Tara Dutta
Part 1: The Last Bench
always felt like a refuge.
From here, Meera Kapoor could watch the world unfold without being noticed. The rustle of papers, the scrape of chairs, the lazy ticking of the wall clock—all part of the ritual she had come to know by heart in Room 21. It was her final year at St. Agnes, and while everyone else seemed obsessed with entrance exams, college brochures, and farewell sarees, Meera remained on the edge, quietly detached.
Until the day Mr. Rayan walked in.
He wasn’t what she expected in a literature teacher. Most of them were middle-aged women with monotone voices and glasses that slipped down their noses. But Mr. Rayan D’Souza—he was different.
Tall, lean, mid-twenties at most. A stubble that seemed perpetually caught between too casual and perfectly intentional. His eyes were the kind of dark that suggested depth rather than mystery, and when he smiled—he didn’t do it often—it felt like the air warmed up just a bit.
That first day, he walked into Room 21 wearing a grey shirt rolled at the elbows, a dog-eared copy of The Bell Jar in hand, and no attendance register. “We’ll get to the syllabus,” he said, placing the book on the wooden desk. “But first, let’s talk about poetry and pain.”
Half the class groaned. A few others feigned interest.
But Meera? She sat up.
By the end of the class, he had quoted Plath, Eliot, and even a snatch of Tagore. He moved as if the classroom was a stage and each line he uttered was part of a play only he understood. But when he called on her to read out a passage, he paused mid-sentence.
“Meera Kapoor,” he said, checking the seating chart. “You’ve read this before?”
She nodded.
“And?”
“It’s like drowning in slow motion,” she answered, without hesitation.
His brows lifted. A smile curved slightly at the corner of his mouth.
“Interesting perspective.”
It wasn’t the words that caught her breath—it was the way he looked at her then. Like he had just discovered something unexpected. Something worth paying attention to.
Later, walking to the library, she caught herself smiling for no reason. It wasn’t just a compliment. It was the way he had said interesting, like it carried weight. Like he had seen beyond her answer and into the way her mind worked.
The next week, she noticed things. How he underlined lines in red ink on the board. How he tucked the chalk behind his ear when thinking. How he sometimes lost his words when talking about tragic endings.
And then, something happened that shook her quiet world.
It was a Wednesday. The bell had rung early. She lingered to copy a few notes. As the rest of the class emptied out, he leaned over her desk and said, “You write, don’t you?”
She looked up. “How do you know?”
“Your eyes. They pause at the right places.”
She blinked. Was this… casual? A compliment? Something else?
He stepped back. “If you ever want to share, I read after school. Quietly. No red pens.”
She didn’t say yes.
But two days later, she left a folded poem on his desk, unsigned. It was about rain and grief and watching someone leave without turning back.
The next class, he walked in, read a quote on silence aloud, and looked at her just a second too long.
From the last bench, her world was shifting.
She began noticing how she dressed on Thursdays—literature periods. She chose books with worn spines, hoping he’d ask. She paid attention to his taste in music, the playlists that sometimes spilled from his phone during free periods.
And then came the day she found a line scribbled at the bottom of her graded essay:
“To love makes one solitary.” —Virginia Woolf
No comments. Just that line.
It sat with her for days.
At home, Meera tried to distract herself. She had always been good at detachment, at staying one step away from the chaos her peers drowned in. She didn’t chase boys, didn’t care about prom, or parties, or the endless cycle of high school drama. Her parents were ordinary people with neat expectations. Study well. Graduate. Don’t make mistakes that stain.
But this wasn’t a mistake.
Not yet.
This was a curiosity. A whisper beneath the usual noise.
And every time she sat in his class, it grew louder.
She told no one. Not her best friend Pia, not her diary. Not even the stars she sometimes stared at from the balcony late at night.
The last bench was her witness. And maybe—just maybe—so was he.
Part 2: Rain and Repetition
The sky had been threatening rain all afternoon. Heavy, brooding clouds clung low over the school, and the air hung damp and expectant. By the last period, students had begun eyeing the windows as if willing the downpour to start—hoping for an early dismissal.
But Meera wasn’t in a hurry to leave.
