Tara Deshpande
Part 1: First Paper Cut
The essay was titled “Love is a Knife with a Sugar Handle.” Rayan D’Souza read the first paragraph, then the last, then the whole thing again in silence. It wasn’t just good—it was surgical. Each line left a mark, a strange blend of emotional vulnerability and cold detachment. The author was Aranya Sen. Roll number 07B/LIT/019. He remembered her vaguely from the second row, a girl who didn’t take notes but always looked like she was memorising the whole room. Her photograph was stapled to the file, standard college protocol, a small passport-size image of a pale-faced girl with unreadable eyes and a smirk that didn’t belong on a college ID.
Rayan shut the file. For a moment, he didn’t breathe.
Later that day, he saw her again—waiting after class, leaning against the grey wall like it was painted there for her to match. “I heard you read my essay,” she said, her voice low, shaped like irony. “Did it make you feel something, Sir?”
He nodded, but didn’t speak. He had learned to stay quiet around students who wanted reactions. She smiled at the silence, took it as a win, and walked away without waiting. Her perfume lingered a bit too long. Vetiver, maybe, or whatever poetry smelled like.
The next essay was even sharper. This time titled “The Anatomy of a Goodbye”, it dissected a fictional break-up with medical precision. “When you leave, do you take back your breath too?” one line asked. He almost wrote a comment, but stopped his pen mid-sentence. That day, when Aranya passed by his desk, she dropped a folded note that simply read: “People are easier to open than letters.” He didn’t respond.
But he began to notice her more.
She wasn’t a topper. Didn’t speak much in class. But her silence made noise. The way she tilted her head when others spoke, the way her eyes stayed locked for two seconds longer than normal. Students noticed too. Some admired her. Some avoided her. She seemed both everywhere and nowhere.
One Thursday, after a poetry reading event, she approached him outside the seminar hall. “Sylvia Plath would’ve hated the performance,” she said casually, falling in step beside him. “They stripped her pain and turned it into Instagram quotes.” Rayan laughed. It was the first time he laughed in front of a student in months. “You write like her,” he said without thinking. Aranya smiled again, this time slower, darker. “Let’s hope I don’t end like her.”
That was the first time she walked beside him without a reason. The walk ended when she reached the cycle stand. “I don’t ride. I like the idea of balance but not the act,” she said, fingers trailing along a rusty handlebar. “Do you believe people can be born broken, or are we just badly edited drafts?”
Rayan didn’t answer. But that night, he dreamt of red ink spilling across blank pages, soaking them like wounds.
The following week, he received a red envelope. No name, no sender, just a small line scribbled in silver ink—“You are being written.” Inside was a printout of his old poem, one he had published anonymously in an obscure literary journal years ago. The poem was about a girl named Naina, his dead ex-fiancée. No student was supposed to know that.
He searched the staff database. No one named Naina ever taught here. No one could’ve known that poem’s link. Unless they were watching him for a long time.
At the next lecture, Aranya wore red. Not college uniform, but an old-fashioned cotton saree. She didn’t explain. No one asked. She answered a question on Virginia Woolf with such exact coldness that even the lecturer beside him raised an eyebrow. “She’s got fire,” the professor said later. “Or ice.”
That evening, Rayan walked into the library’s reading room. Aranya was there, sitting alone, scribbling in a leather-bound journal. When she looked up, her eyes met his like she had expected him. “Do you believe stories can happen twice?” she asked. “Like déjà vu, but with different endings?” Rayan nodded slowly.
“Maybe this time, the knife stays in longer.”
Before he could reply, the bell rang. She stood up, gathered her journal, and left a single paper slip under his notebook. It read:
“Next week, I’ll show you my real essay. It’s about how teachers fall.”
Rayan didn’t sleep that night. He thought of ink, of red envelopes, of how someone could make you feel chosen and hunted at the same time. He didn’t know what was coming. But in the back of his mind, a question had begun to bleed:
Who is really writing whom?
Part 2: Notes from a Quiet War
The staffroom smelled of ink and bad coffee, but Rayan barely noticed. His fingers traced the edge of the slip Aranya had left under his notebook. “Next week, I’ll show you my real essay,” it said. He had read it ten times, each time slower. Not because he didn’t understand—he did. But because something about it felt less like a note and more like a threat disguised as poetry.
