The first thing Mira forgot was the sound of the gate. Not deliberately. It simply disappeared one year, somewhere between changing cities, loud voices, and replacing the last suitcase she had carried out of her father’s house. The old iron gate had complained every morning in the same slow voice, as though the hinges believed leaving should always take a little effort. It had opened reluctantly for school uniforms, milkmen, festival guests, and once for an ambulance whose siren arrived several seconds before anyone recognised it.

Years later, when someone asked her what her childhood home had looked like, she remembered the colour of the bougainvillea before she remembered the gate. Even then, she wasn’t certain whether the flowers had been magenta or merely made brighter by afternoon light.

She thought this was how life worked.

That the larger things remained. Addresses dissolved. The exact arrangement of rooms became uncertain. Faces blurred gently around the edges until they resembled photographs left too long beside a sunny window.

It seemed fair. What right did memory have to demand permanent residence? By the time she turned forty-three, she had become an expert at replacing things before they became irreplaceable.

Curtains and cities. Friends who had belonged to previous versions of herself. She moved through life with the quiet competence of someone who packed lightly, never bought furniture too heavy to carry upstairs alone, and kept important papers in a single blue folder that could disappear into a canvas bag in less than a minute. People admired this quality.

“You’ve never been sentimental,” one colleague remarked after helping her unpack books into a new office.

She smiled because disagreement required explanation, and explanation was another form of unpacking or remembering. The truth was stranger. She had always mistaken absence for healing. Her apartment overlooked a narrow street lined with rain trees whose branches met above passing traffic like elderly neighbours exchanging gossip. Every now and then they shed thousands of leaves that spun through the air without urgency, as though each had negotiated its own descent. From the kitchen window she watched a municipal worker sweep them into neat circles every morning. She wondered how many people could really see the halo over his head that he carried all the time. By afternoon the wind had quietly disagreed with her. Well..maybe there was comfort in this argument between order and return. She noticed it only because she had begun waking earlier than necessary. Age had altered sleep into something less obedient. Dawn entered before permission, carrying distant bicycle bells, the hiss of pressure cookers from other apartments and, somewhere, a woman practising scales on a harmonium with such patience that every note seemed to wait politely for the next.

Mira never learned who she was. It was comfortable.

Some mornings the music stopped halfway through a phrase and did not return until the following day. She wondered if the woman simply stood up to answer the telephone or whether life had interrupted her in ways no stranger could imagine. The thought stayed with her longer than expected. Perhaps because interruption had become the true measure of adulthood. Not birthdays or promotions. Only the gradual understanding that every beautiful thing eventually stops mid-sentence.

One Sunday she visited a market on the edge of the old city. She had intended to buy nothing more significant than coriander and tea. Instead she found herself lingering before a man selling second-hand household objects arranged with inexplicable dignity upon faded blankets.There were brass locks without keys. Porcelain bowls carrying hairline fractures delicate as river maps.Buttons sorted into glass jars by colour. A wooden ruler whose numbers had nearly vanished beneath decades of fingers. Nothing there possessed enough value to justify careful display, yet each item rested as though expecting recognition.

She picked up a small enamel mug. White. Blue rim. A chip near the handle. Entirely ordinary. The vendor looked up from his newspaper.

“Old piece,” he said. “Take it if you like.”

She turned the mug over. Its base carried the faint imprint of a manufacturer that no longer existed. Without warning she remembered standing on a wooden stool while her grandmother poured warm milk into an identical mug every winter morning. Not the kitchen. Not the house. Not even her grandmother’s face. Only the impossible warmth of the enamel against small hands. The memory lasted perhaps three seconds. Then it withdrew.

She took the mug, and thanked him. The memory of this moment etching into her mind like a tattoo. So easy sometimes..to see God, the God’s …slivers of blessings from an ancient universe that intervenes to help you through life.

At home she placed it inside a cupboard without using it. It occupied the highest shelf among bowls reserved for guests. For several weeks she forgot it was there. Then, while searching for cinnamon, she saw the blue rim again.

This time no memory arrived. Only a peculiar expectation, as though something had knocked softly at a distant door and decided not to wait for an answer. She closed the cupboard. Outside, evening settled over the buildings with unusual gentleness.

Across the lane, a little girl watered plants from a green plastic jug far too large for her wrists. Most of the water missed the pots entirely, darkening the concrete instead. Her father watched without correcting her. After she had finished, she solemnly watered the patch of damp pavement as though thirst belonged equally to stone.

Mira smiled. Children had not yet learned that usefulness governed affection. They loved extravagantly. They believed spilled water had still accomplished something. Long after the balcony opposite grew dark, she kept thinking about the pavement glistening beneath the streetlamp.

How much of life, she wondered, was quietly nourishing places we never intended to reach She did not know that this was the first crack. Not in her composure. In time itself. For years she had imagined the past as a house somewhere behind her, growing smaller with every mile she travelled. She had never considered another possibility. That the past was not behind her at all. That it moved with the patience of groundwater…silent beneath rock and root, taking years to cross a distance no wider than a human life. And one day, without ceremony, it would rise where the earth appeared perfectly dry.

She stood at the kitchen window until the light withdrew from the street and the rain trees became only darker shapes against the evening. Somewhere, faintly, the harmonium began again. Not the same phrase. It was not the one that had been interrupted. A different one. She realised then that maybe memory had never been asking her to remember everything.

Perhaps it had only been waiting for her to become still enough to notice what had never truly left. The gate. The enamel mug. A child watering stone. None of them had returned to be understood. They had returned simply to be carried. She thought of all the quiet things that had travelled beside her unnoticed.. the weight of familiar mornings, forgotten voices, ordinary objects and kind people that had gone on remembering her long after she had stopped remembering them. Outside, a breeze lifted the fallen leaves into the air once more. For a brief moment they seemed less like things that had let go than things still deciding where to belong. Mira watched until they disappeared into the dark. Somewhere beneath the visible world, the small, forgotten rivers of a life never stopped flowing towards the sea.

And perhaps that was all life was all about… it kept carrying what had never truly left, through all its glory, suspense, sadness and sometimes brutality, towards whatever waited beyond.

—-

By the time Arvind Mehra first noticed the carpet, he had already lived in Kasauli for eleven years.

This was the sort of fact that frightened him later, though he could not have said why. Eleven years was long enough to know a place by its silences, to recognise the particular barking of the dogs below Lower Mall, the hour at which the army trucks passed on the cantonment road, the smell of damp pine after rain, and the way the mist came down from the ridge in the evenings and settled against the windows as though someone outside were breathing upon the glass. He knew which shopkeeper watered the vegetables with a hose in the morning, which old women sat beneath the awning near the church on Sundays, and which houses had been empty for so long that their gardens had begun to look like forests.

He was forty-eight, divorced, with a daughter in London who called every Sunday and a job in Delhi that had gradually become something he did without enthusiasm and from a distance. He had bought the house because it was cheap by Delhi standards and because, after his mother died, he had discovered that loneliness in the city was noisier than loneliness in the hills.

The house stood above a narrow road near the old cantonment, behind a rusting iron gate and a wall furred with moss. It had once belonged to an English family, though nobody knew which one. There were two bedrooms upstairs, a long drawing room downstairs, a kitchen with a blackened chimney and a wooden staircase that turned at a small landing before climbing towards the rooms.

The carpet was on that landing.

It was an ugly thing. Brown once, perhaps, although years of dust and damp had reduced its colour to something between dried tea and old skin. It was narrow, perhaps three feet wide, and ran from the top stair to the corrridor, covering the floorboards in an awkward strip. One corner had curled upwards and been pushed down with a brass looking nail. The pattern was almost invisible except when sunlight entered through the little landing window in winter, when Arvind could see faded red flowers scattered across it.

He had seen it on the day he bought the house. He had seen it when he moved in and every day for the last eleven years. He wanted to have it removed but figured he may need it some day. He had never once thought much about it after that.

That changed on a Tuesday in October when he woke at 3:17 in the morning to the sound of someone walking upstairs.

There were three steps.Then, a pause. Then two more. Arvind opened his eyes. For several seconds he remained still, listening.

The house had many sounds at night. Timber contracted in the cold. Water travelled through pipes. Wind pushed its fingers beneath the old roof tiles. Once, in his second year there, a monkey had somehow entered the attic and spent an entire afternoon dragging things around above his bedroom.

But footsteps were different. They carried intention.

He heard another step. Then another. Slowly, somebody crossed the landing.

Arvind sat up.

His first thought was that someone had entered the house. His second was that nobody could have. He had checked the doors before bed. The front gate was locked. The back windows were latched. There was no reason for anyone to be there.

He reached for the torch on his bedside table and walked into the corridor.

The staircase descended into darkness. Nothing moved.Then came the sound again. Not footsteps this time. A soft dragging. As if something was being being pulled across the floor. Arvind stood at the top of the stairs.

The landing was empty. The carpet lay exactly as it always had. Except that one corner was lifted.

He stared at it.

The raised corner trembled slightly. He held his breath. A gust of wind moved through the corridor, although the windows were shut. The corner settled.

Arvind went back to bed.

In the morning he laughed at himself. He had spent too many years in Delhi, he decided, where every sound from a neighbouring flat had eventually become a threat. He made tea, opened his laptop and forgot about the incident.

For three weeks, nothing happened. Then the smell began. It was not a strong smell. That was what made it difficult to identify. It came and went, usually after rain, and seemed to linger near the staircase. At first Arvind thought it was damp wood. Then… maybe a dead rat beneath the wooden floorboards. The old houses in Kasauli had their own private ecologies, and things died inside them without permission.

He called the carpenter. The carpenter inspected the floor.

“Old wood,” he said.

“Does it smell to you?”

The man bent down.

He sniffed.

“Damp.”

“Something else.”

The carpenter shrugged.

“Maybe rats.”

They lifted three boards beneath the stairs.

Nothing.

The smell disappeared the following day. A week later, Arvind found a small wet mark on the carpet. It was near the edge, almost black.

He touched it. Cold. Not wet, exactly. Greasy. He washed his fingers twice. That night he dreamed of somebody standing at the bottom of the staircase. He could not see the person’s face. The figure was wrapped in something red.

When Arvind woke, his bedroom door was open. He particularly remembered closing it last night. He was certain of that. He sat in bed for a long time, looking at the corridor. Then, very slowly, he noticed something that made him stop breathing.

The carpet downstairs had moved. Only a little. Perhaps an inch. But it had moved. The following morning he measured it.

He laughed again.

This time the laughter sounded false. He slowly began to dislike the house.

That was new.!

For eleven years it had been the place he returned to, even after long journeys, even after quarrels with his daughter, even after the divorce had left him with the peculiar embarrassment of being a man who had everything he needed except somebody to come home to.

Now he began staying in hotels in Delhi whenever he had work there. He began locking his bedroom door. He stopped walking upstairs after midnight.

And he started noticing the carpet.

Once you notice something, Arvind discovered, it becomes difficult to return it to invisibility. The carpet was too thick. That was the first thing. He could see it now. It did not lie flat against the floor like an ordinary carpet. It had a rounded quality, a slight rise through the middle, as if something underneath it had made a long shallow hill. He crouched beside it one afternoon and ran his hand across the surface.

The carpet was stiff.

Beneath it, something gave. Not much.Just enough. Arvind withdrew his hand. He stood and walked away. For the rest of the afternoon he sat in the garden with a book he did not read..The pine trees moved in the wind. Somewhere below, a woman was calling a child home.

A pressure cooker whistled in a distant kitchen.

Life continued with its extraordinary indifference. At five, Arvind went to the market. He returned after seven. At eight, he drank whisky. At nine, he went upstairs. He stopped at the landing.

The carpet was waiting.

He looked at it for almost a minute. Then he brought a knife from the kitchen.The first cut released a smell that made him step backwards. It was not the smell of a dead animal.

He knew that immediately.

He had smelled death before, years ago, when his father had died in hospital and Arvind had stood beside the bed while nurses changed the sheets.

This was older.

Drier.

It had the sweetness of something that had once been alive and had been kept from becoming completely dead.

He cut again.The carpet opened. Inside was another layer. Then another. It had been rolled tightly, wrapped around something long and heavy. His hand began to shake.

He did not call the police. He did not call anyone. Instead he continued cutting fastidiously .The outer carpet had been stitched shut at the ends. Whoever had wrapped it had taken care. That detail frightened him more than anything else.

People who hide things hurriedly make mistakes. People who intend to hide something for a long time do not. At last he exposed a section of cloth. Then a sleeve. Then a hand. The hand was brown and dry, the fingers curled inward. A wedding ring remained on one finger.

Arvind sat down on the stairs. For several minutes he could not move.

The body had been folded into the carpet and bound so tightly that the years had compressed it into a shape that no longer seemed entirely human. There was a man’s face beneath layers of cloth, turned towards the floor, the skin darkened and drawn tightly across the bones.

But there was something else.

A small metal identification tag had been tied around the wrist. Arvind picked it up. There was a name engraved upon it.

THOMAS ALBERT REED.

He knew the name. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew it. The old stories said Thomas Reed had disappeared in 1989. Some said he had gone back to England.Some said he had gone to Shimla.

An elderly shopkeeper had once told Arvind that Reed had been a strange man who lived alone in a house nearby and collected antique furniture. He had vanished one winter without selling the house or telling anyone where he was going.

The story had become one of those local things that survived because nobody cared enough to prove it false.

Arvind looked at the body.

Thirty-seven years. Thirty-seven years underneath his feet. He began to wonder how many people had stood on that carpet. How many had visited the house. How many had walked across it carrying groceries, laughing, drunk, frightened, in love, grieving, carrying children. How many times had he himself walked over the man’s face?

He called the police.

They arrived after midnight. Then came the questions. Who owned the house before him? Had he noticed anything? Had anyone behaved strangely? Did he know Thomas Reed?

Arvind answered everything. The police photographed the carpet and the body. They took samples from the floorboards. One officer asked him whether he had ever noticed a smell. Arvind said yes.

“How long?”

“Maybe two years.”

The officer looked at him.

“Two years?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you report it?”

Arvind had no answer. The truth seemed worse than any explanation. Because nobody reports a smell that comes and goes. Nobody reports a house for being quietly wrong.

The police stayed until dawn. By morning the body had been removed. The landing was empty. Arvind thought that would make him feel better.

It did not.

For the first time in eleven years, the wooden floorboards were visible. There was a pale rectangular stain where the carpet had been.

He cleaned it. The stain remained. He cleaned it again.It remained. By afternoon, the police had left.The house became quiet. Too quiet.

At six in the evening, Arvind received a call from an unknown number. He answered. Nobody spoke.

“Hello?”

A breath.

Then the line went dead.

He checked the number. It was not available. That night he slept downstairs. At 3:17 he woke. He was lying on the sofa. The house was dark. He heard the staircase. One step.Pause. Then another two steps. Pause. Then a soft dragging sound.

Arvind sat up. He stared towards the staircase. Something was coming down. He could not see it. But he could hear it. A slow movement across the landing. Then another. Then silence. He turned on the lamp. Nothing.

The next morning he called the police again. They returned. They searched the house. They found nothing and acted amused as if he were a child. That annoyed him.

One officer suggested that the sound might have been caused by old pipes. Another suggested that he should spend a few nights somewhere else. Arvind almost laughed. Instead he packed a bag and decided to leave Kasauli.

He would sell the house and head go to London. He would live near his daughter. If he had his way he would never again sleep in a house with wooden stairs.

At noon he began packing. While moving books from a shelf, he found an envelope behind an old photograph. There was no name on it. Inside was a single sheet of paper. The handwriting was faded. He recognised the date.

September 1989. The note was short.

‘I know what happened to Thomas. I also know where he is. But there are things a house keeps better than people do.’

Arvind read it twice. Then he turned the paper over. There was another sentence on the back.

‘If you have found this, then the carpet has been moved.’

Arvind stopped. The carpet had not been moved. Not really. It had been there when he bought the house. When he had first arrived, it had already been there. He suddenly remembered something.

The estate agent had shown him the house in the afternoon. He had walked upstairs. He had asked why the carpet was so old. The agent had laughed.

“Leave it,” he had said. “It’s been there forever.”

Forever!!!

Arvind looked at the empty landing. Then he understood. The carpet had not been hiding the body from him. The house had been hiding it from everyone.

The carpet had been placed there deliberately, but not by the person who killed Thomas Reed. It had been placed there later. By someone who had discovered the body and decided to conceal it again.

The police had taken the body. But who had known? Who had found it before? And why had they covered it?

Arvind returned to the note. There was a final line, written smaller than the others.

‘He wasn’t alone when they rolled him up.’

A noise came from upstairs. Arvind looked towards the staircase. He was alone in the house. He knew that. He also knew that the police had removed the body.