She had stayed back for the parent-teacher meeting, though her mother, as usual, was running late. She sat on the library steps outside Room 21, flipping through a worn copy of To the Lighthouse, the corner of each page folded like a quiet conversation with the past.
That’s when she heard the door creak open.
Mr. Rayan stepped out, umbrella in hand, but paused when he saw her.
“You’re still here?”
She looked up. “Waiting for my mom.”
He nodded and leaned against the wall beside her. The sky grumbled faintly, a distant sound like old regret.
“You like the rain?” he asked.
She turned a page. “I like what it hides.”
He glanced at her. “Like what?”
“Flushed cheeks. Shaky voices. Things that feel too big to name.”
He didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “That sounds like a poem.”
She smiled faintly, still looking at her book.
He pulled out his phone, checking for messages. The screen reflected briefly in the glass door—an unread text, a missed call. Then he locked it and slipped it away.
“You write?” he asked, casually now.
“Sometimes.
“You should keep writing. Even if it’s only for yourself. Especially if it’s only for yourself.”
The silence stretched. It wasn’t awkward—just unusually soft, like the hush before a storm.
“Do you ever… feel like something’s waiting just outside your life?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “Waiting?”
“Like there’s another version of you in some parallel place, living a life that fits better. And every now and then, you catch the echo.”
He laughed under his breath. Not mockingly—more surprised.
“You sound older than seventeen.”
“Sometimes I feel it,” she said. “And sometimes I feel twelve.”
They were both silent again. A gust of wind rattled the windowpane behind them.
“Have you read Neruda?” he asked suddenly.
“Only a little. In translation.”
“Some things survive translation. Like hunger. Or longing.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
The rain finally began to fall—gently at first, then more confidently, tapping the roof like the start of a monologue.
Mr. Rayan looked at the sky.
“I should go,” he said, almost reluctantly. “You’ll be alright waiting?”
Meera nodded.
But she didn’t want him to go. Not yet.
“I liked your note,” she said.
He looked at her, puzzled.
She met his eyes. “The quote in my essay.”
His expression shifted—something unreadable flickering behind his calm gaze.
“Virginia Woolf’s words,” he said.
“But your choice.”
A beat passed. A few more drops fell.
“You saw what I meant?”
“I think you meant more than one thing.”
A faint smile appeared. “I think you’re right.”
And then, without fanfare, he walked away into the misting rain, umbrella opening like a secret.
She watched until he disappeared past the school gate.
That night, Meera sat at her desk, her bedroom dim except for a small study lamp. She didn’t touch her homework. Instead, she opened a notebook and began writing. The words came slowly, as if arriving from some other place, soaked in the scent of damp concrete and unspoken things.
The poem was short, unfinished, and maybe not very good. But it was honest.
She ended it with a single line: “I think you meant more than one thing.”
The next week, she brought the notebook to school, tucked between her Shakespeare play and her lunchbox. She didn’t plan to give it to him. But just knowing it was there made something feel possible.
When she walked into class, he didn’t say anything unusual. No hint of rain-colored memories in his voice.
But after class, as the others shuffled out, he asked her to stay back.
“I read something that made me think of you,” he said, pulling out a slim poetry book.
He opened it to a page and handed it to her.
The poem was Neruda. Translated. Underlined.
“So I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me.”
She read it once. Then again.
When she looked up, he wasn’t smiling. He looked serious, tired maybe, or just careful.
“Do you believe in timing?” he asked.
“I believe in moments. And what we do with them.”
She returned the book, her fingers brushing his.
“I should go,” she said.
He nodded.
She left her notebook behind.
On purpose.
Part 3: Between the Lines
The notebook sat quietly on his desk the next morning—blue spiral-bound, worn edges, her name inked neatly inside the cover: Meera Kapoor. He had known it was intentional, the way she’d left it behind. No accidental forgetfulness could look so deliberate.
Rayan opened it long after school ended, when the halls were silent and the janitors were sweeping chalk dust into corners. The pages were filled with untitled poems, little fragments, half-thoughts. Some were messy, some scratched out. All were painfully honest.
“To be seventeen and unfinished / like a sentence without a verb / still hoping someone reads you slowly.”
He read that line three times.
