Lekha Chatterjee
Part 1: The First Sip of Silence
It was a Tuesday morning wrapped in clouds, the kind where the sun hides not out of shyness but out of habit. Aanya padded barefoot across the wooden floor of her apartment, the chill of the early hour clinging to her skin. She liked these quiet stretches before the world pressed in with its emails and errands, before her phone began to buzz like a restless bee.
She reached for the cupboard that held her teas. It was a ritual more than a craving now—a way to begin, to anchor the day. Her fingers hovered over the usual suspects: chamomile for softness, earl grey for memory, and the half-forgotten pouch of Himalayan green that tasted like her grandfather’s garden.
Instead, she picked the unfamiliar white box she didn’t remember buying. It had no label, only a faded ink stamp on the top: “For when the past whispers.”
Curious, she opened it. Inside were ten neatly wrapped tea bags, each in soft parchment, tied with a twine that looked hand-knotted. She chose the topmost one.
The kettle exhaled its whistle as she unwrapped the bag. But what caught her eye wasn’t the aroma—it was the tag. Not the usual printed quote or wellness message. This was handwritten.
In blue ink, almost faded:
“Do you still sleep with the window open when it rains?”
Her breath caught.
It wasn’t just a question. It was his question.
Six years ago, in a different apartment and a different life, Kabir had asked her that exact thing. She remembered that night clearly. They were lying on her old mattress on the floor, the window cracked open, the city outside humming like a distant lullaby.
“Won’t you catch a cold?” he’d asked, half-laughing.
“And miss the smell of wet leaves and the wind sneaking in? Never.”
Back then, everything had been simpler and warmer—even the silences between them. She pressed the note between her fingers now, the ink faintly smudged.
Could it be a coincidence?
She dunked the tea bag into her mug and watched the water slowly change color.
Maybe the tea company was some boutique brand that wrote poetic lines. Maybe it was all in her head. Or maybe…
No. She folded the note and slid it into her notebook—the one where she stored quotes, ticket stubs, and pieces of days she couldn’t let go of. Kabir’s name had not entered her mouth or her writing in years. Not since they had drifted apart the way some people do when love is not enough, and time is too much.
She had moved cities. He had moved on. Or so she thought.
The tea was earthy, unfamiliar, tinged with lemon and something floral. It left a warm echo in her throat.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. Not because of the note—but because of how it made her feel. Not sad. Not even wistful. Just… alert.
Like a door had cracked open behind her, and she wasn’t sure whether to turn around.
The next morning, she tried to ignore the box. Poured herself instant coffee instead and sat by the window. But the tea box remained where she’d left it, as if waiting.
By Thursday, curiosity won. She opened the second tea bag.
This time, the tag read:
“You never liked sugar in your tea. You said life was already too sweet to need more.”
She gasped. This was too specific. Too hers.
It was something she had said once at the tiny café on Khosla Street, when he’d dumped two sugar cubes into his chai and she had teased him.
“What is this?” she whispered aloud to the empty room.
The tea tasted of orange peel and something darker, like roasted almonds. She stared at the note, fingers trembling slightly.
She considered calling someone. Telling Rhea or her mom. But what would she say? “Hey, my tea tags are talking to me in my ex-boyfriend’s voice”? No. That would only lead to pitying silences or gentle suggestions about closure.
But what if this was from Kabir? Was it a prank? A coincidence?
Or worse—was he… dead?
The thought made her blood freeze. She hadn’t stalked him online in years. She had promised herself she wouldn’t. They had broken up amicably, if such a thing exists, but they had both gone radio silent afterward.
Still, Kabir had been the kind of person who wrote postcards even when email was easier. He believed in slow letters, in time-capsules.
Could he have planted this? But how would he know where she lived now? She’d moved twice.
By the time Friday came around, she had already made up her mind. One more tea bag. One more note. And if it had another memory, she would do something. Maybe call his last number. Maybe write an email.
She pulled the third tea bag.
This time, the tag read:
“I left something in the yellow diary. Page 48.”
Her heart leapt.
She knew exactly what diary he meant. The yellow cloth-bound one they had scribbled in together during their Rishikesh trip. It was filled with bad poetry, pressed bougainvillea, and doodles of the stars. She hadn’t opened it in years.
She found it at the back of her bookshelf, tucked between cookbooks and unopened journals. Her hands shook as she flipped through the pages.
Page 48.
There it was. A folded piece of paper she had never seen before.
On it, in his unmistakable handwriting:
“If you’re reading this, it means you still care. That’s enough for now.”
