"THE LAST LETTER"

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Kagaj ki kashtiyon ko udake,

Aasman ke paar le jane ka wada tha uska.

Kashtiyon ko kya pta thi tufaano ki saazish,

  Apno ne hi unka jahaan tod dia tha.

Jin kashtiyon me khushiyon ka sapna tha,

Unhi me dard ka samundar bhar diya gaya.

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The ink bled slowly across the page, a thin blue river swallowing her trembling words. Viya paused, listening to the night that stretched beyond her open window, a night so still she could hear her own heartbeat. It felt as if the walls were holding their breath. As if even the silence feared the memories she was about to summon.

“To the pieces of a past that never quite let go,” she wrote, the letters a little crooked, her hand unsteady.

There were so many ways she could begin this — with a name, with an apology, with a question she had never dared ask — but none of them felt honest enough. None of them could carry the weight of what she carried inside her bones.

She dipped the pen again, letting the blackness of the ink mirror the blackness of her thoughts.

The boy. The girl. The childhood of them all, tied to half-healed wounds.

If anyone ever found this letter, they might call it a confession. Maybe it was. But it was also a prayer, in a language of shadows, written to no one and everyone all at once.

Because how do you tell the world that you watched love grow like a flame and then watched it burn its own house down?

She looked out at the faint lights of Delhi, the city too big to hold their stories, yet too small to escape them. Outside, car horns cried like wounded animals, but her window was an island. She could almost pretend she was alone with the night.

There was a time, she thought, when these walls were filled with the laughter of children. When they folded paper planes in secret, as if their dreams could fly. She remembered the smell of summer, the sticky mango juice on their fingers, the sound of the girl’s voice calling the boy by a name that turned him into something sacred.

She shut her eyes. The memory was so bright it hurt.

How could something so sweet turn so sour?

Viya let the pen hover above the paper. Words were heavy. Words were dangerous. But stories left unsaid were worse — they rotted inside you until they hollowed you out.

So she wrote.

“Once, I thought love was enough to save us. I was wrong. We were children trying to build a home in the middle of a storm. We were children trying to keep each other warm while the world poured its poison over us.”

A small sigh left her lips. The wind lifted a curl of her hair and made it dance, as if the night wanted to read over her shoulder.

“I wish I could say I was strong enough to protect them. I wish I could say I was brave enough to hold them together when the darkness came. But I wasn’t. I was a girl who watched everything burn.”

The tip of her pen left a little blot, an ink tear.

Viya felt her own tears trying to rise, but she refused them. Tears were useless now.

She had decided long ago that if she ever told this story, she would tell it honestly. All the ragged, twisted, broken edges. All the truth. Even the parts that would stain her.

Because somewhere out there, under the same ruined sky, those children still lived.

In a way, they would always live — trapped in the summer they thought would never end.

And she owed them this letter.

A letter to the ghosts of a time when they were whole.

Viya drew in a breath, let it shiver through her, and then bent her head to the page once more.

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Viya let her pen rest, tracing the paper’s edge as if she could trace the lost children who once played in its margins. There were ghosts here, shadows wearing familiar smiles. Sometimes, in the hush before dawn, she thought she could hear their laughter still, woven through the cracks of memory like a hidden hymn.

If I close my eyes long enough, she thought, maybe they will come running back. Paper planes, bare feet, mango stains. And him.

No one called him by that childhood name now. No one, except her letter, dared whisper that name.

In the quiet, Viya’s mind replayed their sun-soaked afternoons by the ghats of Varanasi, the river always carrying away their secrets, carrying away the children they had been. They built palaces out of mud, crowned each other kings and queens of nothing but dreams.

The girl had been so small then, a child with hair like midnight, eyes wide as the night sky. There was something ageless in the way she looked at him, as though she recognized him not from this life but from another, stitched in stars older than the world.

The boy had matched her innocence with a quiet courage. Even back then, he moved like he belonged to a bigger story.

Maybe he did, Viya wrote.

Maybe they all did.

