Aarohi Jadhav
Chapter 1: Rain, Reluctance, and Rust
The bus ride to Dapoli was as grey and endless as the monsoon clouds that followed it. Vanya Kale sat hunched beside the window, her earbuds silent, the phone in her lap long out of charge. Her mother’s hurried goodbye still echoed in her ears — “It’s just for a month, sweetheart. He’s your grandfather, not a ghost.” But to Vanya, it was all the same. Her grandfather, Arvind Kale, a once-famous Marathi poet, now lived alone in a crumbling house overlooking the sea, speaking to no one and surrounded by furniture that looked like it resented being touched. Vanya had never spent more than a weekend in that house. Now she was being left there like a parcel the city no longer wanted. As the bus wheezed to a halt near the rusting town sign that read “Dapoli welcomes you,” Vanya braced herself for silence, soggy clothes, and a painfully awkward holiday.
The house stood on a hill, slightly tilted like it had stopped trying to be proud. The monsoon had already begun its slow siege — algae crawling up walls, the scent of damp clothes in the air, and frogs announcing themselves from every corner of the courtyard. Arvind Kale, thin and stooped, opened the door without a word. He nodded once, turned, and walked away. No questions, no hugs, not even a “how have you been.” Vanya dumped her backpack inside and was shown to a room filled with mothballs and a single flickering tube light. The first night, she tried journaling but stopped after one sentence: “I miss noise.” Over the next few days, she explored the house like an archaeologist — finding nothing but cracked vases, stacks of untouched books, and the faint smell of old ink that clung to the walls like memory. On the third day, bored and drenched from chasing a mango that fell from a tree, she wandered behind the house and found it — an old, rust-covered letterbox half-buried in the wet soil, hidden behind a curtain of overgrown creepers.
Something about it felt strange, as if it didn’t want to be found but had waited anyway. It was wedged into the wall, its slot sealed with grime and a spider’s delicate web. Curious, Vanya tugged it free and pried it open. Inside were over a dozen folded, yellowing envelopes tied with a thin red thread. The paper was soft with age, the ink faded but legible. Each letter began with “Dearest Reya,” and none were signed. She sat cross-legged in the muddy grass, reading the first one as rain slid down her hair and soaked the pages. The words were poetic, aching, filled with longing and regret. Whoever had written them had loved Reya deeply — and never sent a single letter. As thunder cracked above her and the house stood still behind her, Vanya felt the first flicker of excitement since arriving. The house might be silent, but its walls were hiding a voice — and she had just found it.
Chapter 2: A Town That Forgets
The rain had settled into a rhythm by the time Vanya began venturing beyond the crumbling walls of her grandfather’s house. It wasn’t that the town of Dapoli was unfriendly — it was just indifferent, like an old dog too tired to bark at strangers. The streets were slick with mud, and the air smelled of wet tamarind leaves and boiled groundnuts sold in paper cones at the corner stalls. Shopkeepers sat behind wooden counters with slow eyes, nodding but not speaking unless spoken to. Vanya walked slowly through the lanes, clutching the first letter from the box in her pocket, reading it over and over again like a sacred text. “Dearest Reya,” it began. “If you ever feel the monsoon before I do, know that it’s because I carry your absence like a cloud inside me.” Who was Reya? Why weren’t these letters ever sent? She tried asking a paan seller, a woman at the temple, even a tea vendor who had been there for decades. But every time she mentioned the name “Reya,” a strange quiet settled over them, followed by polite evasion. It was like dropping a name that had been erased from memory on purpose.
On her fifth day in Dapoli, Vanya met Ishaan. He was sitting under a tin roof sketching the monsoon clouds in his notebook, oblivious to the drizzle that danced around him. His sketchbook was full of swirling skies and banyan trees bent by the wind, and he had the kind of presence that made you want to sit quietly beside him rather than strike up conversation. But something about the way he shaded the sky made her speak. “Do you always draw the rain?” she asked. Ishaan looked up and nodded. “It’s the only thing that changes everything else.” They became fast friends, not out of design but convenience — two curious teenagers in a town full of locked doors and locked memories. Vanya showed him the letters. Ishaan read them with furrowed brows, then quietly said, “My uncle once told me about a girl named Reya who used to sing by the cliffside temple. People say she disappeared one monsoon night.” That was enough for Vanya. She felt the thread pulling tighter. The mystery wasn’t just old paper — it was rooted in this town, in its silence, in people who refused to remember.
