Payel Sen
The Return to the Hills
The chill in the Darjeeling air always brought back memories for Atanu. As the toy train screeched into Ghum station, the soft drizzle on the windowpane blurred the world outside. He was forty-two now, with streaks of grey in his once-black hair and lines around his eyes that time had carved silently. A literature professor from Kolkata, he had returned to Darjeeling after two decades for a seminar. But deep inside, he knew it wasn’t just the seminar that drew him here. It was a name he hadn’t spoken aloud in years.
Maya.
He walked slowly along Mall Road in the early evening mist, his leather-bound notebook in hand, coat collar turned up. Tea stalls glowed softly in the fog, children laughed in the distance, and couples strolled by. He paused by a bench outside Glenary’s, the same one where he and Maya had once shared quiet afternoons in college—long before life divided their paths.
She was joy in a red shawl. He was silence in glasses and books. And yet, somehow, they had made sense. He had loved her. Truly. But he had never told her.
He sat down, letting the cold metal of the bench press against memory. That’s when he saw her.
A flash of a cream-colored shawl, a pair of silver earrings that danced as she turned, and then—her face. A little older, a little more composed, but unmistakably her. Maya.
Time lost its pace. His heart paused.
She was standing near the bookstore across the street, flipping through a travelogue just like she used to—biting her lower lip while reading.
He stood, heart pounding like it hadn’t in years.
“Maya,” he called, barely more than a whisper.
She turned, slowly. Her eyes widened.
“Atanu?” she said, her voice soft with disbelief.
He nodded.
A long pause.
Then she smiled.
Tea for Two
Maya walked across Mall Road as if the years between them had folded in an instant. The mist danced around her like it used to all those years ago. Her hair, still long and slightly curled at the ends, carried hints of grey now, but her walk was steady—graceful.
Atanu stood frozen for a heartbeat too long before remembering to breathe. He stepped forward, just as she stopped in front of him. They stood close, unsure of the etiquette for old emotions.
“I can’t believe it’s really you,” Maya said, eyes scanning his face, as if trying to recognize the boy hidden beneath the man.
He smiled faintly. “It’s been… twenty years.”
“Twenty-one,” she corrected softly, then chuckled. “But who’s counting?”
That laugh—he had missed it. A small, melodic thing that used to fill library corridors and quiet cafes.
“Are you free now?” he asked, hopeful but cautious. “For some tea?”
She hesitated, just a fraction of a second. “Yes. I was going to Glenary’s anyway.”
They walked in silence, not awkward, but thoughtful. The town had changed—new signs, fewer trees—but the café looked exactly the same. Warm yellow lights, wooden chairs, and that glass counter still filled with pastries they could never afford as students.
They chose a corner table. Atanu ordered his usual—black Darjeeling, no sugar. Maya raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Some things don’t change, I see.”
He looked at her. “Do you still take lemon tea with too much sugar?”
She laughed. “Guilty.”
When the waiter left, the silence returned—but it wasn’t empty. It was filled with unsaid things.
“How have you been, Maya?” he asked gently.
“I’ve been… living,” she replied, stirring her tea. “I teach history now. In Siliguri. My son just turned eighteen.”
Atanu nodded, absorbing it quietly. “I never married.”
Her eyes met his. “Why not?”
He shrugged. “No one felt… right.”
She looked down at her cup. “Life doesn’t always wait for us to figure it out, does it?”
“No,” he said. “But sometimes, it circles back.”
They sipped their tea. Outside, the mist curled against the windows, and the world softened into a blur. Inside, two people who once loved and lost in silence sat together again—older, wiser, but not quite strangers.
Maya leaned back. “So, what brings you back to Darjeeling?”
Atanu smiled. “A seminar, technically. But also… a bench. A memory. A name I still remember when it rains.”
Maya’s hand paused on her cup. Her voice was quiet. “I thought of you too. More times than I care to admit.”
They sat there as the hours dimmed and the café lights warmed, as if time was finally offering them a second chance.
Rain Between Us
They stepped out of Glenary’s just as the sky released a steady curtain of rain. Not the kind that sends people running, but the gentle sort that made the hills shimmer and the streets glow golden under the lamplight. Maya pulled her shawl tighter. Atanu held his umbrella out, tilting it to cover her more than himself.
