Rhea Kapoor
Part 1 – The Meeting
The rain had been falling since dawn, a steady curtain that blurred the tram lines and softened the edges of College Street’s crowded bookstalls. Water pooled in the cracks of the old pavements, making each step a careful negotiation between slipperiness and stubborn mud. Ayaan tightened the strap of his worn leather satchel and ducked under a bamboo-and-plastic canopy where secondhand books leaned against one another like old companions. His hair, damp and curling from the downpour, clung to his forehead, but his eyes held that restless brightness of someone always in search of something that might save him from himself. He claimed it was always about books, about discovering a voice forgotten or a page misplaced, but it was also about escape, about the possibility that among the yellowing pages he might find a reflection less disappointing than the one in his mirror.
A stall owner, smoking a bidi with the resignation of a man who had seen too many monsoons, grunted at him as he picked up a copy of Eliot’s Four Quartets. The paper was soft, almost pulpy, and Ayaan traced the underlined sentences left by another hand long ago. Outside the canopy the city roared—hawkers shouting the price of umbrellas, cycle bells, the hiss of buses stopping too suddenly—but beneath it there was a pocket of muffled quiet where he could pretend words still mattered. He turned a page, and that was when she collided into him.
It was not dramatic the way films liked to show collisions, not a slow-motion spectacle of flying books and locked eyes. It was clumsy, her umbrella turning inside out at the exact moment she stumbled, her shoulder pressing against his arm as a gush of rainwater slipped from the canopy seam onto both of them. He let out a startled laugh, and she swore under her breath—softly, musically, in Bengali—before apologizing. She straightened, brushing her wet dupatta away from her face, and for the first time he saw her eyes: quick, alive, with that particular sheen of someone who noticed everything but rarely allowed herself to be noticed.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice low, trying not to disturb the quiet rhythm of the stall.
“It’s fine,” Ayaan replied, though his fingers still rested on the book he had almost dropped. “Rain has its own plans.”
She smiled briefly, distracted, shaking water from her hands. Her eyes drifted to the book in his hand. “T. S. Eliot?”
He lifted it slightly, embarrassed. “Secondhand wisdom. I collect it whenever I can afford to.”
That made her laugh, not loudly, but enough to warm the damp space around them. “Better than buying umbrellas that break in ten minutes,” she said, holding up the mangled skeleton of hers.
Ayaan hesitated, then closed the book and handed it back to the stall owner, who looked vaguely disappointed at losing a sale. “Here,” he said, slipping his satchel across his shoulder again. “Let me walk you to wherever you’re going. My umbrella is still alive.”
She studied him for a moment, as if weighing whether he was the sort of man who made such offers casually or whether the rain itself had made him bolder. But the rain was merciless, and she accepted. They stepped back onto the flooded street, sharing the small black umbrella he had inherited from his father years ago, the handle smooth with use.
The walk was awkward, shoulders brushing, neither knowing where to place their free hand. The city was thick with the smell of wet paper, frying samosas, and the sharp tang of diesel. She walked quickly, unafraid of puddles, her sandals splashing without hesitation, and he noticed the careful way she held her bag close to her body. She seemed both weary and vibrant, as if life had already demanded too much from her and yet she refused to give in.
“So,” he said after a silence that felt heavier than the rain, “do you always rescue poets from drowning in their own thoughts?”
She tilted her head, amused. “You didn’t look like you needed rescuing. More like you were hiding.”
He flushed, not expecting her accuracy. “And you? Were you hiding too?”
Her smile faltered. For a second she seemed far away, eyes focused on the blurred tram wires overhead. Then she shook her head, almost to herself. “No. I was just late. Always late.”
He wanted to ask late for what, but the way she said it made him stop. Instead, he asked her name.
“Meera,” she said simply, watching the street vendors pull tarpaulin tighter against the storm.
“Ayaan,” he replied, shifting the umbrella so it covered her more than him. She noticed, but said nothing.
By the time they reached the junction where she said she could walk the rest alone, the rain had softened to a drizzle, though the sky still threatened. She thanked him politely, her tone formal, as if she wanted to erase the intimacy of walking close under one umbrella.
Before he could think of something clever, she reached into her bag, pulled out a small notepad, and scribbled something. Tearing the page, she handed it to him. The ink had smudged slightly, but her handwriting was quick and certain.
“You collect words,” she said. “Here’s one.”
And then she was gone, her dupatta trailing damp in the air, vanishing into the thick crowd of College Street. Ayaan stood still, rain dripping from his hair into his eyes, staring at the page in his hand. It held nothing but an address.
Not a phone number. Not a name. Just an address.
As he tucked the paper into his satchel, he realized the city had shifted around him. Something had been set in motion, something that felt larger than both the rain and the books.
For the first time in a long while, he smiled as if words really did matter.
Part 2 – Ink & Rain
The scrap of paper burned in Ayaan’s pocket as if it carried its own weather, a storm folded into the shape of an address. For two days he didn’t go, convincing himself it was foolish to follow a stranger’s invitation, that she had probably given it out of politeness, a way to end an accidental intimacy without refusing outright. But the words “you collect words, here’s one” echoed in his mind like a refrain he couldn’t dismiss. He told himself it was curiosity, not longing, that pulled him finally one late afternoon to the narrow lane behind the university where the address led.