They began mapping out their search, making lists and noting places where the past might still breathe. Ishaan led her to the old lighthouse, to abandoned parts of the market, to an elderly librarian who remembered the name Reya but insisted she’d “moved away years ago.” Vanya noticed a pattern — people didn’t lie, but they didn’t tell the whole truth either. Back at the house, her grandfather still said nothing about the letterbox. But Vanya had started leaving one letter out on the table every morning. On the seventh day, she noticed one of them had been moved — only slightly, but enough. That night, she found another old photograph tucked between pages of a poetry book — a young woman on a cliff, the wind in her hair. On the back, in faded pencil: Reya. July 1995. The town may have forgotten, but the house hadn’t. And neither would she.
Chapter 3: The Girl in the Photograph
The photograph haunted Vanya more than the letters. Reya stood barefoot on the cliffside, her blue saree billowing around her like a wave about to crash. There was joy in her eyes, but also something harder to name — defiance, maybe, or a longing too heavy to hide. Vanya kept staring at the image late into the night, lying on the creaky bed while the monsoon wind made the windows shiver. The house around her seemed more alive now — the floors creaked in patterns, the walls whispered in damp breaths, and the silence between her and her grandfather had begun to feel crowded with things unsaid. The next morning, emboldened by the photo, she placed it beside the letter on the dining table. Her grandfather, as always, said nothing when he sat down for tea. But his hand trembled slightly as he reached for the sugar tin, and when she looked up, she caught him staring — not at her, but at Reya. After a moment that stretched too long to be accidental, he pushed his cup aside, stood up slowly, and said the first full sentence she’d heard from him in days: “She used to write back.”
The words fell like a stone into a still pond. Vanya’s heart raced. She used to write back. That meant it wasn’t a one-sided love story. That meant Reya was real, and alive at least at some point — not just a fantasy preserved in ink. But before Vanya could ask more, he had retreated to his study, the door shut as tightly as ever. She wanted to knock, to demand answers, but she didn’t. Not yet. Instead, she went to Ishaan, her backpack full of letters and the photo. They sat at their usual spot — a mossy bench near the banyan tree by the old primary school, watching the mist roll in. Ishaan studied the photo quietly. “This is the temple cliff. I’m sure of it. That banyan’s still there,” he said, pointing to the left of the frame. “We can go there tomorrow. My dad says that place was once where people went to fall in love — or off the edge.” His voice dropped as he said the last part. Vanya clutched the photo tighter. She didn’t believe Reya had simply vanished. Disappeared people leave behind echoes, and she could feel one now, loud as thunder before a downpour.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. She walked the house barefoot, listening to the wind shake loose tiles from the roof, letting the dark corners breathe around her. In the attic, beneath an old trunk covered in dust, she found another poetry book. Slipped between its pages was a letter — not folded like the others, but sealed in an envelope. It was addressed in careful handwriting: To A.K., only if I don’t return. Her breath caught. A.K. — Arvind Kale. Her grandfather. She didn’t open it. Not yet. Her fingers traced the envelope’s edge like it was sacred. She understood now: this wasn’t just a mystery. This was a love story no one had dared to finish. And somehow, it had been waiting for her.
Chapter 4: Ishaan’s Rain Sketches
The cliffside temple stood like a forgotten sentinel at the edge of the sea, its stone steps slippery with moss and history. Vanya and Ishaan reached it just after a long downpour, the sky a bruised grey and the ocean frothing below like an argument yet to end. The banyan tree from the photograph was still there — older now, its roots thick and tangled like veins pressed into the earth. Ishaan, always sketching when words fell short, flipped open his notebook and began drawing. Vanya wandered near the edge, her shoes soaked, the wind tugging at her like an impatient friend. On the bark of the banyan, she spotted something — faint but there. Two initials carved into the trunk, almost lost beneath years of growth: R + A. Her heart skipped. Reya and Arvind. It wasn’t just poetic longing. It had happened. Right here, under this tree, beside this view. She ran her fingers over the letters and felt the skin of a story trying to break through.