That evening, he pulled up Aranya’s academic file. Her grades were erratic. A+ in English, C in Political Science, absent in Mathematics. No disciplinary complaints, no glowing recommendations. Just a quiet, cold pattern—like someone doing just enough to stay unnoticed while watching everything.
“Careful with that one,” said Shalini, a fellow literature teacher, peeking over his shoulder. “She gives me the creeps sometimes. Like she’s always three lines ahead of the conversation.”
“Sharp student,” he murmured, closing the file. “Unusual.”
“Unusual students write essays. Dangerous ones write people,” she replied, half-joking.
That night, Rayan couldn’t focus. He walked to the hill behind the campus, where old benches sat crooked under eucalyptus trees. That’s where he used to come with Naina, before the world had cracked. She would scribble on tissues, on his wrist, on fallen leaves—lines of unfinished poems. She called writing a way of bleeding without dying.
Aranya wrote the same way. That bothered him more than he admitted.
Monday came quietly. She didn’t show up to class. Her seat, second row from the left, stayed empty like a deliberate punctuation mark. The absence made everyone quieter. Someone whispered she’d been called to the principal’s office. Another said she was unwell. But no one really knew.
On Tuesday, a brown envelope appeared in his pigeonhole in the staffroom. Typed, unsigned, but unmistakably personal.
“Sir, you once said literature reveals what people hide. What if I’m all literature?”
Enclosed was a single page—a story written in second person. It began with:
“You are a man who watches from windows. You call it observing, but it’s always women. You fall in love with silences that don’t demand answers. You like girls who bleed on paper because it saves you from touching the wound.”
He dropped the paper like it had burned his hands.
That evening, she returned. Standing outside his classroom after hours, arms crossed, wearing a navy-blue kurti and no expression. “Did you like the piece?” she asked. “It’s not really fiction. Just edited truth.”
“You crossed a line,” he said, voice low.
“There are no lines in literature, Sir. Only margins. And I live there.”
Rayan felt it then—the pull. The wrongness wrapped in charm. The part of his mind that knew better was losing the argument to the part that wanted to know what came next. He should’ve walked away. Should’ve reported her. Should’ve done a dozen responsible things.
Instead, he said, “Why me?”
Aranya tilted her head. “Because you’re the only one here who understands loneliness in complete sentences.”
The next week blurred. They spoke in fragments—in library corners, by the canteen queue, under broken lights near the administrative block. Never long. Never open. But always charged. Their words folded like origami—beautiful, intricate, dangerous.
He noticed she carried two journals now. One leather-bound, the other red and spiral-bound. Once, she left the red one on a bench by mistake. Rayan stared at it for a full minute before picking it up. It was filled with observations—about classmates, professors, strangers in cafés. But the last ten pages were about him.
“He avoids mirrors. Probably because he can’t lie to his own eyes.”
“He loved once. She died. He hasn’t forgiven himself.”
“He wants me to be a warning. But he treats me like a poem.”
Rayan returned the journal the next day without saying a word. She smiled. “Did you enjoy my notes?”
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“Because you’re the only one who will read it to the end.”
By Thursday, he was unraveling. He couldn’t tell if she was seducing him or studying him. The line was invisible, shifting, maddening. He began reading his old poems again, wondering if he had written himself into this. Into her. Into the story he thought he was avoiding.
He tried distancing himself. Left class early, skipped office hours. But she found ways back in. One day a quote from Emily Dickinson slipped into his desk drawer. Another day, she left him a cassette tape labeled “For the ones who drown quietly.” It played a single recording—her voice reading his old poem about Naina. How had she found that? How far had she gone into his past?
That weekend, he received a call from Naina’s mother. “Someone left a note at our gate,” she said, worried. “It had a line from your poem. The one about the lake.”
His blood froze.
He went to the principal’s office the next day to report her. But before he could speak, the principal handed him a letter.
“Miss Sen has applied for a transfer. Effective immediately. Family emergency, she said. Odd timing, don’t you think?”
He opened the letter. It read simply:
“You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. I collect stories. And sometimes, the storyteller bleeds into the page.”
Rayan stepped outside into the rain, heart pounding. A paper-thin ache in his chest. He looked up at the sky, where ink should’ve poured but water did instead. The war had ended without ever being declared. And he had no idea who had won.