Yet something had moved across the landing. He heard it again. Slow. Careful. A dragging sound.

Arvind walked upstairs. The landing was empty. However, the pale stain on the floor was no longer rectangular. It was long. Almost the exact shape of the old carpet. And at its centre, where the body had lain for thirty-seven years, there was a single dark wet mark.

Arvind crouched beside it. He touched the floor. His fingers came away smelling faintly of roses. He knew that smell. His mother had worn the same perfume.

He stood up very slowly.

“Mum?”

The word left him before he could stop it. Something answered from the room behind him. Not a voice. A soft knock. Three times. Arvind turned.

The door was open.

Inside the empty bedroom stood a woman. She was old. Her hair was white. Her face was turned away. She wore the same pale blue shawl his mother had worn on the morning she died.

Arvind could not move.

The woman lifted one hand. She pointed towards the staircase. Then she said, very softly,

“You should have left him where he was.”

The lights went out.

The next morning the police found the front door open. Arvind’s car was still parked outside. His suitcase stood beside it. His passport lay on the kitchen table.There was no sign of him. The police searched the house for two days.

They found nothing.

Weeks passed and then months. The house was eventually sold. The new owners renovated it. They removed the old staircase and they replaced the floorboards. They painted the walls. The carpet was thrown away.

Nobody thought much about it.

Not until the following winter, when the new owner complained to the builder about a smell coming from the upper landing.

The builder came. He lifted the boards.There was nothing underneath. Only old timber.The smell disappeared. The builder told him it was probably damp.The house remained occupied.People came and went. Children grew up there. Visitors drank tea beside the fireplace. A young couple once held their wedding photographs on the staircase.

Nobody knew about Arvind. Nobody knew about Thomas Reed. Nobody knew about the carpet. Time swallowed up all that information up until stories of that house began to feel like lore.

Years later, during another renovation, a workman discovered something behind a wall. It was a small metal identification tag. The name on it was not Thomas Albert Reed.

It read:

ARVIND MEHRA.

And beneath the name, scratched by hand, were four words. KEEP HIM ROLLED. The workman showed it to nobody. He put it in his pocket.

That evening, as he was leaving the house, he noticed an old carpet lying beside the rubbish bins. It was brown. There were faded red flowers on it. One corner had curled upwards. The man looked at it for a long moment. Then, without knowing why, he picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy. He carried it back inside.

The house was empty. The hills were already disappearing into evening mist. He rolled the carpet out along the upstairs landing.

It fitted perfectly.

And when he pressed his palm against its centre, something beneath it gave a little, as though whatever lay underneath had been waiting patiently for the weight of a human hand.

The man smiled without knowing why. Then he went downstairs and locked the door. From the landing came the sound of someone walking.

One step. Pause. Two steps. Then three.

And beneath the carpet, something very softly began to breathe.

The train arrived at Suryagarh Road at seventeen minutes past four in the afternoon. It was late by forty-two minutes, which, according to the man sleeping beneath the timetable, was considered almost punctual on this particular route.

The sun lost its white anger and it now leaned heavily upon the railway tracks, turning them into two long strips of exhausted gold. A dog slept beneath the weighing machine, three crows quarrelled over something unidentifiable near the drinking-water tap, and somewhere beyond the station wall a pressure cooker gave three whistles in a railway colony kitchen as a woman called out the name of a child who did not answer.

The train entered slowly, first the engine, enormous and tired, dragging behind it the accumulated lives of fourteen coaches. Then came faces behind barred windows, aluminium water bottles, children with sticky mouths, old men folding newspapers, women gathering steel tiffins and handbags into their laps. Finally, from the third sleeper coach, Meera got down, a woman of twenty-nine years carrying one blue suitcase with a broken wheel. A defect she had known about before beginning the journey but had not repaired, because there are certain inconveniences one tolerates when one believes somebody will be waiting at the other end.

She stepped onto the platform and looked around. This was the first thing she did before putting down the suitcase, before straightening her dupatta, before checking whether she had forgotten anything beneath the berth. She looked around with care, knowing that people change, that hair becomes grey, bodies heavier, faces acquire glasses, wrinkles, disappointments, and that sometimes ten years pass across a person’s face without asking permission.

So she searched carefully among the crowd, at the man holding marigolds who stood on his toes, at the woman near the bookstall, at the thin person in the brown sweater despite the heat, at the stationmaster walking towards his office, and at the people waiting near the exit. She then watched as a family received an old woman in a green sari, two boys running towards her shouting “Nani! Nani!” as she laughed and slapped one of them affectionately upon the head.

The cacophony continued as a porter shouted for space, someone dropped a steel container, a baby began crying, and a tea seller passed carrying a silver kettle blackened at the bottom, calling out “Chai! Chai! Garam chai!”, yet nobody lifted a hand for Meera and nobody called her name.

The train remained for four minutes before the guard blew his whistle, the engine groaned, and the coaches began moving again. Meera watched the train leave, feeling that peculiar loneliness that comes when the train that brought you somewhere disappears, for until that moment you still belong to something. To Coach S3, to Berth 41, to the woman who offered you puris wrapped in newspaper, to the child who kicked you twice while sleeping, to the vendor at Kota who sold you bad coffee, and for eleven hours these things constituted a temporary country, but then the train leaves and suddenly you are standing in a place where nobody knows that you have arrived.

Meera looked at the station clock, which read 4:23, and she smiled not because she was happy but because perhaps there had been traffic, perhaps the scooter had broken down, perhaps the message had not been received, perhaps the clock here was wrong, for there are a surprising number of explanations available to a person who does not yet wish to understand the truth. She dragged her suitcase towards a bench, the broken wheel making a dull, repetitive sound against the concrete as she sat down beside an old man who was eating a guava with a small knife, cutting each slice carefully and sprinkling salt upon it from a folded piece of newspaper.

“You waiting for someone?” he asked, and Meera replied that she was, and the old man nodded as though this were sufficient. For in India, waiting is considered a complete occupation, nobody asking what you do while waiting or what waiting costs, but merely acknowledging it with a quiet understanding, as though to say that we are all waiting for someone. The old man finished his guava at 4:40, and somebody came for him. A young woman touching his feet, taking his bag, and complaining that he had not called when the train reached the previous station, while he complained that his phone battery was dead. They left arguing as Meera watched them disappear through the exit before checking her own phone, finding no messages, and placing it back into her handbag.

At five o’clock the platform changed, as railway platforms do, altering their populations without altering themselves. The sweepers arrived with long brooms, a troop of monkeys crossed the tin roof above Platform Two, the tea seller refilled his kettle, the sun moved further west, and a new crowd began forming for the 5:35 passenger train to Devpura. Meera remained on the bench, and at 5:12 she bought tea in a clay cup, holding it between both hands and drinking it though it was too sweet, paying with a fifty-rupee note for which the boy promised change he never returned. For the rest of the evening she occasionally thought about those thirty rupees, not because she needed them but because the mind, when faced with a large abandonment, often chooses a small injustice to be angry about, something manageable, something that can be understood, something that has arithmetic.

At 5:35 the passenger train arrived and people pushed and shouted. A woman carrying three bags and a sleeping child trying to enter before the passengers inside had descended, a man yelling at another man, somebody laughing, a policeman blowing a whistle that nobody obeyed, and then the train left and the platform emptied again. Meera checked her phone and found nothing, and she remembered being nine years old, waiting outside her school after an annual function. The children had gone, the teachers had gone, the watchman had begun closing the classrooms, and she had sat on the low wall near the gate wearing a paper crown because she had played a tree in a school play. She had waited for forty-five minutes until someone finally arrived and told her, “Why are you making that face? We came, didn’t we?”, and she remembered not the waiting but the sentence, as though arrival erased waiting, as though the forty-five minutes had not existed. As though a child sitting alone beneath a gulmohar tree could simply be collected and the loneliness cancelled, and perhaps this was when Meera first learned that waiting did not count as suffering. For nothing happened to you while you waited, nobody hit you, nobody insulted you, nobody died, you merely sat somewhere while the world continued without you, and what complaint could possibly be made about that?

At six the station lights came on one by one, white tubes flickering against the approaching darkness as moths gathered around them and the station announcement crackled with a recorded voice announcing the arrival of a train that would not arrive for another two hours. She stood up, her legs stiff, and walked to the end of the platform where beyond the tracks lay fields. Perhaps mustard or wheat, she could not tell in the fading light, and a boy was flying a kite from the roof of a small house. The kite rose steadily above the electrical wires and for a moment Meera watched it and wondered why nobody ever told children the truth about growing up. They told you to study hard, to be good, not to talk to strangers, to finish your milk, but nobody said that most of your life would be spent waiting. Waiting for examination results, for a telephone call, for somebody to change their mind, for the doctor to come out of a room, for a promotion given to somebody less deserving, for children to visit, for apologies from people who sleep perfectly well without giving them, for the person who said five minutes, for the person who said next year, for the person who said when things get better.  Nobody tells you that life is not made of arrivals but of platforms, and that we are all standing on one, holding luggage and looking at the clock.

At 6:30 she called again, and the phone rang several times before stopping. She looked at the screen and saw that the call had ended and she waited, thinking perhaps it would be returned. It  was not.

She put the phone away aware that the tea seller was watching her, for people who wait too long eventually become visible. First they go unnoticed and then they are observed by everyone. The porter, the tea seller, the stationmaster, the woman selling boiled eggs, until waiting becomes a small public performance and people begin wondering who she is waiting for, why they have not come, how long she will remain, for the humiliation of abandonment is rarely private in India and there is always an audience.

At seven, a woman sat beside her carrying a sleeping child whose head rested upon her shoulder. The woman looking exhausted, asked which train Meera was waiting for, and Meera replied that she had already arrived, and when asked how long she had been waiting she said not long, though it had been al. The woman did not ask anything further, for which Meera was grateful, and they sat together silently until the child woke and began crying. The woman opened a plastic container, removed a paratha, tore it into small pieces, and fed the child with increasing urgency until the child finally ate. There was something in the woman’s final plea that contained exhaustion, love, anger, defeat, the entire history of women feeding people who did not understand what it had cost to prepare the food.

At 7:25 a man came running, and the woman stood and told him he was late, repeating it as he attempted to explain about the bus, and then she began walking away while he followed. The child, now awake, looked over her shoulder at Meera, who waved though the child did not wave back. At eight Meera became hungry and bought a packet of biscuits, eating some and saving the rest, while the station grew cold in that peculiar railway-station way produced by concrete floors, iron benches, and the knowledge that you do not belong there. She wrapped her shawl around herself, remembering how her mother had given it to her years ago with instructions meant to prepare her for weather, though mothers cannot prepare daughters for silences, closed doors, missed opportunities, or the people who promise to meet you at stations.

At 8:17 Meera called again, but this time the phone was switched off. She listened to the recorded voice until the end before calling again and again, as though repetition might exhaust reality or persuade some unseen clerk within the machinery of the world to grant her this one thing. At 8:45 she went to the toilet and cried silently in the third cubicle. Women learn many forms of crying and concealment, and when she returned someone else was sitting on her bench, and though she felt a brief anger she understood that places do not remember those who suffer in them. So she sat elsewhere.

At nine the Suryagarh–Delhi Express arrived and the platform came alive once more, porters running, families gathering luggage, people shouting coach numbers, and a young woman stood near the door of Coach A1 while a man outside held her hand through the bars as the train began moving. For several seconds they walked together before separating, and Meera watched her disappear and wondered which was worse, to leave someone or to arrive for someone who did not come.

At 9:30 the stationmaster approached her and asked if everything was all right, and she replied that she was waiting, and though he suggested she call again or sit in the waiting room, she declined. He left after advising her to be careful with her luggage. At ten the station grew quiet, not silent but emptied of urgency, and Meera sat alone with her phone battery nearly gone. She remembered all the other stations of her life, the interview rooms, hospital corridors, dining tables, offices, birthdays, festivals, promises of next month or later, and she thought that perhaps the cruellest word in the English language was not goodbye but soon. For goodbye ends something while soon allows you to wait.

At 10:43 Meera finally understood that nobody was coming, and the understanding arrived without drama or without thunder or collapse. It simply settled into her as she looked once more towards the empty entrance and waited a few minutes longer, because even after the heart understands the body asks for a little more time.

At 10:48 she stood, gathered her things, and walked towards the exit, pausing once to look back at the platform where she had waited. She felt the strange comfort of unfinished hope, yet knowing now that sometimes nobody comes, not because you were not worth coming for or because you waited incorrectly, but simply because they do not. And although it is not the end of the world it feels exactly like it.

She descended the twelve steps to the road, counting them as she went. She stepped out into the night where auto-rickshaw drivers surrounded her asking where she wished to go, and she hesitated, for it seemed an enormous question, too large for that hour and that place, yet she chose one and asked to be taken to a nearby hotel. As the auto-rickshaw moved away she watched the station recede until it disappeared, and though she did not feel brave or strong or healed, she moved forward nonetheless, carried by the simple fact of motion.

The town passed around her, and she held her handbag upon her lap, containing her phone, her wallet, a packet of biscuits, a handkerchief, and a small paper ticket proving that she had arrived somewhere. She touched it before beginning to cry again, this time without hiding it, while the driver said nothing. She would remember him for that. The town unfolded in lights and windows and lives, Meera understood, perhaps not then but later, that this is how most people survive. Not magnificently or heroically, but quietly, by reaching the platform, waiting longer than they should. When they finally understand that nobody is coming, they gather what remains and walk on, step by step.

Somewhere between the platform and the road, between the person they waited for and the person they became when no one came, life has already moved on….and, in its cruel, tender way, carried them with it.

— -  -  -

… Part 1

Arun remained standing before the open drawer longer than he cared to admit. It was a foolish thing to do, he told himself, to assign meaning to the direction of another person’s gaze. Passport photographs were imperfect things. People blinked. They shifted. Photographers spoke at the wrong moment. The elderly man’s eyes had perhaps wandered for no reason at all.

Yet the feeling persisted. Someone had been standing just beyond the camera. Maybe someone the old man recognised. The thought followed Arun home and returned with him the following evening. By the end of the week he had begun opening random drawers after midnight. At first he found nothing unusual. Hundreds of anonymous faces stared dutifully ahead, lit by the same flat government flash, each expression compressed into the narrow dimensions required by official instruction. They belonged to teachers, electricians, nurses, labourers, brides, students, children wearing all sorts of clothes. An entire country waited patiently inside those cabinets.

Then, on another Thursday, he noticed the change.

A woman whose photograph he distinctly remembered from the previous week no longer smiled. It was not an overtly dramatic difference. Only the corners of her mouth had softened, as though whatever had amused her a week earlier had quietly departed. Arun carried the envelope to the records room and requested the digital archive.

The image on the computer remained exactly as it had always been. The printed photograph did not. He checked them again. The pixels insisted upon one expression. The paper preserved another.

Mrs. D’Souza found him still comparing them when dawn seeped reluctantly through the frosted windows.

“You’ve begun measuring faces.”

“I think someone is replacing the photographs.”

“No.”

She spoke with the certainty of someone correcting the weather.

“They replace themselves.”

He waited for a smile that never came.

“You’re serious.”

“I stopped joking about this building twenty years ago.”

She reached for the photograph, held it beneath the light, then returned it to him with remarkable tenderness.

“They only change after the person has finished travelling.”

“What does that mean?”

“I hoped you wouldn’t ask.”

She walked away.

After that morning, Arun no longer hurried through his rounds. He listened. Every Thursday the same sounds returned. The restrained murmur of unseen conversations. The faint shuffle of papers. A stamp striking ink. The distant ring of a service bell that no longer existed. None of the noises belonged to the present building. They belonged to another time inhabiting the same walls.

One rainy night he searched the basement archives. Old ledgers occupied shelves that sagged beneath their own memory. Dust lay thick upon the bindings. Silverfish scattered whenever he disturbed a pile. Near the back he found registers dating to the late nineteen-sixties. Inside one, pressed between two brittle pages, rested a newspaper cutting.

PASSPORT OFFICE SHIFTED TO NEW PREMISES AFTER TERMINAL FIRE.

The article was brief. A fire had broken out at the old international departure terminal decades earlier. Officially, everyone had been evacuated. The damage had been described as minimal. There were no names and no casualty list. Yet someone had underlined a single sentence in blue pencil.

“Several personal documents could not be recovered.”

Arun folded the clipping into his pocket. That evening he travelled to Bimal Chatterjee’s modest house on the edge of the city. The old guard answered after a long delay.

“You found the article.”

It was not a question.

“You knew about the fire.”

“I was there.”

“They said no one died.”

“They said many things.”