The house was not remarkable—paint peeling in long strips, iron gate rusted, bougainvillea clinging stubbornly to the wall. He hesitated, listening to the drone of ceiling fans from inside, the smell of turmeric and fried onions drifting from a nearby kitchen. When he rang the bell, it was not Meera who answered but an elderly woman with sharp eyes and silver hair pulled into a bun. She looked at him the way gatekeepers in stories looked at travelers—measuring, doubtful.
“I—Meera gave me this address,” he stammered, holding out the slip like proof of innocence.
The woman nodded as if she had expected him all along, then stepped aside without a word. The corridor smelled of old wood and varnish. In the back room, sunlight fell across canvases stacked against the wall, brushes resting in cloudy jars of water. Meera was there, bent over a half-restored painting, her dupatta thrown carelessly across a chair. She looked up, and for a moment he thought she might pretend not to know him. But then her expression softened.
“You came,” she said, as if this was both surprising and inevitable.
He nodded, suddenly awkward. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“You’re not interrupting.” She gestured to a chair near her. “I was just finishing work.”
The painting was a nineteenth-century portrait of a woman with downcast eyes, her sari patterned with delicate vines that Meera was painstakingly bringing back to life with careful strokes. He admired the patience it must take, the devotion to something already half-lost.
“You restore paintings?” he asked, more to fill the silence than anything.
“I try,” she said, wiping her hands with a rag. “Sometimes it feels like speaking with ghosts. They tell you where they hurt, where the years have cracked them open.”
There was something in her voice that made him think she wasn’t only talking about the painting. He wanted to ask more, but instead he reached for the notebook always tucked in his satchel. He pulled a page free, his pen moving before he even considered what to write. A few lines, clumsy but honest:
Rain writes in the margins of the city,
letters smudged before they’re read.
Maybe that is why we keep searching—
to find the words that refuse to vanish.
He slid the page toward her across the table. She read it, silent for a long time, then folded it neatly as if it were something fragile. From a drawer she pulled her own slip of paper, covered in her quick, certain handwriting. She handed it to him.
“If you want to continue,” she said softly, “we’ll do it this way.”
It was a letter, written in ink already blotted in places where the rain had touched it. She must have been carrying it that day on College Street.
That evening, under the shelter of a tea shop awning, Ayaan read her words:
Ayaan—
I don’t know why I am writing to a stranger whose name I only just learned. Maybe because strangers don’t expect us to be perfect, and so we tell them things we can’t tell anyone else. I spend my days repairing colors time has stolen. Sometimes I wonder if anyone could do the same for people. Maybe you, who hides in books, know what I mean. Write if you want. Don’t if you don’t. The rain will carry it either way.
—Meera
He folded the letter, his chest tight with something unnamed. He thought of all the ways people spoke now—quick texts, emojis, fragmented voice notes—and how fleeting they all felt. But a letter, written in ink that could smudge, that could survive or vanish depending on chance, felt like the truest gamble of all.
That night he wrote back on thick paper, his handwriting uneven but determined. He told her about the way he haunted secondhand stalls not because he needed books but because he needed to see what others had underlined, what fragments had mattered to them. He confessed that sometimes he felt like a ghost himself, living in borrowed words. He did not sign it with just his name but with a line: A stranger who hopes not to stay one.
The next morning he slipped it into her gate, heart racing.
Thus began the rhythm: paper exchanged by hand or left in gates, words carried across streets and storms. They wrote about everything—childhood games, favorite lines of poetry, the smell of petrichor on tram tracks, the loneliness of crowded rooms. Their letters were not love letters yet, but something more dangerous: the slow discovery of another’s silences.
And as July thickened with relentless rain, both of them knew this was no longer coincidence. It was a beginning.
Part 3 – Whispers on Paper
The rhythm of their letters soon became its own season, existing parallel to the monsoon that still gripped Kolkata. Ayaan found himself timing his walks with the postman’s round, though no envelopes bore stamps. These were hand-delivered by chance or by ritual—slipped under gates, pressed into palms when eyes met briefly at tram stops, tucked between the pages of a borrowed book. Each new page felt less like paper and more like a door opening, and he walked through them greedily, afraid of missing even a fragment of her voice.
Meera wrote quickly, as if words burned to be freed from her. Her letters were alive with small observations: the stubborn stray dog that slept by the museum gates, the way turmeric stained her fingers when she helped her grandmother cook, the sound of a tanpura practice drifting each evening from a neighbor’s balcony. They were not dramatic, not confessions of heartbreak or longing, but the dailiness itself seemed to contain a secret intimacy—she was giving him her world in slices, and he received them hungrily.
He tried to match her with his own offerings, though his words often stumbled, too self-conscious. He wrote of the bookseller who tucked away volumes for him, of the smell of ink on fresh notebooks, of his late nights ghostwriting pieces that would never carry his name. He did not tell her the whole truth of that work, not yet—only hinted at the unease of living behind someone else’s words. Still, she seemed to understand, replying once: Sometimes silence is a ghostwriter too. It writes our lives while we pretend otherwise.
That line stayed with him for days, a whisper folded into his chest.
Their letters grew longer. Sometimes three or four pages, ink bleeding where rain seeped in, margins crowded with drawings of leaves or stars or half-formed mandalas. Ayaan began to keep them in a wooden box under his desk, arranging them in the order they arrived, rereading until the sentences felt memorized. He wondered if she kept his too, or if they were scattered in drawers, forgotten. The thought both terrified and thrilled him.
When they did meet, by accident or design, words seemed harder. Once at Coffee House, he caught sight of her across the crowded hall, sitting with a group of colleagues from the museum. She saw him, her eyes lighting briefly before she schooled her face into neutrality. Later he found a note tucked under his teacup saucer: Too many eyes here. Wait for the rain. He slipped it into his pocket, his heart pounding.