They sat under the tree and read one of the letters together. It was dated late July 1995. “I waited yesterday. I saw the blue light at the temple and thought it was you. But the wind brought only silence. If this is our goodbye, I wish I could have held it in my hands.” Ishaan looked up, his pencil stilled. “What if something happened that night?” he asked. “What if she was waiting here and…” He didn’t finish. The air felt heavier. Vanya remembered the sealed letter addressed to her grandfather she had found in the attic — To A.K., only if I don’t return. She hadn’t opened it yet, but it had begun to whisper to her in her sleep. The letters were shifting from romance to tragedy, the way only real stories do. She had to know what happened. That night, as thunder rolled like distant drums, she sat on her bed, the envelope in her lap. She opened it slowly, reverently, as if she might disturb a ghost.
Inside was a single page. Reya’s handwriting was shaky but unmistakable. “If you’re reading this, I did not return. Not by choice, but by force. My father knows. He has locked the doors. He says shame is heavier than water. I tried, Arvind. I waited. If you ever forgive yourself, know that I already have. I never stopped loving you. But love must sometimes live in someone else’s mouth. Speak of me. Or I will vanish for good.” Vanya sat still for a long time. The candle beside her flickered. Her chest ached with something she couldn’t name — grief, maybe, or inherited sorrow. She knew what she had to do now. Reya hadn’t vanished — she’d been erased. By fear, by silence, by people who couldn’t carry her story. But Vanya could. And she would start by doing what no one else dared to: speak her name aloud.
Chapter 5: The Last Letter
The monsoon thickened around Dapoli like a story refusing to end, each day bringing heavier rains, darker skies, and a deeper sense of urgency within Vanya. The sealed letter from Reya had shattered something quiet inside her—no longer was she just a visitor peeling back old wallpaper. She was now a keeper of a truth too long hidden, and the weight of it pressed on her more than the grey skies. She began reading the letters aloud each morning at breakfast, ignoring the silence that followed. Her grandfather never commented, never stopped her either. But his hands trembled a little more with each passing day, and once, she noticed him mouthing a line before she read it, as if the words had once belonged to his tongue and had only now returned. On the tenth morning, she brought out the last of the letters from the rusted box. This one was thinner, its paper delicate, water-stained at the corners. The ink bled in places, but the handwriting remained determined. Vanya took a breath and read: “If this is the last thing I ever say, let it not be I love you, but I waited. I waited until the sirens. I waited even as the tide rose.”
The air inside the dining room went still. Her grandfather dropped his spoon. The sound echoed like a door slamming. Then, slowly, without lifting his eyes, he spoke. “She waited. And I didn’t go.” It was the most complete sentence he’d spoken in years. Vanya sat frozen. He continued, voice trembling but steady: “The night we were to meet… there were rumors. Her father had found out. I got scared. Cowardice is a long shadow, child. I thought I’d go the next morning. I thought she’d understand. But by morning, she was gone.” The last word fell heavy between them. “Gone where?” Vanya whispered. He shook his head. “Some say her family sent her away. Some say she left on her own. Some… believed worse. I never found out. And I never told anyone. Because silence was easier than shame.” He looked at her then, truly looked, as if seeing her not just as a granddaughter but as a witness. “But you… you’ve done what I could not. You listened.”
Later that afternoon, while the rain lightened into a mist, Vanya climbed the attic once more. She held the letters in her lap and stared out the small window at the sea far beyond the hills. She thought of Reya, barefoot on the cliff. Of Arvind, young and afraid. Of the love that was never allowed to speak. That evening, her grandfather brought out an old cassette player and placed a tape into it without a word. The crackling audio that followed was unmistakably Reya’s voice — soft, melodic, reciting a poem. A poem she had written for Arvind. Vanya closed her eyes as the words filled the room like waves. Reya had not vanished. She had been waiting — not just on that cliff, but in every unread letter, every silenced memory. And now, at last, her voice had returned.