No date. No explanation. Just that.
Aanya sat down slowly, the diary in her lap, the cup of tea cooling beside her.
She wasn’t sure if she felt joy or dread.
All she knew was that something had begun.
And it had begun with a sip.
Part 2: The Memory in Steam
Saturday morning greeted Aanya with reluctant sunlight and a head full of questions. The yellow diary sat on her desk like a secret finally stirred awake, its fabric cover fraying at the edges, soft from time. She hadn’t opened it again since last night. She wasn’t sure she was ready.
But the third note still rested inside her palm—“That’s enough for now.”
Enough for what?
She skipped her usual scroll through the news, skipped the gym, skipped the grocery list. Instead, she found herself walking barefoot again toward the kitchen counter, toward the white box of tea like it was a shrine. She paused before lifting the fourth tea bag. Her breath caught when she unfolded the parchment.
The tag read:
“The night we lost power, and you made shadow animals with a candle. You made a fox. I said it looked like a dragon. You didn’t correct me.”
A sound escaped her throat. Half laugh. Half ache.
How could this be? That night had been buried deep in her memory—so unremarkable, yet so tender. It was during the monsoon of 2017, the night the lights had gone out across their neighborhood, and she had lit an old white candle that dripped wax like tears onto the wooden floor. They were supposed to be studying for an exam he was taking, but instead they made shadows with their fingers.
He’d mistaken her fox for a dragon, and she had let him. It was easier to let people see what they wanted.
Aanya clutched the tag between her fingers. No one else could know that memory. Not her mother, not even her closest friend. It was a moment that lived solely between them—unimportant to the world but unforgettable in its quiet.
The tea tasted like mint and cardamom this time. Unsettlingly familiar. She cradled the mug in both hands, letting the steam rise around her like a foggy veil. Somewhere in that swirl, she thought she saw the outline of him.
Not Kabir as he had been—young, wild-haired, always sketching into napkins and margins—but a shadow of him. A possibility. A whisper.
She sat on the couch and pulled the yellow diary toward her. Page 49. Then 50. Nothing new. Just their old poems and inside jokes.
But on page 51, scribbled faintly in pencil as if added later, were four words she hadn’t noticed before:
“Not every ending ends.”
The air shifted.
She didn’t remember writing that. She didn’t think he had, either. But who else? And when? It hadn’t been there before. Of that she was sure.
Suddenly, the apartment felt too quiet, like the kind of silence that watches you.
She got up, opened the windows, and let the city rush in—cars honking, dogs barking, someone selling guavas in the lane below. Life. Realness. Noise.
Still, she couldn’t stop thinking about it.
By noon, she’d done what she swore she wouldn’t do. She typed Kabir Sharma into every social platform she could think of. Instagram, Facebook, even LinkedIn. The accounts existed—but all were inactive. No posts in two years. The last post was a photo of a sketch he’d made in a train station, captioned “Some departures are forever.”
She searched further. Obituaries. News. Alumni groups. Nothing.
Alive or dead, Kabir had gone dark.
And yet, here he was. In her tea. In her diary. In her mornings.
By evening, she called Rhea. Just to ground herself.
“Hey, what’s up?” Rhea asked, cheerful as ever.
“Nothing much. Just… do you remember Kabir?”
“Umm… wow. Random! Yeah, the tea guy, right? You used to make him taste-test every blend?”
Aanya smiled faintly. “Yeah. That’s him.”
“Why? Did he text you or something?”
“No, not exactly. Just… dreams, maybe.”
“Dreams?”
“Yeah,” Aanya said softly, not ready to say more. “Dreams.”
That night, she didn’t open another tea bag. She didn’t want to know what it would say. Not yet.
But when she went to the kitchen in the middle of the night for water, she saw something she hadn’t seen before.
A post-it note.
On the fridge. Yellow, curling at the edges.
Her heart froze.
It read:
“I liked your fox. But I loved your silence more.”
She backed away, the glass of water trembling in her grip.
This wasn’t just a memory anymore.
Someone—or something—was writing back.
Part 3: A Cup for the Unspoken
The post-it was still there in the morning.
Not a dream. Not a hallucination. It fluttered slightly with the breeze from the window, a quiet yellow ghost pinned to stainless steel.
Aanya stared at it as if it might disappear under scrutiny. But it didn’t. It only stared back with its eight handwritten words: “I liked your fox. But I loved your silence more.”
That was not something Kabir had ever said aloud. But it was something he would have said.