She noticed and said, “Still the gentleman.”
He smiled without a word.
They walked without destination, the kind of walk they hadn’t taken in decades. The kind that didn’t need purpose. Mall Road was quieter now, tourists huddled under shop awnings, some laughing, some annoyed. But in their shared silence, everything around them faded.
“Do you remember the rain that day before our final exams?” Maya asked.
Atanu chuckled. “You were furious that your notes got wet. You blamed me.”
“You didn’t bring an umbrella then either.”
He looked at her sideways. “Some habits stick. Though this time, I came prepared.”
She smiled, then went quiet. “I used to think of that moment often. Standing under the eaves of the college library, water dripping down my back, and you trying to protect my books instead of me.”
“Books don’t break,” he said softly. “Hearts do.”
That line hung between them, heavier than the rain.
Maya stopped walking. They were at the viewpoint now, the one that looked out onto layers of hills, soaked in mist. The valley below looked infinite, like a dream still unfolding.
“I used to wonder,” she said, her voice more fragile than it had been over tea, “what might’ve happened if you had said something. Back then.”
Atanu’s jaw tightened slightly. “I wanted to. Every day. But we were… young. And then you got engaged. It all moved so fast.”
“It did,” she whispered. “Too fast.”
A rickshaw trundled by, its driver humming a song from a forgotten decade. Atanu and Maya leaned against the railing. The umbrella now rested between them on the ground, forgotten.
“I thought of writing to you once,” she said. “After the wedding.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t brave enough.”
Atanu nodded slowly. “I think… I spent years pretending I didn’t miss you. But every time it rained in Kolkata, it brought you back.”
She looked up at him. “And now?”
He met her gaze. “Now I’m standing next to you. Still unsure what to say.”
The rain slowed, drizzling like a memory letting go. The silence between them felt different now—not like absence, but like a beginning.
Maya said quietly, “I’m glad you came.”
He replied, “I’m glad you remembered.”
And then, without planning it, without meaning to cross a line, Atanu reached out—not for her hand, but for the moment. Maya didn’t pull away.
There was no confession, no dramatic gesture. Just two hands brushing lightly against each other on a rain-slick railing, beneath a grey Darjeeling sky that had waited just as long as they had.
The Letter Never Sent
Later that evening, Atanu sat by the window of his hotel room, the one overlooking the mist-laden slope behind Observatory Hill. The rain had stopped, but drops still clung to the glass like fragile memories unwilling to let go. He had opened his notebook again, not for work, but for something older, deeper.
In the pages between his lecture notes and scribbled quotes, there was an envelope. Yellowed at the edges. Sealed, but never posted.
He had written it twenty years ago.
A letter to Maya.
He held it in his hands for a long moment. It felt heavier than paper had any right to be.
Dear Maya,
I don’t know how to say this to your face, so I’m writing it down. Maybe I’ll hand it to you someday. Or maybe I’ll just keep it hidden forever. But I need to tell you.
I love you.
Not with fire or fury, but with something quiet and constant. Like how the sun rises without asking for attention. Like how rain remembers the hills even in summer.
I’ve loved you from the day we sat by the old pine tree outside the library and you recited that line from Neruda.
“If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life.”
That was the moment. You didn’t know, but I did.
I know you’re leaving soon. I heard from friends. And I won’t stop you. Life has its way of pulling people apart. But if you ever wonder—if you ever need to know—you were loved. Deeply. Fully. Silently.
—Atanu
He stared at the signature. The words were still true. But the weight of them felt different now. Older. Softer. Wiser.
The next morning, over breakfast at Keventer’s, he handed Maya the envelope.
“What’s this?” she asked, surprised.
“Something I should’ve given you twenty years ago.”
She looked at him, then carefully opened the flap. Her fingers trembled slightly as she unfolded the letter. Atanu watched her eyes move across the lines, the way they had once moved across textbooks and poems.
When she reached the end, she didn’t speak immediately.
Then she said, very quietly, “I wrote one too.”
Atanu’s eyebrows lifted. “You did?”
She nodded. “I burned it.”
He half-laughed, half-sighed. “We were fools, weren’t we?”
“Hopeless ones.”
A moment passed before Maya looked up again. “Thank you for not throwing this away. For carrying it.”