Chapter 6: Reya’s House
The discovery of the cassette tape changed everything. Reya’s voice — grainy, gentle, and impossibly alive — echoed in Vanya’s ears long after the tape stopped spinning. It had the strange effect of collapsing time, as if Reya was no longer a faded name from old letters but a real woman sitting across from her, still waiting to be found. Vanya couldn’t rest anymore. The story was incomplete. One night, while flipping through her notes and sketches with Ishaan at their usual spot beneath the banyan tree, she said it aloud: “We need to find her house.” Ishaan didn’t question her — he simply nodded. Over the next few days, they dug through library archives, whispered questions to tailors and barbers who had seen too many monsoons, and scoured old municipal records in a damp office with leaking ceilings. Finally, an address surfaced: Reya Deshpande, registered in 1995, House No. 38, Lotus Lane. A narrow street that barely existed now, overtaken by weeds and silence.
They went the next morning, under skies that threatened rain but held back just enough for them to reach the house. It was locked, abandoned, the paint peeling like old bark. Vanya climbed the rusted gate with a determination that surprised even her. Inside, the house smelled of disuse and forgotten summers. Dust lay thick on every surface, but there were traces — a broken frame still holding a faded photo, the corner of a harmonium peeking from under a cloth, a child’s drawing on the wall. In the bedroom, the walls were bare except for a mirror, its silvering cracked like a spiderweb. It was Ishaan who found the hollow panel behind the cupboard. Inside, wrapped in silk that had once been red, were Reya’s journals — five of them, bound in twine, each one labeled by month and year. Vanya’s hands trembled as she opened the first one: June 1995. And there it was — Reya’s story, in her own voice, raw and real.
Reya had written about Arvind, about their meetings by the cliff, the poems he whispered, the mangoes they stole, and the fear that always hovered like a third presence. Her father, a powerful man obsessed with reputation, had grown suspicious. The night of their planned elopement, she had dressed in blue — the saree from the photograph. She had left the house and made it as far as the temple before being dragged back. “They locked me in the store room for two days,” she wrote. “No food, no light. My mother cried but didn’t speak. My father said love was a disease only shame could cure. When they released me, the letters had stopped. And so had I.” The journal ended abruptly. No mention of where she went or what happened after. But there was a note in the final page: If anyone finds this, tell him — I waited too.
Vanya sat cross-legged on the dusty floor, tears tracing clean paths down her cheeks. She read the line again and again, and then, without a word, handed the journal to Ishaan. That evening, they returned to Arvind. Vanya placed the journal on the table. Her grandfather stared at it for a long time before opening it with shaking hands. And as he read, a silence heavier than grief settled around him — the silence of finally knowing, of finally being known. No longer buried in regret, no longer the villain in his own memory. Reya had waited. And now, her words had come home.
Chapter 7: Letters to the Rain
The days that followed felt like an unraveling — not of something breaking, but of something long-tangled finally coming free. Vanya watched her grandfather change in small but unmistakable ways. He moved slower, but his eyes no longer seemed lost behind misted windows. He began pulling out old notebooks from shelves, touching their pages as if greeting forgotten friends. One morning, she found him on the veranda with a pen in hand, not shaking, not hesitating. He was writing. Poetry. Real, aching, alive. When she quietly slid one of Reya’s journals beside his cup of tea, he placed his fingers over it and whispered, “I didn’t deserve her words. But she gave them anyway.” That evening, Vanya sat beside him on the floor, handing him one letter at a time from the old rusted box. For each one, he would pause, sometimes smile, sometimes weep, but always read every word aloud. “I buried these,” he said softly, “because I thought silence could protect me. But it only kept me hollow.”
With Ishaan’s help, Vanya began scanning Reya’s letters and journals, preserving them one by one like relics from a hidden temple. They created a folder labeled Rain Letters Archive, and another called Reya’s Voice. Ishaan, ever thoughtful, began sketching accompanying artwork — blue sarees in the wind, sea cliffs at dusk, a banyan tree etched with initials. One afternoon, Vanya sat under that same banyan tree, a fresh notebook in her lap — the one her grandfather had gifted her. On the first page, she wrote: “Dear Reya, I don’t know if I can do your story justice. But I will never let it go quiet again.” Page after page, she poured herself into the task — not rewriting, but reweaving. She added notes, imagined missing pieces, painted the spaces between the lines with the empathy only a girl her age could bring. She wasn’t just preserving Reya’s love story — she was finishing it.
