Rhea Solace
Part 1
There was nothing extraordinary about the small writing desk by the window—except perhaps, how it held hundreds of lives within it. Neatly stacked ivory paper, a brass fountain pen with fading gold initials, and a mug forever stained with tea. This was where Aanya wrote love stories… not hers, but everyone else’s.
Every day, she sat with requests. A line from a shy lover, a paragraph from an apologetic husband, a mother trying to bridge years of silence with her daughter. Aanya wrote letters for them all. Anonymous, elegant, and filled with emotions she had never personally felt. Her clients called her “The Letter Lady.” None of them knew her real name.
One late winter evening, the bell above her apartment door chimed.
She walked over, barefoot, and opened the door to a young man—messy hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and a folder tucked under his arm like it contained fragile truths.
“Are you the one who writes… feelings?” he asked, his voice unsure.
“I help people say what they can’t,” Aanya replied simply.
He hesitated. “I want to write to someone. But not all at once. One letter at a time.”
She smiled, intrigued. “What should I call you?”
“Just… R,” he said, leaving no more details.
The first letter was short. Two paragraphs. “Tell her I saw her across the bookstore,” he had written. “She wore blue, and turned pages like they whispered to her.”
Aanya didn’t ask who ‘she’ was. Her job wasn’t to ask. It was to write, shape, and deliver.
She drafted the letter that night—soft language, gentle rhythm, the kind of cadence that echoed in people’s chests. Before sealing it, she read it once, and strangely, felt her own heartbeat pick up.
She posted it to a PO Box, as instructed.
The next week, another letter came.
“Tell her I like how she avoids eye contact when she’s unsure, but always tilts her head to listen.”
Aanya froze.
That was something she did.
Was it coincidence?
She brushed it off.
The letters kept coming. Every Thursday. And each one, in its small, hidden way, described something… about her.
The tea she always drank at 5 PM.
The song she hummed while typing.
The way she leaned over the balcony to watch the rain but never stepped into it.
And yet—there was never a name. Never a hint.
Was it someone she’d passed in the market? A neighbor? Or…
No. It couldn’t be.
Still, every letter she wrote in response—on behalf of this mysterious ‘R’—felt less like a service, and more like a mirror.
One day, she almost wrote: “I think I know who you’re writing to.” But she stopped. That wasn’t the rule.
Rule #1: The writer doesn’t speak.
Rule #2: The ghost doesn’t haunt her own letter.
And yet, there it was—the ghost of a feeling she couldn’t name, stitched into paper.
On the seventh week, the letter came folded with a pressed marigold.
Inside it read:
“Tell her, if she ever wrote back… I’d know.”
Aanya’s hands trembled slightly.
Outside, the city was moving in its usual rhythm. But inside her little room, time paused.
That night, for the first time in years, she didn’t write for someone else.
She pulled out a sheet. And wrote:
“Dear R,
This letter is not for your ‘someone’. It’s for you.
Let’s stop hiding in letters.”
But she didn’t send it. She tucked it under her teacup.
Because sometimes, silence is a language.
And love… a letter never sent.
Part 2
The marigold had wilted by morning.
Its petals had curled inwards like a quiet sigh, resting between the pages of Aanya’s notebook. She didn’t have the heart to throw it away, so she pressed it again—gently—between her old copy of The Little Prince. It felt like the kind of thing R would do too.
But she didn’t send her reply.
Not yet.
Instead, she waited.
Not for the next letter, but for a sign. A look. A presence. Anything that told her R wasn’t just a game her heart was playing on itself.
That Thursday came like clockwork. Postman Arun dropped the brown envelope on her doorstep like always—no stamp, no return address, just her name in the same slanted ink.
Aanya opened it slowly.
“Tell her I saw her pause today, before crossing the street. That she looked up at the same bird I did, a black kite gliding above the city smog.
Tell her we’re both watching the same sky. Maybe we always have.”
She felt the words wrap around her like a scarf on a cold day.
The strange part? That morning, she had stopped at that exact crossing. She’d looked up, distracted, because a child had pointed at the sky and shouted “eagle!” She’d smiled quietly and moved on. No one else had looked.