Only that he had been written.
Part 3: The Girl Who Wasn’t There
The classroom felt colder after she left. Rayan noticed it in the way the sunlight slanted across the desks, untouched. In the silence between questions that students used to fill with laughter. Aranya’s absence wasn’t loud—it was precise. Like a comma removed from a sentence, making the whole paragraph stumble.
He told himself it was relief. That now, everything would return to normal. But something in his days had become untethered. He found himself checking the second row each morning, expecting that ghost of a smirk. That insolent eye contact. Instead, there was only Srishti, polite and forgettable, adjusting her glasses and asking about metaphor density in Tagore’s “Shesher Kobita.”
He wanted to care. He didn’t.
That week, he kept hearing her name in half-sentences. “She was odd, na?” “I think she wrote about someone in admin too.” “She told me I’d die in a library fire and smiled.”
Then, on Wednesday, something changed.
A new girl arrived in his 11 a.m. class. Tall, fair, large-framed glasses. Said her name was Rukmini Chatterjee, transfer from the Kolkata campus. She spoke softly, dressed conservatively, and chose the same seat Aranya once did. Coincidence, maybe. Except Rayan noticed the ink stain on her finger—red, and fresh.
He ignored it. Told himself not to be paranoid.
The following day, he found a new message on his desk. It was hidden between the pages of The Bell Jar in the college library. Scribbled on yellow legal paper:
“Absence is just another kind of presence. You’re still reading me, Sir.”
No name. No signature. But the handwriting matched the notes she used to pass—slanted, with sharp Rs and exaggerated dots on the ‘i’s.
He took the note home, sat in bed with the lights off, and stared at it for hours. He thought about the time Naina once said, “Some people don’t want to be known. They want to be decoded.” Back then, he didn’t understand. Now he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to.
Two days later, Rukmini handed him a poem for the college magazine. “It’s raw,” she said. “Needs polishing.”
He read it in his office. The poem wasn’t just raw—it was Aranya. Same rhythm, same metaphors that bled. One line stood out:
“I found a teacher who knew how to fold silence like origami. And then I taught him how to set it on fire.”
He ran the poem through plagiarism software. No matches. Checked library archives. Nothing. But the weight in his stomach grew.
He emailed the admin: “Please confirm if a student named Rukmini Chatterjee transferred this semester.” The reply was delayed.
That night, he dreamed of ink-stained fingers pulling red threads from his books. His shelves collapsing. Her voice reciting his old poems backwards.
In the dream, he was drowning. But it felt warm.
The next day, he walked into the reading room and found her—Rukmini—sitting in the same corner Aranya used to sit in, writing in a red notebook. He approached her slowly.
“I know who you are.”
She didn’t look up. “Do you?”
He sat opposite her. “Why the disguise?”
She smiled faintly. “I told you. Stories happen twice. Once as tragedy. Then as theatre. This is the encore.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“And yet, here I am.” Her eyes met his. “Don’t you want to know how it ends?”
He should have left. Walked out. Called security. Instead, he whispered, “Why me?”
“Because you remember pain beautifully,” she said. “And I need that. For the last chapter.”
He felt breathless. Like falling without gravity. She passed him a folded note. “Come to the amphitheatre tomorrow. Midnight. I’ll give you the ending.”
He didn’t sleep that night. Sat at his desk, surrounded by old notebooks, old drafts, and a dozen photographs of people he used to know. He thought of Naina, how she never liked endings. “Leave it open,” she used to say. “Let the reader ache.”
He arrived at the amphitheatre at twelve sharp. It was empty, silent, the kind of quiet that hums in your teeth. Then she appeared—emerging from the shadows in a black shawl and bare feet.
“I brought you here,” she said, “because this is the place where stories are performed.”
“I’m not your story,” he replied.
“But you are,” she said. “From the moment you read my essay. From the moment you saw me not as a student, but as a mirror.”
“What do you want?”
“For you to stop pretending you’re innocent.”
He froze.
“You picked me, Rayan. You kept reading. You followed the trail. You let me in. So maybe the sociopath isn’t the one who writes… but the one who watches and stays silent.”
A long pause. The amphitheatre echoed with a wind that wasn’t there.