He thought of his own seventeen, lost in a city far away, with parents who didn’t understand why someone would want to teach poetry instead of study finance. Thought of old heartbreaks, and new fears.
Thought of the girl who sat at the last bench, scribbling something during class when she thought he wasn’t looking.
It would be wrong to write back, he told himself. But then again, silence had its own kind of cruelty.
So he wrote one sentence on a sticky note and placed it inside the notebook.
“Sometimes the sentence reads you back.”
He left it on the library table before the next class, where he knew she’d find it.
Meera opened her notebook before school assembly, heart in her mouth. The note was there—blue ink, his handwriting. She ran her fingers over the words like they were something precious and delicate, something warm in the middle of a cold morning.
After that, everything began to feel… different. Not louder, just sharper.
Every literature class felt more like a conversation between them, no matter how many others were in the room. When he quoted Donne or Dickinson, her eyes would flicker up from her notebook, and sometimes he’d already be looking at her. It wasn’t flirtation. It wasn’t even obvious.
But it was there—a thread stretching quietly between them, strung tight with what-if.
Once, during a debate on The Great Gatsby, he asked, “Do you think Gatsby really loved Daisy? Or was he just in love with the idea of her?”
Before anyone else could answer, Meera said, “Sometimes ideas are more loyal than people.”
Their eyes locked.
He nodded slowly. “Indeed.”
That night, she wrote a poem titled The Idea of You. She didn’t show it to anyone. She wasn’t even sure it was about him. But every line knew.
Soon, they began exchanging quotes on the last page of her assignments. Always under the last paragraph, where only someone looking closely would notice.
From him: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” —Pascal
From her: “Even the moon has a dark side.”
Once, she found a line from Rilke:
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses waiting to see us act just once, with beauty and courage.”
It stayed with her for days.
They never spoke about the notes. That was the unspoken rule. In the corridor, she was just another student. In class, he was the teacher. Their conversations lived between lines, between bells, between boundaries they both knew they shouldn’t cross.
But Meera was changing. She noticed how she stood straighter when he entered the room. How she paused before responding, considering the weight of her words. She was becoming someone she hadn’t known she could be—sharper, braver, more aware.
She stopped wearing her hair in a ponytail on Thursdays. Started carrying poetry books in her bag instead of fiction. Every little change was for her. But also, somehow, for him.
The day of her eighteenth birthday, she found a gift tucked between her textbooks in the library: a copy of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda.
There was no card. But on the inside of the front cover, in handwriting she’d memorized by now, one line was underlined:
“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
She closed the book slowly, hands trembling.
No name. No signature.
But it didn’t need one.
That evening, she sat under the neem tree outside her building, the book on her lap, her phone untouched beside her. The air smelled of new leaves and petrol and something else—possibility.
She thought of all the rules they hadn’t broken. Of how a look could be more dangerous than a touch. How poetry could say what mouths dare not.
She didn’t know what this was. But it was something.
And whatever it became, she would carry it with her like a secret stitched into her skin.
Part 4: The Confession
March arrived with golden afternoons and the hush of endings. The trees lining the school boundary had begun to flower again—gulmohar and laburnum. Exam timetables were up on the noticeboard, farewell sarees were being discussed in hushed excitement in the girls’ washroom, and every moment now carried the scent of goodbye.
Meera counted days without meaning to. Seven classes left. Three Thursdays. One final literature period.
And still no words.
Not the kind that mattered.
There had been poems, glances, silent exchanges on the margins of essays. But no one had named it. Not her. Not Mr. Rayan.
Until that Wednesday afternoon.
The class was over. Everyone was hurrying off to prepare for the farewell skit. The corridor bustled with laughter and secrets. Meera stayed behind, standing near the window, sunlight staining her face with a soft gold. She waited.
He packed his bag slowly, as if unsure of his next move.
“I’m leaving,” she said, breaking the quiet.
“I know,” he replied.
She stepped closer. The classroom held its breath.
“I don’t want to go without knowing,” she said. “What this is. Or was.”
He turned to her. His eyes were tired, thoughtful.
“Meera… we’ve never crossed a line. You know that.”
She nodded. “But we danced close.”
“Yes. Too close sometimes.”
