In a modest 1BHK flat of Vasant Vihar - a neighborhood where Delhi's heartbeat slows just enough to remember itself, Amrita had carved out a life true to its old refrain. Seven years into Delhi's hum, she woke each dawn to the soft chime of Trickle and Time - a waterfall ringtone more memory than sound. She moved with quiet precision: a rinse of the face, a twist of the hair, the turning of the latch. Milk and newspaper waited dutifully at the door, faithful companions to her dawn. Within minutes, tea simmered on the stove, scenting the air with cardamom and routine.

With a practised touch, she spread the newspaper open, flipping pages filled with photographs of beaming toppers to columns draped in quiet condolences. Political volleys followed—sharp, relentless—then the elaborate editorials, often abandoned halfway. Glamour brushed past grief as cinema’s shimmer met society’s dust: fashion parades beside headlines of potholes, protests, promises unmet. It was a mosaic of noise—an archive of urgency and unrest.

And in the midst of it, Amrita felt briefly unmoored, as though surrounded by a world impatient to arrive somewhere, yet unsure where it was going. Her eyes paused on a black-and-white photograph of a burnt-out home, and memory bled in—of a school project once, when she had drawn not just a house, but a living, breathing space: children tumbling across a sunlit yard, a teenager by the first-floor window absorbed in study, mothers tidying rooms with reverent care, men angled gently toward their wives—disciplined, tender. Some corners she’d left cracked, worn by time, recession perhaps, or quiet resignation. And there, in the centre, sat a grandfather figure—serene, spectacled—reading a newspaper that headlined, "Many lives and homes burnt alive in political strife."

Even then, as a child, she had sensed the tremor beneath the ordinary. Now, years later, the world’s din echoed that sketch—loud with knowing, but soft in understanding.

The city below hurried on, but up here, the world slowed.

Just then, a northerly breeze stirred the paper in her hands. From beyond the balcony rail, a single sheet of blank paper fluttered down—light, aimless—before landing in her lap, as if inviting her to write to the one whose absence had made her present so quiet, so gently unbearable.

Things so conventional had been circling her mind—rituals, headlines, expectations—that she no longer had room for formalities. She did not want to begin with Dear, or wonder how he was, or pretend that her tea still tasted the same.

A single tear welled up, uninvited, catching the edge of her smile—the kind that comes not from joy, but from the tenderness of remembering. And then, with a breath that felt like surrender, she lowered her pen to the page. Her heart did not hesitate.

It called out the only word that still made sense "Love,

And with that, the letter began—not written to inform, or to impress, but simply to reach. A reaching across time, silence, and the soft ache of missing.

The answers cling to home, soft, unseen,

Just as she set her pen down, the final word still soft on the page, her phone began to ring—Office, the screen read. But Amrita sat unmoved, still as water held in the hollow of a quiet vessel, untouched by the swirl of time or its insistent rhythms. A single tear traced the curve of her cheek, falling directly on the word Love.

The phone rang again. This time, the caller was 'UNKNOWN'.

She picked it up, slowly, almost forgetting how to greet. But before she could say hello, a voice, rich with something between memory and music, spoke first:

"Ere dusk of life nudges to greet,

It wasn’t the network’s doing that named the caller UNKNOWN—she had saved it herself, for Prayaas, whose presence in her life had always been unmapped and inexplicable, yet somehow always arriving with the answers to every dilemma she never dared to voice.

And then, as if the silence around her could no longer hold it, her tears arrived—neither fully of sorrow, nor solely of joy, but something beautifully suspended in between.

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