Unless…
She ran to her window. The street below was moving, indifferent. The tea vendor called out to regulars, buses hissed at stops, and someone’s dog barked at a cyclist. But nowhere in that patchwork of life was a face she could name R.
Aanya pulled back the curtain.
She began to make lists.
People she saw every Thursday.
The man who always bought a cigarette but never lit it.
The librarian who never smiled but always wore mismatched socks.
The flower boy who whistled old Hindi songs.
It could be any of them. Or none.
Each letter from R now felt like a thread, pulling her through the fabric of her own life. It made her notice more—smell more sharply, hear with intent, see beyond the ordinary.
And in noticing the world, she noticed herself more than ever.
That week, she wrote back. Not to R. Not formally. Just… to see how it felt.
“You write as if you know me. But what if you’re wrong? What if I’m not the girl in the blue scarf? What if I’m not brave enough to read between the lines?”
She folded it and placed it beside the marigold.
Aanya didn’t send it. Again.
But this time, the silence felt heavier.
Friday passed.
Saturday slipped quietly.
Sunday tasted like unfinished sentences.
And then—Monday.
A knock at the door.
Not the bell. A knock. Three soft, deliberate taps.
She opened the door.
Nobody.
Only an envelope, held down by a small pebble. No name. Just a familiar fold.
Her fingers were cold as she opened it.
Inside, one line.
“Even if you never write back, I’ll keep writing. Because some silences deserve to be seen.”
Her breath caught. She looked up again. Down the stairs. Nothing.
But something had changed.
For the first time, she wasn’t writing someone else’s letter.
She was inside one.
Part 3
By now, Aanya knew.
This wasn’t just a commission anymore. It hadn’t been for weeks.
She had become the subject of the letters—their unknowing muse, then their reluctant reader, and now, a participant in a wordless, unfolding conversation. One where neither side said it aloud, yet everything was being said.
Each Thursday, the envelope arrived. Like breath. Like ritual.
But today, she didn’t wait for it.
She watched for it.
From her window, behind the curtain, she sat with her tea just warm enough to sip and her pulse just fast enough to notice. The lane below yawned with quiet activity—delivery boys, a vegetable cart, children with oversized backpacks.
And then, just before noon, a shadow approached the gate.
A man. Tall, shoulders slightly hunched forward, a messenger bag across his chest.
She leaned closer. Her breath fogged the glass.
He looked up.
Just for a second.
Eyes, dark and unreadable. Not searching. Just aware.
And then he slipped the envelope into the latch and walked away. No hurry. No pause.
Aanya pressed her palm to the window.
She didn’t open the letter right away. She let it sit beside her notebook, as if it might reveal something just by being there. Its weight was small, but inside it was everything that hadn’t yet been said.
She finally unfolded it in the late afternoon, when sunlight slanted across her desk like soft lace.
“Tell her I don’t need to know everything. I already know the way she talks to the books on her shelf. How she says ‘hmm’ when words fail her.
Tell her I saw her today. And I didn’t look away.”
She read the last line three times.
Her fingers rested lightly on the page, as if her skin might hear better than her eyes.
For the first time, she allowed herself to feel… found.
That night, the electricity blinked out in the whole neighborhood.
In the darkness, Aanya lit three candles, made herself some masala chai, and took out her letter-writing kit. Not for work. Just for him.
“Dear R, You saw me today. So now I’ll see you, too.
I don’t know your face. But I’ve known your voice—hidden in your letters, between punctuation and pauses. I’ve known the way you watch gently, never intrude, always wait.
I’m not brave. But maybe I don’t have to be.
Maybe this is enough for now.”
She folded the page, sealed it, and…
didn’t address it.
Instead, she left it at the window.
Just in case.
Just in case he passed by and looked up.
The next morning, there was no knock. No envelope.
But her own letter was gone.
Only the candle wax remained.
And beside it, a single line written in her own notepad—
“Now we’re writing together.”
Part 4
After that night, the silence changed.
It wasn’t the absence of sound anymore. It was an invitation—a quiet pull between two hearts learning how to speak without noise.