“Then why not name it?”
He sighed and leaned against the desk.
“Because naming things gives them a weight. A shape. A cost.”
She didn’t move.
“I’ll be eighteen next week,” she said. “I’m not a child.”
“I never said you were.”
“Then why treat me like one?”
His voice softened. “Because I am your teacher, Meera.”
“For three more days.”
He looked away. “It doesn’t change the past.”
She stepped closer still, just enough that her presence was undeniable.
“Do you feel it too?” she asked.
There it was. The question that had been pulsing beneath every line of poetry, every underlined phrase.
He didn’t answer immediately. But something shifted in his eyes.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I feel it.”
The air around them trembled with that confession.
She reached for his hand—slowly, carefully—not to hold it, but just to brush her fingers against his.
He let them stay.
“But feelings,” he said quietly, “don’t always belong to the moment they arrive in. Sometimes they belong to a time we haven’t reached yet.”
She closed her eyes.
“That sounds like something out of a novel,” she whispered.
“Maybe,” he said. “But it’s also the truth.”
That evening, Meera sat on the terrace, watching the moon rise through scattered clouds. Her mother called her twice to come down for dinner, but she didn’t move.
She remembered his eyes when he said yes. Not a promise. Not an apology. Just the truth.
And somehow, that was enough.
She opened her notebook and began to write, not a poem this time, but a letter.
Not addressed to him. Not even signed.
Just a memory caught in ink:
“We never touched hands in public, but I still feel the echo between my fingers.”
She folded it and slipped it into the pages of Twenty Love Poems. Then she wrapped the book and sealed it with string.
The next day, she found him in the staff corridor, alone, near the water cooler. No students around. No teachers either.
She handed him the parcel.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“A thank-you gift.”
He looked confused. She didn’t clarify.
He didn’t open it then. Just placed it in his satchel and said, “Take care of yourself.”
“You too.”
They didn’t say goodbye. It wasn’t that kind of parting.
Some things are too full to end with a single word.
Part 5: The Last Bell
The morning of the farewell dawned warm and slow, like a page being turned with care.
Meera draped herself in her mother’s midnight blue saree, a silver border shimmering as she walked. Her hair was tied in a loose bun, jasmine tucked behind her left ear. She had never looked in the mirror this long. Not out of vanity, but something else—an ache to preserve this version of herself: on the edge of girlhood and everything that came after.
St. Agnes looked different that day—less like a school, more like a soft-lit stage waiting for final acts. The walls bore paper flowers. The canteen played old Hindi songs. Everyone had cameras, laughter, and unfinished jokes in their mouths.
But Meera was only looking for one thing.
Or rather, one person.
Mr. Rayan was standing beside the library gate when she saw him. A navy blue shirt, no tie, sleeves folded up. He looked the same. And yet, not.
Their eyes met across the corridor. A moment passed. Neither smiled. But the silence that filled the space between them said more than a thousand parting words could.
She didn’t walk up to him.
And he didn’t move.
Because they both knew: there were too many eyes. Too many assumptions.
And perhaps, even more dangerously, too many truths that couldn’t be carried in public.
Instead, Meera walked into the auditorium where the farewell ceremony had begun. There were speeches. Roses. A photo slideshow. The principal crying softly. Teachers shaking hands and passing wishes like folded paper boats.
And then, the last bell.
Not literal. Symbolic.
A moment to stand, bow, and exit the stage.
She thought she might cry. But instead, Meera just felt stillness.
Like the calm after rain.
Later, as the crowd thinned and goodbyes turned to promises and group selfies, she sat alone on the stone bench outside the music room.
In her lap was her copy of Twenty Love Poems. The gift she had once received. And now, inside it, she found something she hadn’t placed there.
A note.
Tucked carefully within the last page.
Her heart caught.
The handwriting was unmistakable.
“Come to the library. 6 PM.”
By six, the school was mostly empty. Staff had left. Decorations were half-torn. Paper cups littered the corridors. A cat roamed lazily near the cycle stand.
But the library lights were still on.
She entered quietly. He was there, by the poetry shelf, arms folded, leaning lightly.
For a moment, they said nothing.