He always liked the way she could sit beside him without filling the air with noise. “You listen like trees do,” he once told her, brushing hair away from her cheek, “as if you’re rooted in the moment.” At the time, she had laughed. Now she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or lock her doors.
But that would be silly. The door had been locked.
Her fingers hovered over the tea box again. She didn’t want to open the fifth tea bag. Not because she feared what it might say—but because she needed it now. The notes had become a thread back to a self she thought she’d outgrown. A self that wore mismatched socks, believed love could be simple, and still tasted monsoon wind in her breath.
She unwrapped the fifth tea bag with care, the parchment softer now, like old skin.
The tag read:
“You said we’d never need photographs. That memory was enough.”
Aanya closed her eyes.
She had said that. Not just once. She had believed it fiercely. She hated selfies, hated how they reduced entire moments to frozen frames. With Kabir, she always said, “Let’s remember this in our bones, not our phones.”
And yet, now she ached to see his face.
She searched through her drawers, her photo folders, her old backup drives. Nothing. It was true—there were no photos of them. Not even group pictures from college events. He had honored her wish so fully, it now felt like a curse.
Aanya opened her closet and pulled down the box of old college memorabilia—pins, scribbled notes, a dried rose from someone else. Tucked under a faded scarf, she found a worn-out boarding pass with Kabir’s doodle on it.
It wasn’t his face. But it was his hand.
A tiny sketch of her, sitting cross-legged on a bench, hair piled messily on top of her head, lost in a book.
She placed it beside her tea cup like a totem.
That night, unable to sleep, she sat on the balcony. The city was quieter than usual, wrapped in an unusually thick fog. She wondered if fog was memory in disguise—how it softened edges, blurred the present, made everything feel like déjà vu.
She took her phone and typed Kabir’s number. The one she had memorized once. Just to see.
It rang.
Once.
Twice.
Then voicemail.
But the voice was unmistakably his.
“Hey, you’ve reached Kabir. If I didn’t answer, I’m probably sketching something that won’t make me money. Leave a message… or better yet, leave a poem.”
Her eyes welled up.
She didn’t leave a message. But she whispered, “I still sleep with the window open.”
When she walked back inside, there was another post-it. This time, on her mirror.
She hadn’t heard anything. No creaks. No footsteps. But it was there.
“I always knew you would.”
The handwriting was slightly tilted now. More rushed. More alive.
Aanya wasn’t scared. Not really. Something deeper than fear was blooming in her chest—curiosity. Longing. The sweet ache of being seen by someone no longer present.
She stared at her own reflection, holding the note like a charm. Her own face had changed. Less bright-eyed. More cautious. But still—under the exhaustion and years—there was the girl who loved handwritten things and wild silences.
The tea box still had five bags left. Five more days. Five more truths.
But what would happen when the last one was gone?
Was this a countdown? A story? A haunting?
Or was it—somehow—a second chance?
She placed the latest tag inside the yellow diary, now bulging with notes. Then she wrote something beneath it, on page 52.
“Come in the morning light, if you’re real.”
She wasn’t sure who she was writing to. A ghost? A man? A memory?
But she left her front door unlocked that night. Just a sliver. Not out of recklessness. But out of hope.
Part 4: Shadows on the Rim
The morning came quietly, as all revelations do.
Light spilled across Aanya’s kitchen tiles like melted gold, hesitant but deliberate. She woke with a strange certainty—a sense that the day already knew something she didn’t. Her first instinct was to check the door.
Still locked.
Still exactly as she’d left it—ajar just an inch, like a held breath.
No one had come.
No footprints. No new post-its. No whispers in the steam of the windowpanes.
Disappointment settled into her shoulders. She had half-expected to open her eyes and find him there—Kabir, in the doorway, holding a cup, smirking at her foolish hope like he always used to.
“Still dramatic,” he’d have said. “Still beautiful.”
Instead, there was only the tea box. Patient. Silent. A paper coffin of memories.
She opened the sixth pouch.
This time, the tag read:
“Do you remember the chipped blue mug? You said it reminded you that imperfect things still held warmth.”
Her hand flew to her mouth.
She had said that. The mug had a hairline crack, right along the rim. Most people would have thrown it away. Kabir had tried to, once.
But Aanya had snatched it back.
“It holds the heat longer. Like me. A little broken, a little stubborn.”
They’d made it her mug after that.
She still had it, somewhere. Buried at the back of the highest shelf, behind souvenir cups and dusty glassware.