Aanya found herself rearranging her room, though she didn’t say it aloud. A chair near the window became permanently turned outward. Her teacup always sat across from it, as if waiting for another. She wore soft colors now. Brushed her hair a little slower. And every morning, she looked out not for someone, but with the soft hope that someone might be looking back.
The next Thursday, there was no envelope.
Instead, tucked between the pages of her morning newspaper, she found a small square paper.
In the same familiar handwriting:
“If I were a page, would you underline me?”
She smiled.
She didn’t know she was capable of that kind of smile—one that bloomed so slowly it felt like a secret shared with the morning sun.
That day, she went out.
To the bookstore.
Not because she needed anything.
But because… that’s where it had all begun.
She wandered among the shelves, fingertips grazing the spines of stories written by others. In the poetry section, she paused. A folded note peeked out from between Love in the Time of Cholera.
She opened it.
“Page 248.
Third line.
I underlined it for you.”
She flipped to it.
It read: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
She held the book to her chest.
A deep, blooming ache settled inside her.
This wasn’t a game.
It was a trail.
And she was following it, willingly.
That evening, she wrote her shortest letter yet.
“Dear R,
I do not want to forget you.
Even if I never fully know you.”
She didn’t leave it at the window this time.
She slipped it into The Little Prince, in the bookstore’s donation shelf. Just like that.
The next morning, she found a bookmark on her doorstep.
It wasn’t hers.
On it, a single word:
“Same.”
Days passed like whispered notes in a concert—each carrying something you couldn’t quite hold, but couldn’t let go of either.
She found more notes.
One inside a library book on astronomy: “You are a constellation I never learned, but always stared at.”
Another in her favorite café, slipped beneath the sugar jar: “You stir your tea clockwise. I do too.”
She no longer questioned how he knew.
She only wondered how he felt.
The last letter that week came with no envelope.
Just a square piece of soft grey paper left at her gate.
“Do you believe in meeting before you meet?”
She read it under the yellow light of her hallway bulb, the scent of marigold in the air again.
She didn’t reply with a letter.
She replied by staying up all night, watching the sky lighten from navy to pale blue, as if waiting for a dawn that had already arrived.
Part 5
Aanya had never felt this kind of closeness before—without voice, without touch, without knowing.
It was like walking alongside someone in the dark, hands never quite touching, yet each step guided by the warmth between them. The world moved around her—buses screeched, tea boiled over, keys clicked on office keyboards—but inside her, a quiet poem was unfolding.
That week, the letter didn’t come.
Instead, a package arrived.
Wrapped in brown paper, tied with thin cotton string. No name, no sender. Just a tiny marigold pressed beneath the knot.
She opened it carefully.
Inside was a notebook.
Plain, fabric-bound, and soft at the edges—like it had lived in someone’s bag for a long time.
The first page held a note:
“I thought maybe it’s your turn now.
To write.
Not for anyone else.
Just for you.
Or maybe… for us.”
Aanya held the book to her chest.
She closed her eyes.
And for the first time in a long time, she allowed herself to believe—this was real.
She began writing that night.
Not letters. Not messages.
But thoughts, scattered and wild.
Snippets of dreams.
Descriptions of people she passed on the street.
Old memories that rose without warning.
Moments where she thought of R, and wondered if he too paused in his day to wonder about her.
At the bottom of every page, she signed with a single letter: A.
One evening, she left the notebook on her windowsill.
No message.
No instructions.
Just the unspoken hope that the wind might carry it.
In the morning, it was gone.
And in its place was a new one.
His handwriting on the first page:
“I read every word.
Some twice.
I smiled at page 6.
Cried a little at 11.
I wrote back.
Turn the page.”
She did.
The pages that followed held his voice—more open than ever before.
Stories of his childhood.
The first book that made him cry.
A list of things he noticed about her before she ever noticed him.
A sketch of her balcony.
And one unfinished sentence:
“If you asked me who you are to me…”
She stared at that line for a long time.
Did she want to know the rest?
Or did the pause say more than the words ever could?
That week, she didn’t work.
She turned down clients, let the laundry pile up, and spent her days writing in the new notebook, answering his thoughts with hers, filling silence with scribbles, doodles, hopes, and hesitations.