The rain was their accomplice. On stormy evenings she sometimes left a letter in the crook of a tree near the tram depot, and he would find it hours later, paper swollen, words blurred but still legible. Once he arrived too late and found only a sodden scrap of blue ink dissolving into pulp. He kept even that fragment, proof that she had been there, that the rain had conspired only half-successfully to erase her.
It was during one of these exchanges that the tone shifted. He had written, without quite realizing it, a line that carried more weight than intended: I think of you when it rains, as if the city itself whispers your name in every drop. He sealed it before he could reconsider, slid it under her gate at dusk, then spent the night in restless guilt. It was too much, too soon, he thought.
Her reply came two days later, on creamy paper fragrant with sandalwood. The letter was shorter than usual:
Ayaan—
Maybe the city is wiser than both of us.
—Meera
That night he walked the length of College Street under a steady drizzle, her words echoing. Not a declaration, not quite an invitation, but something dangerously close to both. He felt the line between friendship and something else thinning, as fragile and certain as ink that refuses to dry.
Meanwhile, her grandmother, the silver-haired woman at the gate, began to notice the pattern. Once, when Ayaan arrived to deliver a letter, she held him in her sharp gaze and said, “Words can heal, but they can also wound. Be careful what you write, young man.” He nodded, chastened, but later found a folded scrap from Meera hidden inside his letter: Ignore her. She is afraid of rain too.
By August the monsoon was at its peak, and so was their correspondence. Letters became less about the world around them and more about what stirred beneath the surface: fears, half-secrets, dreams whispered only to paper. She admitted she still woke sometimes with the sensation of waiting for someone who never arrived. He admitted he feared he would spend his life writing words that belonged to others. Their letters carried weight, yet they also carried relief—the strange liberation of speaking in ink what lips could not risk.
And always, they ended the same way: without goodbye, only the expectation of another letter.
One night, as thunder rolled across the river, Ayaan held her latest page under his lamp. In it she had drawn a small map of College Street, an X marking the stall where they had first met. Beneath it, in her quick scrawl, she wrote: Sometimes beginnings ask to be remembered. Meet me there, same rain, same hour.
He closed the letter, heart racing, already knowing he would go.
Part 4 – Mumbai Nights
The letter arrived folded with unusual care, the ink pressed deep into the paper as if Ayaan’s pen had carried not just words but hesitation. Meera read it three times, her chest tightening more with each pass. He had been offered work in Mumbai—a chance to ghostwrite full-time for a well-known novelist. It was everything he had quietly dreamed of, a doorway into the literary world, but between the lines she felt what he had not written: that it meant leaving, that the fragile rhythm of their letters might be broken.
She sat by the window of her room, rain sliding down glass in crooked trails, and held the letter to her chest. The city beyond still smelled of damp paper and frying pakoras, but suddenly it seemed lonelier. She wanted to write back immediately, to tell him not to go, but the words refused. Instead she picked up her brush and worked on the cracked sari folds of a portrait she was restoring, each stroke a way of steadying herself. Yet all the while her mind whispered: Mumbai. Distance. Silence.
When Ayaan left, it was with a suitcase borrowed from his cousin and a heart heavy with contradiction. The train station was a storm of umbrellas and impatient voices, and as he climbed aboard, he imagined her somewhere in the crowd. But she wasn’t there. He carried only her last letter, folded in his pocket, where she had written: Cities change us. Just promise you will keep writing, and I will too.
Mumbai overwhelmed him. The buildings rose higher, the streets pulsed faster, and every night the sound of trains echoed like a restless heartbeat. His job was demanding—pages of dialogue, outlines of plots, rewriting paragraphs until they sounded like the famous author’s voice instead of his own. There was a strange pride in being trusted, but also a hollowness he hadn’t expected. To spend your days crafting stories that belonged to someone else was like wearing a mask so often you began to forget your own face.
But at night, in the cramped rented room where a fan spun shadows across peeling paint, he opened Meera’s letters. They were his anchor. She described the museum’s quiet rooms, the way sunlight touched old canvases, the smell of rain-soaked bougainvillea at her gate. She teased him about Mumbai’s chaos—Do you carry earplugs with you on the local trains? Or have you learned to read people’s lives from their faces the way you read secondhand books? Each sentence reminded him of what he was afraid of losing.
He wrote back faithfully, telling her about the sea that roared endlessly beyond Marine Drive, about the yellow-black taxis that swarmed like bees, about how the nights smelled of salt and diesel. But beneath all that he confessed a loneliness: The words I write here are never mine. Only the ones I send you feel alive.
One evening, while walking back from the publishing office, he ducked into a small postbox corner shop to send her another letter. The clerk, a boy barely out of school, asked, “So many letters these days, dada. Who writes like this anymore?” Ayaan smiled but didn’t answer. He wanted to say: those who believe ink can carry what mouths cannot.
Meera, for her part, kept her promise. Her grandmother disapproved, muttering about a girl writing endlessly to a man who was not family, not fiancé, but Meera ignored it. Every letter she wrote was less about updates and more about presence—an insistence that distance could be bridged by paper. Still, in her quiet moments, doubts gnawed at her. What if he grew accustomed to Mumbai’s speed, its lights, its temptations? What if her letters began to feel provincial, heavy with the slower rhythms of Kolkata?