She stepped closer. “Do you want to kiss me again?”
“I never did.”
She smiled. “That’s the first lie you’ve said aloud.”
She handed him a new manuscript. Titled: Red Ink on White Paper. His name was on the dedication page.
He flipped through the pages. There he was—in every paragraph. Flawed, broken, complicit.
“I’m submitting this,” she said. “For publication. It’s a love story. And a warning.”
He looked at her one last time. “This is manipulation.”
“No,” she said. “This is authorship.”
And just like that, she turned and walked into the darkness.
He stood there, under the dead sky, manuscript in hand, heart caving in. Somewhere behind the clouds, stars were watching. Or maybe they were blinking out, one by one.
He didn’t know anymore.
Part 4: Ink Doesn’t Fade
He didn’t open the manuscript for three days.
It sat on his desk like a loaded gun, spine unbroken, edges clean. Every time he passed it, something in him recoiled. He taught literature, loved books, but never feared one. Until this. Until Red Ink on White Paper. Until her.
Rayan had been taught to believe words could save. But these pages felt like they were meant to drown.
On the fourth night, when the electricity flickered and rain pressed against his windows like unwanted memories, he opened it. The first line was:
“A man who wanted to disappear began by falling for a girl who saw him.”
He flipped through paragraphs that read like surveillance reports. Conversations replayed, word-for-word. His words. His gestures. Footnotes about his emotional pauses. Margins annotated with comments like “He hesitates here—guilt?” or “Typical abandonment complex surfacing again.”
Halfway through, he stopped breathing.
There was a scene—a memory—he had never spoken aloud. Not to anyone. A fight with Naina the night before she died. She had cried, torn up his old poem, said, “You love the version of me that hurts, not the one that heals.”
How did Aranya know?
He flipped to the back of the manuscript. The acknowledgements page was handwritten.
“To those who leave gaps in conversations so others can fill them with secrets. And to him—who never stopped reading me, even when he should have.”
His phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number:
“Did you like your chapters? The ending’s still blank. Come write it with me.”
No name. No location. Just a shared madness that now refused to dissolve.
He should have burned the manuscript. Instead, he packed it in a brown envelope and took it to the college library’s archival desk. “I’m donating this for preservation,” he said flatly. The staff member, a quiet man with ink-stained hands, nodded. “Unpublished?” he asked. Rayan just smiled faintly. “Not yet.”
By the next week, rumors began again.
Someone saw Aranya—still calling herself Rukmini—outside the photography lab. Another claimed she’d applied to be a research assistant in the Psychology Department. No one had proof. Just passing shadows.
One evening, Rayan walked into the auditorium where an inter-college poetry slam was taking place. He didn’t plan to stay. But then he heard her voice.
Not on stage. On paper.
A girl from another college read a piece titled “The One Who Read Me Wrong.” The poem wasn’t just Aranya’s. It was Rayan’s too. Her voice bled through the lines, her rhythm unmistakable. He closed his eyes and listened as the crowd clapped, clueless.
That night, he returned home and sat down to write a letter.
Not to her.
To himself.
“You knew the red flags. You just mistook them for bookmarks.”
The next morning, his inbox had a submission notice. Aranya had sent Red Ink on White Paper to an online journal under the pseudonym Mira Ray. The journal had shortlisted it for the Young Writer’s Prize.
The editor’s note read:
“Stunningly intimate and haunting. We thought it was fiction until we Googled the professor’s name.”
Panic. Guilt. Shame. Rage. All at once. He reached out to the editor. Claimed it was fictional slander. Asked them to pull the piece. They refused—said the names were changed, the college unnamed, the story untouchably legal.
But he knew the truth wasn’t in the names.
It was in the gaze.
He walked back to the amphitheatre that evening, retracing the steps of that last encounter. No one was there, of course. Just benches, cracked stone, and the echo of unspoken sentences.
He sat where she once stood and tried to remember when it had all gone wrong.
Maybe the first time she handed him a folded note.
Maybe the first time he didn’t throw it away.
Maybe the first time he wanted to be understood more than he wanted to be safe.
He stayed there until the sun dipped and the shadows turned solid.
As he stood to leave, he noticed something etched into the underside of the bench.
A single line, written in permanent marker:
“Ink doesn’t fade. It just sinks deeper.”