On Thursday, she returned it to the same windowsill.
And waited.
But this time, it didn’t disappear the next morning.
Or the one after that.
Two days.
Then three.
No notebook returned.
No letter.
No marigold.
The silence, once warm and slow like honey, now tasted bitter.
Aanya sat by the window for hours. Listening. Hoping.
Questioning whether she had leaned in too far, too fast.
Whether she had imagined more than what was ever there.
She whispered to the empty air:
“R, where are you?”
On the fifth morning, she woke to find the notebook placed gently at her doorstep.
With it, a note.
“I was away.
Not from you.
Just from the world.
I needed to be sure that what we’re writing…
isn’t fiction.”
She sank to the floor with the notebook in her lap.
The marigold had dried completely.
But somehow, it was more beautiful now.
Part 6
The silence between Aanya and R was no longer empty.
It was layered.
With words they hadn’t written yet, feelings that had no tidy shape, and the weight of something fragile—almost real, almost too delicate to touch.
She held the returned notebook like it was a living thing.
His last note echoed:
“I needed to be sure that what we’re writing… isn’t fiction.”
Aanya couldn’t help but ask herself: Was it?
Were they simply falling in love with the idea of one another—carefully curated words, pages that could be edited, a version of closeness that didn’t risk real heartbreak?
Or had they become more real through letters than most people ever did face-to-face?
That evening, the sky opened.
Rain tapped against her window in a hush, not urgent, just steady—like someone knocking softly, not to enter, but to remind her they were still there.
Aanya opened the notebook.
She turned to a blank page. And wrote:
“Dear R,
There are things I want to ask.
Like your name.
Your favorite smell.
The first lie you ever told.
The last time you were really afraid.
But I won’t.
Not because I don’t want to know…
but because I don’t want to scare this away.
What we have is fragile.
I think if we look at it too closely, it might vanish.
But still—
if I saw you in a crowd…
I hope I’d recognize your silence.”
She left the notebook beside her pillow that night.
She didn’t put it on the windowsill.
She didn’t offer it to the rain.
She wanted R to come for it.
To choose it.
Two nights passed.
Nothing.
On the third, she heard it.
A sound.
Not at the window.
At her door.
A soft knock.
Just like the first time.
She froze.
Not out of fear.
But anticipation so deep, it felt like standing at the edge of something you’d built with your own breath.
She walked to the door.
Opened it slowly.
No one.
Just the wind.
And the faint scent of… eucalyptus?
She looked down.
The notebook was gone.
But in its place—a small black umbrella.
With a note tucked into the handle:
“For the next time it rains.
I hope we don’t have to stand in different corners of the city anymore.”
Aanya closed the door, her hand still around the umbrella’s curve.
She sat on the floor, against the door, like a girl half her age, smiling to herself.
He had come.
Not just for the notebook.
But for her words.
For her.
That night, she dreamt of bookstores without aisles, letters that folded into paper boats, and strangers who walked side-by-side, saying nothing—but meaning everything.
And in the dream, R was always just beside her.
A voice without face.
But not without meaning.
Part 7
The umbrella stayed by her door.
Unused.
Untouched.
Almost sacred.
Aanya didn’t move it—not because it belonged to R, but because it somehow now belonged to the space between them. A silent promise wrapped in fabric and wire.
That week, the rain returned. Softer. More hesitant. The kind that hesitates at your windowsill before slipping in like a secret. She stood at the balcony, holding the umbrella in her hands, but didn’t open it.
She wanted to feel the rain.
Maybe, somehow, R was standing somewhere in it too.
She didn’t write anything for three days.
Not in the notebook. Not for work. Not even in her journal.
Her fingers itched, her thoughts piled like scattered envelopes inside her mind—but the words didn’t come. She was waiting.
For him.
On the fourth night, the notebook returned.
No knock. No sound. Just there—by her chair, beside her cold teacup.
She opened it.
A page marked with a dried lavender sprig.
His words below it, rougher this time. Not poetic. Just honest.
“Aanya,
I’m tired of letters.
Not yours. Yours I could read forever.