“I didn’t carry it,” Atanu said. “It carried me.”
And suddenly, they both laughed—not the nervous laughter of two old acquaintances, but the deep, unfiltered laughter of something rediscovered.
Shadows and Sunlight
The sun came out that afternoon, the kind of golden light that spilled like honey over Darjeeling’s rooftops. The clouds had retreated behind the hills, and the air had that crisp, almost magical stillness that made every sound—children’s laughter, bicycle bells, prayer flags fluttering—feel like part of a forgotten lullaby.
Atanu and Maya found themselves wandering through Bhutia Busty, away from the usual crowd. She wanted to visit the old monastery. He followed, not because he believed in anything sacred, but because she was going.
“I used to come here when I felt lost,” she said as they walked the winding path lined with moss-covered walls.
He glanced at her. “And now?”
“I still feel lost sometimes,” she said, smiling faintly. “But differently.”
Inside, the air was cool and heavy with the scent of incense. A young monk nodded politely and went about his work. They sat on the low wooden benches, side by side, beneath the quiet gaze of the Buddha.
“This place… it listens,” Maya whispered.
Atanu looked at her sideways. “Do you have regrets, Maya?”
She didn’t answer right away. Then she said, “Not about loving you. Only about not saying it out loud.”
He nodded. “Me too.”
Outside, sunlight streamed through cracks in the monastery window, dust motes floating like tiny secrets in the air.
She turned to him. “Do you think it’s too late?”
Atanu smiled, his voice steady. “I don’t believe in ‘too late.’ Only in what we choose to begin now.”
For a long moment, nothing was said. And then Maya reached into her bag and pulled out an old photograph—faded, corners curled. The two of them at college. She was laughing, hair flying in the wind, and Atanu stood next to her, awkwardly holding a book like a shield.
“I kept this,” she said. “Even when I wasn’t supposed to.”
He stared at it, his throat tight. “We were young.”
“And in love,” she said simply.
They sat there as the light moved slowly over them, not as strangers meeting again, but as the same two people—just in different bodies, different years.
Outside, prayer flags fluttered like whispers in the wind. Shadows passed over the stones, and sunlight followed.
What We Never Said
They walked back slowly from the monastery, the town below glowing in the late afternoon light. The narrow paths between homes were familiar, yet every turn felt like they were discovering something new together. Maya paused often—to watch a girl chasing a paper kite, to smell roses blooming outside an old wooden gate, to look up at prayer wheels turning in the breeze.
Atanu noticed these pauses. And for the first time in years, he didn’t feel like rushing anywhere.
“Do you remember that poem I wrote and never shared?” Maya asked suddenly.
He looked at her, surprised. “You wrote poems?”
“I did. Mostly bad ones,” she smiled, “but there was one I wrote for you. The day you brought me tea when I had a fever and said nothing but just sat there reading Tagore.”
Atanu laughed softly. “That sounds like me.”
“I was waiting,” she said, stopping to lean against the railing overlooking the town. “For you to say something. Anything. But you were always quiet when it mattered most.”
“I was afraid of losing you if I said it.”
“And I lost you anyway,” she said, gently.
He looked at her then—really looked. There were faint lines under her eyes, a deeper calm in her voice, but the spark was still there. The same spark that had drawn him in twenty-one years ago in the college library when she had recited poetry to him instead of answering his questions about class notes.
“What did the poem say?” he asked.
She hesitated. “I don’t remember it all. But the last lines were something like…”
She paused, her voice suddenly quiet.
“You were the sentence I left unfinished,
The silence I wore like a second skin.”
Atanu didn’t speak. He couldn’t.
Maya turned toward him, uncertain. “Too dramatic?”
“No,” he whispered. “It’s… exactly what I felt.”
They stood side by side as the light dimmed into a blue hush. The town below began to light up—tiny homes like distant stars in a twilight sky.
“Can I say it now?” Atanu asked.
Maya raised an eyebrow. “Say what?”
He took a breath. “That I loved you then. That I never stopped.”
She looked at him, unreadable for a moment.
“I know,” she said softly. “I’ve always known.”
And there it was—not a confession, not a revelation, but a release.
They didn’t hold hands. They didn’t kiss. They simply stood there, letting the weight of all they never said slowly lift into the evening air.
