Yours, From This Far

As much as I love the smell of fresh, crisp pages of a new book, I also adore a thrifted one.

 It gives off an old-world charm. The yellowed pages hint at its journey. I always wonder who owned it before me. What kind of person were they? How did it end up here?

 I took a pit stop on my way back from the office, at my favourite bookstore that sold old books. After my eyes filtered through the shelves, I found a book with a dirty, slightly torn, but prettiest spine and cover.

It was a hardcover, with an antique feel to it. I paid my Rs. 100 and brought it home.

After dinner and my basic skincare, I got into bed with the book. I turned on my bedside lamp, switched on the AC, pulled the comforter over me, and opened it.

It was a historical fiction. I had been loving those lately. As I turned the first page, I saw a name scribbled on it — Samridhi. Was she the owner?

I read on. The story was set in India before independence, a fiction about two people who loved each other and died. The book was damn interesting.

I hadn't realised I was already halfway through. I put my bookmark in and decided to continue the next day.

But sleep eluded me, and so did my urge to finish the book. I was fifteen pages further in when, as I turned a page, a paper fell onto my lap.

 It was old, torn, yellowed. It was folded three times, small enough to have once fit inside an envelope. The creases were soft, worn in a way that suggested it had been opened more times than anyone could count. I unfolded it carefully, careful not to let it tear any further.

 Does this belong to Samridhi? my mind wandered.

 It looked like a letter, written in ink, in a hand that had pressed down hard in some places and gone faint in others, as if the writer's grip had changed with his mood.

💌💌💌💌💌

Dear Beloved,

 I hope this letter reaches you, though I no longer know by what road it would travel, or whether such roads between us exist at all anymore.
I hope you are the one reading it. I hope the winter has already arrived and that you are keeping warm.

 Most of all, I hope you are happy — even without me there to see it, and even though I was the one made to leave.

London is grey most days, and the days here have never felt longer. I count the lamp posts along the street outside to pass the hours, and without meaning to, I count the days since I was made to board that ship as well. The two counts have started to feel like the same thing — one measuring the dark, the other measuring you.

The lights on a rainy evening here are pretty, people tell me, but they are nothing next to how you looked that day in your white saree, the rain just starting behind you. Do you still have it? I hope you do. I hope you keep it somewhere safe, the way I have had to keep that evening safe only in my mind, since I was not permitted to keep anything else of India with me when they sent us home.

I do not know if a letter can even find its way to you now, with everything that has changed since the men in charge decided our countries were finished with each other.

I am told the post between here and there is slow, when it moves at all, and slower still for men like me, who left under circumstances some would rather forget. Still I cannot stop writing to you. I do not know if you will ever hold this page.

I write anyway, because the alternative — writing nothing, as if you had never existed to me — is a silence I cannot manage.

 As I write this, it has started to drizzle outside my window — the same as it was drizzling the day I kissed you. I have never forgotten how shy you went afterward, and then how you held onto me anyway, as if you didn't want the moment to end even as everything around us was already ending.

I can still feel your arms around me some nights. Your fingers in my hair. You have no idea how much I miss you, or how strange it is to miss a place and a person at once, and to be barred from both.

I think often of the evening I went down on one knee in front of you, and you ran. I have turned it over a hundred times since. I do not think you ran because you did not want me. I think you ran because you understood, faster than I did, what a soldier from London proposing to you would mean in a country about to no longer belong to men like me. I was slow to see what you already knew.

 I am sorry it took a whole ocean between us to teach me. I do not know if you married since. I do not know if you are even permitted, in the eyes of those around you, to think of me at all anymore, given everything my country did and undid in yours. I only know that some nights my chest goes hollow with wanting an answer I may never get — not because you owe me one, but because I would carry it more easily than I carry this silence.

I no longer know if I can come back for you, or if you could ever be allowed to come here for me. The men who once commanded me have made it plain there is no going back, not for men who left the way I left, under a resignation they took as something closer to betrayal.

I am trapped here, my love, in a city that is supposed to be home and does not feel like it, the same way I remain trapped by the thought of you — your smile, your laugh, none of it has left me, not for a single day

I do not know what I am asking for anymore. Perhaps only this — that if this letter somehow does reach you, you will know that I did not stop thinking of you the moment the ship left the harbour. That distance did not do what distance is supposed to do.

My heart aches without you beside me. Some days it feels entirely empty, like a room with the lamp gone out. I do not know if I am still the person you ran from, or if I have become someone else entirely, waiting here, for a person I am no longer sure I am allowed to want.

Yours, always and completely, even from this far and this forbidden.

💌💌💌💌💌


There was no name after that. Just a small tear where a name might have once been, or might never have been at all.

I set the letter down slowly, my hands trembling a little without my meaning them to. I hadn't expected it to turn like that — from love, into something so much bigger and sadder.

 A country splitting two people apart, not just an ocean. I picked up the book again and flipped back to the front page, staring at the name. Samridhi. I wondered, with a strange, sinking feeling, if she was the woman in the white saree. If she was the one who ran. I wondered whether this book — this story of two people in pre-independence India who loved and died — was somehow her own story too, hidden in plain sight, disguised as fiction.

I turned the pages faster now, half reading, half searching, looking for any line that felt too real to be invented. A soldier. A ship. A proposal, a rainy street. My heart was beating oddly fast for someone just reading in bed at midnight.

 I thought about him in London, grey and far away, counting lamp posts the same way I had been counting pages. I thought about how he must have written this not knowing — truly not knowing — if it would ever cross the sea, if she would ever be allowed to read it, if she was even still alive to read it. And yet he wrote it anyway.

That undid something in me. I don't know why. Maybe because I understood, suddenly, that some letters are not written to be answered. Some are written only so the writer does not have to carry the silence entirely alone. I looked at my own phone lying face-down beside me, at how easy it would be to send anything to anyone, anywhere, in seconds.

 And yet here I was, holding a message that had taken decades to reach anyone at all — maybe never reaching the person it was meant for, maybe ending up here instead, in the hands of a stranger, on an ordinary Tuesday night, for no reason I could explain.

 I did not know if Samridhi ever wrote back. I did not know if she ever went to London, or married the man he feared she might, or lived her whole life a few streets from where he'd once knelt in front of her, never finding out he had written this at all.

The book would not tell me. The letter would not tell me either. I only knew that somewhere, once, a man had loved a woman enough to keep writing to her long after every road between them had closed.

 And somewhere, maybe, a woman had kept a letter — or lost one — that carried the last of what he felt for her, waiting decades to be found by someone who had no right to it at all, except that she happened to be reading late on a rainy night, in a book that had cost her only a hundred rupees.

I decided to frame this letter and keep it with mw forever 💛