Bimal invited him inside. The room smelled faintly of mustard oil and old books. For a long while neither man spoke. At last Bimal lifted a framed photograph from a cupboard. It showed the old terminal before the fire. Crowded. Ordinary. Thousands of travellers moving beneath a departure board. He pointed towards a narrow office in the background.

“The Photograph Department used to be there.”

“It was moved?”

“No.”

Bimal looked at him steadily.

“The files were moved.”

Silence settled between them.

“The room remained.”

“It happened on a Thursday,” Bimal said at last.

“The fire spread too quickly. Most escaped. A few did not. Some were waiting for emergency travel documents. Some had surrendered their passports that morning. Their photographs remained inside the cabinets.”

“But surely…”

“The photographs survived.”

“How?”

“I’ve never understood that part.”

The old man’s voice had become almost inaudible.

“When the new office opened, every surviving photograph was transferred. Clerks began noticing little things. Eyes that no longer met the camera. Smiles fading. Heads turning. At first they blamed dampness. Printing errors. Then they realised the changes always occurred after news arrived from abroad.”

“What news?”

“Deaths.”

Arun stared at him.

Bimal continued.

“It was never every traveller. Only those whose last journey ended without anyone waiting to remember them.”

The following Thursday Arun returned before midnight. He switched off every light except one desk lamp in the Photograph Department. The building seemed to hold its breath. When the clock struck twelve, the first drawer slid open. Not violently. Gently. As though someone had pulled it from the other side.

Then another.

And another.

One by one the cabinets eased themselves open. Thousands of photographs caught the lamplight. No wind stirred the room. Yet every loose picture trembled. The murmur returned. This time he understood it. It was not conversation.

It was the soft chorus of immigration counters.

There were names being called, countries pronounced and pages turning. The endless rhythm of departure. He should have fled. Instead he walked between the cabinets. Every photograph had changed. Not grotesquely. Not impossibly. Merely truthfully. A young sailor appeared to be listening to someone behind him. An elderly woman seemed moments away from tears. A child looked upwards in wonder. A doctor wore the exhausted relief of someone recognising home. Each face carried an emotion no camera had ever captured.

The final one.

Then Arun saw her. The little girl with the blue ribbons. She no longer smiled. She stood exactly as before, yet her eyes had shifted towards the office door. Waiting patiently. For someone who had not arrived.

Almost without thinking, Arun whispered,

“Who are you waiting for?”

The room became perfectly silent. Not quiet. Silent. Even the flyover seemed to forget the weight of passing trucks. The little girl’s expression altered by the smallest imaginable degree. Her eyes lifted. Past Arun. Towards the doorway. He turned. A man stood there. He was middle-aged and had a travel bag over one shoulder, and had a passport clutched tightly in one hand. His clothes belonged to another decade. His face carried the bewilderment of someone who had entered the wrong room.

He looked first at the girl. Then at Arun. Finally he smiled.

“My train was late,” he said softly.

The little girl smiled too. For the first time since Arun had known her photograph.

The man held out his hand. She took it. Neither walked away. They simply became a little fainter, like reflections disappearing from glass as evening gathers outside. The photograph fluttered once. Then settled. When Arun looked again, the drawer was empty. Only the blue-ink words remained on the envelope.

Application withdrawn. Nothing else.

Years passed. The Passport Office became digital, and the steel cabinets disappeared. Paper files were shredded. The Photograph Department was converted into a server room where silent machines replaced silent clerks. Arun stayed until retirement. On his final evening he locked the building, signed the register and paused before leaving. The young guard waiting to replace him asked, almost absent-mindedly,

“Anything I should know about the night shift?”

Arun smiled.

For a moment he almost answered with practical advice about faulty lights and leaking pipes. Instead he remembered another old guard standing beneath the same yellow light many years before. He handed over the keys. Then he said quietly,

“If a photograph begins looking back at you...”

The young guard laughed. Arun did not.

He walked out into the evening, listening to the traffic beyond the flyover. Halfway to the gate he stopped. Behind him, from somewhere deep within the building where no paper records remained, came the unmistakable sound of a rubber stamp striking an ink pad.

Once.. twice… then a pause.

As though someone, somewhere beyond the reach of memory, had finally approved another journey.

- - -

THE END…

“If a photograph begins looking back at you,” the old guard said, “do not be the first to look away.”

Arun laughed because the sentence had arrived so casually that it seemed incapable of carrying any weight.

The old man continued folding yesterday’s newspaper into neat squares. He did not smile. Outside the security cabin, the evening crowd drifted through the gates of the Regional Passport Office with the impatience peculiar to government buildings. Plastic folders rubbed against one another. A child complained about the heat. Somewhere in the courtyard a tea vendor struck the rim of his aluminium kettle twice with a spoon before pouring another glass.

“You tell that to all the new guards?” Arun asked.

“No.”

“Then why me?”

The old man took longer than necessary to answer.

“Because you’ll be here on Thursday.”

Before Arun could ask what that meant, his name was called from the reception counter. His appointment papers had arrived. By the time he looked back, the old guard had returned to his newspaper as though the conversation had never happened. His name was Bimal Chatterjee. He retired three days later.

Nobody organised a farewell. Government offices rarely found time to celebrate departures. Files continued arriving, stamps continued falling, clerks continued arguing over missing signatures. Bimal accepted a thin envelope containing his pension papers, shook hands with three people who barely looked up from their desks, and walked out carrying a steel tiffin box polished smooth by four decades of use.

Just before leaving, he stopped beside Arun.

“The Photograph Department is locked after six.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Don’t open it after midnight.”

Arun smiled.

“I don’t scare easily.”

Bimal nodded, almost sadly.

“Neither did I.”

He left without another word.

The Passport Office stood beside an ageing flyover whose concrete pillars were dark with monsoon stains. Even after midnight, trucks rolled overhead with a slow metallic groan that made the windowpanes tremble. Every few minutes the vibration travelled through the building until it settled somewhere inside the walls like an old memory refusing sleep.

The building itself was older than anyone cared to admit. Successive governments had painted over its cracks without repairing them. The corridors smelled faintly of damp paper, floor disinfectant and carbon copies. Ceiling fans clicked above rows of plastic chairs worn pale by years of waiting. There were portraits of former ministers as they watched the public with expressions that had long ago faded into the colour of weak tea. Nothing about the place invited imagination. Perhaps that was why imagination settled there so easily.

Arun had worked night security before. At warehouses, hospitals, a private school. Buildings changed after midnight. They always did. The pipes expanded. Doors settled. The rats held conventions beneath staircases, and loneliness supplied the rest.

He trusted loneliness.

It explained far more than ghosts ever could. His duties were simple. Lock the public halls, record the meter readings, walk each floor every hour and sign the register. Then he waited for dawn. The second floor ended in a narrow corridor where the Photograph Department occupied a room no larger than a classroom.

The first time Arun entered, he paused. Not because it frightened him, but because it was unexpectedly beautiful. The solid steel cabinets reached almost to the ceiling. Thousands of brown envelopes rested inside them, tied carefully with white cotton tape. Each contained passport photographs, cancelled applications, duplicate submissions, corrected identities, rejected documents, expired passports, people who had changed their names, faces that had once been considered unsuitable because someone smiled too broadly or wore spectacles or tilted their head a fraction too much.

Every life left behind a spare face.

The room held them all while the dust like an old friend floated lazily through the yellow light. Someone had placed a brass bowl of dried jasmine on the windowsill years earlier. It had become dust without losing its shape.

A clerk named Mrs. D’Souza noticed him standing there.

“You’ll spoil your eyes.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Looking at too many photographs.”

She shut a cabinet with more force than necessary.

“They begin to resemble people.”

Arun laughed.

“They are people.”

“No.”

She adjusted her spectacles.

“They used to be.”

The first week passed quietly. The second did not. On Thursday evening, shortly after half-past eleven, the electricity flickered. Only once. The emergency lights came on for barely a second before normal power returned. Arun continued his rounds. Nothing unusual.

At exactly twelve o’clock, however, he heard laughter.

It came from upstairs. Not loud laughter, not even drunken laughter. It sounded instead like several strangers attempting to remain polite while waiting in a queue. Small bursts of conversation. Someone clearing their throat. The faint rustle of paper.

He climbed to the second floor. The corridor was empty. Every office remained locked. The sound had stopped. He stood listening until he became aware of another noise.

Click. Click. Click. A rubber stamp. Steady. Patient.

As though an invisible clerk continued approving files somewhere beyond the wall. He followed the sound. It led him to the photograph Department. The door was still locked. He unlocked it. The room lay exactly as before. The cabinets. The dust. The bowl of dead jasmine. There was nothing else.

The stamping had ceased.

Arun smiled to himself.

Perhaps it was the pipes. The fact this was an old building and the acoustics that accompany it maybe? He switched off the light and turned to leave. Something made him look back. One of the cabinet drawers stood open by perhaps two inches. He was certain it had been shut. He yanked it fully open.

Inside lay hundreds of passport photographs arranged alphabetically. Nothing remarkable. He pushed the drawer closed. It stopped halfway. Something had caught. He pulled it open again. A single photograph had slipped sideways.

A little girl. Perhaps nine years old wearing two blue ribbons and a white school shirt. She smiled directly into the camera with the effortless confidence children possess before they learn that photographs can survive them. On the reverse someone had written, in blue ink:

Application withdrawn.

There was no name, no file number. Nothing. Arun replaced the photograph, closed the drawer and locked the room. As he reached the staircase, he realised the laughter had returned. Only this time it sounded farther away. Almost as though it were travelling downstairs ahead of him. The following morning Mrs. D’Souza found him making tea.

“You opened the Photograph Department.”

It was not a question.

“How did you know?”

She stirred sugar into her cup without looking at him.

“The dust moves.”

Arun laughed again.

“You people have strange ways of frightening newcomers.”

“We don’t frighten them.”

She met his eyes.

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“For Thursday.”

She carried her tea away before he could ask another question.

That night Arun returned to the Photograph Department, and it was not because he believed anything. It was because he disliked unfinished conversations. The thought of not returning nagged him. He opened the same drawer.

The little girl’s photograph was gone. In its place rested another. An elderly man with gentle eyes. The was nothing unusual except for one impossible detail. He was looking over the photographer’s shoulder. Not at the camera. Not away from it. At someone standing just beyond the frame.

-- - -

Note: Click here to read Part II

Long before dawn, when the river was still only a pale suggestion moving through the darkness and the hills wore the last fragments of night upon their shoulders, the jungle was already awake. Not the jungle, people came searching for with binoculars and cameras and lists of animals they hoped to see before returning home. Not the jungle of excitement and photographs. This was the older jungle, the one that lived beneath attention. It stirred beneath carpets of leaves, inside hollow logs softened by rain and age, beneath stones that remembered yesterday’s warmth. It was a world of tiny lives and quiet labour, where creatures so small they rarely earned a glance carried responsibilities upon which entire forests depended.

At the foot of an old sal tree near a bend in the Ramganga River lived two dung beetles. Nobody knew they existed.

The elephants did not know. The deer did not know. The tourists certainly did not know. Even the monkeys, who knew everything, had never noticed them. Yet, for years the two beetles had worked side by side. If beetles had names, perhaps they would have been called Bira and Chini.

Every morning they emerged from their burrow while mist still lingered among the grasses and began their journey across the forest floor. To larger creatures the terrain appeared ordinary. To them it was enormous. Grass stems rose like pillars. Pebbles became hills. Fallen twigs forced long detours. Yet they moved patiently through this vast landscape, rolling spheres of elephant dung that often weighed many times more than they did and Inside those rough brown spheres slept futures.

Jamun seeds.

Fig seeds.

Bamboo seeds.

Seeds from trees that would one day cast shade over resting deer, feed hungry birds, shelter nests, hold riverbanks together and survive storms. The beetles did not know any of this. They simply did their work. The jungle knew. That was enough.

Bira loved Chini.

He never said it because love in the jungle was not something that required words. It lived inside habits. Every evening he searched for the smoothest patch of earth near their burrow. Every morning he chose the heavier load. Whenever a journey became difficult, he found himself positioned behind her, helping push.

Chini noticed every one of these things. She simply was shy to say anything. Sometimes she secretly pushed part of her burden toward him when he wasn’t looking. Sometimes she found food first and then acted surprised when he discovered it.

This was their language. The river understood it. The trees understood it. The jungle had been watching creatures love one another for far too long to require explanations. The years passed gently. The rains arrived and departed.

The Ramganga swelled into a broad brown force during the monsoons and shrank again beneath winter skies. Herds of elephants crossed the river. Hornbills travelled between fruiting trees. Langurs shouted warnings from the canopy. Fish moved through deep pools hidden beneath overhanging roots. And all the while, beneath the notice of almost everyone, Bira and Chini continued planting forests.

One winter morning they paused atop a small rise and watched a herd of elephants crossing the riverr. The oldest female entered first. The younger elephants followed. Tiny calves stumbled through the current while older siblings nudged them forward. For a long time neither beetle spoke. Finally Chini sighed.

“They’re beautiful.”

“They are.”

“Do you think they know how much trouble they cause?”

Bira laughed.

The herd had left behind enough work for a month.

“Probably not.”

The elephants disappeared into the forest. Behind them remained hundreds of seeds. Ahead of them waited forests they would never realise they helped create.

The jungle was full of such partnerships. Everyone was helping everyone else. Most simply didn’t know it. And that was perhaps the most beautiful experience on earth. To help and be helped without agenda.

Then came the drought. At first the changes were subtle. The river narrowed. The pools dried earlier than usual.The grass lost its colour. The air felt sharper somehow. The animals grew restless. The old elephant matriarch crossed the river weeks before she normally would. Hornbills abandoned certain fruit trees. Even the cicadas seemed uncertain, making far less noise than they usually do.

The jungle was speaking.

Only those who lived inside it understood the language. Food became harder to find. Many insects disappeared. Days grew hotter. One afternoon Bira and Chini rested beneath a fallen branch while nearby a safari vehicle stopped abruptly. Excited voices drifted through the trees. A guide pointed toward distant grass.

A tiger had appeared.

Cameras rose instantly. People leaned from seats. Someone whispered urgently.Someone else gasped. Then the tiger vanished.The excitement moved away with it. The vehicles followed and the dust settled. Silence returned..

Bira watched the empty track.

“They never notice us.”

Chini smiled.

“The river notices us.”

“The river is busy.”

“The river notices everything.”

He looked toward the Ramganga. It moved steadily between stone and forest as though carrying secrets collected over centuries. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps being unseen was not the same thing as being unknown.

The drought finally broke. But the monsoon that arrived seemed determined to compensate for lost time. The rain fell without pause. The streams overflowed. The riverbanks collapsed and ancient trees disappeared into rushing water. The jungle trembled beneath days of relentless rain.

Bira and Chini remained deep inside their burrow while the world above rearranged itself. When sunlight finally returned, the forest had changed. New channels cut through old pathways. Fresh sandbars glittered beside the river. Entire sections of forest looked unfamiliar. Yet life immediately began repairing itself.

Spiders rewove. Termites rebuilt. Young plants emerged from mud. The jungle’s greatest gift was not survival. It was recovery.

Years passed.

A fig tree near their burrow grew taller. Bira remembered carrying the seed. Chini remembered nearly losing it during a floods. Now birds nested among its branches. Monkeys visited every fruiting season. The tree had become part of the landscape. Neither beetle mentioned it often. Still, both felt quietly proud whenever they passed beneath its shade.

One evening they sat beside the river watching hornbills cross a crimson sky. The water reflected the last light. The forest settled toward sleep. Chini rested beside him.

“Do you ever wonder what happens to all the trees we plant?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

Bira considered the question.

“Because we’ll never know.”

She laughed softly.

“You have a talent for optimism.”

He laughed too. The sound disappeared into the gathering darkness. Neither knew it would be one of their last evenings together.

The fire arrived the following summer. Not a great disaster. Not the sort that appeared in newspapers. Just a small fire born from carelessness somewhere beyond the forest boundary.

A forgotten ember. A careless flame. A tiny mistake.

The grass accepted it. The wind encouraged it.Soon smoke drifted between the trees. The animals fled and the birds abandoned nests. Monkeys moved through the canopy with unusual urgency.

The jungle knew fire. Fire was ancient. But ancient dangers remained dangerous. Bira and Chini hurried toward damp ground near the river. Heat followed behind them. Ash floated through the air. The forest crackled. For a moment it seemed they would escape.

Then came a sharp sound overhead. A branch weakened by flame broke free. Bira heard it before he saw it.

A crack.

A rush.

A shadow.

The branch struck the ground. Dust exploded around them. When it settled, Chini was trapped beneath it.

Bira rushed forward. He pushed. Screamed. Dug. Scraped. Strained. Nothing moved. Nobody heard his cries. Hours passed. The fire continued onward. Smoke slowly thinned. Evening arrived.