But tired of hiding behind paper. Of being clever. Of using metaphors because we’re both afraid of what might happen if we just said it—
I miss you.
Even when I’ve never fully had you.”
She read that line over and over.
I miss you.
Even when I’ve never fully had you.
It cracked something.
Because she felt the same.
That night, she wrote only this:
“I’m ready.
Not for a grand reveal.
Just… a beginning.
If you are too—
meet me.
Sunday.
4:00 PM.
The second bench at the bookstore café.”
She didn’t sign it.
She left the notebook out.
No umbrella this time.
No flower.
Just the quiet.
Sunday came like a held breath.
At 3:40, she was there.
A light blue scarf around her neck—not for warmth, but memory.
Hair down. No makeup.
A book in her hand, but unread.
The café buzzed lightly around her. Couples murmured. Someone played the violin faintly through a speaker. The smell of espresso and old wood made the air feel thick with nostalgia.
3:55.
No one yet.
She tapped her fingers on her book.
4:03.
A waiter passed.
4:07.
She almost stood up.
And then—
Footsteps.
A presence.
She didn’t look up right away.
But when she did, he was already standing there.
Not saying a word.
Holding The Little Prince in his hand.
Open to the page where her first letter had once lived.
Their eyes met.
Not as strangers.
Not as pen and paper.
But as people who had already known each other in the most secret way possible—through truth, without pretense.
He smiled. Not big. Just enough.
“Hi,” he said.
And that one word—spoken after hundreds of silent ones—meant more than all the letters in the world.
Part 8
“Hi,” he said.
And suddenly, the world was too loud.
Chairs scraped. Cups clinked. Someone laughed too hard at the next table. But between them—at the second bench of the bookstore café—there was a pause so soft it felt like a page turning.
Aanya blinked.
Her heart didn’t race. It recognized.
He sat down. Across from her.
Not too close.
Not too far.
“I almost didn’t come,” he admitted, eyes flicking toward the window.
“Why?” she asked, her voice steadier than she expected.
“Because I didn’t want to ruin… this. Us. Whatever this is.”
She smiled gently. “You didn’t.”
Silence.
But not the old kind.
This one breathed. It allowed space.
“I’m Rishaan,” he finally said, a little awkwardly. “Not just R.”
She looked at him carefully, letting the name settle like tea steeping in hot water.
“Aanya,” she said, even though he already knew.
“I know,” he whispered, almost with a grin.
They didn’t talk about the letters.
Not immediately.
Instead, they talked about other things.
The bookstore’s mismatched chairs.
The fact that both of them hated raisins in desserts.
How she read endings first.
How he folded receipts into tiny cranes.
Nothing extraordinary.
But everything that mattered.
When their tea cups were empty, and the afternoon had faded into a honey-colored hush, Rishaan asked:
“Can I still write to you?”
She looked surprised. “Even now?”
“I think I still have things to say that paper understands better than my mouth.”
She nodded.
“I’d like that.”
They left the café side by side, not touching, not needing to.
The sky was soft with cloudlight. The world didn’t watch them, but if it had, it would’ve seen two people walking in rhythm—not rushed, not hesitant, just… in step.
Before they parted, he handed her something.
A folded letter.
“I wrote this before today. Didn’t know if I’d give it to you.”
She took it without opening it.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll read it tomorrow.”
He nodded.
No hug. No dramatic goodbye.
Just a look that said: this is not the end.
That night, she didn’t sleep.
She lay in bed, letter unopened beside her lamp.
At 2:11 AM, she finally read it.
“Dear Aanya,
If we ever met face to face, I worried I’d say something wrong. Or worse, nothing at all. I’ve never been good with beginnings. But I hope you’ll forgive that, because I’ve never wanted something more gently than I want you.
Not loudly. Not perfectly.
Just honestly.
Yours,
Rishaan.”
She folded the letter.
Pressed it to her lips.
And whispered the name that now had weight, shape, and meaning.
“Rishaan.”
Part 9
Something changed after the café.
Not suddenly. Not like a door slamming open.
More like a curtain slowly pulling back to let the morning in.
