The Darjeeling mist clung to the hillside like a shy lover, wrapping the tea gardens in a soft, grey embrace. Meera Rai stood at the edge of her family's small estate, the dampness seeping through her woolen shawl. In her hand, she held the envelope. It had taken her three drafts, four tear stains, and every ounce of courage she possessed to write it.
The paper smelled faintly of jasmine, from the dried flower she had pressed between the pages. Her handwriting, usually neat and disciplined like the botanical sketches she made, trembled on the final line.
Come back, or set me free.
She traced the words with her fingertip, the ink already smudged from her earlier tears. Eight months. Eight months of silence after a year of letters that arrived like clockwork every Friday. Eight months of staring at the postbox at the end of the winding hill road, her hope withering a little more with each empty-handed return.
"Meera beta, the last post is going!" her father called from the veranda of their modest bungalow.
"I'm coming, Papa!" she shouted back, her voice swallowed by the mist.
She looked at the address one last time:
Capt. Arjun Shekhawat
56 Field Regiment
*C/O 56 APO*
She had memorized it. She had memorized every word of every letter he'd ever sent. The early ones, full of academy bravado and missing her mother's aloo parathas. The later ones, more serious, tinged with the weight of his new commission. The last one, posted from somewhere near the border, promising he would write as soon as he reached his new post. That was 242 days ago.
With a prayer whispered to the misty hills, she slipped the letter into the bright red postbox. The metal flap clanged shut with a finality that echoed in her bones.
Be safe, Arjun. Just tell me you're alive.
Seven hundred kilometers away, in a bunker carved into a mountain of Ladakh, Captain Arjun Shekhawat held a different envelope.
It was grimy, creased from being carried against his chest for weeks. The jasmine scent had long faded, replaced by the smells of gun oil, cold earth, and sweat. A single kerosene lamp threw shadows that danced on the rough-hewn stone walls.
His men slept, their exhausted breaths a quiet rhythm in the cramped space. The ceasefire was holding, but the tension was a live wire in the air.
He opened the letter for what felt like the hundredth time. He didn't need to read it. He knew it by heart. Every word was a searing brand on his soul.
My dearest Arjun,
The monsoon here is beautiful and terrible. It reminds me of you. Beautiful because it makes the whole world green and alive. Terrible because it washes everything away...
He skipped to the end, his eyes, gritty with fatigue, finding the line that shattered him every time.
I love you. I have loved you since we were seventeen and you stole my botany notebook. But love cannot live on silence. I am starting to feel like a ghost, loving a ghost. Come back to me after your posting ends next month. Or… set me free. Let me go. Please.
Yours, always and never,
Meera
A sound escaped him, something between a groan and a sob. He clamped it down, looking sharply at his sleeping men. An officer could not break. Not here. Not now.
He had written a reply that very night, under this same flickering lamp. A single line on a page torn from his field service notebook.
Meera, my heart is and always will be yours. Forgive me.
He had never sent it.
How could he? The promise he had made was not written on paper, but carved into the conscience of a soldier. It was etched in the dying eyes of his commanding officer, Major Vikramaditya Singh, as the medevac helicopter’s blades thumped uselessly in the thin air.
"Arjun… my wife… she cannot know… the truth of how I… Promise me. Look after them. And… let nothing distract you. Not even love. Promise me."
A promise to a dying hero. A vow that sealed his own heart in a tomb.
He took out his pen now. The reply he could not send was gone, burned in a small, respectful fire along with the Major’s personal effects. But he wrote the line again, on a fresh sheet. A ritual of penance.
Meera, my heart is and always will be yours. Forgive me.
He folded the paper, sealed it in a fresh envelope, and wrote her Darjeeling address. He held it over the lamp flame. The paper blackened, curled, and turned to ash, falling silently to the dirt floor.
Set her free, he commanded his breaking heart. It is the only gift left to give.
Ten years later. Mumbai.
The air in the grand ballroom of the Taj Lands End was thick with the scent of roses, expensive perfume, and joyous chaos. A live band played a fusion sangeet tune, and the dance floor was a riot of colorful lehengas and sparkling laughter.
At the center of it all was Meera Rai. Or, in a few hours, she would be Meera Malhotra.