Chini never rose again. For three days Bira remained beside her. The river flowed. Birds sang. Leaves moved in the wind. The jungle continued.

Nothing felt more cruel.

How could the world continue? How could sunlight still arrive each morning?How could trees still produce fruit? Loss made every ordinary thing seem offensive.

Weeks became months. Bira stopped working. Seeds remained where they fell. Paths vanished beneath weeds. The fig tree continued growing. The river continued travelling. Everything moved forward except him.

One evening an old tortoise approached.The tortoise had lived through floods, fires, droughts and storms older animals barely remembered. He sat beside Bira.

For a long time neither spoke. The sky darkened. Finally the tortoise nodded toward the river.

“It lost a bank last year.”

Bira said nothing.

“The fig tree lost a branch.”

Silence.

“The elephant herd lost a calf.”

Still silence.

The tortoise watched the first stars appear.

“The jungle loses things every day.”

“What does it gain?” Bira asked.

The old tortoise thought for a moment. Then he answered.

“Room.”

Bira hated the answer.For weeks he carried it around like a thorn. Then one morning he noticed something growing near the burned clearing.

Saplings 🌱

Dozens of them. Small green shoots rising from blackened earth. He recognised the leaves.Many belonged to seeds he and Chini had carried years earlier. Some perhaps came from the final season they had worked together.

The sight hurt. The sight healed. Both feelings arrived together. The jungle often worked that way. Slowly Bira returned to work.

Not because grief disappeared. It never did. Instead it learned to travel beside him. Years passed. The burned clearing became a grove. The saplings became trees. Birds arrived. Shade spread across the ground. Fruit appeared. Life returned in abundance.

One winter morning a safari jeep stopped nearby. A child pointed toward the grove.

“What are those trees?”

The guide glanced briefly.

“Oh, just young trees.”

The vehicle moved on.

Bira watched from beneath a leaf. Just young trees. As though forests appeared by themselves. As though nobody carried their beginnings.

Yet for the first time he did not feel anger. The jungle knew. That was enough.

By the time he grew old, the grove had become one of the most beautiful places in the forest. Deer rested there during summer afternoons. Birds nested there every spring. Monkeys argued among its branches. The soil remained cool even during the hottest months. One evening, near the end of his life, Bira climbed a small rise overlooking the Ramganga.

The river glowed gold beneath the setting sun. Elephants emerged from distant forest.Hornbills crossed the sky. Behind him the grove whispered in the evening wind.

Thousands of leaves moving together. For a moment he closed his eyes. The sound reminded him of Chini. Not as memory. Not as absence. As consequence. The trees existed because she had once lived. The shade existed because she had once worked. The birds existed here because she had once pushed a burden through grass taller than herself.

Love, he realised, did not disappear. It simply changed shape. It entered roots. Entered shade. Entered fruit. Entered futures. The following morning Bira did not wake.

The river continued. The elephants crossed. The hornbills flew. The grove remained. And beneath the soil, not far away, another young beetle emerged into the world and began pushing a small brown sphere across the forest floor. Inside it slept several seeds. Inside those seeds slept forests. And inside those forests waited lives not yet born, sheltered by the quiet labour of creatures no one would ever notice.

The jungle watched the tiny beetle begin its journey and carrying forward its oldest lesson….that love is not measured by how long it stays beside us, but by what it leaves behind, by the strength it creates in others, and by the hope that continues to grow.

— - -

Author’s Note:

A few evenings ago, at sunset in a national park, I watched hundreds of deer emerge from the forest and make their way into an open meadow. The ranger told me they do this because by nightfall the tigers will come, and out there they stand a better chance. They know one of them may not see the morning, yet they gather anyway and face the darkness together. There was something quietly magnificent about that…less like survival and more like courage. It reminded me of Pink Floyd’s Learning to Fly. It seemed only apt.

“Tell me,” she asked him one evening, while the last turmeric light dissolved quietly over the river, “at what age does a person stop waiting to be chosen?”

He did not answer immediately.

Below them, the Ganga moved like old silk in darkness. A boat drifted past with one lantern hanging from its side. Somewhere someone was singing awfully. Somewhere someone was crying. Somewhere sandalwood burned beside flesh and prayer rose with smoke into the fading Benaras sky.

And the city….as it has for centuries, held all of it together without judgment.Love. Ash. Bells. Rot. Milk boiling over. Wet stone. Death arriving barefoot. And two people sitting side by side like unfinished sentences.

Her name was Meera. She was thirty-six. Old enough to have survived disappointment more than once. Young enough to still be wounded by hope. She lived alone in a narrow rented house near Assi Ghat where the staircase leaned slightly to one side and the plaster peeled from the walls like paper from forgotten letters. In summer the ceiling fan made a tired clicking sound all night. In winter the floors turned cold as metal. During monsoon, damp crept into everything, bedsheets, cupboards, books, memory.

Each morning she woke before the city did. Before the priests gathered. Before the tea stalls steamed. Before the students bicycled through the lanes. Before the pilgrims came wrapped in shawls carrying brass plates and marigolds. At dawn Benaras belongs to those who cannot sleep.

Dogs. Boatmen. Widows. Mourners. Milkmen. And women carrying private thoughts too heavy for daylight.Meera walked through the narrow gullies in rubber slippers and an old cotton sari, brass lota in hand, passing shuttered shops, sleeping cows and walls stained with time. The lanes smelled of incense, wet clay, milk, dung, flowers and river water.

Nothing in the world smells like Benaras before sunrise. It smells ancient. Not old. Ancient. Like something that has witnessed every human ache and become quiet because of it.

She taught Hindi literature at a girls’ college nearby. Poetry mostly. Kabir. Amrita Pritam. Mahadevi Verma. She spent her days teaching young women how longing had always been turned into language. And spent her nights carrying her own in silence.

Then she met Arvind.

He was forty-two, an architect from Delhi, in Benaras for the restoration of a decaying riverside haveli near Darbhanga Ghat. He had come for six months and stayed longer. He first saw her in Godowlia market arguing with a coriander seller.

“You’re charging too much.”

“Madam, everything is expensive.”

“Then be expensive honestly.”

The vegetable seller laughed. Arvind laughed too. She turned and looked at him.

He smiled.

That was all. And like many things that ruin a life beautifully, it began as nothing. After that he kept appearing. At the tea stall near Assi. At the bookstore where old books smelled of mildew and dust. On the ghats in evening light. Outside the paan shop where old men debated politics like unpaid philosophers.

Sometimes they spoke. Sometimes they walked. Kabhi Kabhi they sat without speaking at all. And silence slowly became a language between them.

“What do you miss most?” he once asked her.

“My twenties,” she replied.

“Why?”

“Because I thought life would explain itself by now.”

He laughed.

“And you?”

He looked toward the river for a long while.

“Certainty.”

Benaras entered them slowly. Like smoke enters cotton. Like haldi stains fingertips. Like grief enters bone. Monsoon arrived. Rainwater ran down temple steps into the river until stone and water forgot where one ended and the other began. A buffalo stood half-submerged in the flooded edges. Children dove laughing into brown currents. Priests lifted wet robes with one hand. Tea sellers covered kettles with cloth.
Boats knocked against one another like teeth in cold weather.

And still they met.

Under leaking tin roofs. By chai stalls wrapped in steam. On the ghats under one umbrella neither held properly.

One evening she asked him, “Do you think people meet for a reason?”

“No.”

She looked at him.

“No?”

“I think people meet because life is careless.”

She smiled.

“That’s terrible.”

“It’s true.”

“And then?”

“Then we spend years trying to call that carelessness fate.”

She laughed out loud then. But later that night she repeated his words to herself in the dark. Life is careless.Still, she fell in love with him. Love after thirty-five is different. It doesn’t arrive like spring. It arrives like monsoon.

Heavy.

Unexpected.

Flooding rooms you had finally learned to live inside. It leaks into routine. Into hunger. Into loneliness. Into ordinary hours. Meera began noticing ridiculous things. The way he folded his sleeves exactly twice. The way he held hot tea with both hands in winter. The crease beside his mouth when he smiled. The way silence softened around him. She began waiting. For footsteps. For messages. For evening.

Waiting is a country women know too well.

One night while they sat on the stone steps watching diyas drift across the river, she asked quietly…

“Arvind… what are we doing?”

He did not answer.

The water touched the ghats below them.

A temple bell rang somewhere behind.

“Do you want to know?” she asked.

He exhaled.

“Meera…”

“Say it properly.”

He looked away.

“I care for you.”

She waited.

“But my life is complicated.”

She smiled.

“Complicated. That famous word.”

“That’s unfair.”

“I’m not trying to be fair.”

After that, everything shifted. He still came. Still called. Still sat beside her. But distance had entered the room like winter air through cracked windows. Invisible. And everywhere. Then one evening she saw him standing outside the haveli, speaking softly on the phone. His voice carried tenderness. A softness women recognize instantly. When he saw her, he ended the call.

“Who was it?”

He hesitated.

And hesitation said everything.

“My wife.”

Meera stared at him.

“We’ve been speaking again,” he said.

“Speaking?”

“We’re trying to fix things.” The words entered her like shattered glass. Not clean enough to kill. Sharp enough to remain.

“And when were you planning to tell me?”

“I didn’t know how.”

“So you said nothing.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

She laughed.

No bitterness. Only exhaustion.

“No one ever does.”

That night she lay awake listening to Benaras continue without her permission. Pressure cookers whistled before dawn. Dogs barked in the alley. Someone coughed in the next building. Temple bells began at first light. A child cried. A woman called for milk. A funeral procession passed somewhere below.

Life continuing. Rude in its continuity. And she understood something terrible.

Sometimes heartbreak is not losing someone. It is discovering they were never yours in the place you believed they were. Winter arrived in Benaras quietly. Fog swallowed the river each morning. Boatmen became silhouettes. Tea glasses steamed in cold hands. Sunlight appeared in brief patches across old walls and old women sat in them like lizards warming ancient bones.

Weeks later Arvind came to see her. He looked tired. As though regret had kept him company for too long.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said.

“For Delhi?”

“Yes.”

She nodded.

“I wanted to say sorry.”

She stood by the window.

“For what exactly?”

“For hurting you.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

Then said softly,

“You didn’t fail me.”

“It feels like I did.”

“No.”

She smiled.

“Life brought you to me unfinished and took you away unfinished. That isn’t failure.”

He lowered his eyes.

“I loved you.”

“I know.”

“Will you hate me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because hate is still intimacy.”

He said nothing.

“What will you do now?” he asked.

She looked toward the fog-covered river beyond the rooftops.

“What women always do.”

“Which is?”

“Continue.”

That night she walked alone to the ghats. Benaras glittered around her in fragments. Temple lamps floated over dark water like misplaced stars. Fire rose from Manikarnika. The air smelled of smoke, ghee, mud and endings. She removed her slippers and stepped into the river. The stone beneath her feet was cold. Cold enough to feel truthful.

One foot.

Then the other.

The water rose around her ankles. Then her calves. Sharp as winter. Sharp as memory. Behind her the city murmured endlessly. Ahead, the river moved in silence. She thought of every version of herself she had once been. The girl who believed love arrived and stayed. The woman who waited. The woman who forgave quickly. The woman who kept setting out two cups for tea. The woman who mistook tenderness for promise. The river folded around her knees.

She closed her eyes.

Not to die. No. But to surrender something. His voice. His unfinished apologies. His absence. His almost-love. Everything still lodged inside her like splintered bone. And into the dark water she whispered….

“Take what is not mine anymore.”

The Ganga touched her without judgment. Cold. Ancient. Maternal.

Far away someone sang a bhajan woefully. A boat rope knocked against wood. A child called for his mother. A priest coughed. Life everywhere. Messy. Ordinary. Unfinished.

She stood there until her sari became heavy. Until the water carried circles away from her into darkness. Until memory loosened enough to float. Benaras watched. As it has watched women for thousands of years… arrive carrying flowers…
ash,
widowhood,
desire,
prayer,
children,
silence,
and broken love…

and they step into the river hoping something invisible will leave them there. Some return lighter. Some return emptier. Some never fully return. When Meera finally walked back up the stone steps, no one stopped her. No one asked where she had been. Benaras never asks. It simply breathes beside your sorrow until one day you begin breathing with it again. Behind her the river kept moving. Taking petals. Taking ash. Taking names.

Taking what people could no longer carry.

“Do you think planets remember us,” Isabela asked, “or do they just shake us off like dust after a storm?”

Captain Mateo Alvarez was slicing a guava in zero gravity with the concentration of a priest handling confession. Tiny pink cubes floated around him like wounded sunsets.

“I think,” he said, “planets remember everything. That’s the tragedy.”

Isabela smirked. “That sounds like something an old Cuban man says before cheating at dominoes.”

“I’m forty-six.”

“In space years,” she replied, “you’re basically antique furniture.”

The ship groaned softly around them. Not elegantly. Not like the polished silver spaceships from old American movies. The Santa Lucia sounded like an overworked bus climbing hills somewhere in rural Colombia. Tired. Faithful. Slightly asthmatic.

Outside the viewing glass, stars glittered with the cold arrogance of rich tourists in Cartagena.

Isabela caught a drifting guava slice. “You know what I miss most?”

Mateo sighed. “Here we go.”

“The sound of neighbors fighting through open windows.”

He blinked.

“In summer,” she continued, “in my grandmother’s street in Barranquilla, every apartment had the same argument every night. Somebody screaming about money. Somebody accusing somebody of dancing too close to somebody else at a party. Then ten minutes later everyone eating mangoes together.”

Mateo laughed quietly.

“Human beings,” she said, “are unbelievable.”

Below them floated Planet Eos-9, wrapped in jungles thick as spilled ink.

Their mission was simple, visit dying colonies and archive human life before it disappeared. Recipes. Songs. Local slang. Love letters. Funeral rituals. The Department of Cultural Continuity called it preservation.

Isabela called it emotional taxidermy.

She had joined after fleeing a marriage that collapsed so slowly it almost felt polite. Mateo had joined because his daughter stopped answering his calls two years ago.

Nobody in recruitment posters mentioned loneliness. The posters showed heroic explorers staring into galaxies. Not divorced women drinking cheap rum alone beside laundry machines.

The colony below had once been named Nueva Córdoba. Then Eos Administrative Sector 4. Humans always murdered beautiful names first.

As they descended, rainstorms crawled across the planet like bruises.

“You know what our problem is?” Isabela muttered.

“What now?”

“We leave Earth but carry it everywhere like overpacked mothers.”

The colony greeted them with nineteen residents, four chickens, and a mayor wearing flip-flops to an official ceremony. Mayor Esteban hugged them both immediately. Latin people considered personal space a northern conspiracy.

“We haven’t had visitors in twelve years,” he announced proudly.

“That explains the chickens,” Isabela whispered.

The colony smelled of wet wood, frying garlic, diesel, and old coffee. Human smells. Real smells. Not the sterile chemical cleanliness of orbital stations that always felt like hospitals pretending to be civilizations. An old woman named Rosa fed them before asking a single question.

“No conversation before food,” she declared. “That’s how governments steal your honesty.”

Her fish stew tasted almost like home. Almost. Like memory translated badly.That night rain hammered the colony roofs while electricity flickered on and off. Nobody reacted. Poor communities and space colonies shared the same religion: expect disappointment early. Unable to sleep, Isabela wandered the settlement corridors until she found an old man repairing a radio.

Not a communications console.

An actual radio.

“You know that won’t catch signals here, right?” she asked.

The man adjusted his glasses slowly. “I know.”

“Then why fix it?”

He smiled sadly. “My wife used to listen to boleros while cooking.”

He tapped the cracked speaker gently.

“When you miss someone long enough,” he said, “their habits become holy objects.”

The sentence entered Isabela like a knife finding its old wound.

Back on Earth, her marriage had ended over tiny stupid things. Noise. Jealousy. Burnt rice. Messages left unread too long. Love never died dramatically. It died like old paint peeling silently from walls.

She suddenly asked, “Did you love your wife until the end?”

The old man laughed softly.

“No. Some days I adored her. Some days I wanted to disappear into another country.”

Isabela frowned.

“That’s marriage,” he said. “Love is not constant emotion. It is constant return.”

The words haunted her.

The next evening the colony gathered for dinner beneath weak lantern light while storms rattled the roofs. Somebody played old salsa music through crackling speakers. Then the power died completely. Nobody panicked. Candles appeared. And slowly people began telling stories. Not heroic stories. Human stories. A woman confessed she once got drunk and kissed the wrong astronaut during a festival. A fisherman admitted he cried for two days because tomatoes on Eos-9 tasted “emotionally incorrect.”

The room exploded with laughter. Isabela watched their faces glowing gold in candlelight and realized something terrifying. Humanity did not survive because it was intelligent. Humanity survived because it attached unbearable emotional meaning to absolutely everything.