The Room with the Yellow Light
That night, Atanu couldn’t sleep.
Darjeeling had quieted. The streets were empty, the wind soft against his window. From his bed, he could see the faint outline of the hills in the dark, sleeping giants under starlight.
His thoughts kept circling back to Maya. To her poem. To the photograph she’d kept. To the way she had looked at him when he finally said the words neither of them had dared to speak in college.
He didn’t know where this was going. And for the first time in his cautious life, he wasn’t trying to name it. He just wanted more of it.
The next morning, she knocked on his hotel door.
She was wearing a light blue shawl, and her eyes held that unreadable calm that only Maya carried.
“Come,” she said, holding up a thermos. “I found a place that still makes lemon tea the old way.”
He followed her through the waking town, past closed shops, barking dogs, and the golden light creeping in between the leaves.
She led him to a small homestay at the edge of the hills. A two-story house with green windows and bougainvillea spilling over the railing. They climbed up to the balcony where a table and two chairs waited, surrounded by potted marigolds and the smell of freshly baked bread.
“It’s my friend’s place,” she said. “I come here sometimes when I need to think.”
He sat down beside her. She poured the tea. The steam curled like quiet music between them.
“I used to imagine this,” she said after a while.
“What?”
“Sitting with you. Just… this. No noise, no ‘what ifs,’ no timelines. Just tea and a morning that didn’t belong to anyone else.”
He looked at her face—so close, so open—and for a moment, he saw it all: the college Maya, the newly married Maya, the mother, the woman she had become. All at once.
“Maya,” he said gently, “I don’t want to rewrite the past.”
She smiled. “Neither do I.”
“I just want to be here. Now. With you.”
She didn’t reply, but she didn’t have to. Her fingers brushed his across the table, warm and deliberate. A quiet yes.
Later, they sat in the room just behind the balcony—painted a soft yellow, with lace curtains and the smell of old books. The light slanted across her face as she leaned against the window.
“What is this room?” he asked.
She smiled. “It’s where I read. Write sometimes. It’s mine.”
He walked over to her, close enough to see the tiny silver threads in her hair.
“It feels like the kind of room where stories begin.”
She looked up at him. “Then maybe ours starts here.”
And in that room with the yellow light, two people who had waited too long finally stepped into the present.
Not trying to recapture youth.Just choosing love—quiet, late, and real.
The Phone That Rang Too Late
The days in Darjeeling slipped by like pages in a novel they didn’t want to end. Mornings were for long walks, mist curling around their steps like shared secrets. Afternoons for quiet cafés, dog-eared books, and comfortable silences. Evenings brought golden light, cardamom tea, and the occasional shared memory that made them laugh a little too loudly.
But then came the phone call.
It was a Thursday. Late afternoon. The clouds had begun to gather over the hills, the sky bruised and slow. They were in Maya’s favorite spot near the Mahakal Mandir, watching prayer flags dance in the wind. Atanu’s phone buzzed once, then again. He checked the screen.
Rohini (Sister)
He hesitated.
Maya noticed. “Everything okay?”
“Probably,” he replied, though his brow had already furrowed.
He answered.
“Dada,” Rohini’s voice came, a little breathless, “Ma slipped in the bathroom. Nothing too serious, but she’s bruised and shaken. She’s asking for you. Repeatedly.”
Atanu closed his eyes.
“How bad is it?”
“She’s stable now. But… she’s been more forgetful lately. The doctor thinks it might be early dementia. Come home soon.”
“I will,” he said, quietly.
When he hung up, Maya didn’t ask anything. She simply looked at him and waited.
“I need to go back,” he said. “Tonight, if I can.”
She nodded. “Of course. Family comes first.”
He wanted to say more, but the words stayed trapped behind the storm in his chest. There was something heartbreaking about the moment—not because they were being torn apart, but because neither of them panicked. There was no drama, no begging. Just understanding.
“Will you come back?” she asked gently.
He looked at her. “Would you want me to?”
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Only if it’s your choice.”
That evening, they stood on the same bench outside Glenary’s, where it had all begun. The same fog, the same light drizzle.
“I’m not good at promises,” he said.
“I’m not asking for any,” she replied.
He leaned in, his forehead gently touching hers. “But I want to return.”