Then he gestured to the bench near the window. The one where she’d sat during her first poetry assignment.
They sat side by side, not touching.
Just breathing in the same moment.
“It feels different when the school’s empty,” she said.
“Yes,” he replied. “Quieter. More honest.”
She turned to him.
“So,
what now?”
He looked away. “I’m still your teacher—for a few hours, maybe. But after that… I don’t know.”
“Do you want to forget this?”
“No,” he said instantly. “But I don’t want to ruin it either.”
She smiled faintly.
“Then don’t.”
They talked for over an hour. About books. Their shared love for slow songs and silent endings. He told her he once dreamed of being a writer but ended up teaching because he needed a job. She told him she wasn’t afraid of being misunderstood anymore.
“You made me less afraid of my thoughts,” she said. “Of feeling too much.”
He looked at her. “You taught me to feel again.”
They both knew it wasn’t a love story in the usual sense. Not yet.
But it was something real. Something beautiful.
As she stood to leave, he didn’t stop her.
But he whispered, “If we ever meet again—not here, not now…”
She turned, her hand on the door.
“I’ll write to you,” she said.
And then she was gone.
Part 6: One Year Later
The city of Mumbai had a strange way of swallowing people whole.
In her first month of college, Meera Kapoor often found herself feeling like a paper boat floating in gutter water—tossed, anonymous, and easily forgotten. The lectures were long, the hostel noisy, and the monsoons relentless. People moved quickly here—between trains, between relationships, between choices.
But some things didn’t move.
Some things remained.
Like the copy of Twenty Love Poems she kept in her drawer, wrapped in a cloth like an heirloom. Or the line she carried quietly in her bloodstream:
“To love makes one solitary.”
It wasn’t that she thought about Mr. Rayan every day. But when she passed a secondhand bookstore, or read a poem in the college magazine that felt too loud, too fake—he returned. Like breath on a mirror. Faint. Real.
She hadn’t written to him.
And he hadn’t written back.
But maybe they both had been waiting for the silence to soften into something new.
It was a slow Sunday afternoon in July—one of those rare days when the hostel was unusually quiet, and the breeze from the cracked window carried the smell of old newspapers and fresh rain. Meera was sitting cross-legged on her bed, a mug of black coffee cooling on the floor, a half-written poem abandoned beside her.
Then her phone buzzed.
Inbox: 1 New Email
From: Raghav Dutta
Subject: After the Bell
She stared at the screen for a full minute before touching it.
There was no greeting. Just a poem.
After the Bell
By R.D.
I taught you metaphors, you taught me silence
Between chalk dust and unsaid syllables
I watched a girl become the question I never asked
Now spring is here again, and I remember
What cherry blossoms do to a quiet heart.
Meera read it once.
Then again.
Then five more times.
She didn’t cry. But her throat tightened like a knot pulled too fast.
She typed slowly.
Subject: Re: After the Bell
I used to think poetry was only beautiful when sad.
Now I think it’s beautiful when it waits.
I’ve waited.
Not for a reply.
But for the part of me that could finally speak back.
—M.
That night, she walked to the small garden behind her hostel, barefoot, letting the damp earth press against her skin. The world felt suspended—like someone had paused time to let her breathe fully.
She remembered what he had said that day in the library.
If we ever meet again—not here, not now…
Now wasn’t then.
But it didn’t have to be.
Now was its own thing.
Two weeks later, a package arrived.
Inside: a handwritten letter and a single sprig of cherry blossom pressed inside a blank journal.
The letter simply said:
“Begin again.”
Epilogue
Years later, long after school bells had faded and syllabuses were rewritten, Meera Kapoor stood behind a podium at a small literature festival in Shimla. Her first poetry collection—Between the Lines—had just won a debut award. Her hair was longer now. Her voice steadier. But her eyes still carried the depth of someone who had once lived between glances, between boundaries.
After the reading, a man walked up to her quietly.
Tall. Familiar. Slight greys at the temples.
He didn’t speak.
Neither did she.
Instead, she handed him a copy of her book.
Inside, she had written:
“To the one who taught me the pause between stanzas.”
And beneath that, in her own handwriting:
“Still waiting to see what spring does with the cherry trees.”
THE END