Yet she continued. She wrote about her childhood garden, about a forgotten dream of learning to play the sitar, about the way she sometimes pressed his letters to her face just to smell the faint trace of ink and city air. Each confession was careful but true, and she hoped it was enough.
Months passed. Their letters thickened into bundles. But cracks had begun to show. Sometimes his replies were delayed by weeks; sometimes she sensed exhaustion in his words. Once he admitted he had thought of giving up writing entirely. She answered fiercely: Don’t you dare. If you stop, the rain will forget our names.
But what she did not tell him—what she could not—was that shadows of her past still haunted her. The fiancé who had left her without explanation, the silence that had carved her trust into caution. She wanted to confess it, but every time she began, her pen faltered. She feared it would change how he saw her: no longer whole, but broken.
Meanwhile, Ayaan carried his own secret. The recognition he longed for as a writer felt further away, swallowed by his employer’s name on every published page. He wanted to tell Meera of his resentment, of the creeping fear that he was losing himself. But shame kept him silent. Their letters were full of honesty, yet these were the truths they both withheld—the truths that would soon press against the fragile paper until it tore.
One night in Mumbai, as monsoon clouds gathered again, he wrote by lamplight: Sometimes I wonder if the rain is kinder in Kolkata. Here it only drowns the streets. There, it gave me you. He sealed the envelope, unaware it would be one of the last letters to reach her before silence crept in.
Back in Kolkata, Meera traced his words with her fingers, smiling through the ache of distance. She thought of the day they had met, the single umbrella, the gift of an address on a rain-soaked scrap of paper. She whispered aloud, as if the rain might carry it across cities: “Don’t stop writing, Ayaan. Don’t stop.”
The rain outside her window answered only with silence.
Part 5 – Unwritten Truths
The silences in their letters began so subtly that at first neither of them noticed. Ayaan skipped over details about his employer, describing only the city’s lights and sea. Meera, in turn, avoided writing about the ache that sometimes seized her chest when she thought of her broken engagement. Instead, she filled pages with careful stories—the stray cat that slept in her grandmother’s courtyard, the way College Street smelled after rain, a dream she had of walking into a painting. Ayaan responded with equal poetry, writing of sunsets over the Arabian Sea, the scent of fried vada pav in narrow lanes, the cries of train vendors at midnight. On the surface their exchange was alive, rich, unbroken. But beneath the ink, unspoken truths pressed against the paper, restless and waiting.
One evening in Mumbai, after a long day of typing another man’s thoughts into neat paragraphs, Ayaan sat in his rented room staring at a blank page meant for Meera. His hands trembled with a confession he couldn’t frame: that he felt like a ghost haunting his own life, that success felt like betrayal, that every sentence he sent her was both true and incomplete. He began: Meera, there is something I have not told you… But then he stopped. He crumpled the page, opened a fresh one, and wrote instead about the color of the sea at dusk.
In Kolkata, Meera did the same. She had taken out her old diary, one that still held entries from her fiancé—the man who had promised her a life, then vanished with nothing but silence. The memories made her hand shake, but she thought if she wrote them down for Ayaan, perhaps the burden would lessen. She began: Before you, there was someone else. I need to tell you… Yet when she read the words aloud, they sounded like betrayal, like weakness. She tore the page, fed it to the small fire her grandmother used for incense, and started again. Instead she wrote about a child at the museum who asked if paintings ever dreamed when no one looked.
Thus their letters remained lyrical but evasive, circling what mattered most. The unwritten truths grew heavier, like stones carried silently in their pockets.
One night, Meera’s grandmother confronted her. “These letters,” she said, pointing to the bundle tied with ribbon on her desk. “You guard them like treasure. But words can vanish. What if he stops writing? What will you hold then?”
Meera didn’t answer. She only hugged the letters tighter, as if ink could anchor her against all loss.
Meanwhile, in Mumbai, Ayaan attended a book launch where his employer’s new novel was celebrated under chandeliers. The audience clapped, the author smiled, and Ayaan stood at the back of the hall, invisible, his own sentences dressed in another man’s voice. That night he wrote Meera: Do you ever feel you are living someone else’s life? He wanted her to read between the lines, to sense the ache. But her reply came days later, gentle but distant: Sometimes restoration feels that way too. I paint over another hand’s brushstroke, never sure if it is mine or theirs. Perhaps we both are ghosts of other people’s work.
He folded her letter carefully, but instead of relief, he felt the echo of what they weren’t saying.
The turning point came with the letter he never received. Meera had written late into the night, candlelight flickering as the rain lashed the shutters. For once she had allowed herself honesty: she told him about the man who had left her, about the silence that still haunted her dreams. She wrote that meeting Ayaan had felt like stepping out of a storm into shelter, but she feared he would see her as fractured. She signed it with trembling hands: I don’t want to lose you to my past.
The next morning she sealed the letter, slipped it into the post, and waited. Days passed, then weeks. She told herself perhaps Mumbai’s rains had delayed delivery. But no reply came.
What she didn’t know was that the letter had been lost—soaked through in a flood, its words dissolving into blue blurs. Ayaan never saw her confession. From his side, her silence felt deliberate, a withdrawal. His next letter was hesitant, shorter than usual. When no answer came quickly, he wondered if she had grown tired of carrying his shadows.
Thus began the quiet unraveling: her waiting for him to acknowledge her confession, him waiting for her to explain her silence. Neither knew the truth. Neither could step across the gap.