When she found it, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The crack had spread a little more, but the mug still stood. Stubborn. Warm in her hand.
She poured today’s brew into it. Ginger and lemongrass. The scent alone curled around her like a memory.
She sipped it slowly, letting the warmth find the corners of her she had sealed up. A part of her didn’t want this to stop. The notes. The voice. The presence.
But there were only four tea bags left.
She stared at the clock. 9:17 AM.
Then something shifted.
The mirror in her hallway—long and plain, bought from a thrift shop—was fogged.
But there was no steam. No kettle boiling. No shower running.
And yet, words had formed on the glass. As if drawn by a finger.
“I’m sorry I left without saying goodbye.”
Aanya’s knees buckled slightly.
She stood, breath caught somewhere between her ribs, staring at the words like they might fade. But they didn’t. The message stayed, soft-edged and real.
She reached out and touched the glass. Cold. But the letters were warm, slightly raised, like someone had written them from the inside.
She didn’t remember crying. But her cheeks were wet.
The silence of the room began to hum.
She whispered to the mirror, “Why are you here now?”
The mirror did not respond. But her heart did.
Because he hadn’t said goodbye.
That summer six years ago, Kabir had boarded a train to Ahmedabad for a short artist residency. One month. That’s all it was supposed to be.
And then… nothing.
No calls. No emails. No returned messages.
He had vanished without a trace.
At first, she was angry. Then worried. Then exhausted. She called mutual friends. She messaged his mother. She even emailed the residency centre. They said he had checked in and checked out. That was it.
No drama. No closure. Just absence.
Eventually, she’d told herself the narrative everyone told you to believe—he left. He moved on. He didn’t want to explain.
But maybe… that wasn’t it.
She looked back at the mirror. The words still lingered, though they were starting to fade now, evaporating into the morning like tea steam.
She ran to her notebook, flipped to a blank page, and began writing:
Questions for the Ghost of Kabir:
1. Why did you vanish?
2. Are you real or memory?
3. Why the tea bags?
4. Did you ever regret it?
5. Are you… alive?
She stared at the last question.
Then crossed it out.
Instead, she wrote:
Do I want you to be?
That was harder to answer.
Because if he was alive, then why this strange ritual? Why the tea, the mirrors, the post-its?
But if he was… not…
Then why did this feel like closure unfolding in slow motion?
She placed the cracked blue mug on the windowsill. Let the light pool into it. Let the past sit where it belonged—in the open, not the cupboard.
There were still four teas left.
Four more truths.
And then?
She didn’t know.
But she’d be waiting. With the door ajar.
Part 5: When Silence Leaves Footprints
Aanya didn’t sleep that night. Not truly. She floated on the edge of wakefulness, the way a kettle hovers just before boiling—still, but ready to erupt. Outside, the city moved on in its noisy indifference. Inside, her flat felt like it was holding its breath.
When dawn seeped in—grey and hesitant—she got out of bed and padded to the kitchen like someone responding to a call. She didn’t reach for her phone, didn’t scroll through messages or check headlines.
She went straight for the tea box.
She unwrapped the seventh bag with a care that felt ceremonial now. The parchment unfolded like old secrets. The tag read:
“Your laugh always arrived a second late. Like it wanted to make sure it was allowed.”
Aanya sat down.
That line—it pierced through her like sunlight through fog.
She hadn’t known anyone had noticed that about her. But it was true. She always waited. Always measured the room before letting her joy in. Kabir had once teased her for it—“Your laughter’s got stage fright,” he’d said.
But she didn’t know it had stayed with him.
Until now.
The tea today was cinnamon and honey—comforting, golden. Like a hug from someone you’d forgotten how much you missed.
As she sipped, her eyes drifted toward the window.
And that’s when she saw it.
The footprints.
On the balcony.
Two clear, dusty marks. Barefoot. Fresh.
She dropped the mug. It hit the rug with a dull thunk, tea sloshing over the edge but not breaking. Her heartbeat thrummed like a monsoon drum.
She stepped forward. Slid the glass door open.
The footprints were still there. Faint, but visible. They led from the railing to the edge of her yoga mat, then disappeared.
She crouched down and touched one. Warm.
Not just a ghost, then. Not just memory. Something—or someone—had been here.
She looked over the railing. The street below was empty, a delivery scooter zipping past. The fog was lifting slowly. No sign of anything unusual.
Back inside, she found a new post-it. Not on the mirror. Not on the fridge.
This time, it was on her bookshelf. Tucked beside their old copy of The Prophet.