Her grandfather began speaking more often, especially in the evenings when the rain tapped on the windows like an old friend. He told Vanya stories about Reya — how she sang Raag Malhar when it rained, how she hated coriander, how her laugh was shaped like a sudden wind. One night, he shared a poem he’d written just that morning — his first in years. It ended with the lines: “She was a monsoon I feared / but I was only a house with a locked door. / Now the door is open. / And the rain is welcome.” Vanya didn’t speak; she simply placed her hand over his, letting the silence say what it needed to. They had both lost things — him, a love; her, a mother too busy to listen, a city too loud to care — but in that small, moss-covered house in Dapoli, they had found something else: healing, through words left behind.
Together, they began preparing a manuscript — Letters to the Rain, by Reya Deshpande and Arvind Kale, curated by Vanya Kale. Vanya knew it wasn’t just a book. It was a resurrection. A voice once silenced would now sing again, not from the temple cliff or attic journals, but from bookstores and digital pages and hearts of readers far beyond Dapoli. Reya’s name would no longer be a whisper — it would be spoken, remembered, honored. And every monsoon, when the rains returned, Vanya would sit by the window and write her own letters — not to ghosts, but to the living pulse of memory, of love, and of courage passed down like a flame.
Chapter 8: The Monsoon Ends
The monsoon began to recede like a sigh, gently lifting its long curtain of cloud and letting in streaks of soft gold. Dapoli, soaked and softened by weeks of rain, felt reborn — trees looked greener, the earth smelled sweeter, and even the sea, once turbulent, now whispered instead of roared. Vanya sat at the edge of the veranda with her notebook, watching the first clear sunrise in weeks. Ishaan arrived with two copies of the final manuscript printed and bound at the local press. Letters to the Rain — a book stitched together by three lives: Reya, the poet who had vanished into silence; Arvind, the poet who had buried his words; and Vanya, the girl who had found both in time to bring them back. Her name was printed at the bottom, not as an author, but as “The Listener.” It felt right. Some stories didn’t need rewriting. They just needed someone to care enough to listen.
Her grandfather held the manuscript like it was glass — careful, reverent, a little afraid. He didn’t say much, but when he touched the pages, Vanya noticed his eyes glistening again. Not with regret this time, but something gentler. “She waited for me,” he whispered. “And somehow, even after all these years, I was found.” The first copy would be sent to a Mumbai literary archive — Vanya had already spoken to a professor who specialized in lost regional voices. The second copy was left at the foot of the cliffside banyan tree, wrapped in waterproof cloth, placed in a hollow carved between the roots. “In case Reya ever returns,” Vanya said softly, and Ishaan didn’t argue. Some offerings weren’t for the living. They were for the wind.
On her last day in Dapoli, Vanya packed her bag more slowly than she ever had. The rusted letterbox — now cleaned, polished, and repainted — stood beside the garden gate. It no longer held old regrets. It held blank envelopes, fresh paper, a pen. Her grandfather had placed it there himself. “For any stories that lose their way,” he’d said. Before she left, he handed her a new leather-bound journal. The first page had one sentence in his handwriting: Keep listening. The rain always returns. At the bus stop, Ishaan gave her a sketch — Reya, standing on the cliff, her blue saree flying, looking forward this time instead of back. They didn’t hug. They didn’t need to. Their story would stretch beyond Dapoli, beyond letters and silence.
As the bus pulled away, Vanya opened her notebook and began to write. Not about Reya. Not about Arvind. But about herself — a girl who had come to a quiet town carrying nothing but boredom, and left with a story that had waited decades to be heard. The monsoon had ended, yes. But something else had just begun. And in the background, the wind carried three names stitched forever in rain — Reya, Arvind, and Vanya — storytellers all, in their own way.
End