And so the unwritten truths, once folded neatly between the lines, now swelled to fill the spaces. Their letters became fewer, more cautious. Where once there had been pages of rain-soaked poetry, now there were short updates, polite reassurances, words that pretended not to notice the ache beneath.
But each night, alone in their separate cities, both reached for the wooden boxes where the older letters slept. They reread them, searching for the selves they had almost become together, wondering if the rain that once spoke their names had fallen silent forever.
Part 6 – The Letter That Never Arrived
The rains in Mumbai had grown heavier, the kind that turned streets into rivers and stranded trains for hours. Ayaan sat by the window of his cramped room, staring at envelopes piled on his desk. He had written to Meera—twice, three times—but her replies had slowed to a trickle. When one came at last, weeks late, it was only a single page describing the museum’s restoration work and a note that she had been unwell. The warmth that once spilled from her letters was gone, and he wondered if she was gently teaching him to let go.
He did not know about the missing letter, the one where she had poured her heart like ink into confession. Somewhere between Kolkata and Mumbai, the rain had claimed it, leaving only pulp and smudges. The truth she had entrusted to paper had dissolved before it reached him. And so, in his silence, she read rejection. In her silence, he read abandonment.
Each waited for the other to explain. Neither did.
In Kolkata, Meera would walk to the postbox, letter in hand, and then stop before dropping it. What was the point, she thought bitterly, if he had already read her confession and chosen not to answer? She began keeping her words in her diary instead, unsent letters stacking like shadows of what could have been. Some nights she reread his earlier pages, the ones where he had called her name in the rain, and felt tears sting her eyes. Perhaps she had been foolish to believe that strangers could build a life from ink alone.
Her grandmother watched her more closely now, remarking, “I told you. Letters vanish. Love written in rain cannot last.” Meera said nothing. She folded the old bundle tighter, as if resistance itself was an act of devotion.
In Mumbai, Ayaan drowned himself in work. The publisher demanded more chapters; his employer grew impatient with his hesitations. Every day he wrote thousands of words that were not his, sentences that carried no trace of his own heartbeat. Only when he pulled out Meera’s old letters did he feel alive again. He kept one folded in his wallet, a page where she had drawn the crooked map of College Street, her handwriting hurried and playful. He touched it often, a talisman against the growing emptiness. But he could not silence the thought: She no longer writes because she no longer needs me.
At night, he wrote her anyway. Letters that began with ordinary observations—the color of the sea at dawn, the chaos of local trains—and ended with questions he never dared to ask: Do you still think of me when it rains? Do you still keep my words? Or am I a ghost now, only ink fading in your drawer?
Most of those letters he never sent. They piled up in his desk drawer, sealed but unsent, like bottled storms. He feared her silence too much.
One evening, after weeks of not hearing from her, he walked along Marine Drive. The waves battered the rocks with a violence that seemed to echo the storm inside him. He pulled out his notebook and wrote a single line: If rain can carry words, then let it carry mine back to her. He tore the page and let the wind snatch it, watching it vanish into the sea.
Back in Kolkata, on that same night, Meera stood at her balcony, the city soaked in another downpour. She whispered his name aloud for the first time in weeks, as if the rain might still be listening. The drops streaked her face, indistinguishable from tears. She thought of the day he had sheltered her under his umbrella, how small gestures had felt like promises. She closed her eyes, aching to believe that somewhere under the same sky he still thought of her.
But morning brought only silence. No letter in the gate, no envelope slipped beneath the door. Days turned into weeks, and the absence thickened like fog.
What neither of them realized was that the story of their silence was being written not by their hands, but by the accidents of weather and time. The rain that had once been their messenger had turned traitor, swallowing confessions, carrying away the fragile bridge they had built.
And so, two cities apart, two hearts waited—each convinced the other had already let go.
Part 7 – The Silent Year
The months folded into one another like pages left unread, and before either of them could name it, a year had passed. Letters that once came weekly dwindled to none. Both Ayaan and Meera still wrote, but the words remained locked in drawers, sealed envelopes stacked like monuments to pride and doubt. The rain, once their confidant, now fell without meaning, just weather washing over two cities that no longer spoke to each other.
In Kolkata, Meera’s days became routines of restoration and quiet labor. She leaned over canvases in the museum, steadying her brush against cracks in paint older than memory. Each repaired stroke felt like an act of penance. She told herself it was enough to breathe life into colors that had faded, even if her own life dulled in the process. At night she opened her diary, rereading the last letter she had sent—the one she believed he had received and ignored. She had bared her past, written of the fiancé who had left her, of the silence that still stalked her dreams. His lack of reply became its own cruel answer. She whispered to herself, Better he left me in ink than in person. Yet her hands shook each time she folded his old letters back into their ribboned bundle.
Her grandmother noticed. “The letters are gone,” she said one evening, handing Meera a cup of tea. “And still you wait. That is not strength, child, that is foolishness.” Meera only smiled faintly, but when she lay down later, she pressed her cheek against the wooden box that held his words, as if it could still warm her.
In Mumbai, Ayaan lived in a blur of deadlines and borrowed sentences. His employer’s new book had become a bestseller, praised for its ‘lyrical depth’—words Ayaan knew he had written, though no one else would. At the launch party, he stood at the back again, a glass of cheap wine in his hand, applause echoing like mockery. He thought of Meera then, how she had once told him silence could ghostwrite our lives. He wanted to tell her that she was right, that his silence with her had already rewritten his story into something he no longer recognized.