The note read:
“I didn’t know how to leave you. So I didn’t.”
Aanya’s hands trembled. Her mouth opened, but no sound came.
She read it again. And again. And still couldn’t breathe.
She sat down beside the bookshelf. Her heart felt too full of ghosts and words.
He hadn’t left her, not willingly. Not out of boredom or cruelty.
But then—why? What happened?
She pulled the yellow diary toward her and wrote on page 53:
You disappeared. I mourned you without a funeral.
Was I supposed to wait?
Was I supposed to know you hadn’t really left?
There was no answer, of course. Only the quiet clink of her mug cooling on the rug.
The rest of the day passed like a paused film—silent, surreal. She cancelled plans. Turned off her phone. Spoke to no one. She kept watching the window, wondering if he’d come again.
She didn’t know if she meant the ghost or the man. Or if they were now the same thing.
That night, she left the balcony door slightly open. Just enough. A ritual now.
She lay in bed with the yellow diary open beside her pillow. A pen uncapped. Waiting.
Around 3:12 AM, she woke to a breeze that didn’t belong. The curtain was moving. The pages of the diary had fluttered.
She sat up.
No one.
But on page 54, there was new ink. Fresh. Smelling faintly of clove and memory.
“Sometimes we don’t die. We just get lost between pages.”
She pressed her palm to the ink. It smudged slightly.
Still wet.
Her eyes filled again, but this time it wasn’t pain. It was the strange, impossible comfort of being found in the middle of being lost.
She didn’t know where this would go. Or how it would end.
But the tea box had three bags left.
And now, Aanya was no
longer afraid.
She wanted to know how the story finished.
Even if it meant finishing it alone.
Part 6: The Mug That Never Cooled
By now, Aanya had stopped questioning whether it was real. She had surrendered to the strange rhythm of the tea tags, the post-its, the ghost footprints. Logic had taken a backseat to emotion, and for the first time in years, she didn’t feel hollow when she woke up.
She felt… expected.
Three tea bags remained. The box looked smaller now, as though it too understood that something was nearing its end.
She took the eighth tea bag and held it like a relic. The tag unraveled slowly, the parchment trembling in her fingers.
“You never drank your tea all the way. You liked the ending to stay warm.”
Aanya smiled, and for the first time in this bizarre journey, she laughed—softly, but fully.
He was right. She always left the last sip in the mug. Her reasoning? “Some warmth should be preserved,” she used to say. “Like an unfinished kiss.”
Kabir had called it poetic nonsense. But he had stopped teasing her about it after the third time.
The tea today was lavender and rose. Gentle. Grieving. She let the steam rise to her face and closed her eyes.
And then… she felt it.
Not a whisper. Not a draft.
A touch.
Light. Airy. Barely there. Like a fingertip brushing past her cheek.
She gasped and opened her eyes. The room was empty.
But her skin remembered.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She simply sat there, tea in her lap, heart rising like the morning sun.
He was closer now. Whoever he was—ghost, lover, thought, memory—he was near.
When she returned to her diary, a fresh page had already been turned. Page 55. No handwriting this time.
Instead, pressed between the pages, was a tea stain.
A perfect, pale brown circle, like the bottom of her mug had kissed the paper.
Inside the ring, written in blue:
“Memories are warm even when people aren’t.”
She traced the sentence with her thumb.
Then, underneath, she added in her own hand:
But what if you’re still warm?
What if you never left the cup?
She sat for hours that day, re-reading the old pages of the yellow diary. Their doodles. Their lists. Their arguments over favorite books. Kabir had always loved sad endings; she had preferred unresolved ones.
“I like questions more than answers,” she had written once.
Now, all she had were questions—and they didn’t feel lonely.
That evening, she took the cracked blue mug, poured water in it, and set it on her balcony rail to catch the last light of the day.
A ritual. An offering.
At midnight, the mug was still warm. Not just from the day’s sun—but still warm, though the wind had turned cold.
She picked it up and found another post-it tucked inside.
“I stay in small things. You taught me that.”
Tears welled again. Not out of grief this time, but the ache of recognition. The sweetness of being understood, across time and space and logic.
She held the mug to her chest like a heart she didn’t want to break.
That night, she didn’t write in the diary. She simply left it open beside her, the pen resting diagonally across the page like an invitation.
When she woke just before dawn, a new sentence had appeared in delicate ink:
“Don’t be afraid to boil over. Even tea needs heat to reveal its flavor.”
Aanya laughed again.
This was him. Only Kabir could write with such mess and clarity all at once.