He touched the words like they were still warm.
He left the campus quietly after that. Submitted his resignation. Told the administration he needed time, space, clarity. They understood. Or pretended to.
He didn’t tell anyone where he was going.
Three weeks later, he received a courier. No return address. Inside: a fountain pen. Old, elegant. Engraved on the cap was a phrase:
“For the next story. This time, be the writer.”
He held it carefully. Not like a gift. Like a relic.
Outside, the rain had begun again. And somewhere in the distance, maybe in another classroom, another girl was watching another man, already writing.
But this time, he would not be the page.
Part 5: Girl in the Mirror Draft
It took Rayan exactly thirty-seven days to return to writing.
He was living in a small rented cottage on the outskirts of Coonoor—no Wi-Fi, no classes, no college brochures pretending to be education. Just long walks, tall pines, and a metal table beside a foggy window where he sat each morning with a fresh notebook. He wrote in black ink now. Deliberately. As if trying to distance himself from everything she ever used.
The first pages were clumsy. Notes about weather, memories of Naina, half-poems about guilt. But on the eighth day, a line slipped out that made his hand pause:
“Some people don’t love you back. They write you back.”
He stared at the sentence for a long time.
He hadn’t told anyone he’d left the city. The college’s final email had been routine—acceptance of his resignation, thanks for his service, no mention of the girl who turned a teacher into a character. He expected silence. What he didn’t expect was a white envelope taped to the front gate of his cottage.
No stamp. No return address.
Inside: a photograph.
Black and white. Grainy. Taken at the amphitheatre from above. He was sitting alone, hunched over, a small open book on his lap. The caption at the back read:
“What a character you turned out to be.”
He closed the gate with shaking fingers. Searched the area, the trees, the quiet. No one. No footsteps. Just air that had started feeling like breath held too long.
That night, he took out the red notebook she once left behind—the one he had secretly photocopied before returning it. He flipped through Aranya’s observations. Pages upon pages of her watching others. Her conclusions weren’t kind, but they were never wrong. His page was different. It had a mirror image sketch of his face, charcoal smudged along the eyes. She had written:
“He doesn’t look in mirrors. Because he’s afraid the reflection might ask questions.”
He didn’t remember the last time he had looked in a mirror for more than a few seconds.
The next day, he tried to write her out of his system. Wrote stories where she was just a shadow. A side character. A paragraph in a chapter about someone else. But the story always curled back to her. Even when he changed the names. Even when he killed her off in the second page. She returned. Always returned.
Once as smoke in a window.
Once as a line in a stranger’s poem.
Once as a girl walking past the tea shop in a red scarf.
And then, one morning, she wrote back.
An email. From a new address. Subject line: “Reflections are stories too.”
The body contained only this:
“I’m writing a sequel. This time, it’s from the teacher’s point of view. Don’t worry. I’ll be gentle.”
No greeting. No sign-off.
He shut his laptop and vomited into the sink.
That evening, a courier arrived. This time from a real publishing house. The editor who had seen her manuscript, Red Ink on White Paper, had now offered her a two-book deal. The sequel was being pitched as “a metafictional thriller about a power-shift between a teacher and a student, told with eerie intimacy.”
He knew that phrase. Eerie intimacy—he had once used it in class to describe Dostoevsky.
He sat on the floor for hours, manuscript beside him, phone buzzing with news alerts and congratulations he never signed up for. Friends from Delhi, an old university mate, even the head of department—all curious. “Did you really inspire the story?” someone texted.
He didn’t answer.
Instead, he turned on his old cassette player. The one Naina had gifted him. He played her favorite recording—her voice reading Pablo Neruda. Halfway through, her voice cracked. He remembered she was crying when she read it. He had asked why. She had said: “Because even in poems, people never stay.”
Aranya stayed. In every word.
He looked at himself in the mirror that night. The first time in months. Studied his greying stubble, the tired eyes, the lips that had kissed too little and kept too many silences. He whispered, “You let her in.”
The mirror whispered nothing back. But the reflection stayed.
At dawn, he packed the red notebook, the printed manuscript, and his own half-written novel. He mailed it to her publisher. No note. No name. Just a title scribbled on the first page:
“Girl in the Mirror Draft.”
He knew she’d find it. She always did.