But he did not send the letter he drafted that night, the one that began: I never received your last words. Did you stop writing, or did the rain swallow them? He tore it up instead, afraid of sounding desperate, afraid she had moved on. In the drawer the pile of unsent letters thickened, a cemetery of what he could not say.
The city ground him down. He walked Marine Drive at dawn, watched lovers sit on stone walls with thermos flasks of tea, their laughter bright against the waves. He turned away, unable to bear it. He spent nights in cafés scribbling fragments of poetry he pretended were exercises, though each line whispered her name. And always, he carried one of her old letters in his wallet—the sandalwood-scented page where she had written, Maybe the city is wiser than both of us. Sometimes he read it at red lights, lips moving silently, as if it were a prayer.
Meanwhile, in Kolkata, festivals came and went. Durga Puja lit up the streets, pandals rose with glittering idols, and the city thrummed with drums. Meera walked among crowds with her colleagues, their laughter a shield around her. But inside she felt only the hollow echo of absence. Each sound reminded her of what had been lost—not to death, not to betrayal, but to silence, which was somehow worse. One night she stood before a pandal where rain dripped steadily through bamboo scaffolding. She whispered his name into the din of the dhaak, certain it would be swallowed.
The seasons shifted. Winter arrived, crisp and sharp, but still no word. In Mumbai, Ayaan worked through the chill, fingers numb as he typed another’s triumphs. He told himself he was too busy to think of her, yet each night he found himself pausing at the sight of the rain-stained letters in his drawer. He imagined her walking College Street in the fog, umbrella in hand, her eyes quick and alive, noticing everything. He longed to write, but pride stopped him.
And so the silent year carved them into parallel lives: two people bound by absence, each believing the other had let go. Meera restored paintings until her eyes ached. Ayaan wrote books he would never sign. Both carried unsent letters like weights, their secrets pressed flat between pages.
But silence, like rain, cannot last forever. Beneath the stillness, the city itself seemed to wait.
And in that waiting, destiny began to turn.
Part 8 – Across the Festival Crowd
The Kolkata Literary Festival spilled across the grounds of the university like a city within the city. Stalls of books glimmered under strings of yellow bulbs, the air filled with the hum of debate, poetry readings, and the thick scent of samosas fried in quick oil. Rain clouds lingered above, undecided, casting the entire afternoon in a half-light that felt like something waiting to happen.
Meera had come reluctantly, urged by her colleagues from the museum. She walked among the stalls with polite smiles, nodding at familiar faces, but her heart wasn’t in it. For months she had avoided book fairs, afraid the sight of too many words would remind her of letters no longer written. Yet here she was, carrying her loneliness through the crowd like an invisible bag. She paused before a stall displaying translations of poets, tracing the cover of a Neruda collection. A sudden ache filled her chest. He had once copied a Neruda line for her in a letter: I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. She shut the book quickly, blinking against the memory.
On the other side of the grounds, Ayaan moved slowly through the aisles, his publisher’s badge clipped to his shirt. His employer was scheduled to speak on a panel, and Ayaan had been asked to accompany him, though everyone knew his presence was unnecessary. He hated festivals now—the way applause clung to names that weren’t his, the way stories he had written were praised under someone else’s face. He kept his head down, drifting toward the quieter stalls where independent presses displayed their thin, earnest volumes.
And then it happened. Across the press of people, beyond the rows of books, he saw her.
She stood under a canopy of fairy lights, a white dupatta draped loosely over her shoulder, head bent toward a book she wasn’t reading. Even from that distance he recognized her stillness, the way she seemed to listen to the world instead of simply looking at it. His chest tightened with a force that almost brought him to his knees. A year of silence collapsed in that instant, replaced by the sudden certainty that she had never left his thoughts, not for a single day.
Meera looked up as if tugged by an unseen thread. Her eyes scanned the crowd—and found him. The noise of the festival fell away. For a heartbeat, there was no one else, only the shock of recognition and the ache of what had been lost. She froze, unsure if she should turn away. But his gaze held her, unflinching, and she could not.
They moved toward each other slowly, hesitant, as though crossing through a storm. When they finally stood face to face, words failed them. It was the first time they had spoken aloud in over a year.
“Meera,” he said, her name tasting both strange and familiar.
“Ayaan,” she whispered, almost afraid the sound might break the fragile moment.
For a long time they just looked, their silence more crowded than the festival around them. Then he reached into his satchel. His fingers shook as he pulled out a bundle of envelopes, worn at the edges, tied with string. He held them out.
“These are all the letters I wrote,” he said. “I never sent them. I thought you had stopped wanting them.”
Her breath caught. Slowly she opened her bag, pulled out her own bundle, tied with a blue ribbon. “I thought you had read mine and… chosen silence.”
He stared, confused. “But—I never got anything after…” He stopped, realization dawning. “One must have been lost.”
“Yes,” she said, tears already filling her eyes. “The one where I told you everything.”
They both laughed then, a broken, trembling laugh born of relief and sorrow all at once. Around them, the crowd jostled and music played from a distant stage, but they stood in a bubble of recognition.
“Can we talk?” he asked, his voice raw.
She nodded. Together they stepped away from the chaos of the fair, finding shelter under a rain-darkened peepal tree near the gate. Drops began to fall again, slow at first, then steady, as though the sky itself conspired in their reunion.
They did not rush. Instead, they sat on the low wall, rain dampening their clothes, and began at the beginning—trading back the words that had been stolen from them. She told him about her lost letter, about the fiancé who had left, about the fear that he would see her as less. He listened without interruption, his hands clenched, eyes fixed only on her.