“I know,” she whispered. “And I’ll wait. Quietly. Like before. But without hope this time—only choice.”
The rain began to fall in earnest as he stepped into the taxi. Maya watched as it disappeared down the winding road, headlights blinking once through the mist before vanishing completely.
The silence that followed wasn’t cruel.
It was simply waiting.
The Visit
Three weeks passed.
Darjeeling moved on—as all hill towns do—quietly, beautifully, indifferently. The rain returned in spells, the prayer flags faded a little more, and the wooden table on the balcony where Maya once poured lemon tea remained empty, except for the marigold petals the wind brought in from the garden.
Maya didn’t call Atanu. She didn’t message. She didn’t want to disturb whatever life had drawn him away so suddenly. Some loves weren’t meant to be chased—they were meant to return if they were meant to stay.
She walked every morning past the bench at Glenary’s, not expecting anything. Sometimes she sat alone with her tea. Sometimes she brought her notebook and scribbled half-poems she never finished.
And then one late afternoon, as the sky dimmed and the breeze smelled like cardamom and mist, she looked up and saw him.
Standing exactly where she’d last seen him.
Atanu.
He wasn’t wearing his usual coat. He looked tired. But when he smiled, it undid something in her chest.
“I was afraid,” he said as he walked closer.
“Of what?”
“That you wouldn’t be here.”
She blinked, then whispered, “And yet you came.”
They stood in silence again, but this time it was different—no weight, no hesitation. Just the simple presence of two people who had finally crossed every ‘almost.’
“How’s your mother?” Maya asked softly.
“She’s adjusting. Some days are better than others,” Atanu said. “But she remembered something last night. A song she used to sing when I was a boy. She hummed it for me.”
“That’s a gift,” Maya said. “Memories returning.”
He looked at her deeply. “Yes. And that’s why I came back. I didn’t want to forget what we started. Or lose it to time. Not again.”
She smiled, but it wavered. “I wasn’t sure if you would.”
“I promised nothing,” he said, stepping closer. “But I made a choice.”
“And what’s that?”
“That this—us—deserves a today. Even if we wasted yesterday. Even if tomorrow is uncertain.”
She didn’t move. But she didn’t need to. He reached for her hand.
No grand speech. No kiss. Just fingers lacing through fingers, gently, as if teaching each other trust again.
“You know,” Maya said, voice soft with emotion, “this is the first time you’ve held my hand in public.”
“Twenty-one years late,” Atanu replied. “But not too late.”
She laughed through her tears. “Not too late.”
The hills watched quietly, wrapped in cloud. The past stood behind them, forgiving. And the future? It waited patiently at the edge of the next page.
When We Begin Again
They didn’t move in together. There were no sweeping declarations, no frenzied embraces on a platform as a train pulled away. That wasn’t their story.
Instead, Atanu stayed in Darjeeling for another week. He rented a small room above a bakery that smelled like cinnamon and old laughter. Maya visited every afternoon after her classes were done. They shared tea, books, and silences that no longer hurt.
One evening, he brought her a gift—not flowers, not jewelry, but a stack of old letters. Ones he had written to her over the years, never sent, never shown. Words he had carried like sacred weight.
She read them slowly. Some made her laugh. Some made her cry. All made her feel seen in ways she hadn’t felt in years.
When she finished, she said nothing. Instead, she placed her hand over his and held it there for a long time.
On their last evening before he left again—this time to sort out things back home, to plan properly, not to run—they stood at the edge of the hilltop behind the monastery.
The sky was full of stars. Real stars. The kind that cities forget.
“I think,” Maya said, resting her head on his shoulder, “we were always meant to pause in each other’s story.”
Atanu smiled. “And maybe we’re meant to write the second half together.”
She turned to him. “There’s no rush, you know. We’re not young anymore.”
“No,” he said. “But I don’t want to be young with you. I want to be real.”
He returned to Kolkata the next morning—but this time, with her number saved in his phone, her voice in his inbox, and her promise in his heart.
They called every night. Sometimes they said a lot. Sometimes just sat quietly, listening to the rain at each other’s ends of the world.
Months later, he moved to Siliguri.
He never asked her to start over.
Instead, they began again—mid-chapter, older, braver, with all the scars they had earned. No fairy tale. Just something deeper.
Not a second chance.
A real one.
The End
