When Ananya stepped into her new flat in Pune, the first thing she did was shut all the windows.
The real estate agent had told her the fifth floor had a beautiful view of the hills, especially at sunset. But Ananya didn’t care for hills or sunsets. She wasn’t here for scenery. She was here to forget.
She had packed light — two bags, a framed photo of her mother, and a yellow notebook filled with unfinished poems. The past three years in Kolkata had turned her heart into a closed room. She needed a new door, and Pune felt far enough.
It was easy to pretend she was someone else in a new city. No one knew her here. No one asked about her past. Not her landlord, not her new boss, and certainly not the neighbors — people always too busy, too wrapped in their own lives.
But the thing about silence is — it leaves room for whispers.
At first, it was small. The mug she dropped on her first morning reminded her of the one she and Rishi had bought at a street fair in Park Street. The chipped green rim looked identical. She picked up the broken pieces and laughed softly. “Coincidence,” she whispered. But her fingers trembled.
A week passed. The city was polite. Too polite. It didn’t ask questions. Nobody noticed that Ananya never smiled with her teeth or that she walked with her eyes always scanning, as if someone might call her name from behind.
Her neighbors were quiet too, except the man in Flat 5B — a pianist. Every evening around 7, soft notes of old Hindi songs floated from his window to hers. Once, when “Tujhse Naraz Nahi Zindagi” began playing, Ananya stood frozen in the kitchen, her hands soaked in soap suds, her breath caught. It was her mother’s favorite song — the one they had played at her funeral. She sat down on the kitchen floor and cried for the first time in months.
By the second month, the dreams began.
In them, she was always in her childhood home, but the furniture had changed. The walls were cracked. She heard laughter — her own, younger and free. And then, suddenly, silence. In every dream, a door slammed, and she was alone again. She’d wake up sweating, gasping for air. Sometimes, she’d forget where she was — Pune or Kolkata, past or present.
It was getting harder to write at work. Her manager noticed. “Writer’s block?” he asked gently.
She nodded, lying. The truth was worse. It wasn’t a block — it was an overflow. Every sentence she wrote reminded her of something. Some line she’d said to Rishi, some word her mother used to hum while making chai. The past had a strange way of turning the most innocent words into knives.
One afternoon, she received a call from an unknown number.
“Ananya,” said a voice she hadn’t heard in over a year.
Her stomach dropped. “Rishi?”
“I heard you moved,” he said. “I didn’t call to bother you. Just… I saw your poem published in that magazine. You used the name ‘A.R.’ but I knew it was you.”
She said nothing. Her heart thudded in her chest like it had something urgent to say.
“I’m proud of you,” he said, softly. “And I hope you’re okay.”
She hung up.
That night, she opened her yellow notebook again. She wrote:
You run away to escape the fire,
but sometimes you carry the smoke inside your lungs.
The next day, she knocked on the door of 5B.
A tall man with wire-rim glasses opened the door, surprised.
“Hi,” she said. “I live across from you. I… I hear your music every night. It reminds me of someone. Would you mind if I listened… just once? In person?”
He stepped aside. “Please. Come in.”
The piano was simple, a little dusty. He played without asking what she wanted to hear. Somehow, he knew. The notes filled the room gently, like water soaking into dry earth.
She didn’t cry. Not this time. Instead, she closed her eyes and let the music stitch something broken back together. For the first time in a long while, she didn’t feel like she was running.
After that night, the dreams softened. The door still slammed, but this time, she turned and walked out of it. She didn’t wake up gasping anymore. She started leaving her windows open. She smiled at the tea vendor who set up his cart near the gate. She let herself listen to laughter without turning away.
A month later, she submitted her first long-form essay to an online magazine: “How Grief Moves Cities With You.”
She signed it with her full name.
The past doesn’t disappear when you move cities — she knew that now. It hides in the music from a neighbor’s piano. It rides on the breeze that carries the smell of chai from the stall across the street. It calls you unexpectedly, not to pull you back, but to remind you of what made you.
And slowly, with kindness, you learn not to run from it — but to walk beside it.
On the 100th morning in her new flat, Ananya opened all her windows wide. The sun was rising over the hills, lighting the city golden. She stood there for a long while, breathing in everything.
Even the smoke.
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