Echoes of Unspoken Love

The hills had turned a wet green, the kind you only saw after the first week of rain. Govind stood on the veranda, his chai growing cold in his hand. The tin roof drummed overhead, louder than he remembered from last year.

Three summers now. Delhi had swallowed her up the way it did with everyone who left. The wooden swing moved slightly in the breeze, rope creaking against the hook his grandfather had screwed into the beam. It was empty now.

He had checked his phone twice already this morning. Rohit from Bangalore, his cousin is about some wedding, three notifications from WhatsApp groups he never opened. The number he had memorised at seventeen was not saved anymore. He had deleted it last winter, then typed it back in from memory the same night.

“Beta, aur chai?” Ma's voice from the kitchen, already knowing he would not answer.

The swing moved again. She used to sit there with her feet tucked under her, listening to Dadi's stories about the British sahib who built their house. Tulsi would laugh at the wrong parts, missing the point entirely, and Dadi would pretend to be annoyed. “Yeh city wali ladkiyan,” she would mutter, but she had saved the best sweets for Tulsi every evening.

His pocket buzzed. The startup job in Bangalore, probably. Six lakhs to start, flat provided, stock options. Rohit had forwarded the listing three times now. Govind pulled out his phone, his thumb hovering over the notification. He put it back without looking.

The rain was picking up. Somewhere near CP, Tulsi would be hurrying under shop awnings, her dupatta pulled tight. Or maybe she had learned to carry an umbrella by now. Three years was enough time to become a proper Delhiwali.

She had been fourteen that first summer, lost near the post office with directions written in her aunt's careful Hindi. Her salwar was too long, city-tailored for flat ground. He had walked her home the long way because she kept stopping. Every cat, every flower, every view down the valley made her pause. “Kitna sundar,” she had whispered at the Shimla hills like she was seeing mountains for the first time.

Maybe she was.

“The cities make you forget the sky,” Dadi used to say. “Too many buildings blocking God's face.”

Thunder rolled somewhere above the clouds. Govind stepped back under the overhang, rainwater dripping from his hair. Inside, Ma was humming while she kneaded dough, the same tune she had been humming for twenty years, something her own mother had taught her. The rhythm never changed.

That last summer, Tulsi had tried to learn the song. She sat in the kitchen with Ma, stumbling over words she had never needed in Chandigarh. “Bhool gayi main,” she had laughed after forgetting the third verse. “I keep forgetting.”

But she had remembered other things. How to make round rotis instead of her usual squares. Which neighbour's dog bit? That Govind liked his chai with extra cardamom and no sugar. Small things that felt larger when you were eighteen and believed memory was permanent.

The Delhi University letter was still in his drawer upstairs, folded along the same creases for three years. He ran his thumb along the edge sometimes, but never opened it. He already knew what it said.

His phone rang. Rohit again.

“Yaar, at least think about it. You can't spend your whole life in those hills.”

“I like the hills.”

“Missing what? Some girl who doesn't even call anymore?”

Govind hung up. Rohit meant well, but he had never understood the weight of staying. How some places held you not because you couldn't leave, but because leaving felt like betrayal.

The rain was softer now, settling into the steady rhythm that would last until evening. In a few hours, the temple bells would start across the valley. Seven-thirty, same as always. Time here moved differently than in the cities, circular instead of linear, measured in seasons instead of deadlines.

Tulsi used to say the bells made her feel holy. “Not religious,” she would clarify, “just connected to something bigger.” They would sit on this same swing, listening to the bronze voices calling across the hills, and he would watch her face change in the golden light. No makeup, hair in a simple braid, completely different from the girl who would step off the Delhi bus each June.

Which one was real? The mountain Tulsi or the city one?

Maybe both. Maybe that was the problem.

He finished his cold chai in two gulps and went inside. Ma looked up from her dough, flour dusting her forearms.

“Kya socha?”

“About what?”

She smiled the way mothers do when their children pretend not to understand clear questions. “That boy called again. The job.”

Govind shrugged. “Thinking.”

“Thinking is good. But thinking too long…” She shaped the dough into perfect balls, each one identical to the last. “Sometimes the train leaves while you're still deciding which seat to take.”

Outside, the swing continued its small dance in the wind. Back and forth, keeping time with something he couldn't name but felt in his chest. It was not quite grief, not quite hope. Something in between, formless as mountain mist.

His phone buzzed once more. This time he looked.

New message from +91-98*****23*

His thumb hesitated over the screen. Three years of silence, and now, what? A random text? A wrong number?

Hey... I'm coming home for Diwali. Aunt said your grandmother passed. I'm sorry.

The words blurred slightly. He read them again, then once more.

Home.

She had called Shimla home.

He set the phone on the kitchen counter without replying and walked back to the veranda. The rain had stopped, leaving everything clean and temporary-looking. Water dripped from the pine needles, each drop carrying the light of a sky trying to decide between storm and sunshine.

The swing hung still now, waiting.

Govind sat down slowly, feeling the familiar give of rope and wood. His weight settled into the grooves left by years of use: his grandparents, his parents, him and Tulsi through four summers that felt both endless and impossibly brief.

The temple bells had not started yet, but he could feel them coming. Seven-thirty, same as always. Some things, at least, did not change.

He pulled out his phone again, his thumb hovering over the keyboard. What do you say to someone who has been gone for three years? How do you compress all that silence into a text message?

Okay, he typed. Then deleted it.

She was asking about you at the end, he tried. He deleted that too.

Finally: When?

He hit send before he could think better of it, then put the phone face down on the swing beside him. The mountains waited, patient as always, while somewhere in Delhi, a message travelled through towers and cables toward a girl who might or might not still think of Shimla as home.

The first temple bell rang across the valley, bronze and eternal. Govind closed his eyes and listened, counting the familiar rhythm. Still here. Still the same.

Still waiting.