Songs. Streets. Coffee mugs. Smells after rain. Even suffering became family heirloom. Later that night, Mateo found her alone outside the colony dome watching lightning crawl silently across alien clouds.

“You’re thinking too hard again,” he said.

“How can you tell?”

“Your left eyebrow becomes philosophical.”

She smiled faintly.

“You know what scares me?” she whispered.

“What?”

“That maybe every civilization ends the same way.”

“How?”

“People sitting in dark rooms trying desperately to remember who they were.”

Mateo stared at the storm for a long time.

“Maybe that’s all civilization ever was.”

Three days later, they prepared to leave.

The archives were complete. Songs recorded. Recipes preserved. Humanity folded neatly into files again. As the Santa Lucia rose back into orbit, Isabela watched the colony shrink beneath endless rain. Then the alarms began screaming. Red lights flooded the ship. Mateo rushed to navigation.

“Debris field!”

Old mining wreckage surrounded them suddenly. Twisted metal. Cargo fragments. Broken satellites drifting like bones through water. Something slammed against the hull.The ship lurched violently.

Isabela grabbed the controls. “Hull breach on lower deck!”

Outside, floating through darkness, were the remains of another colony ship.

Ancient.

Dead. Except…

Mateo froze staring at the scanner.

“There’s a signal.”

Weak. Rhythmic. Music.

They docked carefully with the drifting vessel. Inside, the ship was cold and dark. Water stains climbed the walls like black veins. Children’s drawings still floated in corridors.

Nobody alive.

At first.

Then they heard humming. A soft woman’s voice singing somewhere deep inside the wreck.

Isabela’s stomach tightened.

They followed the sound through narrow corridors until they found a woman sitting alone in the dining chamber.

Very old. Very thin.

Smiling. Candles surrounded her.

“How long have you been here?” Mateo whispered.

The woman tilted her head strangely.

“Thirty-two years.”

Isabela felt ice crawl through her spine.

“That’s impossible.”

The woman smiled wider.

“No,” she said softly. “Impossible was the first year.”

Mateo stepped closer carefully. “Were you alone this entire time?”

The woman looked toward the dark hallway behind them.

“No.”

Silence.

Then slowly…very slowly…

footsteps echoed somewhere deeper in the ship. Not mechanical. Bare feet. Isabela turned sharply.

“Who’s there?”

Nothing answered.

The old woman kept smiling.

“We stayed alive by taking turns,” she whispered.

Mateo frowned. “Taking turns doing what?”

The woman’s eyes glistened strangely in candlelight.

“Being hungry.”

The ship suddenly groaned around them. And from the darkness behind the corridor came another sound. Breathing.

Several people breathing.

Isabela’s blood turned cold. Mateo reached slowly for the emergency light. Then dozens of pale faces emerged silently from the dark.

Watching.

Thin.

Smiling.

Human eyes shining like animals trapped underground too long. The old woman whispered gently:

“You shouldn’t have boarded hungry.”

There is a particular silence that settles over the world after too much shouting. Not peace, not reconciliation…just the kind of quiet that arrives when voices have exhausted themselves but nothing has truly been resolved. It is the silence of a house after an argument, when doors are closed but hearts are still open wounds.

You can feel that silence across the world today.

The news is loud. Speeches are louder. Screens glow with maps, arrows, explosions, accusations. Every hour another conflict, another retaliation, another explanation of why this violence is necessary, why this anger is justified, why this war is unavoidable.

And yet beneath the thunder of it all there is a strange feeling that the earth itself is tired. Tired the way a parent becomes tired when their children fight over something that was never meant to be owned. Because if we step far enough back from the shouting…from the flags, the speeches, the maps coloured by ideology…most of our conflicts look painfully simple.

They are arguments about land. Arguments about belief. Arguments about identity. Arguments about who belongs where on a planet that has belonged to no one for four and a half billion years.

We call these borders.

We call them regions.

We call them sacred territories.

But rivers do not recognize them. The wind ignores them entirely. Clouds drift lazily across them without permission. Even the birds migrating across continents every year would fail almost every embassy interview on this planet.

“Purpose of visit?”

“To survive winter.”

“Duration of stay?”

“Until the flowers bloom.”

“Financial proof?”

“Just wings.”

And yet they travel freely across the earth while we…the most intelligent species the planet has produced have created a world where a human being can be born on the wrong side of a line and spend their entire life proving they deserve to breathe somewhere else.

Somewhere along our journey, geography began to dictate dignity. And so the question rises quietly, like a child tugging at the sleeve of history.

When will we grow up?

Because fights over region and religion should have been over by now. Humanity has split atoms, mapped the human genome, and photographed galaxies billions of years old. We have machines that can learn, systems that can think, rockets that can travel millions of kilometres into space. Surely a species capable of such brilliance should have figured out how to share a planet. Yet history keeps looping like a stubborn song we refuse to stop singing.

If history were a classroom, humanity would be the student repeating the same grade again and again. We fight over land. We fight over belief. We fight over language. We fight over memories of conflicts that ended before most of us were even born.

Many of today’s conflicts are not really about the present. They are arguments inherited from the past.

Imagine two brothers fighting bitterly not because one stole the other’s bread…but because their great-great-grandfathers once disagreed about where to place a fence. The fence is long gone. The brothers are hungry. But the fight continues, passed down like a family heirloom.

At what point does memory become stubbornness?

At what point does loyalty become blindness?

At what point does identity become a cage?

These questions are uncomfortable, which is why they are rarely asked. Instead we inherit stories, slogans, resentments. A child is born and before they learn to read, they are taught who their enemies are. Before they learn to question, they are taught what to fear.

And then we wrap this inheritance in noble words.

We call it patriotism.

We call it devotion.

We call it duty.

But perhaps the most dangerous myth humanity still believes is the idea that war produces winners.

History books love winners. They catalogue victories like trophies. Empires rise, empires fall, borders shift, flags change colour. But if you walk quietly through the graveyards after the celebrations end, the truth becomes obvious. War does not produce winners. It produces survivors. And survivors carry stories that history rarely prints.

Stories of mothers who still glance at doors that will never open again. Stories of children who grow up learning the sound of missiles before the sound of rain. Stories of soldiers who return home but never truly leave the battlefield inside their minds.

In a war nobody wins.

Only the future loses.

The future loses teachers who might have inspired classrooms. Doctors who might have saved lives. Artists who might have changed the way we see the world. Engineers who might have built bridges instead of bombs.

When a life disappears in conflict, the loss is not just that person. It is every possible version of that person that will never exist. An entire library of possibilities burns quietly with every human loss. And yet every generation convinces itself that its conflict will be the final one…the necessary one, the righteous one!

But long ago one of India’s great philosophers, Dr. S Radhakrishnan, wrote something so simple and so devastatingly logical that it echoes form me especially now. While reflecting on the great traditions of Indian philosophy, he observed that civilizations collapse not because they lack intelligence, but because they lack moral imagination. Knowledge without compassion, he argued, becomes dangerous. In essence, his logic was simple: when wisdom does not grow at the same pace as power, civilization begins to fail itself.

Look around our world today and that sentence feels less like philosophy and more like diagnosis. Never in human history have we possessed so much power. We have extraordinary innovation. We have satellites circling the earth like silent guardians. We have global networks connecting billions of minds.

A rocket launches and thousands of satellites spread across the sky like a digital constellation. Starlink connecting remote villages to the internet. Electric cars glide across highways without a whisper…Tesla redefining transportation and energy.

Artificial intelligence learns languages, writes code, analyzes diseases, predicts patterns humans could never detect. The speed of our innovation is breathtaking. Human beings have become architects of extraordinary systems. And yet somewhere between all this brilliance, something essential has been misplaced.

Perhaps the real tragedy of our age is not that humanity lacks intelligence, but that our intelligence has grown far faster than our wisdom.

The simplest measure of civilization.

Are our children safe?

Are they happy?

What is the purpose of building rockets to Mars if children on Earth are still growing up under the shadow of bombs? What is the point of artificial intelligence if we have not yet learned the ancient intelligence of kindness? What is the value of satellites and electric revolutions if mothers still fear sending their children to school in parts of the world?

It is a strange paradox of our time.

We are inventing the future faster than we are understanding it. One side we are going to Mars. On the other side we are still struggling to live peacefully on Earth. One side we fear that artificial intelligence may replace us.

Even the newest generation of AI systems, including those developed by companies like Anthropic, were designed with strong ethical safeguards to help humanity…but are already being explored in analyzing vast streamss of data in modern conflict and security systems, reminding us how quickly powerful tools can drift into the machinery of war.

And somewhere a voice laughs quietly and says:

“We fear AI will take over our jobs… or AGI will rule over humans. I say why not? We are doing a terrible job of taking care of things anyway.”

The line sounds like a joke, but it carries a mirror. Because the real fear about AI may not be that it becomes worse than us. The real fear might be that it becomes better than us.

More rational.

Less tribal.

Less obsessed with ancient grudges.

Imagine an intelligence that simply evaluates what benefits humanity as a whole. An intelligence that does not care about religion, region, nationality, ideology. One that only asks the most logical question of all:

What decision allows the most humans to live safely and peacefully?

Such intelligence might look at many of our conflicts and find them absurd. Why fight over land when cooperation creates prosperity?

Why divide humanity by belief when survival depends on unity? Why invest trillions in weapons when those same resources could solve poverty, hunger, and climate collapse?

But machines alone cannot save us. Technology can guide. Technology can illuminate. But compassion must still come from human hearts. Artificial intelligence may mirror our logic. Only humanity can supply the wisdom. Which brings us back again to that small but enormous question that history keeps whispering to us.

When will we grow up?

Because maturity is not measured by how far we can travel into space. It is measured by how gently we learn to live together on Earth. A mature civilization would measure success not by the strength of its armies, but by the safety of its children. Not by the speed of its rockets, but by the kindness of its societies.

One day, perhaps centuries from now, astronauts will stand on the dusty surface of Mars and turn back to look at Earth glowing quietly in the darkness of space.From that distance there will be no borders. No religions. No regions.

Just a small blue planet floating silently in the vastness.

Fragile.

Beautiful.

Shared.

And perhaps one of those astronauts will whisper the question that echoes through our age today:

“When did we finally grow up?”

Let us hope the answer is simple.

Before it was too late.

— —

They return to Bhikyasen, Uttarakhand, with the posture of men who have lived elsewhere.

Four of them. Mid-twenties, perhaps a little older. Dubai has straightened their backs, sharpened their jokes, placed a certain brightness in their eyes that only distance gives. They have poured concrete under a sun that did not forgive hesitation. They have slept in rooms that hummed all night with machines and other people’s dreams. They come back carrying money folded into careful wallets and the quiet belief that survival has already tested them properly.

The town looks smaller than memory allowed.

Nothing here appears capable of harm. Not after cranes that creaked in desert winds. Not after highways that swallowed hours without apology. The mountains feel familiar, almost decorative. Someone laughs at how slow everything moves. Someone else says the tea here still tastes better than anything they found abroad.

They stop at the liquor shop openly. No secrecy. Men buying what men buy. The bottle is cheap and sharp. It burns the way they expect. They drink as they walk, not rushing, not hiding. Jackets open. Voices easy. The road bends into trees that have known them since childhood.

Stories of leopards float around them like old gossip.

They don’t argue with the stories. They simply don’t carry them seriously. They have seen more dangerous places, they think. They have stood on scaffolding high enough to make the ground irrelevant. A forest that watched them grow up feels incapable of betrayal.

They split near a bend where the road thins.

One turns toward a house where a light waits patiently. Another climbs upward, boots crunching on gravel. The third keeps straight, humming a tune learned somewhere between work shifts.

The fourth walks a little slower.

Not drunk. Not careless. Just unhurried, enjoying the air that feels kinder than anything he has breathed in years.

A few metres behind.

The others do not notice immediately. When they turn back, it is with mild irritation, not concern. They call his name once. Then again. The forest gives nothing back.

They wait longer than they intended. Phone torches flatten the darkness into pale tunnels. Someone steps into the trees and returns quickly, unsure why his breath has shortened.

By morning, the town knows. By the second day, the mountain returns what it chooses to return…cloth, bone, the suggestion of a man no longer shaped by memory.

The leopard has not broken any rule.

It has simply eaten.

The men do not speak of Dubai again with the same ease.

—-

Eight months later, I arrive.

This quiet village does not present itself dramatically. It exists the way certain places do…finished long before you reach them, uninterested in convincing you of anything. It does not need to, because it is breathtaking.

I wake next morning because the river is loud.

Not lyrical. Not gentle. Loud with certainty. Water striking stone as if the world depends on its persistence. The sound fills the tent completely, crawls beneath the blanket, presses against my ribs until I cannot pretend to sleep.

The cold has already entered.

It has found the careless gaps….ankles, wrists, the hollow beneath my throat. Mist presses against the canvas from outside, dense and patient, as if the valley is leaning close to see who has come.

When I finally gather the courage to step outside my tent , the morning feels incomplete. Trees emerge slowly from fog. Voices drift from the kitchen tent. Someone offers tea before I ask. My bags sit where they were carried the night before, placed carefully, as though even weight deserves respect.

The place is beautiful without effort.

And that is what draws me to look upward… not courage, not conquest, just curiosity sharpened by the promise of solitude. The mountains surround the valley like tall old men from another age. I tell myself I must attempt to climb one of them, even as they and everyone around me seem to frown at the idea.

To reach the road, I cross a narrow bridge. The river below moves with a kind of authority that does not require witnesses. Halfway across, I stop and watch the current fold around stone, precise and indifferent.

A temple rests against the slope beyond. I touch the threshold without asking for anything. Just acknowledgment. Just the awareness that I am about to choose something unnecessary, that I also deeply yearn for.

The road climbs sharply.

And then, a little while later I see the steps….thin, almost hidden, disappearing into trees. Joy arrives quickly, without permission.

A way exists!

There is a moment before the climb truly begins, when something inside me adjusts….not fear, not hesitation, just the faint awareness of being noticed. A subtle shift in the air, as though the forest has lifted its head to register a change in weight.

I ignore it.

Being alone in the mountains excites me in a way cities never allow. No traffic signals, no conversations that ask for performance. Here, my movement belongs only to me. Every breath feels self-earned. Every turn of the path feels like a private discovery.

That happiness of absolute solitude is intoxicating.

It sharpens my senses at first…..the scent of pine, the texture of stone beneath my boots, the sound of my breath becoming part of the landscape. I feel alert, capable, almost elegant in my solitude.

And that is where my judgement softens.

In cities, my awareness is precise, almost surgical. I notice everything…..the way people stand, the way silence and noise behaves in rooms. Here, beauty persuades me to lower that guard. The openness feels like permission rather than neutrality.

The sense of being followed arrives again, faint but deliberate. Not footsteps. Not sound. Just pressure behind the ribs, like a question I have not asked aloud.

I stop once and listen.

Nothing answers.

The forest absorbs my attention without reflecting it back. I continue upward, faster now, driven by the pleasure of movement, by the rare luxury of being unseen. Ferns crowd the path. Thorny branches leave thin signatures on my skin. Sunlight breaks into fragments that feel almost edible.

A man carrying firewood passes me on a narrow bend. He says one word…”leopards” and gestures vaguely into the trees. His tone is not dramatic. Just factual. I nod, smile, continue.

I come from Rajasthan, where leopards exist alongside villages without constantly claiming them. I tell myself this warning belongs to a different rhythm of life, one that exaggerates risk because it has learned to live with it.

The dog appears soon after.

A Bhutia…large, pale, deliberate. He looks at me once, as if measuring something invisible, then turns uphill. I follow him because it feels easier than deciding.

Higher up, the quiet thickens. Birds vanish. My breath grows louder, almost intrusive. Still, beauty continues to reveal itself….mountain after mountain … unfolding like withheld sentences finally spoken.

When I reach the saddle ridge, the world opens suddenly.

Snow peaks stand far beyond, impossibly clear, edges so sharp they seem carved rather than formed. The sight lands inside me with the force of grief…too beautiful to hold, too distant to touch.

The dog stops.

Every muscle in him angles away from what lies ahead. His stillness feels absolute. I tell myself he is tired. I step past him.

The mountain does not rush.

The breath I hear has been there all along, moving when I move, pausing when I pause. I understand too late that solitude does not mean absence.

Impact arrives without metaphor.

Weight slams me down. Claws tear through certainty, through skin. Pain arrives skilfully. The forest explodes into noise……mine. I fall hard, the world breaking into bark, sky, blood.

As I lie there, the snow peaks return to my vision, perfectly framed between branches. They are unbearably beautiful.