Her lehenga was a masterpiece of crimson and gold, heavy with embroidery. The weight of it, the weight of the diamonds at her throat and ears, felt both alien and anchoring. In the mirror this morning, she had seen a stranger—a beautiful, poised, successful stranger. Dr. Meera Rai, lead botanist for a premier pharmaceutical firm, author of two respected papers on Himalayan medicinal plants. The girl from Darjeeling who mailed heartbroken letters into the mist was a ghost from another life.
"Smile, Meera! One more with Rohan's cousins from London!" the photographer called.
She turned, her smile practiced and perfect. Her eyes met Rohan's across the crowd. Rohan Malhotra. Her fiancé. Handsome, kind, successful, and wonderfully, solidly present. He had never been a ghost. He was real, he was here, and he loved her with a steady, reliable warmth that had, over two years, thawed the permanent winter in her soul. He knew about Arjun—the broad strokes, the young love lost to time and distance. He called it her "Darjeeling romance," with a gentle, understanding smile that held no jealousy, only compassion.
He was her safe harbor. And today, she was choosing the shore.
"All done, madam!" the photographer said, finally.
Meera exhaled, the real smile touching her eyes as Rohan made his way to her, deftly avoiding aunts with cameras.
"Tired?" he asked, his hand finding the small of her back.
"A little. Happy-tired," she said, leaning into his touch.
"You look… incandescent," he whispered, and for a moment, she felt it. She felt like a woman on the brink of a beautiful beginning.
Her maid of honour, Priya, rushed over, holding Meera’s sequined clutch. "Your phone has been buzzing non-stop! Probably more last-minute wishes."
"Thank you, Priya." Meera took the phone. Dozens of notifications. WhatsApp messages, emails. She swiped them away, her mind already on the sacred pheras a few hours from now.
Then she saw it.
An SMS. From an unknown number. A +91 number she didn't recognize.
Her thumb hovered. It was probably a wrong number. A spam message. Yet, a cold trickle, like a drop of Darjeeling mist, slid down her spine.
Rohan was pulled away by his uncle. The music swelled. The world was a blur of colour and noise.
Meera opened the message.
Two lines. Just two lines.
I stood at the back of the church at your sister’s wedding last year. You wore blue. You looked happy.
The letter. I never forgot.
*- A*
The world did not shatter. It simply stopped.
The music vanished. The laughter melted into a silent, slow-motion pantomime. The weight of her lehenga became the weight of the entire ocean.
The letter.
Only one person in the world called it that. The letter. The last one.
Her eyes scanned the words again, desperately seeking a different meaning. A. Not Arjun. Just A. As if he knew any other initial would be redundant. As if, after a decade of silence, he could simply walk back into her life with a single, devastating alphabet.
Her fingers turned to ice. The phone screen blurred.
Come back, or set me free.
He had done neither. For ten years, he had done neither. And now… now, on the day she was finally, finally choosing freedom for herself…
"Meera? Meera, love, are you alright?" Rohan was back, his face swimming into her vision, etched with concern. He touched her arm.
She flinched.
The shock in his eyes mirrored the earthquake inside her.
"Meera? What is it? You're white as a sheet."
She tried to speak. Her throat was sealed shut. She tried to hand him the phone, to show him the seismic fault line that had just cracked open beneath their perfect wedding day, but her fingers were locked around it.
She looked past Rohan, her eyes sweeping across the ballroom, over the heads of dancing relatives, past the towering flower arrangements.
Was he here? Did the message mean he was here?
The band transitioned to a joyful bhangra beat. The crowd whooped. Colours swirled.
And in the farthest, darkest corner of the ballroom, near the grand exit, she saw him.
A tall, straight-backed silhouette in formal attire, standing utterly still amidst the motion. The distance was too great to see his face, but she didn't need to see it. She knew the set of those shoulders. She knew that posture of watchful stillness, as if he were on a sentry duty.
Their eyes met across the whirlwind of her wedding celebration.
Time folded. Ten years vanished. She was twenty-two again, standing in the mist, her heart in a red postbox.
He gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.
Then he turned, and was gone.
The phone slipped from Meera's numb fingers. It clattered on the marble floor, the screen shattering into a spiderweb of cracks, over those two impossible lines.
Rohan bent to pick it up, his brow furrowed in alarm. "Meera, for God's sake, talk to me! What's happening?"
She looked at her fiancé, at his loving, worried, uncomprehending face. She looked at the shattered phone in his hand. She looked at the empty space in the dark corner where a ghost had just made himself flesh.
All the air left the room.
The music crashed back in, deafeningly loud.
End of Chapter 1.