The box now held only two bags. Two more notes. Two more sips.
But she wasn’t afraid anymore.
Even endings could taste like beginnings—if you let them steep long enough.
Part 7: The Day the Mug Cracked
By the seventh day, Aanya no longer checked the box with hesitation. The fear had burned off, like the bitter aftertaste of a too-strong brew. What remained was warmth, wonder, and a longing so tender it no longer hurt.
She brewed tea the way one might prepare to write a final letter—not rushed, not ritualistic, but with intention. She unfolded the ninth tea bag, hands calm now, almost reverent.
The tag read:
“You believed endings should be silent. I never agreed.”
Her lips parted slightly. Of course he didn’t agree. Kabir never believed in quiet exits. He used to say life deserved crescendos, not ellipses. Once, after a loud, clumsy fight that ended in laughter, he’d told her, “If I ever leave, it’ll be with a symphony.”
But he hadn’t. He had left like smoke—thin, disappearing between moments. Until now.
The tea today was black with a twist of citrus. Strong. Bracing. A goodbye in liquid form. She let it sit in the cracked blue mug, the one that had somehow survived every move, every kitchen shift, every careless knock.
She curled her fingers around it, feeling the warmth soak into her palms.
And then—
A snap.
A sudden, almost imperceptible sound.
The mug cracked down its center.
A clean, final line. As if the warmth had tried to hold too much.
She gasped and placed it gently down. Tea trickled out like memory. The floor caught it. The moment swallowed it.
The mug was done.
She should’ve been sad. But she wasn’t.
It felt… right.
Like something had finished its job. Like a vessel whose work was done.
She wrapped the broken mug in her old college scarf—the faded red one Kabir used to mock for being “too revolutionary” for someone who hated protests. Then she tucked it into a box marked “Letters and Things That Still Matter.”
Later that evening, she sat by the window and opened the yellow diary.
On page 56, a new entry had appeared.
Not in his handwriting. Not in hers. But softer. Almost typed. As though someone had whispered it into the paper.
“Do you remember the day you stopped writing poems?”
She stared at the words. Her breath caught.
She did remember.
It had been a rainy Tuesday, months after Kabir vanished. She had written a final poem, folded it, and thrown it out the bus window somewhere between Lajpat Nagar and Khan Market. It had felt useless then—writing for someone who wasn’t coming back.
But now…
She opened a fresh page in the diary and wrote:
Maybe I didn’t stop. Maybe I just paused until someone remembered I could begin again.
She left the diary open. She always did now.
That night, she dreamed.
She was standing at the edge of a railway platform—not lost, not waiting—just there. A steaming cup in her hand. Fog rolling in.
And across the tracks, Kabir.
Dressed in the same olive jacket, same crooked smile. Sketchbook under one arm, the other hand holding a mug that looked exactly like hers.
They didn’t speak.
But when the train came rumbling between them, it didn’t stop. It passed through like a memory rushing back.
And when it cleared, he was gone.
But the mug in her hand was whole again.
She woke up with tears on her pillow.
And a new note resting on her chest.
Not a tag. Not a post-it.
Just a slip of yellow paper.
“One more sip. One more truth. Then let go, my fox.”
Part 8: The Penultimate Steep
Sunday arrived dressed in stillness. Not the lazy kind, but the heavy hush that settles before something inevitable—like the seconds before a confession, or the breath you hold just before reading the final page.
Aanya moved slower that morning, each step deliberate. The tea box sat where it always did, but its weight had shifted—lighter now, humbler. Only one pouch remained inside. One more truth sealed in parchment. One more echo of a love that had refused to stay dead.
She reached in and pulled it out.
The ninth tea bag.
The tag read:
“I watched you leave the bookstore that day and knew you were rewriting your story without me.”
She closed her eyes.
That day.
She remembered it now—how she had lingered too long in the poetry aisle, fingers grazing the spines of Neruda, Tagore, Nayyirah Waheed. How, for a split second, she had felt eyes on her—warm, familiar, the kind that didn’t ask for anything but acknowledgment.
But she had ignored the instinct. Walked out. Kept walking.
Kabir had been there. Alive. Watching.
And he had let her go.
Or maybe she had let him.
Aanya sat down on the floor, the diary in her lap. The tea steeped beside her, its aroma delicate—jasmine and bergamot, the scent of dusk.
She opened the yellow diary, expecting words to have appeared, like every day before.
Nothing.
No message. No tea ring. Just her own scribbles and the faint scent of paper and time.
