her ears, fish scales glittered on wooden slabs, sweat trickled down her back. At night, neighbors argued, televisions blared, the city never slept. Mira sometimes longed for the cold clarity of the south, for the way silence carved space around her. Yet she had learned not to flee from longing. She wrote through it instead. Each page became a map, not of where she had been but of where she stood.
One afternoon, as she sorted through the mail again, she froze. A postcard lay buried beneath envelopes. The front showed Ushuaia’s lighthouse. She had seen this image before, many times, but this card bore fresh ink. On the back: You are not at the end of the world now. But remember—you carry it within you. Don’t forget. The script was hers. Mira held it without fear. She smiled faintly and pinned it above her desk, not as a mystery but as a reminder.
In the weeks that followed, she began to teach again—literature classes at a small institute near Park Street. Her students were curious, restless, their questions darting like sparrows. Mira stood before them, chalk in hand, and found herself speaking differently now, not only of novels but of silence, of landscapes that shape us, of the voices we carry inside. When she mentioned Patagonia, the students leaned forward, eyes wide. She told them only fragments: glaciers cracking like thunder, winds that erased footsteps, a lighthouse steady in the storm. She did not mention the postcards. That story belonged to her alone.
At night she walked along the Hooghly, the river swollen with reflections of bridges and lamps. The air smelled of oil, incense, and the faint rot of water. She thought of the Beagle Channel, the way icebergs had drifted like cathedrals, and yet she felt no fracture between then and now. Both rivers, both currents, carried her. She leaned on the railing, closed her eyes, and whispered, “I am still at the end of the world. It is here too.”
One evening she dreamed again of her double. But this time the figure did not stand apart. It sat beside her, hands folded, eyes calm. They watched the city together, the dream filled not with menace but with companionship. When she woke, she felt a stillness so complete it seemed to breathe through her. She wrote: I am not divided anymore. The shadow is not something to fear. It is my echo, my companion, my proof.
As winter deepened, Kolkata cooled, the air tinged with smoke from roadside fires. Mira walked College Street, fingering books piled in heaps, their pages yellowed, their spines cracked. She bought a stack of blank postcards from a vendor, not with the intention of mailing them but of carrying them empty. She slipped one into her pocket each morning, a silent companion, a reminder that she herself was now the message. Sometimes she wrote a line, sometimes she left it blank, but each card became a mirror of her day, no longer dictated by a shadow, but chosen by her own hand.
One day, walking home, she stopped at a postbox, pulled out a card, and without thinking wrote: I am here. I am whole. She slipped it into the slot, smiling. She had no need for the card to return. The act itself was enough.
Part 10
Winter in Kolkata had always been brief, more suggestion than season, a soft coolness that lingered only in the mornings before the city returned to its humid urgency. But for Mira, that brief coolness carried an echo of Patagonia, a whisper of the winds that had carved her, the glaciers that had split open silence. Each time she stepped into the morning air and saw her breath fog faintly before her, she felt the immensity of the south ripple through her, as if reminding her that distance could not unmake presence. She had brought the end of the world back with her.
Her days took on a rhythm both ordinary and renewed. She taught literature with a steadiness she had never known before, not hiding behind analysis or borrowed voices but speaking directly. Her students noticed. They leaned closer when she described landscapes as characters, when she said a novel was also a journey one takes with oneself. She told them, without naming it, that sometimes the most dangerous landscapes were not mountains or seas but the terrain inside, where shadows walked ahead of us until we learned to walk beside them. Some students nodded as though they understood. Others scribbled notes, unaware they were writing their own postcards already.
Evenings she spent writing at her desk, the lighthouse postcard pinned above like a star. She no longer wrote to her past self, no longer pleaded for answers. Instead she wrote to no one, or to everyone, pages filling with fragments of Patagonia: the taste of bitter coffee at a dusty stop, the thunder of Perito Moreno’s ice, the faceless figure who had walked just ahead until she caught up. She did not explain them. She did not need to. The act of writing was the message itself. Each word steadied her.
On weekends, she wandered the city. She moved through College Street, buying books and pausing to watch the chaos of bargaining voices. She strolled the Hooghly, listening to the slap of oars against water, the murmur of lovers pressed close under the bridge’s shadow. She even returned to Howrah Station, the place where years earlier she had stood with her husband, waiting for trains that had never taken them anywhere new. Now she stood alone on the platform, and instead of emptiness she felt expansion. She whispered, This too is a horizon, and stepped back into the crowd, whole.
And yet, sometimes, a faint tug returned. A dream where she stood at the edge of a steppe, postcards fluttering from her hands into the wind. A sudden feeling in class that someone had walked past her shoulder, unseen. But these moments no longer unsettled her. She smiled at them, grateful. The shadow had not disappeared—it had dissolved into her. It was reminder, not threat. It was witness. She understood now that she would always be writing postcards, not on paper but in living.
One afternoon, while clearing her desk, she found an envelope slipped among her papers. She did not remember placing it there. Her pulse quickened, a familiar ache of fear, but when she opened it, she laughed softly. Inside was a single blank postcard. Nothing on the front, nothing on the back. She ran her fingers across the smooth surface and whispered, “Yes.” She pinned it beside the lighthouse card. Not a message from her double, not a mystery from ahead or behind—only a space waiting, infinite.
As the months passed, she began to speak of her journey more openly, not to students but to friends, colleagues, sometimes even strangers. At a dinner she told someone about the glaciers without mentioning the cards. At a wedding she described the silence of Antarctica without explaining who had walked beside her. Each telling was another layer, another way of writing herself into the world. And each time she spoke, she felt lighter, as though sharing the journey turned it outward, making it part of something larger than her own solitude.
The year turned. Kolkata’s brief winter gave way to spring, then to the heavy rains of monsoon. Mira sat by her window one evening, the downpour hammering the street below, and thought of Patagonia again—the rain not so different from the endless southern winds, each drop a small insistence on presence. She opened her notebook and wrote the words that had carried her all along: I am here. I am whole. Then she closed it gently, as one might seal an envelope, and let the sound of rain carry her into sleep.
In her dream, she walked once more across the Patagonian steppe, but this time she was not following anyone. She carried no satchel, no stack of postcards. The sky arched wide, the horizon endless, but her feet were steady, her heart calm. She walked until the land fell away into the sea, and there stood the lighthouse, glowing red and white against the storm. She reached it, opened its door, and found not her double waiting but only a mirror. She looked into it, saw her own face, and smiled. The mirror did not frighten her. It welcomed her. She touched its surface, and it rippled like water.
When she woke, dawn had just touched the city’s rooftops, the sky pale and full of promise. She made tea, stood at her balcony, and watched the lane come alive—children chasing a ball, vendors shouting their wares, the newspaper boy tossing folded bundles. She felt no urge to flee, no ache of absence. The postcards had done their work. She was the message now, carried in every step, every glance, every breath.
Mira lifted her cup, let the steam rise into her face, and whispered into the morning, “I am both the sender and the receiver. I am the journey, and I am the return.”
And the city, alive around her, answered in its own way—with horns, with laughter, with the soft rustle of leaves in the wind.
END