Then, he walked into the hills. No phone. No pen. Just air. The cold kind that peels memory off your skin.
Behind him, the story continued.
Somewhere, a girl in a red scarf wrote the next page.
And this time, he didn’t want to read it.
Part 6: The Writer’s Funeral
The obituary ran on page five of the Ooty Chronicle, sandwiched between a column on orchid festivals and a missing dog notice. It read:
“Rayen D’Souza, 29, former literature lecturer at St. Benedict’s College, passed away last week. Known for his haunting poetry and quiet nature, he is survived by no immediate family. His body was cremated in a private ceremony. No funeral was held.”
It wasn’t true. Not the age. Not the death.
But Aranya—now writing under Mira Ray—had made sure it reached every inbox that mattered. It was printed, framed, and posted on social media with poetic hashtags.
#LastLecturer #WordsWillRemain #RedInkLegacy
She even added a quote he never said: “We all become paper in the end.”
Rayan sat in a borrowed cabin in Kalimpong, watching the digital death unfold. His real name buried, replaced by a typo and a fiction. And yet, it felt like a release. Like the world had finally stopped expecting him to reply.
He hadn’t spoken to anyone in over two weeks. Not since he sent his unpublished manuscript—Girl in the Mirror Draft—to the publisher anonymously. Not since he buried his red pen behind the cottage like an offering to gods who had stopped listening.
But one person still listened.
Three days after his fake obituary, a package arrived. Brown paper, no stamps. Inside: a red ribbon, a newspaper clipping of the obituary, and a page torn from his own manuscript with her handwriting scribbled across the top:
“A funeral is just a blank page pretending the story ended.”
That night, he sat outside under a trembling sky, rereading her lines. She had begun turning their story into lectures now—guest appearances at literature festivals, panel discussions on boundaries and “dangerous emotional proximity.” Her face on posters. Her voice in podcasts. Calm. Poised. Chilling.
“She never mentioned my name,” he whispered.
“She never needed to,” the wind replied.
He began walking again. Every morning, down to the village tea stall, where no one knew him, and up to the mossy cliff where lovers carved initials they hoped would outlive them. Once, he saw a carving that read “A + R // 2019” and wondered if that was them—some past life version of their tragedy, a different draft of the same unfinished book.
But guilt has its own geography. It follows you across latitudes, fits inside silent mugs of chai, and blooms in the pauses between turning pages. He tried to write again. But all the sentences came out like echoes.
Until the publisher replied.
An email. Brief.
“Your manuscript has been read. We have no idea who you are. But Mira Ray called us. She says thank you. She also says: ‘Only the dead can write honestly. The rest edit themselves to sleep.’”
He stared at the screen. His hands trembled. He hadn’t signed the manuscript. No name. No ID. And still, she knew.
She always knew.
That evening, he found a small bookstore tucked into a hill corner—half-forgotten, fully loved. He picked up a dusty copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Inside the cover was a familiar scribble in red ink:
“Beauty fades. Stories rot slower.”
She had been here.
He ran his fingers along the shelf. Every third book had something—pressed flowers, underlined phrases, bookmarks made from torn poems. A trail. A breadcrumb map drawn by obsession. Or adoration. He couldn’t tell anymore.
On the wall, a pinned note advertised a local writing workshop. The speaker? Mira Ray. Topic: “Fictionalizing the Living: Ethics of Intimate Narratives.”
He laughed out loud in the empty bookstore. The kind of laugh that unhinges something in your chest.
He went to the workshop.
Not to be seen. Just to listen. Hidden in the back row, behind a pillar, face partially covered with a scarf. She walked in wearing a grey shawl and black boots. Hair tied back. Calm like a storm paused mid-sentence.
She didn’t look for him. Didn’t scan the crowd. She didn’t have to.
Her talk was clinical. Passionate, but detached. She spoke of literature as a scalpel. Of memory as the rawest material. Of the right to narrate one’s version of events—because “truth is often just a better-edited lie.”
Then, a question from the audience: “How do you separate revenge from writing?”
She paused.
Then answered: “I don’t.”
And smiled.
That night, Rayan didn’t sleep. He walked to the old cemetery behind the church, found an unmarked bench near the slope, and sat under the full moon. He took out a notebook. Wrote the first sentence in weeks:
“This is not about love. This is about who holds the pen when the story ends.”