She frowned. For the first time in nine days, the silence felt unfamiliar. Not cruel—but waiting.
She flipped back to the earlier pages. Read the notes again. The sketches. The shared jokes. The hidden poem on page 13 she’d forgotten she’d written for his birthday.
It was all there. Still hers. Still his. Still alive.
She didn’t realize how long she sat like that—tea growing cold beside her, the sun inching across the room.
Until her phone rang.
The screen lit up with a number she hadn’t seen in years.
No name. But she knew. She knew.
Her hand trembled as she picked up.
“…hello?”
There was a pause.
Then: “Hey, Fox.”
It was his voice.
Older. Scratched by years. But unmistakably his.
She didn’t speak. She couldn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t have the words. So I sent the tea instead.”
“How…?” she managed, her voice a ghost.
“I wrote those notes years ago,” Kabir said. “Every tag, every line. I had them packed and ready. I didn’t know where to send them. But when I saw you that day in the bookstore… I followed you. Just to know you were okay. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know if I deserved to. But I mailed the box to your building’s name, not knowing if it would reach you. I figured… if you ever opened it, maybe that would mean something.”
“You… you watched me?”
“I watched you let me go. And I finally understood—I had left you, but you had stayed. With all the warmth. All the silence. All the poems.”
Aanya’s tears were silent. They slipped down her cheeks without protest.
“I didn’t die, Aanya,” he whispered. “But I did disappear. For a while. I had to.”
“I thought you were a ghost,” she said, laughing through the ache. “You wrote on my mirror. You left notes inside my locked house. I thought I was losing my mind.”
Kabir chuckled softly. “Maybe I did too. I slipped a post-it through your kitchen vent once. That day it was windy and your curtain was moving. I told myself it was okay to be foolish for a moment.”
She smiled, wiping her eyes.
“You broke my mug,” she said.
“I bought you a new one,” he replied. “It’s on your doorstep.”
She stood up. Walked to the door. Opened it slowly.
There it was. A small brown parcel. Light as breath.
Inside: a new blue mug. Whole. Clean. But with one tiny, painted crack running down its side—intentional. A reminder.
Beneath it, a final note.
“I’m not asking to come back. I’m just hoping you remember that I once loved you in small sips. And I still do.”
She clutched the mug to her chest.
“Is this the last message?” she asked.
“No,” Kabir replied. “There’s one more tea bag.”
“But you wrote only ten.”
“I did,” he said. “But the l
ast one… that one’s not from me.”
Aanya blinked. “Then who?”
Kabir’s voice softened.
“It’s from you.”
Part 9: The Letter I Forgot to Write
Aanya didn’t brew the last tea immediately.
She placed the tenth tea bag on her desk and stared at it, her fingers brushing the parchment like it was fragile skin. For days she had believed the notes were a haunting—then a memory, then a ghost, then a kind of resurrection. But now, knowing Kabir had never died… somehow made it more tender.
Because he had disappeared not into death, but into distance.
He had chosen silence, then stitched his apology into tea tags. It was ridiculous. It was poetic. It was so very Kabir.
And now, the final tag wasn’t even his.
It was hers.
Or rather, it was meant to be.
She took the yellow diary, turned to a clean page near the end, and wrote:
Tea Tag Ten – For the One Who Stayed
From Aanya
Then she stared at the page for a long time.
What did one say in a final note? Not goodbye—not anymore. Not with his voice in her ear still echoing from last night. Not with the mug on her table, a deliberate crack painted in place of a real one.
She picked up the tea bag and brewed it slowly. The scent was unexpected—lemon, a hint of thyme, and something like vanilla. It reminded her of the first time she had fallen in love. Not with Kabir. With the idea of writing. When she was fifteen and wrote poems about the moon as if it were listening.
She unfolded the tag.
Blank.
Just plain white.
It startled her. She turned it over—nothing. Not a smudge, not a dot.
And then she realized what Kabir had meant.
This one was hers to write. Hers to name.
She took a pen and slowly, carefully, wrote in neat, uncertain letters:
“You don’t need to haunt me. I remember you.”
She looked at it. Sat with it. Then added beneath it:
“But I’d still like to hear from you. Even if it’s just in steam.”
The tea was ready. She poured it into the new blue mug. The one with the deliberate painted scar. The warmth curled around her fingers like a promise.
She took it to the balcony.
Outside, the street was quietly alive. A woman walking her dog. The milkman passing on his cycle. Pigeons lining the wires like musical notes.