Mist gathers, thick and enclosing…not hiding what is happening, only softening its edges. I think of the tent. The warmth. The hands that carried my bags. Those who loved me …the ones who will miss me and all the happiness I had been given without asking in this lifetime.

I am glad it is me.

Not the dog.

I do not regret coming. Only mistaking beauty for permission. The river keeps moving. The village remains beautiful enough to call the next traveller forward. And the mountain keeps its quiet..not because nothing happens here, but because everything does.

And still, the river moves.

— - - -

Author’s Note

This story grows from a reality many people across Bhikyasen, Almora, and other parts of Uttarakhand live with every day. Human–wildlife conflict here is not abstract. Government data records hundreds of lives lost to wildlife attacks over the past decades, with leopards responsible for a significant share. Livestock loss, fear in villages, and encounters near homes and roads have become part of daily life for many residents.

I believe deeply in the protection of wildlife and the dignity these animals deserve. Yet coexistence cannot rest only on the shoulders of villagers, shepherds, or travellers. More thoughtful and balanced solutions .. through policy, forest management, and community support are needed so that both people and wildlife can live without constant fear. The mountains remain breathtaking, but they are living landscapes with their own laws. We are only visitors here.

The opening story of the men walking home and the leopard taking one of them is true I heard it firsthand from someone in the village.

— -

The room didn’t argue. It sat there in its indifference. The way rooms do when they’ve witnessed your anxiety pacing across the floor long enough to become familiar with your footsteps. I ran a hand through my hair, exhaled, and said again, more firmly, “This is happening.” As if saying the sentence out loud would stitch a thread between the chaos inside me and the world outside, giving the pain a place to sit instead of everywhere at once.

It’s strange how the hardest days never introduce themselves. They just arrive, heavy and uninvited, like a sudden storm that slams every open window of your life. And when the dust settles, you find yourself alone in a way that feels almost surgical…a clean, precise loneliness, the kind that cuts without bleeding. If someone had told me this was natural, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so betrayed by the silence. Maybe if we were taught in school how to sit with ourselves… really sit, I would have known that solitude in suffering is not abandonment but an inner classroom. I’ve learned this through experience, and time.

But nobody teaches you that.

We learn triangles and tenses and the lifecycle of a frog, but not how to stand still when your world hiccups and your breath becomes a question. We learn how to calculate speed and momentum, but not how to slow down when our thoughts are running faster than our pulse. We learn geography, but not the topography of our own breaking points.

The truth, though, is that when life shakes you, really shakes you…..you will find yourself alone. Not because people don’t care, but because pain is a narrow doorway and only you can fit through it.

For me, the pain feels like an abandoned house inside my chest, full of open windows that whistled with a cold breeze. Every memory becomes a draft. Every conversation from the past feels like furniture left behind…

still there, but no longer useful. Loneliness creaks in the floorboards. I keep turning on the light, hoping something inside will feel warm again, only to find that the bulb flickers with the same hesitance that I feel waking up each morning.

There is an allegory I return to often: hardship as an unexpected river. One day the ground beneath you simply gives way, and suddenly you’re standing knee-deep in a current you never asked for. You try to build dams, distraction, denial, pretending…but the water always finds a seam to slip through. Eventually, despite your resistance, the river redraws the map of your inner world. Paths you once walked confidently are gone; old certainties are washed clean. The village of who you were becomes unfamiliar terrain.

This river is not kind. It chills you. It isolates you. It carries away pieces of who you thought you were. That is its nature.

And yet…here is the secret that nobody tells you early enough, it doesn’t drown you. It teaches you how to breathe differently.

Acceptance is the first breath. That tiny, trembling sentence I began with… this is happening … is a lifeline. Not because it fixes anything, but because it ends the silent war inside your mind. Acceptance is not resignation; it is recognition. It is the moment you stop negotiating with reality and start understanding it.

Once you accept the river, you can begin to learn its language. Healing is never a thunderclap. It doesn’t arrive in a cinematic swell of music or a sudden revelation. Healing is the unglamorous, deeply human work of tending to yourself in small, stubborn ways. It is drinking water even when you feel undeserving of care. It is stepping outside and letting sunlight touch your face because your body has forgotten what warmth is. It is writing a sentence… any sentence… to prove to yourself that your thoughts still belong to you. It is choosing one small act of kindness for your future self, even when the present self has curled into a corner.

If only schools taught this. If only there were chapters titled How to Be Alone Without Feeling Like You’re Failing or How to Recognize the First Signs of Overwhelm or How to Ask Someone to Sit With You Without Fixing You. Imagine classrooms where we practiced saying, “I’m hurting,” the same way we practiced reading comprehension. Imagine group projects where the assignment was to hold silence for someone, to listen without rushing toward solutions.

I think about the inner critic we all grow up feeding…. the stern headmaster inside who shouts when we falter. Hard times make that voice louder than ever. But emotional education could teach us to question it the same way we question a faulty equation:

Where is the proof? Is this assumption true? What evidence do I have that I’ve failed before I’ve even begun?

Slowly, as the days stack upon each other, the river starts to lose some of its violence. You begin to notice tiny openings …. moments where your chest unclenches, where your breath softens, where you feel the faintest tug toward living again. You begin to stitch yourself together not with dramatic changes, but with miniature acts of courage:

• getting out of bed

• eating something warm

• replying to a message

• stepping into the day even when every cell wants to retreat

And somewhere in the midst of this slow, ordinary healing, you realize something astonishing:

You haven’t just survived.

You’ve become someone who knows how to weather storms.

There is a reserve inside you. A quiet, persistent strength, that awakens when called. Not a superhero’s strength, not a glossy cinematic resilience. Something softer. Something honest. Something like a neighbor knocking on your door with a cup of tea. It arrives without insisting on applause.

I wish we taught people to trust this reserve. To nurture it early. To know that when the hardest days come… and they will, they are not powerless. They are not broken. They are simply standing in a river that will, in time, lead them somewhere new.

To anyone reading this who is in the middle of their own challenging day:

• begin with acceptance

• say the sentence out loud

• then choose one small act of tending

I’ve learned that self-transformation is one of life’s hardest lessons, yet always one of its most necessary. Often it comes through people who trigger something deep in us, not to hurt us, but to push us toward growth. (The truth is nobody wants to truly hurt you..they are usually just watching out for themselves and that is absolutely ok) Because it is real. It feels personal, even painful, especially when it comes from those we trust, but it is usually a timely intervention, even if it feels like a betrayal. Perspective. That divine word, that can switch things from darkness to light.

The world will not snap back to its old shape. But you will grow into a version of yourself that can hold more truth, more clarity, more courage. And one morning, the room that once watched you fall apart will watch you rise…quietly, steadily …..into a life that feels entirely your own again.

That is the real, gentle miracle:

Not that you heal instantly,

but that you heal truthfully.

Thank you for reading! 🤗

“Remember which door belongs to us,” Amma used to say, which was her gentle way of warning me where not to leave myself behind.

I was seven the Sankranti my life folded like an old newspaper; a little torn at the edges, still pretending to carry news. Janjgir was trembling with celebration that year: paper kites stitched the pale-blue sky, smoke rose from a thousand wood fires, and the Arpa River whispered secrets of last monsoon’s floods to anyone who cared to listen.

Our home, one room of crumbling brick, stood between a tailor’s shed and the Patels’ house… that grand two-storey one with balconies like open arms that never truly welcomed. My father, a wiry man with quiet eyes, worked odd jobs and spoke little. Silence, in our home, was inherited the way some families pass down gold.

By Sankranti morning, he had already lit the stove, fed the cow, and counted his coins twice. “Stay in the lane,” he said, tying his muffler tight. “Don’t run near their house. And don’t look too long when people talk.”

He didn’t mean it cruelly. He meant it the way men who’ve lost too much mean everything, like protection mistaken for distance.

The town was alive with colors… strings, sweets, drums, the sharp smell of jaggery and smoke. The sky itself seemed to be a festival. But I wasn’t part of it. Not really. My shoes were torn, my kite was borrowed, and my laughter, when it came, came softly…like it didn’t want to wake anyone.

By noon, I went to Mausi’s house two lanes away. She was mending old saris and frying til-guls, ( a seasame jagggery preparation) and the seher radio coughed out songs from Raipur. “You’ve grown thin, Pari,” she said, placing a bowl of dal in my hands. “You must eat more.”

“I do,” I lied, and smiled the way girls smile when they’ve learned that hunger isn’t something to confess.

When I returned, the wind had picked up. The Patels’ terrace was full of people, men shouting, children laughing, kites bleeding red and blue against the horizon. Someone had tied a loudspeaker to the banyan tree, and devotional songs floated through the lane, cracked by static and joy.

That’s when he called me.

The Patel son, older than me by many years… his voice smooth like the sweets his mother offered to the temple first.

“Pari,” he said, “come help hold this spool. You’re light; the wind won’t pull you away.”

I hesitated. My father’s warning echoed, don’t linger near their house. But then again, he was our neighbor; his mother often sent us leftover puris, sometimes old clothes. He smiled, not kindly, but confidently… the way people who always get what they want smile.

I climbed the narrow stairs to the terrace.

Up there, everything was blinding, the white light, the laughter, the distant kites slicing through air like birds too proud to land. His friends shouted from the edge, their wrists strung with bright threads.

He stood beside me, closer than needed. His hand brushed mine as he showed me how to hold the spool.

“See? Not too tight,” he murmured.

The words were gentle, but something else wasn’t.

I don’t remember everything… only the wind, how it suddenly dropped; how his shadow lengthened; how the laughter from below became muffled as if someone had pressed cloth over the world.

Later, when I ran home, my palms were cut from the string, my breath full of dust. I washed my hands until they stung, then sat by the hearth until the water on my wrists turned to steam. My father asked nothing. He was fixing the latch, muttering to himself. He believed silence kept us safe. He didn’t see the salt drying on my cheeks.

That night, as the fireworks rose above the roofs, I told myself nothing had happened. I folded the day in half, then again, smaller and smaller, until it disappeared into a corner of me I would not open for years.

Days became seasons. The festival passed; the sky forgot its colors. The Patels went back to being loud, generous, enviable. I went back to being invisible. My father worked more, spoke less. He thought I was quiet because of my mother’s absence, she had died years ago, her breath folding into the same smoke that left our chimney each winter. I let him believe that.

Sometimes, I’d pass the Patel boy on the road. He’d nod, casually, like nothing had been taken. And I, too, learned that in our world, what is stolen without witnesses is never called theft.

Years later, when I left for Raipur to work as an apprentice in an embroidery shop, I thought I had outgrown that winter. The trains were louder than memory; the city full of smells that promised forgetting. My father pressed fifty rupees into my hand and said, “Be strong, my girl. Don’t let anyone pity you.”

I nodded. I had learned that strength was often just silence dressed nicely.

In the city, I stitched other people’s dreams into fabric… peacocks on dupattas, vines on blouses, suns rising out of saree borders. My fingers moved quickly, obediently. The women around me gossiped, laughed, lived easily in their skin. I listened. Sometimes, when one of them spoke of love, I felt a small closing inside me, like a door someone had once locked from within.

There was a man who used to visit the shop. A kind one, patient, with eyes that saw rather than searched. He offered to walk me home once. I refused. Another time, I didn’t. The moon was half that night, the road quiet. He spoke of his sister, his plans to open a small bookstore. I wanted to believe in the sound of his words. But when his hand brushed mine, even gently, something in me recoiled, old as wind. He noticed. He didn’t ask.

The next day, I stitched an entire blouse without noticing I’d bled a little onto the white thread.

That’s how life was for years… full of small mistakes I mistook for safety. I learned to keep my laughter rationed. I smiled in photographs but always from one side, as though the other still belonged to the cold January wind of my childhood.

I returned to Janjgir much later, to cremate my father. The house had shrunk, its walls stooped like old men. In the courtyard, the neem tree was gone, but the Patels’ house still stood, its paint brighter, its gates higher.

As I sorted through my father’s things, I found the only letter he had ever written me… unsent, folded between a newspaper clipping and an old train ticket.

You were always quiet, Pari, it said, but I hope you knew I tried. Some things I didn’t see. Some things I didn’t ask. Forgive me for both.

His handwriting trembled like it had aged before him.

That night, as the town lit bonfires for Sankranti again, I walked up to the terrace, the same one that had once stolen my breath. The kites above were still fighting, their paper wings rustling like restless souls. Children screamed with joy, their voices filling the spaces between rooftops.

A small girl stood at the Patel gate, watching. She looked like me … thin wrists, hopeful eyes, wearing shoes too big for her. She waved her kite at no one in particular. I wanted to call out to her, tell her which door belonged to safety, but words stayed behind my teeth. She ran off laughing. The wind swallowed her sound.

I looked up. My fingers, out of old habit, twisted an imaginary spool. The sky stretched endlessly… the same cold blue, the same soft violence.

For the first time, I let the memory in fully….. the shadow, the stillness, the way the world went quiet that day. It was not a scream I remembered; it was the after. The hush. The neatness with which I’d erased it to survive.

And suddenly I understood: forgetting was never healing. It was just another way of folding pain into usefulness.

Now, I live alone in Raipur, in a room with a small balcony that catches sunlight at noon. I still sew. I make dresses for girls who have not yet learned to lower their eyes. Sometimes, when they come for fittings, I watch their reflections in the mirror, how easily they trust the glass. I smile, adjust their hems, tell them to look straight ahead.

No one would guess. I am soft-spoken, dependable, the kind of woman who makes good tea. My neighbors call me Didi with affection. On festivals, I hang kites by the window… blue, red, yellow. None of them fly. They flutter only when the wind insists.

People say I have a calm face, like someone who has made peace with the past. I let them think so. What they can’t see is that calm is a learned language… one spoken only by those who have survived storms that had no names.

And sometimes, late at night, when the ceiling fan hums and the city holds its breath, I find myself whispering into the dark, not prayers, not questions, but small reassurances to the girl I once was:

You did well to hide. You did even better to return.

The door still belongs to us.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about human emotions… maybe because I feel them like everyone else. After two decades of living online, it’s clearer than ever how they’ve been tamed, repackaged, and sold back to us.

They will tell you to calm down. To get over it. To grow up. They will call your anger “toxic,” your jealousy “low vibe,” your pain “unnecessary.” But I believe they’re wrong. These are not flaws. They are the parts of you still alive.

What was once raw and unedited is now managed like a PR account. Somewhere along the way, emotions “progressed” or so we’re told…into calmer, more “mature” versions of themselves. In truth, they’ve just been bent to fit algorithms, skewed data, and marketing campaigns. We’ve been coached to supervise our own hearts like they’re unruly interns who might embarrass us in front of a client.

This is the part no one says out loud anymore: those messy, inconvenient emotions, the ones that make you slam doors, stay in bed too long, cry on the wrong person’s shoulder… they are not the enemy. They are the weather system that grows the forest. They are the proof you are not just functioning, but living.

Somewhere in this age of mindfulness apps, brand-friendly “wellness,” and ‘the right foods to accomplish the right moods’ we were sold the idea that a good life is an unruffled ‘planned’ life. That real strength is constant composure, constant cool. But old-school logic, the kind you hear from your grandmother while she’s peeling fruit… knows better. It knows that a person who has never been rattled cannot be truly steady. That strength without the memory of being broken is just… rigidity.

The market thrives on our flatness. The smoother our inner landscape, the easier we are to predict. If we’re always fine, we don’t leave jobs impulsively, or run to someone we love in the middle of the night, or start something wild and impractical just because our hearts can’t stand still. We keep showing up where we’re told, buying what we’re sold, staying inside the lines.

But life was never meant to be lived entirely inside the lines. Especially not when you’re young. Young adulthood is the apprenticeship… the years when your heart is still soft enough to bruise deeply, when anger can still set your whole body alight, when longing is sharp instead of tired. These are not flaws to iron out. They’re the seasons that make you understand the climate of yourself.

And yet, we’ve been constantly reminded to “manage” these emotions out of existence. Be above it. Be unbothered. Take the high road. But what’s the point of always taking the high road if you never walk through the town itself… its noise, its smells, its arguments, its unpredictable weather?

We used to have room for this mess. Someone could sulk for a week without it becoming a diagnosis. You could laugh at the wrong moment without it becoming a scandal. People understood that emotional weather changes, and that it’s okay if yours is stormy today and clear tomorrow. But now, every outburst is a liability, every raw reaction an unwise “brand choice.” We’ve all become unofficial spokespeople for ourselves, trimming the edges so we’re always presentable.

The irony is that the very feelings we’re trying to avoid are the same ones that make us capable of joy, connection, and compassion later on. A person who’s never let themselves feel deeply… even painfully, will struggle to recognise the depth in someone else. Pain stretches the container so love and compassion can fill it. Anger burns a path where courage can follow. Even jealousy, that much-maligned shadow, can show you what you secretly want from life. Not the best of emotions to acknowledge 😉..it is however a true mirror to who you can be, sometimes.