But there had always been something wrong in the corners of their happiness. A hush in the girl’s voice when her father’s name came up. A wince in her grandmother’s eyes. A bruise half-hidden by a new dress.

Viya remembered being too young to understand, too young to stop it.

Sometimes she still woke up at night to the echo of the girl’s screams, though the house where those screams were born had long since turned to dust.

The ink of her words bled from one line to the next, as if even the paper could not bear to separate them.

She paused, twisting the ring on her finger, a cheap copper circle the girl had given her one summer, laughing. “Tie a wish to it,” the girl had said, “and maybe the wind will carry it somewhere safe.”

What foolish faith they had, to think the wind could be trusted.

Viya’s lips curved in something between a smile and a wound .

.

.

He is gone now.

.

.

She did not write the boy’s name. Could not write the boy’s name. The wound was too fresh, still bright as an open flame. It had been one week, seven days that refused to pass, since they laid him down in the earth next to the girl.

No one would ever speak that aloud, not yet. The truth was too big to carry. It would shatter them all.

But here, in this letter, Viya would let it breathe.

“Forgive me,” she wrote, the words slicing through her ribs. “I cannot carry your story any longer. It has grown too heavy for one heart alone.”

Because their story had never belonged to one person. It had belonged to them all:

the girl who burned with unspeakable grief.

the boy who held her through nightmares.

the friends who tried to fix what could not be fixed.

They were children with matchsticks, playing inside a hurricane.

We were never meant to survive it, she thought.

But somehow, for a little while, they did.

Viya closed her eyes, letting a single tear slip down her cheek. The air tasted of old incense, of prayers half-said, of something that felt like a eulogy for everything they lost.

“What is love,” she wrote in the margin, “if not the willingness to burn with someone, even knowing you will turn to ash?”

A quote, yes, but also a question that had no answer.

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Viya felt the paper trembling beneath her hand, as though it were alive, refusing to hold these memories. She pressed her palm against it, willing it to stay still.

“Write it,” she told herself. “Write it before it devours you.”

Because silence was a sickness, and she had carried this silence for too long.

She had watched the girl’s world collapse, brick by brick, until nothing was left but a child’s screams and a mother’s cruelty. She had seen the bloodstains scrubbed from marble floors, heard the excuses whispered through tight lips, smelled the stale perfume that never quite covered the rot.

There were monsters who wore family names. Monsters who said “I love you” with hands that bruised. Monsters who told little girls they were to blame for surviving.

Sometimes, Viya wondered if the true horror was not that these things happened, but that no one wanted to look too closely. Because to look was to confess that their world was built on bones.

We build our homes from the same stones that once cut us, she thought. We build our love from the same hands that once shook in terror.

She let those words linger. Maybe someone would read them one day and understand. Maybe someone would see their own scars inside the girl’s.

“Love is not a cure,” she wrote next, in a spidery line of script. “It is only a place to rest between battles.”

No one had ever taught them how to rest.

Not the girl, with her soul made of night storms.

Not the boy, who kept trying to fix the world with his gentle fire.

Not even Viya, who thought that holding everyone together would somehow heal them all.

She had been wrong. Love was not enough to save them from knives in the dark, or from the weight of a father’s rage. It was not enough to mend a mother who refused to believe, refused to forgive, refused to see the truth written in her daughter’s eyes.

Trauma is an echo, she wrote, “and no matter how far you run, it follows you like a ghost.”

It was not fair. None of it had been fair.

Viya let herself cry now, tears dropping onto the page like tiny rainstorms. The ache had grown too big to hold back.

She remembered a night, still clear as glass, when the girl had clung to her in the dark, shaking.

“If I disappear,” the girl had whispered, voice so small it barely existed, “promise you’ll remember me as the girl who wanted to fly, not the girl who was caged.”

Viya had promised. And broken that promise a thousand times since.

Because the girl who was caged was easier to remember than the girl who wanted to fly.

It was easier to name the wounds than to name the dreams.

She reached up and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, the page blurring, the ink smudging. The words blurred, but the meaning did not.

“What we survive,” she wrote, “never leaves us. It builds a home in our bones, waits there, wakes with our nightmares, and reminds us how to bleed.”