He closed the notebook. Placed it under the bench.
The next morning, it was gone.
In its place: a red envelope with nothing inside.
Not a word.
But he understood.
The silence was the next chapter.
Part 7: Red Isn’t the End
The envelope was empty, but it screamed louder than anything she had ever written.
He sat on the bench in the cemetery, the sun barely rising behind him, the grass still wet with dew and regret. The red envelope lay open in his lap, fluttering slightly in the breeze like a wound too fresh to clot. No note. No ink. Just red—pure, intentional, haunting.
Aranya was reminding him: this wasn’t her ending. It wasn’t his either. Just another pause.
He remembered something Naina once said while reading one of his unfinished poems: “You always stop before the scream.” Maybe Aranya had picked up where Naina left off—except she didn’t scream. She whispered, and the world still trembled.
That day, he didn’t go back to his cottage. He walked for miles along the hills, through fog, through silence. In the distance, monks chanted at a small monastery, the bells like punctuation marks across the landscape. He wanted to believe in quiet. He wanted to believe in anything that didn’t write back.
But when he returned that evening, a girl was waiting at the gate.
She looked young, barely twenty. Not Aranya. Not even close. But she held a notebook—red, spiral-bound. She handed it to him without speaking.
Inside: a letter.
Dear Mr. D’Souza,
She told me you’d be here.
She said if I wanted to learn how to write honestly, I should find you. That you would tell me what not to write first. That you would know the difference.
I don’t know who you are to her, but she called you “the only person who didn’t try to own the story.”
I think that’s rare.
Would you read mine?
— T.
Rayan turned the pages. The handwriting was different—less precise, less venomous. The girl had written about a broken home, about grief, about a brother who disappeared one night and never came back. It wasn’t perfect. But it was raw.
And it was untouched by Aranya’s brand of weaponized narrative. Or so he thought.
At the end, tucked between the pages, was a folded scrap of paper—Aranya’s unmistakable script:
“You taught me how to bleed without cutting. I’m teaching them how not to need blood at all.”
He closed the notebook. Sat down on the grass. Laughed. Long and bitter and sad. She wasn’t just a writer anymore. She was a publisher of ghosts. A mentor of mirrors.
He replied. Took a new notebook, opened to the first page, and wrote:
“Dear T,
If you truly want to write—start by asking what you’re afraid to remember. Then write that down. Don’t worry about beauty. Worry about honesty. That’s what she never learned.”
He mailed the notebook to the return address. No stamp. No signature.
He tried to forget after that. Truly forget. Not just distract himself with walking or tea or hill winds. But silence is only peaceful until it starts whispering again. She returned in glances—in a shopkeeper’s voice, in a girl’s laugh outside the library, in the reflection of a train window that looked too much like her posture leaning in.
Then came the real blow.
Her second book was released.
Titled: “The Ink That Vanished.”
He should’ve known. It wasn’t about him directly. But it was. A nameless professor. A manipulative student. A manuscript that disappears every time someone reads it. A metaphor, and a weapon.
He bought a copy. In a small stall in Siliguri, far from anyone who might recognize him. The shopkeeper smiled, “Mira Ray’s on fire. She’s doing a TED Talk next week.”
He nodded, paid, walked out.
That night, he burned the book in his fireplace. Watched the flames curl around her sentences. For a moment, he thought he heard her laugh in the crackle.
He didn’t sleep.
At dawn, he wrote again.
This time, not for her. Not about her.
He began a new story. About a boy who wanted to become invisible and a girl who painted him every day anyway. The story didn’t end in death or silence. It ended in forgetting.
And it felt like freedom.
He sent the first three chapters to an editor friend in Mumbai under a new pseudonym: Ray Benedict. The friend replied within hours.
“Sharp. Raw. Honest. Who is it based on?”
He replied: “No one you’ll ever meet.”
But a week later, another email arrived.
Subject: Correction Needed
Dear Mr. Benedict,
I know this voice. And I know whose silence you’re writing against. Perhaps we both need to stop pretending we’re not still in the same story.
— Mira
Attached: a picture of the burned copy of The Ink That Vanished, its ashes spread across white paper.