And then he confessed: the ghostwriting, the emptiness of living behind another man’s name, the nights spent drafting letters he never dared to send. “You were the only place my words were mine,” he said, voice breaking.
The rain thickened, drumming on leaves, but neither moved. For the first time in a year, they were speaking aloud instead of in ink. And though it hurt to reopen wounds, the truth at last flowed between them like water released from a dam.
When the lights of the festival glowed brighter through the storm, Ayaan looked at her and said quietly, “Do you want to start again?”
Meera held his gaze, rain streaming down her hair, and after a long silence, she whispered, “Only if we never stop writing.”
He smiled through the tears. “Never.”
The rain fell harder, but neither reached for shelter. They had found it already.
Part 9 – The Unsent Confessions
They found a quiet tea stall off the festival grounds where the rain drummed softly on a corrugated roof and steam lifted from glasses like small prayers. The owner, bored and kindly, left them to a corner table with two clay cups and a plate of biscuits that softened as soon as they touched them. They did not speak at first. They untied their bundles instead, his string, her blue ribbon, the envelopes fanning out like wings that had forgotten how to fly. For a long time they touched the pages without opening them, as if to memorize the weight of what had been withheld.
“Can we read them?” Ayaan asked at last, his voice unsteady. “Not all—just a few. The ones that hurt to keep.” Meera nodded. She picked a letter that still smelled faintly of sandalwood and monsoon; he chose one with the crispness of a room kept too cold. They switched envelopes like offerings and read, each line a needle threading the past to the present. In his she found the confession he had never dared to send: I am praised under another man’s name. Sometimes I wonder if I exist at all unless you read me. In hers he discovered the truth the rain had stolen: I was left without a word. Silence turned me into a careful person. I was afraid you would see the broken edges and call them my shape.
The tea cooled as they kept reading. He learned that on nights when the museum felt haunted by damaged faces, she had written to him because she trusted the steadiness of his attention; she learned that after a publisher’s party where everyone applauded a novel he had stitched in secret, he walked to the sea and wrote her name on the wind. He laughed once at his own melodrama; she cried once at her own restraint. They were quieter after that, chastened by how close they had been to losing everything to pride that had pretended to be dignity.
“Why didn’t you send this?” she asked, tapping a page where he had written about the fear of becoming permanent scaffolding for someone else’s house. He shrugged, ashamed. “Because I wanted you to think of me as a writer, not a shadow.” She folded the letter carefully, returned it to its envelope, and said, “I fell in love with the person who watched rain write on tram tracks. Not with a book cover. Even your shadows carry your handwriting.” The word love hovered between them like a bird that had finally dared to land. Neither reached to touch it; both felt its weight settle into the table.
She handed him a letter dated the month of Durga Puja. In it she had described crowds and lights and the way drumbeats can feel like someone knocking from inside your ribs. Then, midway, a paragraph she had crossed out so fiercely the paper had thinned. “It said I missed you,” she whispered, eyes lowered. “It said I wanted to hold your hand in the crowd and feel my pulse find a reason. I crossed it out because I didn’t want to be the woman who asks for too much.” He turned the page over and traced the furrows of the erased lines, the ghost of her words thrumming under his fingertips. “You never asked for too much,” he said. “You asked for truth. I didn’t give it.”
A sudden downpour surged, rattling the tin roof so loudly that they had to lean closer to hear. The stall owner turned up a small radio that hissed with static and then offered a fragment of an old ghazal. The world narrowed to the space between their faces, the tea, the letter-piles dampening at the edges. “I loved you then,” Ayaan said, the sentence leaving him with the shock of something long trapped breaking loose. “I love you still. Through the year of not writing. Through the crowds. I kept loving you like a habit I couldn’t break.” The words did not sound like a speech. They sounded like a fact.
Meera closed her eyes as if adjusting to new light. When she opened them, she did not look away. “I loved you too,” she answered, steady now. “I loved you in the matches I struck for the incense fire, in the careful strokes on a stranger’s sari, in the way I listened to the rain for messages. But I was afraid to write the word because the last time I named love it vanished.” Her smile was small and incredulous. “This time it vanished without being named. The universe is not sentimental.”
“No,” he said, and reached across the table. She let his hand find hers. It was an ordinary gesture and therefore the most impossible of all. The rain softened. The radio flickered to a different song, and the owner pretended not to notice the way the two young people had just stopped being strangers. “We could keep reading for hours,” she said at last, “but maybe we don’t need to exhume every ghost. Maybe we choose what we carry forward.” He nodded, relieved that forgiveness did not demand a forensic catalogue.
They walked out when the rain loosened to a sheen and cut back toward College Street, the festival’s lights trembling on puddles like small constellations. At the peepal tree they had left earlier, she paused. “One more confession,” she said, voice playful and shy. “I still have the first address I gave you. I rewrote it three times to make the handwriting look like I wasn’t shaking.” He laughed, pulled out his wallet, and showed her the folded map she had drawn, its creases polished by worry and touch. “I kept this like a passport,” he said. “Every time I thought I didn’t belong anywhere, it argued with me.”
They drifted back into the fair, now thinning, now gentler. Near a stall selling handmade journals, Ayaan asked the man for two blank books and paid before she could protest. “A pact,” he said, offering her one. “No more unsent letters. If we write, we read—together.” She flipped the first page and dated it with the day’s rain. He wrote his name under hers, the shared page already altering the world.