A quote for someone, someday. Maybe a reader who would see their own haunted heart in these lines.

Viya placed a hand over the letter, as if to calm it, as if to calm herself.

The boy was gone now. One week in the ground, next to the girl who had left three years before him. Their story, finished.

Or so everyone thought.

But stories do not die when the heart stops. They keep breathing in the spaces left behind, in the questions left unanswered, in the love left unspoken.

“I will tell your story,” she promised, pressing the pen against the last line. “Even if no one believes it. Even if no one forgives it. Even if I cannot forgive myself.”

Because these children, these warriors of half-broken dreams, deserved to be remembered.

And she — she had seen too much to ever look away.

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The night outside her window had grown deeper, a velvet black so rich it almost seemed to swallow the world. Viya paused, breathing in the hush, feeling the weight of memory settle across her shoulders like a funeral shawl.

There was no right way to end this letter. Some stories refused to close themselves neatly. Some stories were not meant to have a last page.

But endings were a kindness, even if they came soaked in blood.

She steadied her pen and let her heart bleed one final time.

“To the girl who taught me that even a broken wing remembers how to fly. To the boy who tried to hold the sun in his hands, no matter how it burned him. To all the children who loved beyond reason, who trusted beyond fear, who paid for their dreams with their innocence.”

Viya felt the words echo through her chest, a hollow bell.

They were gone.

One lost to a darkness too heavy to lift.

The other following her, perhaps because some souls cannot bear to wander alone.

She could still hear their laughter if she closed her eyes. Could still feel the heat of a summer that was supposed to last forever.

But time was cruel.

It turned them from living children into ghosts, from dreams into graves, from a story into a secret that no one dared speak.

No one but her.

“I will speak it,” she wrote, “even if my voice shakes. I will write it, even if my hands tremble. Because there are children out there right now, fighting storms with matchsticks, and they deserve to know: you can love, and still break. You can love, and still lose. You can love, and still survive.”

She felt a sob rip through her.

The city outside was waking up now, a thin blue line of dawn threatening to cut through the night. Viya hated dawn. It felt like a betrayal, a new day that dared to rise while the past was still unburied.

Some wounds were too deep for daylight.

She thought of the girl’s eyes — endless, fierce, drowning.

She thought of the boy’s smile — fragile as a candle in the wind.

“What is love,” she whispered, “if not the willingness to lose yourself in someone else’s sorrow?”

Maybe that was why their story had devoured them.

Maybe that was why it still devoured her.

She signed her name at the bottom of the letter. Viya. No surname, no family mark. Just a girl writing to ghosts.

Folding the paper, she pressed it against her lips, a silent prayer. If there was any God listening, if there was any mercy in the world, let them hear her now.

“Find peace,” she breathed, eyes shut tight. “Wherever you are. I will keep the embers warm, I will keep the story safe.”

Because stories — the true stories, the dangerous ones — were worth saving, even if they hurt.

Especially if they hurt.

As the first rays of sun dared to pierce the window, Viya set the letter down. Her hand was numb, her pulse unsteady, her breath ragged. But there was a quiet in her bones now, the kind that comes only after the worst storm.

She rose, stepping to the window, letting the pale dawn spill over her face. Somewhere out there, their story was waiting to begin again.

The story of children who tried to love each other back to life.

The story of a boy whose name was turned holy by a girl’s laugh.

The story of a girl who became a legend, and then a shadow, and then a whisper no one dared speak.

What remains unwritten, Viya thought, will always belong to them.

She closed her eyes.

And let the morning take her.

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Ek tha raja, ek thi rani, dono ki thi prem kahani..

Kisse sune kahani suni raja ki aur rani ki..

Par kisi ne na batlaayi thi unke jeevan ki kahani

Dost the, kuch mashooq the jale jo ishq me vo bhi kuch junoon se

Hr waqt kehta hai ek kahani

Pr is kahani me jaise ki waqt thehera sa  hai.

Is kahani me bas yun samjho,

Har pal tha adhoora, har saans thi udhaari.

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