Aanya and Rishaan began to meet—not often, not loudly, but intentionally. Walks to nowhere in particular. Silent coffee on rainy afternoons. Notes exchanged not through notebooks now, but folded into books or tucked into napkins.
The magic remained—but it evolved.
No longer anonymous, but still sacred.
One evening, they sat beneath a banyan tree in the park near her home.
The branches curled above them like a quiet cathedral. Aanya had brought homemade biscuits in a tin. Rishaan carried a book of poems he never opened.
He asked, “Do you miss the letters?”
She didn’t answer right away.
“I think,” she said slowly, “I miss the version of us that lived only on paper. That version was braver.”
Rishaan looked at her, not with surprise, but recognition.
“I miss it too. There was a safety in invisibility.”
“But this…” she added, motioning between them, “is scarier. Because now, we can get it wrong.”
He smiled. “And also right.”
They fell into a rhythm that wasn’t quite dating, but wasn’t distant either.
People around them noticed. Her landlord smiled more often. The librarian once asked if her “quiet friend” would return the sketchbook he borrowed.
Aanya laughed.
She had begun to write again—not just for others, but for herself.
Little things. Reflections. Moments.
She even started writing short pieces for an online blog under a name only Rishaan knew.
She wrote one called “The Boy Who Wrote in Parentheses.”
It was about someone who said important things softly, never center-stage, always in the margins—but always meaning them most.
Rishaan sent her a reply in the comments:
“I hope one day I’m not a parenthesis anymore. Just a sentence. Clear and brave.”
She screenshot it and saved it to her phone.
But with clarity came weight.
They began to talk about what this meant.
What they wanted.
Where it might go.
And in those conversations, a strange discomfort surfaced—not because of disagreement, but because real life was harder to write than fiction.
She lived with her father, who had a heart condition and didn’t trust “men from the internet.”
He had a job offer in another city—designing immersive storytelling for a publishing tech company in Pune.
They didn’t fight.
They just… paused.
Aanya said, “Would this have been easier if we never met?”
Rishaan replied, “No. It would’ve just been emptier.”
The last line he wrote her in that season wasn’t in a letter.
It was on a Post-it stuck to her bookshelf:
“Whatever this becomes, I’m grateful for the version that found you.”
She didn’t reply in words.
But she left the umbrella he gave her on his doorstep.
With a note:
“In case it rains in Pune.”
Part 10
Time moved, as it always does—not with drama, but with the quiet certainty of tea cooling in a forgotten cup.
Rishaan moved to Pune.
He didn’t leave with promises.
Just a hug that lingered too long, and a folded page slipped into her palm before he stepped onto the train.
She didn’t read it right away.
She let it rest beside the marigold in The Little Prince, beside the umbrella he once gave her, beside the memory of letters that once filled the air between them like birds in early morning light.
Her life didn’t change dramatically.
She still wrote for others.
Still stirred her tea clockwise.
Still watched the rain from her window.
But now and then, she paused mid-sentence.
Because his absence wasn’t a hole—it was a presence of its own.
Like ink that had dried, but still left meaning on the page.
One afternoon, a letter arrived.
Typed.
From an official address.
She opened it cautiously.
Inside was a handwritten note, attached to a printout.
The note was from Rishaan’s publishing house.
“Ms. Aanya,
We are publishing a limited chapbook of letters as part of our new campaign ‘Love Between the Lines.’
The writer has insisted that this copy be sent to you first.
No one else has read these pages.
Warmly,
Editorial Desk, Varnika Press”
Aanya’s hands shook.
She read the first page.
And there it was:
“Silent Letters of Love”
by Rishaan Verma
Each letter was dated.
From the very first one:
“Tell her I saw her in the bookstore…”
To the last:
“If I ever become just another story in your life, I hope I’m the one you read again when it rains.”
She wept.
Not because it was sad.
But because it was finished.
And still—
so full of beginning.
The last page was blank.
Except for one sentence at the bottom:
“This page is for you.
Tell me your version.”
Aanya smiled.
She took out a pen.
And began to write.
Not to Rishaan.
Not to the past.
Not to the girl who once waited behind windows.
But to herself.
To the story still unfolding.
THE END