And I keep thinking …if we actually succeed in becoming these glossy, unshakable superhumans who never flinch, what then? What will we write about? What songs will we sing? Who will make the clumsy apologies, the awkward confessions, the impulsive, reckless acts that become family legends? A life without the mess is not a clean life. It’s an empty one. Ahh so boring no?

You don’t have to be afraid of feeling too much. The world might want you to be constant… but life does not. Life wants you to be porous. To be moved. To let the tide in, even if it wrecks the furniture.

And so when the emotions come, let them. Let them arrive uninvited. Let them track mud through your perfect hallway. Let them stay just long enough to leave something behind you didn’t have before. You will survive. And when you look back, you’ll see that the feelings you once thought were interruptions were actually the main story.

Alright..have a good weekend all!

Note: I’m not offering expertise. This could be flawed, biased, untrained. But it is raw. And it is my my human experience and truth. Please feel free to rip me point to point. I can take it ( i think) 🤣

The rain hadn’t stopped since dawn. It hadn’t wept either. It simply remained, falling in long… diagonal lines like old truths being remembered. Around the tin-roofed cottage near the foothills of Sultan Bathery,Kerala; every leaf glistened like it was newly born. The mountains were hidden behind a translucent green mist, and the pepper vines hanging from the trees trembled like someone about to speak a truth they’ve long withheld.

Inside the cottage, the smell of turmeric, curry leaves, and something faintly burnt lingered like an argument that had long settled into the walls.

“So, you still put coconut in the omelette?” Asha asked, her fingers curled around a chipped ceramic cup. There was a small elephant etched into the handle… faded now, but somehow still triumphant.

“I never stopped,” Ravi said. “It makes it softer.”

“Everything soft breaks easier,” she muttered, not looking up.

A moment passed. Outside, a rooster called out in confused triumph, perhaps announcing a victory from years ago. Asha’s hair was damp from the drizzle she had walked through, now curling in erratic waves against her temples. She looked older, but not aged. There was something about her presence that remained unscathed, like a song hummed under breath through years of war.

“I would’ve thought by now you’d switched to something simpler,” she said, sipping her tea, “scrambled eggs or silence.”

Ravi chuckled. It was a sound not born from mirth but from the debris of it.

“Silence is never simple,” he said. “And scrambled eggs feel too… undone.”

They sat at the wide stone sill of the kitchen window. The rain painted the view in brushstrokes of grey and green. Somewhere in the forested distance, a koel called, its voice echoing like a child who’d lost their way long ago.

The kettle hissed again on the stove. Ravi stood up, poured more tea into her cup without asking, and sat down.

“I came because I saw the jackfruit tree in bloom,” Asha said quietly. “I remembered how your mother would roast the seeds with salt and red chilli. I thought maybe she’d still be here.”

“She’s not,” Ravi replied. “Three years now. Kidney failure. Refused dialysis. Said machines were no place for souls.”

Asha nodded, as if some inner part of her had already guessed that. “She used to say the forest would take her back when she was done with us.”

“It did,” he said, sipping his tea.

They watched a drop of rain slide down the edge of the window like a word left unsaid. A dog barked in the distance. The smell of wet earth wafted in, rich and fungal.

“Do you remember,” Asha said suddenly, “that monsoon when we ran to the stream barefoot, thinking it was a wedding procession?”

“Because of the temple bells and drums echoing from the valley,” Ravi smiled. “You tore your heel on the rocks. Bled all over my mundu.’

“I still have the scar,” she said, lifting the hem of her cotton salwar to show a faint crescent above her heel. “Looks like a moon in mourning.”

He looked at it, but didn’t comment. A silence followed not awkward, not tense. Just full.

She sipped again. “You haven’t asked about him.”

“Because I already know.”

Her hand paused mid-air. “How could you?”

“You wrote about it,” he said. “In that piece for The Hindu. ‘The Boy Who Drowned in the Still Pool’.”

Asha turned her face toward the rain. It had grown heavier, louder. A mourning choir.

“That wasn’t meant to be read,” she whispered.

“But it was,” he said. “It always is.”

The omelette in the pan had begun to darken. Ravi got up and flipped it, the sizzling sound like static between radio stations. The smell of grated coconut, fried shallots, and green chilli filled the room. He slid the food onto a plate, placed it between them, and sat down.

Asha stared at it. “He loved coconut,” she said.

“I know.”

She looked at him, then. Really looked. His hair was greyer, but not thinner. His eyes still had that duskiness to them…. like stories waiting at the edge of evening. His hands, though, trembled slightly as he poured the last of the tea.

“I shouldn’t have left like that,” she said, her voice thinned by regret.

“I would’ve left too,” he said. “If I had known what you were carrying.”

The thunder came, not loud, but long. Like an exhale from something very old.

“It was early,” she said. “Too early. We thought it was just a fever, that he’d been out in the mud too long. You know how boys are. Dirty, wild, sun-colored. He said he felt dizzy but laughed when I carried him on my back.”

Ravi said nothing.

“They said the water was still. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t,” she repeated, eyes wide now. “It pulled him like a hand. I jumped in but it had already taken him. His shirt, his little green shirt… was floating, but not him. Never him.”

The rain was now a hymn. The kind sung when no one survives.

“I didn’t even cry the first three days,” she said. “I just walked up and down that riverbank. Telling people what happened. Like a narrator in some cruel play.”

Ravi touched her wrist gently. It was the only way he knew to say: I saw you. Even then.

“I blamed the water. I blamed the frogs. The algae. Myself. The woman who sold us mangoes that morning. Anyone. Anything.”

“And me?” Ravi asked, his voice barely there.

She looked at him with such softness it almost burned. “I didn’t have the strength.”

He nodded.

“I left your letters unread,” she admitted. “I couldn’t bear kindness.”

“I wrote them because I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I know.”

They both stared at the omelette now. Untouched. Soft. Golden.

“After him,” Asha said, “I couldn’t sleep. You know how he used to hum at night? This little tune, like a raga he was inventing? That stopped. And it was the loudest silence I’ve ever known.”

“Silence can bruise you,” Ravi said.

She nodded.

A gust of wind pushed the door slightly ajar. The rain tried to come in, but failed. The pepper vines swayed harder.

“We called him Aran,” she said. “It means shelter, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Ravi replied. “Or forest.”

She smiled faintly. “How fitting. To be claimed by what you’re named after.”

He looked out at the foothills, the slopes now barely visible. “The land takes what it’s owed.”

Asha’s voice cracked. “I kept his anklet. The one he wore as a baby. It still smells like soap and dust.”

They sat like that. No more tea. No more questions. Just two people, steeped in what they never said when they could have.

“I never married,” Ravi said finally.

“I know,” Asha replied.

And that was all.

The rain slowed, as if exhausted by its own mourning. The hills looked closer now, like witnesses leaning in.

Asha stood up. Her eyes were red, but dry. “I have to go.”

Ravi didn’t try to stop her. He just stood beside her at the door and watched as she put her shawl over her head.

“Take the umbrella,” he said.

“No,” she replied. “I want the rain.”

As she stepped out, she turned once. “Do the jackfruit seeds still roast the way your mother made them?”

“Yes.”

“Will you save me some?”

“Always.”

She left then… feet crunching against wet leaves, figure swallowed by green and grey. Ravi stood in the doorway long after she disappeared.

He returned inside. The omelette had cooled. He took a bite anyway.

It was soft. And it broke.

The Convent of Saint Joseph’s in Chandannagar, draped in ivy and Catholic melancholy, stood like an aging dowager by the banks of the Hooghly. The air around it had always tasted of salt, starch, and silence. Salt from the river, starch from the uniforms, and silence from the prayers that stitched the building’s past with invisible thread. Built of greying stone and softened by time, it was a place where bells rang like sighs and the corridors always echoed with the weight of too many footsteps that had long since vanished.

Violet DeSouza arrived there in 1984, barefoot in a pinafore two sizes too big and clutching a lunch tin with faded cartoons. She was just two years and three months old, a rosebud plucked far too early from the stem of her home in Calcutta, where her mother worked double shifts at an Army Canteen near Khidderpur and had no hands left to hold her with. Her father had died of something vague and tragic when Violet was only eight weeks old. Some said it was jaundice, others a broken heart. Death has always had more than one excuse.

The nuns, grim in their white habits and gentle as crows with memory, took pity on the cherub with cinnamon skin and curls like burnt sugar. “Violet,” one of them whispered, her eyes misting, “like the flower. But she looks more like a petal torn off by the wind.”

That was how it began. A child too young to spell her name, dropped off at a school whose windows blinked like tired eyes, and where laughter was a rare and carefully rationed thing.

When the main gate clanged shut that first morning, iron against iron, a sound that could split bone…Violet blinked up at the rusting padlock, then turned to ask where her mother had gone. But the gate, stoic and unmoved, offered no answers.

That evening, as twilight wrapped itself around the convent like an old shawl, Violet was tucked into one of the tiny cots in Dormitory Nine. The room was a pale blue box lined with twenty identical beds, like matchsticks laid out for fire. Violet’s lace nightie had a tear at the shoulder, and her pillow still smelt of mothballs and borrowed linen. Somewhere beyond the window, the Hooghly sang its endless, weeping song.

The other girls, older, already shaped by convent silence, slept with folded arms and rosaries like barbed wire around their necks. Violet, with eyes round as planets and a mouth still full of unspoken questions, lay awake.

Then, later, came the whisper of soft shoes. A hush of cloth against stone. A scent of violet powder and ancient soap.

She saw her.

An old nun with a face like worn parchment, her eyes half-lantern, half-lullaby. Her habit was of a deeper white, not quite belonging to this world, and when she walked it was as if her feet did not trouble the floor. She came to Violet’s bedside, sat beside her with the air of someone who had done this for centuries, and ran her hand gently over the little girl’s forehead.

“You mustn’t be afraid of the night, child,” she said, her voice like warm milk. “It is the place where mothers go to rest and still keep watch.”

And Violet, feeling as though the moon had tucked her in, fell asleep with her thumb in her mouth and the comfort of something older than memory.

The nun came every night.

Violet learned to wait for her. Alfred the bedtime prayers, after the creak of the senior girls’ beds, after the whistle of the river wind. She came like a hymn, slow, familiar, and full of mercy. She would smooth Violet’s hair, sometimes hum a tune that no one had ever taught in music class, and press her palm lightly over the child’s heart.

Once, Violet asked, “What’s your name?”

The nun smiled, her face full of rain and dust. “You may call me Mother Fernanda.”

Violet remembered the name. Wrote it in chalk under her bed. Whispered it to the cracked walls.

The senior girls began to notice.

“She talks in her sleep,” one of them said to Sister Adelaide, the dorm matron. “She laughs… sometimes cries. Like she’s speaking to someone.”

“Imaginary friend,” Sister Adelaide muttered, though her rosary beads clicked faster that evening.

On her fourth week at Saint Joseph’s, Violet refused to get up from bed.

“She’ll come,” she said. “Mother Fernanda comes every night. She says if I’m good, she’ll show me where the stars go in the morning.”

There was something so serious in her voice that even the cook in the kitchen stopped whistling for a whole minute.

It was Sister Maureen, the oldest of the sisters, who finally broke the silence one afternoon in the convent’s crumbling library.

“Fernanda D’Souza?” she whispered, as if saying the name might awaken old dust. “She was here once. Long ago. A nursemaid-nun. Looked after the very little ones.”

“Died in the cholera epidemic,” another nun added, looking down at the yellowing pages of a ledger.

“1974?” Sister Maureen blinked. “No, no. She died in 1939.”

After that, everything became a quiet storm.The nights were no longer restful. The older girls lit candles under their pillows. Sister Adelaide slept in a chair at the door of Dormitory Nine, her eyes always half-open, her Bible clasped in her lap like a shield.

But Violet grew more radiant. Her cheeks plumped. Her speech ripened. She began quoting things she couldn’t have read… verses from forgotten hymns, lullabies from languages not spoken anymore.

“She is not just talking to Fernanda,” Sister Maureen whispered. “She is becoming her.”

Four months in, and the river had changed.

The Hooghly, once calm and olive-skinned, began frothing at its banks near the convent in the evenings, as though something beneath the surface had grown restless. The mango trees by the east wall dropped their fruit early, and the sky seemed to darken five minutes before it should.

In the chapel, the Virgin’s face looked a shade too pale. Finally, Sister Agnes, the youngest nun, who still remembered laughter, called Violet’s mother.

“She must leave,” she said gently, as they sat near the garden over weak tea. “It’s not that she is unwell. In fact, she glows. But… she is no longer alone in there.”

Violet cried when she was told.

“She’ll be lonely without me,” she whispered, hugging her threadbare bunny. “Who will hold her head when she has bad dreams?”

Her mother, heart cracking in places that had long healed over, picked her up like she had when Violet was new to the world. The little girl smelled of ironed sheets, old lavender, and something more ancient than breath.

As they crossed the school gates, the same rusted iron doors that had clanged shut that very first morning… Violet turned to look one last time.

And high above, on the second-floor landing of Dormitory Nine, a thin white figure watched her go, eyes full of stormlight, her hand raised in a gentle goodbye.

—

Years later, the girls of Saint Joseph’s would whisper about the little girl and the ghost-nun during midnight feasts. They’d dare each other to sleep in Violet’s old bed. Some swore the pillow still held a dent, as if someone lay there each night.

One girl, brave and half-believing, claimed she heard humming one dusky evening…a lullaby older than the river.And every now and then, just before the monsoon rolled in, the mango trees dropped their fruit early.

—

Postscript by Violet DeSouza (from an unpublished memoir)

I do not remember her face clearly anymore, just the feel of her hands, cold, like wet marble in summer, and kind in a way the world rarely is.

But sometimes, when I lie down at night and close my eyes, I still hear her voice.

“Do not be afraid of the dark, Violet. It’s where all the mothers wait.”

And I sleep better than most.

Note:

This story is fiction, but I really was admitted to Saint Joseph’s when I was two. I remember little…just the nuns calling down to me from the balconies as I ran through the fields, and the great wooden gate at the entrance, like a quiet old giant standing watch. And the river just beyond that door. Or was it?

Nobody warns you that after forty, things quietly stop sticking together. The friendships. The routines. The jobs. The skin on your face. Your own sense of self. It all loosens. Quietly. Almost politely.

The house still stands. The work emails still come. The kids still need dinner. But behind the curtains, everything feels a little… unglued.

You smile in photographs. You reply to the group chat. You meet deadlines. You telll your parents you’re fine, even as their hair thins into cotton wool and their voices grow small like old radio static.

You tell your partner it’s nothing, that you’re just tired. You tell yourself that you’re just tired.

But it’s not tiredness, is it?

It’s the slow, steady unravelling. Just life..teaching you new ways to live…And the terrible thing is… this was always coming.

We were raised on this myth like it was gospel. Hold it together. Be dependable. Be solid. For women, it came with a smile and the quiet martyrdom of our mothers, who carried everyone’s grief in the folds of their sarees, who held the family with trembling hands that never dared tremble in public.

For men, it came wrapped in pride and silence. Their fathers fixing taps, paying bills, never blinking, even as life sanded them down like old wood.

It didn’t matter what cracked beneath the surface. The only crime was letting anyone see it. But now, after forty, the cracks aren’t beneath the surface anymore.

They’re in the corners of your eyes. In your belly that won’t become tight despite the daily Yoga. In the awkward silences with old friends. In the growing distance between your body and your reflection. In the quiet fear that maybe this isn’t a phase. Maybe this is just how it feels now.

It’s older. Sadder. Quieter.The exhaustion of always being the strong one. Of carrying the house, the parents, the spouses, the children, the job, the fears, the facades…..without ever once admitting it’s too heavy.

For men, it’s the quiet panic of becoming invisible. The receding hairlines. Of watching the world celebrate youth and hustle while you feel yourself slowing, softening, becoming irrelevant. And yet you show up. You stay solid. You joke at parties. You don’t say you feel scared.

For women, it’s the heartbreak of fading friendships, of growing invisible in a room, of tending to everyone’s needs until your own feel unfamiliar. Of buying creams for your face and swallowing the bigger grief….the slow vanishing of your own name from the conversation.

And the most brutal part? You’ve been told this is called strength.

It isn’t.

It’s forgetting how to fall apart.

This isn’t new.

Our grandparents did it. Their parents did it. They just didn’t have Instagram to pretend otherwise.

Look back far enough and you’ll find whole generations glued together by duty, by reputation, by the quiet terror of collapse.