Caption: “Red isn’t the end. It’s just the brightest part of the bruise.”
He stared at the screen. Then closed the laptop.
Outside, a boy was selling newspapers. He shouted headlines, one of them absurd:
“Love letters mistaken for suicide note. Girl claims it was fiction.”
Rayan walked past him, into the wind, and smiled.
She was still writing.
But now, so was he.
Part 8: Final Draft
There was no grand finale. No confrontation in the rain. No confession across candlelight. There was just a man and a blank page, and a woman he could no longer unwrite.
Rayan D’Souza sat in a café in Pondicherry, a place filled with tourists who smiled too wide and laughed too fast. He wore sunglasses now, not because he wanted to hide, but because looking too directly at the world sometimes made it bleed. The page before him remained white. Not because he didn’t know what to say. But because, this time, he wanted the silence to arrive first.
Outside, the sea was dull, unromantic. A grey sheet of rhythm. The kind of sea that doesn’t carry metaphors. Just salt.
He thought of Aranya. Or Mira Ray. Or whatever she called herself now. She was everywhere these days—bookstores, interviews, articles titled “India’s Sharpest New Voice.” Her latest story, “The Professor’s Pause,” had just been shortlisted for an international award. The plot, again, was hauntingly familiar: a man falls in love with a woman who keeps rewriting him.
But Rayan no longer flinched.
He knew now that Aranya was not his nemesis. She was his mirror. His editor. She had taken the worst parts of him—the silences, the distance, the dangerous admiration—and given them names. Given them chapters. And in doing so, she had set him free.
Because you cannot escape what you don’t acknowledge. And Rayan had finally read himself, cover to cover.
He sipped his cold coffee. Then picked up his pen.
And wrote:
“This is the final draft. The one where I stop writing her name in every paragraph. The one where I accept that being loved by a sociopath isn’t the same as being destroyed by one. It’s just being read, too deeply, for too long.”
He wrote slowly now. Deliberately. Not chasing cleverness. Just truth. He filled pages with poems that didn’t rhyme, stories without villains, letters never sent. He didn’t erase anymore. Didn’t edit out the parts where he failed.
That night, a woman in her twenties approached his table at the beachside café. “Are you Ray Benedict?” she asked, holding out a copy of The Boy Who Forgot Her Face—his new book under the pseudonym.
He smiled. “Sometimes.”
She handed him a folded note. “Someone left this for you. Said you’d know what to do with it.”
The handwriting on the outside was unmistakable.
He waited until she walked away, then opened it.
Inside: a single line.
“I’m done writing you. Your turn.”
No name. No flourish.
But he felt it—like a curtain finally closing on a stage that had run out of actors.
He stood, left cash on the table, and walked along the promenade until the streetlights began to blur.
At the edge of the water, he tore the note in half. Then dropped it into the waves.
He whispered: “Thank you for the story.”
The sea took it without comment.
Months passed. The world turned.
Mira Ray released her next book—“Characters I Buried”. It did not mention him. Not even once. Not even as a silhouette. Instead, it told the story of a girl who fell in love with the idea of being unreadable.
Critics called it a turning point. Softer. More humane.
Rayan read it once. Then shelved it.
His own writing bloomed quietly. He wrote about forgotten cities, about grief that didn’t perform. About a woman who healed in footnotes. And slowly, his name—Ray Benedict—gained its own shape. Separate from hers. From his past.
He taught again. This time online. Under a different name, in a different voice. He taught students how to find their story without hurting someone else’s. How to feel deeply without dissecting the person who made them feel.
He never mentioned her.
But when students asked about love and obsession, he simply said: “Be careful who you write. Some people stay inked inside you long after the pen runs dry.”
On the anniversary of Naina’s death, he visited her favorite bookstore in Bangalore. On the counter sat a handwritten note for customers:
“Books don’t haunt. People do. Choose your characters wisely.”
He smiled. Wondered if Aranya had passed through.
He hoped she had.
One evening, a young man emailed him: “Your story saved me from becoming someone else’s plot twist.”
And that was enough.
Rayan no longer needed endings. He only needed the next sentence.
As he sat down by the sea, journal in lap, pen in hand, he finally wrote the line he had avoided for years:
“I forgive you. Because I want my story back.”
And this time, the ink didn’t vanish.
The End