Everything was exactly as it had always been. But she wasn’t.
She sipped slowly, leaving just enough in the bottom.
Inside the diary, on page 58, she pasted the final tea tag.
Then she wrote underneath:
This story is still steeping.
Later that evening, her phone pinged.
One new message. From a number no longer unsaved.
Kabir:
There’s a poetry reading at that café on Khosla Street next Friday. They serve terrible tea. Want to go judge them mercilessly with me?
Aanya stared at the screen.
Then she typed, paused, deleted, and retyped:
Aanya:
Only if we leave before the last sip.
He replied in seconds.
Kabir:
Some warmth should always remain. Isn’t that what you used to say?
She smiled, heart blooming.
Aanya:
I still do.
And that night, for the first time in years, she wrote a poem that didn’t ache.
It was about tea. About ghosts. About love that lingered like steam—faint, curling, real.
Part 10: Love, in the Last Sip
The café on Khosla Street hadn’t changed much—still dimly lit with mismatched furniture, ceiling fans that creaked like slow thoughts, and jazz music playing low enough to hear your heartbeat between notes. The bookshelf near the counter still leaned at an odd angle, as if it were listening in on conversations.
Aanya arrived early. Not out of nervousness, but curiosity. She wanted to see the place again before Kabir stepped into it. She hadn’t been back since the day he vanished from her life—back when they sat at the corner table by the window, sipping cardamom chai and arguing about Sylvia Plath.
Today, she chose the same table.
The tea menu still boasted “worldly infusions and soulful blends,” but she knew none would match the ghost-brewed comfort of the past week. She ordered a cup of lemon basil green tea and waited, her fingers resting on the worn surface of the table. In her bag: the yellow diary, the ten tags, the cracked blue mug, now empty but carried like a totem.
When Kabir walked in, it was as if no time had passed—and yet all of it had.
His hair was shorter, his jaw sharper, and his eyes… softer. He wore a deep green kurta over jeans and carried no sketchbook this time, just himself. Raw. Unarmored.
He paused at the door, scanning the room. Their eyes met. And Aanya saw it. That flicker of recognition not just of a face, but of a life.
He smiled. A hesitant, hopeful curve of the lips.
She nodded once. Just enough.
He sat down across from her without saying a word. For a full minute, they simply existed—no need for greetings. The tea arrived, placed between them by a bored waiter.
Kabir looked at it and grinned. “Still terrible?”
“Worse,” Aanya said. “I think the bitterness’s aged like fine regret.”
He chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck. “I wanted to bring tea bags. But I thought that might be… too on the nose.”
“Depends. Did you have more?”
“No. That box was all I had in me. All the words I didn’t send.”
She sipped her tea and winced.
“Told you,” she muttered.
They laughed.
And just like that, the years softened. Not erased, not forgiven. But softened—like the steam that rises, lingers, and eventually fades.
Kabir’s voice lowered. “I was afraid you’d hate me.”
“I did,” she said gently. “For a while.”
He looked down.
“But not anymore. I think… I was just waiting to know whether I imagined the love, or if it had really existed.”
Kabir met her gaze. “It existed. In every sip. In every silence.”
She pulled out the yellow diary. Placed it on the table.
“I brought something,” she said.
He opened it carefully, as though touching scripture.
Page after page, he flipped through their old verses, doodles, the ghost-notes, and her final lines. His eyes glistened.
“Even the blank one,” he whispered. “You filled it.”
Aanya nodded. “It was never truly blank. Just… waiting for the right hand.”
Kabir closed the diary, pressing his palm against the cover.
“Can I… write one more?”
She slid it toward him.
He opened to the final page and scribbled a line in silence. Then handed it back.
She read it aloud.
“Let’s leave the last sip untouched, together.”
They sat there in the café, sharing the terrible tea and the not-so-terrible history.
When the cup was nearly empty, Aanya pushed it to the center of the table, and Kabir mirrored her action.
Two mugs. Two stories. Two final sips left behind—warm, waiting.
Later, they walked out into the Delhi dusk. The air smelled of rain and dust and pausing traffic.
“Where do we go from here?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But maybe we can start by drinking tea that doesn’t come with ghosts.”
He laughed, the sound warm and full.
As they turned the corner, the wind picked up.
In her bag, the yellow diary shifted, its pages rustling like leaves preparing for spring.
And inside, a loose tea tag fluttered free from its envelope.
It read:
“Love is what remains when the tea cools and you still stay.”
Aanya smiled.
She was staying.
And so was he.
End