On the way to the gate, an announcement blared for the final session, and voices surged briefly, then ebbed. Meera stopped him with a touch on his sleeve. “There is something else,” she said, bracing, but her eyes were clear. “I’m not only the girl who was left. I am also the woman who stayed—through storms, through work, through a year of silence—and I am tired of being careful. If we try again, I want to be uncareful with you. I want to be found ridiculous by people who don’t read letters. I want to be honest enough to embarrass us both.”
He grinned helplessly, the relief in him almost ferocious. “Then embarrass me,” he said. “Tell me everything you want in a voice loud enough to frighten the rain.” She surprised herself by doing it: the small domestic wishes (a steel kettle, mornings with paper and ink), the larger ones (a city that didn’t bruise them for being tender, a life where his name sat openly on his pages). He answered with his own: that he would send in his resignation to the ghostwriting job and publish under his own name even if it meant waiting tables; that he would move cities if she asked, or stay if she wanted him to; that he would learn to cook one dish she loved so that on nights the city failed them, dinner wouldn’t.
By the gate, a vendor sold cheap black umbrellas. Ayaan lifted one and held it above them out of habit. She stepped closer under it, their shoulders finding that old, easy angle. A breeze carried the smell of wet paper and frying oil. “Tomorrow,” she said. “We begin with tomorrow. No more waiting for the perfect sentences.” He kissed her forehead, a brief, reverent touch, and it felt like signing a promise in rain.
When they parted, it was only to walk in the same direction. Neither looked over a shoulder to check the other was still there. They both knew. In their bags the unsent letters lay quiet, their work finally done. Ahead of them shimmered blank pages stitched into two journals that would not be stamped or lost by weather. The night opened, surprised to find itself tender, and the city remembered how to speak their names again.
Part 10 – The Promise of Letters
The morning after the festival, Kolkata woke to a softer kind of rain, the kind that whispered on windows rather than hammered on rooftops. Ayaan rose early in his rented guesthouse, heart unsteady with the strangeness of hope. He had not slept much, his mind replaying every moment from the night before—the tea stall, the confessions, the way her hand had found his across the table. For the first time in months, he felt as if his life belonged to him again, no longer ghostwritten by silence or another man’s name.
He dressed quickly, tucked the new blank journal into his satchel, and walked to College Street. It felt fitting to begin where they had met, under the canopies that still dripped with last night’s storm. Booksellers were setting out their wares, pages fanned like wings drying in the damp air. He paused, letting the familiarity steady him, then sat at a stall with a notebook open, pen in hand. The first words he wrote were not a letter to her but a sentence for himself: I will no longer hide behind borrowed voices. It felt like breaking a curse.
Meera arrived not long after, her dupatta already damp at the edges, her own blank journal clutched close. She smiled shyly when she saw him, as though this was another accident, another collision arranged by the weather. “You’re early,” she said.
“I couldn’t wait,” he replied.
They bought two cups of tea from a street vendor, then found a quiet corner beneath the sprawling branches of the peepal tree. The ground was wet, the air cool, but neither cared. They opened their journals and began to write—not separately this time, not in silence, but side by side. He wrote a paragraph, then turned the page toward her. She read, laughed, and answered with her own lines. The pages filled slowly, each sentence not sealed away in envelopes but shared immediately, like conversation set down in ink.
Hours passed. The city roared and quieted around them, trams clanged past, children splashed in puddles, but their little circle under the tree remained constant. When their wrists ached, they stopped to talk, words tumbling easier now that they no longer had to hide them. She told him of her dreams of studying art restoration abroad one day, though fear had kept her from applying. He told her he wanted to publish under his own name, even if rejection came a hundred times. They promised to remind each other of these dreams when courage wavered.
At one point, she reached into her bag and pulled out his very first letter—the one with the lines about rain writing in the city’s margins. The paper was worn, the ink smudged, but she had kept it as carefully as a relic. “This was the first time I thought—maybe this stranger is not a stranger at all,” she said.
He took it gently, kissed the corner of the page, and handed it back. “And now?”
“Now,” she said, tucking it into her journal, “I know you are not a stranger. You are the address I was always meant to write toward.”
The rain thickened, forcing them to huddle closer under a borrowed umbrella. They laughed at the déjà vu of it, how it felt like a circle closing. “Strange,” he said, “how the same umbrella can carry us from strangers to this.”
“Not strange,” she corrected, her eyes bright. “Necessary.”
When evening came, they walked together along the street where the bulbs of the festival still glowed faintly. They didn’t need grand declarations. The act of walking side by side, journals tucked against their chests, felt larger than any vow.
At her gate, they paused. Her grandmother watched from the balcony, sharp-eyed, but this time Meera did not lower her gaze. Instead she turned to Ayaan and said, “I’ll write tonight. But I’ll also call. We don’t need to choose only one voice.”
He smiled. “Write first, call after. I want to hear the words twice.”
She laughed softly, and in that laugh he felt the year of silence lift at last.
As he walked back through the rain-washed streets, the city seemed altered, brighter, as though it had been waiting too. In his satchel the new journal pressed against his side, its first pages already alive with their shared handwriting. He thought of all the letters they would still write—not to be lost, not to be hidden, but to be read together, aloud if need be, so no silence could ever wedge itself between them again.
The rain fell steadily, but this time it did not sound like loneliness. It sounded like promise.
And for the first time in a long time, both Ayaan and Meera stepped into tomorrow without fear, certain that whatever storms came, they would face them not as strangers, not as ghosts, but as two voices written into the same page.