The Romans had a word for it, Auctoritas. Not just authority, but the kind of quiet, unshakeable dignity you wore like armour, even when your insides felt like a crumbling temple.The Roman statues still stand in museums. Proud. Untouched. Unbroken. But the real men and women behind them?

They cracked. They faltered. They lost. They aged. They softened. They died. We’ve inherited their statues.We’ve inherited their silence, too.

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud, not even at 2AM after three whiskeys when the truth usually spills. Maybe we weren’t meant to hold it together forever. Maybe things are supposed to fall apart sometimes.

The friendships.

The versions of ourselves that no longer fit.

The illusions of being invincible.

Maybe the house of cards collapses, not because we failed, but because everything beautiful needs to be rebuilt sometimes.

Including us.

I look around at my friends in their forties and fifties, and I see it everywhere. The man too proud to say the business scares him now. That love scares him now. That he does not mind ‘failing’ now if it means peace. The woman laughing at brunch, but grieving the friend who ghosted her years ago.

The marriages that feel like two people renting space inside old memories. The friendships that faded, not because of betrayal, but because life grew noisier and none of us knew how to shout over the static.

We think we’re unique in this ache. But history hums differently. People have always unravelled. And some of them, brave, tired, stubborn …learned to weave themselves back together.

Not neatly. Not perfectly. But honestly. So here’s my quiet rebellion, offered to you gently, without hashtags, without platitudes:

You don’t have to keep holding it together. It’s okay to:

• Let friendships go if they’ve turned into polite ghosts.

• Admit you miss the person you used to be.

• Allow yourslef to become a new version, something that makes you happy

• Cry in your car after the parent-teacher meeting.

• Say out loud that you don’t feel young anymore, and it scares you.

• Rage softly or loudly against the invisible walls life built around you.

• Reach out to people ..to talk, to love, to sometimes simply ask for help.

It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you real. The Romans lost their empires, but the people found their way. Our parents buried their exhaustion in rituals, but we… we can choose something else.

We can name the cracks. We can sit with the pieces. We can stop apologising for the years when the glue simply stops working.

You’re not broken. You’re just unfinished.

We all are.

The house may lean. The hands may tremble. The friendships may thin like old bedsheets. But nothing says you can’t begin again.Softly. Slowly. With trembling hands and tired hearts.

Not to rebuild the old house exactly as it was, But to make space for the person you’re still becoming.

Even now.

Especially now.

🪷

I’ve been neck-deep, or rather heart-deep, in wrapping up my next book. Those endless final rounds of edits, line shifts, semantics, and the quiet battle between what must stay and what must go. Writing a book is one thing. Finishing it is another altogether. It’s like rearranging the stars until they hum just right. I wanted to give this one everything, so I could hand it to you with both palms open.

And while the manuscript was being gently tortured (and occasionally loved) into its final shape, life, as it always does, kept humming at full pitch.

Here in India, the summer has been particularly merciless. The sun seems to have taken its job a little too seriously, pouring its molten gold over us from dawn to dusk. Meanwhile, I’ve been part-time referee, full-time peacekeeper, part-time guard at the fridge, occasional short-order cook, on-call confidant, and the emergency department for every scraped knee, lost ball, and sudden injustice between my son and his friends on their long summer break.If you’ve never tried to mediate a game 47 degrees Celsius, I do not recommend it without proper hydration and at least one functioning sense of humor.

In between breaking up mock battles and supplying cold nimbu paani, life unfolded its quieter, heavier pages too.

A few days ago, India was cloaked in grief. Lives were lost, suddenly, needlessly. I won’t mention the names or the headlines, you already know. The loss sits heavy. And far beyond our city, there are children in other corners of the world, in places where wars are not chapters in history books but the air they breathe. Little ones who should be learning alphabets, not hiding from sirens.

Tonight, as you read this, I ask you, gently, sincerely to pause for a moment. Close your eyes. Think of all of them. Of the mothers holding prayers on their tongues. Of the fathers carrying hope like fragile glass. Of the children who dream even inside rubble.

Let us, together, create a kind of invisible blanket, woven from our thoughts, our prayers, our most tender energies. Let it cover every sorrow with a touch of mercy.

And today I leave you with a few words, born from this ache, this love, this shared fragility:

in the hush between heartbeat

let us gather not to fix

but to hold the world gently

in our open palms

grief moves like rivers under skin

but so does love

clear, stubborn, ancient

somewhere, a child dreams beneath broken ceilings

somewhere, a mother hums to an empty chair

and yet beneath all this unraveling

a small light burns

like a secret the dark cannot steal

tonight,

let us be its quiet keepers

——

At precisely 5:32 AM, Mrs. Genda Devi Mehra stepped out for her constitutional round of moral policing.

Clad in her rust-orange kota doria saree, her back straight like a moral compass dipped in starch, she carried with her two things: a neem datun, and a second, pre-folded dupatta, reserved for emergencies. Emergency meaning: shoulders. Exposed ones.

And Jaipur was full of them now. Summer had seduced everyone into short sleeves and shorter sense. She spotted her first victim: Rinku, age 28, watering her tulsi plant in a noodle-strap nightie, yawning like sin.

Genda Devi narrowed her eyes, a missile of disapproval launched from beneath her bifocals.
“Beta, this isn’t Ibiza. Cover your future. It starts with your shoulders.”

Before Rinku could blink, she was swaddled in a spare dupatta, handed like a flag of surrender.

Respect came before respiration. Always.

And the real tragedy? Jaipur was melting. The kind of melting where the roads look like they’re questioning their own existence. Where even the crows give up mid-caw. The kind where you can see heat, not feel it, not imagine it, see it wobble above the rickshaw roof like a bad omen.

But still, the pallus must be held low, the pleats must be straight, the izzat must be upheld.

Summer in Jaipur doesn't ask. It arrives. Like heartbreak.

Not the theatrical, movie-type heartbreak. No. The quieter kind. The one that happens in kitchens while you’re slicing lauki and realise you no longer miss the person, you just miss who you were when they looked at you with soft eyes.

The kind of heartbreak that turns into habit.

That’s what Jaipur’s summer feels like. Not a season. A shift.
The suddenness of it all. One day, you’re sipping buttermilk under bougainvillea, and the next, your spine is stuck to the plastic chair and the fan above you sounds like a dying pigeon.

Just like love. One day warm. The next day gone.
And you? You’re standing in the aftermath, sweaty and blinking, wondering if you should’ve invested in linen emotions instead.

But survival isn’t for the sentimental.

Survival is for the kachori uncle, who, despite the city boiling like dal on a high flame, still insists on piping hot kachoris at 4 PM. He sits on a plastic stool that has accepted its fate, sweat pouring down like loyalty, and sips kadak chai like he’s testing God.

“This,” he says, wiping his face with a gamcha soaked in hope, “isn’t heat. This is heritage.”

Sir, this is madness. But then again, maybe that’s what love is too. Wanting fire in your mouth even when your lips are blistered.

Meanwhile, back in the Mehra household, the air was thick with both heat and hierarchy.

Genda Devi’s daughter-in-law, Anjali, had dared to wear a chiffon saree to the kitchen. A slippery, rebel saree that clung like unresolved tension. Each time Pinky bent to open the fridge, her pallu misbehaved.

“Bahu, ek pallu sambhalna nahi aata toh kya sambhalegi kal ka ghar?” Genda Devi declared, stirring the dal with the weight of centuries.

What she meant was: Don’t fall apart, even when everything is melting.
But Anjali, quietly revolutionary, had a secret. A battery-operated fan tucked inside her blouse. Feminism, Jaipur edition.

Outside, the city adapted in its own bizarrre ways.

Auto drivers wrapped wet towels on their heads like ghost stories. Children ran through sprinkler leaks pretending it was a water park. And somewhere, someone in a boutique was trying to make “monsoon-ready lehengas” a thing.

We say we’re used to it. That this happens every year. But the truth is, every time Jaipur shifts into summer, it stings like new grief. Because there’s no slow betrayal here. It’s sudden. It’s brash.

Just like when someone you loved becomes someone you used to love.

You look at the sun, so arrogant in its presence, and you remember the time someone held your hand during Holi and said, “Stay.”
And you remember how they didn’t.

But life, like sarees and tea, goes on.

We iron our cottons. We twist our dupattas. We sip our chai with cracked lips.
Because here in Jaipur, dignity doesn't melt. Just the people inside it do.

We sweat, but we smile. We curse the heat, but bite into hot kachoris anyway. We hold onto our pallus like they’re the last shred of control.

And slowly, somewhere between the 11th glass of chaach and the 18th WhatsApp forward on “heatwave remedies,” we become okay again.

Not cool.
Just okay.

But okay is enough.

Especially in 47 degrees.

The hotel stood at the edge of Kota, a monument to something long forgotten, veiled in time’s shadow. To the Subramaniam family, it was an oasis of opulence they’d only dreamed of, a gift of rare luxury that would prove they had finally arrived. Arvind, the patriarch, beamed with pride as the family crossed the threshold into the grand, cavernous lobby. Divya, his wife, smiled thinly, masking a flutter of unease that seemed to swirl in the heavy air. Their daughter, Ananya, scrolled through her phone, already disenchanted with the old-world charm that the hotel tried to sell as ‘authentic.’ Rohit, the youngest, tugged at his mother’s sleeve, pointing at the massive chandelier above them. He wasn’t looking at the glass crystals but the faint movements… shadows that danced behind them.

The hotel had the look of somethnig ancient, its red sandstone walls gleaming beneath the thick layers of dust time had failed to erase. It reminded Divya of something she could not quite name, the sagging weariness of old places that had outlived their purpose. Yet, in its layers of grandeur, Saantham Palace clung to its beauty as a secret. Its towers stretched like the arm of a long-dead king still reaching for eternity, but the inside? The inside was a different thing entirely. The walls hummed, carrying with them faint murmurs from somewhere beyond the present, somewhere in the forgotten past.

Arvind, though, had none of Divya’s reservations. He was enamored by the size, the grandeur, the pride of the place. “It’s a steal for what they’re charging,” he remarked as they were escorted to their suite. “A palace, Divya. A palace.”

The suite was as gilded as the rest of the palace, with sprawling windows that let in streams of sunlight, casting shadows on the marbled floors. They had everything, plush velvet curtains, ornate furniture, and intricate murals of ancient hunting scenes on the walls. Yet, for all its beauty, there was something quietly unsettling in the room. The furniture, though pristine felt slightly out of place, like it had been chosen for its sheer extravagance rather than any sense of comfort. There was an unnaturalness in the air, the weight of something hidden.

The first night was uneventful, save for the whisper of the wind beneath the windowsills and the creaking of the doors as if the hotel was sighing in its sleep. But by morning, Divya began to feel it, a sense that something had shifted. She couldn’t put her finger on it. Objects were misplaced. Little things like a hairpin she had left on the vanity was no longer there when she returned. Ananya’s phone charger, which had been plugged in by the bedside, had disappeared. These weren’t the things of nightmares, but something about it gnawed at her, the constant unease, the feeling that the hotel was watching them, testing their resolve, waiting.

Rohit was the first to speak of the strange lady. He had been playing near the lobby when he saw her, an old woman with long, gray hair, a sari draped in tatters, her face pale and sunken like the remains of a forgotten thing. “She said I shouldn’t go into the rooms,” he whispered that night, eyes wide with fear. “She told me I must stay out of the corridors.”

Divya, though alarmed, dismissed it as childish imagination. “It’s just a hotel, Rohit. Nothing to fear.”

Yet, something about his words lingered. And it wasn’t just him. That night, as Divya lay awake beside Arvind, she could have sworn she heard a soft, melodic tune floating through the air. The haunting pluck of a veena, high and distant… as though played on the wind itself. It should have been beautiful, but it wasn’t. It made her skin crawl.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered to Arvind.

He didn’t respond, lost in the haze of sleep.

The next morning, she couldn’t shake the sense of being watched. The hallway outside their room seemed to stretch farther than she remembered, the walls seeming to bend in ways that didn’t make sense. The laughter from the dining room echoed too loudly, and the scent of something untraceable, damp, cold, and metallic hung in the air.

By their third day, the family was fraying at the edges. Rohit had stopped playing, retreating into himself, his eyes flicking nervously at the corners of rooms, and shadows under the bed. Ananya, who had been once so aloof to the entire experience, was now uneasily quiet. Even Arvind’s pride began to wear thin as he noticed how the staff would avoid looking him directly in the eye. The manager, a thin man with slicked-back hair, was always at hand but never quite helpful. He offered to show them the sights of Kota, but whenever they tried to ask about the hotel’s history, he would smile and turn the conversation to something else.

That night, Divya found herself wandering the halls, unable to sleep. She tried to call Arvind, but the phone kept cutting off, not the signal, but the call itself, like a breathless hush on the other end. And then she found it… the door to the library, which she had never noticed before. It was not locked, but behind it, something made her freeze in place. There, beneath a thin layer of dust, was a large book open on the table, its pages yellowed with age. The book’s contents were not stories of luxury but chronicles of a different time, a time when the palace was not a hotel but a residence for the British army during the war. She read the fragment of a letter from a British officer, Major Jonathan Pembridge, written in 1944, that spoke of a servant girl named Shanti, who had died in the palace under mysterious circumstances.

“Shanti was locked in the lower pantry,” the letter read. “No one found her until it was too late. They say her spirit still haunts these halls.”

As the words echoed in her mind, Divya’s phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Ananya. “Mom, Rohit won’t stop crying. He keeps saying the lady is in the room with him.”

The walls seemed to close in on her.

They decided they would leave in the morning. Pack everything, get the children, and go. But somehow… the hotel wouldn't let them.

The front desk claimed the system was down. The car wouldn’t start. The staff avoided their eyes and only mumbled in a dialect that none of them could understand. Doors that were once unlocked stayed shut. Phones stopped working. Time felt slower. Sticky.

It was as if the hotel itself wanted something from them.

By evening the air grew thick with dread. Then, Arvind disappeared. They had all been in the suite, and when they looked for him, he was gone. His clothes were still folded neatly on the bed, his wallet left behind, but Arvind was nowhere to be found.

And it wasn’t finished.

Frantically, Divya searched the hallways, calling out his name. Ananya and Rohit clung to her, their faces pale with fear. The staff offered no help. The manager simply looked at her with simply no expression. Like he was used to this.

“It is a large place, madam,” he said softly. “Perhaps your husband is resting somewhere. These things happen. People lose track of time.”

But Divya could not be convinced. Arvind had never been one to wander aimlessly. Something had happened. Something worse than they had imagined.

They begged for the CCTV footage. There was none. The hotel, so pristine in every other way, had no record of Arvind’s departure.

They fled under a shroud of confusion and dread, suitcases barely closed, tossed into the car as the road unfurled before them like a charred ribbon. The hotel loomed behind them, silent and watching. Everyone insisted Arvind would show up… and by then, Divya was willing to believe anything, so long as it meant she could escape with the children. She kept her eyes forward, refusing to look back. But the mirror betrayed her.

A figure stood on the palace balcony. Still. Unmoving. Watching.

She couldn’t tell if it was Arvind… or the woman.
The one in the sari.
The one with hollow eyes.
The one who never moved, only waited.

As they drove further, Divya found herself asking a question, one that had no answer.

Why do we choose to stay in places like this?

Is it because we crave the luxury, the prestige, the illusion of history?

Or is it because we, too, are drawn to the quiet suffering of a place long past its time, as if something inside us seeks to be swallowed by it?

We choose to stay because, perhaps, the lure of what is forgotten, is simply too strong.

In the backseat, nestled between the bags and the sleeping children, someone else had slipped in.
Rohit, the youngest, looked up at her with wide, unblinking eyes.
“Mummy,” he whispered, voice barely audible over the engine.
“Who’s the lady in the back?”

…

of two toothbrushes

slowly migrating

to separate cups


as if love could evaporate

in the quiet refusal

of bristles to touch


here’s the thing no one tells you

you can adore someone

down to the freckles

on their disappointed forehead,

and still

you have to let go


like estranged lovers at a baithak

sitting side by side

saying nothing

sharing only the weight

of what’s no longer said


because love

doesn’t guarantee

the plumbing won’t burst

or that someone won’t stop

saying “i miss you”

and start just…

missing


sometimes you run

because you’re afraid

other times,

and listen carefully now

you run because

you respect them too much

to stay

and sour into something

bitter and brittle


you see

we all have feet

not just to dance at weddings

but to sprint out of burning houses

where the fire has no villain

and the villain is no one

but entropy


sometimes love is a wild animal 

you feed it

tame it

but the second the cage closes

it bites

so let it go

let it tear the sky

as it runs


this is love too

this, the walking away

the running

not from,

but for


because if you really loved them

truly, skin-and-soul loved them

you’d want them free


and you?


you’d want to remember them

in full bloom… 

not as petals falling

in your hands

          🍁