Wisp of Memory
The cursor blinked on cell D42. I stared at it like it would fill itself.
Half the row was done. Numbers lined up. There were comments I hadn’t responded to, formulas I hadn’t closed. But I couldn’t go further. Something had pulled the brakes, softly, but completely. I didn’t realise when I stopped typing.
Outside, Delhi was quiet. That strange stillness before sunrise, when even the air stops shifting. Inside, the fridge hummed, the ceiling fan turned in slow rotations, and the last of the coffee had gone cold in my mug. A playlist I’d set hours ago was still playing. Low volume. Just enough to not feel alone.
Then it played. That song.
“Mana ke hum yaar nahi…”
I didn’t need to check. I knew. The way my chest tightened gave it away. I leaned back into the chair. Not in exhaustion. Just in surrender. She was here again. Not in memory, more real than that.
Aruhi.
She used to say that some songs don’t knock. They walk in.
“Jaise koi purana dard ho jo ghar ka address yaad rakh ke aata hai.”
And this song, this fragile, breaking song, was hers.
I had once played it for her without thinking. She had gone very quiet. Then she turned to me, eyes soft, and said,
“You know, it’s like someone finally spoke the language I thought only hearts could understand.”
I smiled.
She didn’t.
That was the thing about Aruhi. She didn’t overshare. She made you sit in silence with her truths. I remember another night, walking back from a poetry open mic in Lajpat, she suddenly stopped near a shut florist stall and said,
“There are some songs, Pratap, that feel like bandages and knives at the same time.
Mujhe unse pyaar ho jaata hai.”
She laughed before I could respond.
“Maybe because they feel like me.”
She wasn’t wrong. Aruhi was both comfort and ache.
The kind of girl who never took photos at concerts because she didn’t want to “freeze a feeling before it was done.” The kind who paused mid-sentence to listen to a faint flute sound from a passing rickshaw. The kind who never said goodbye properly.
She just slipped out of things quietly, leaving behind air that took longer to settle. And somehow, I never asked her to stay.
She had once scribbled something in my notebook while I was ordering coffee. I came back, and there it was, in her rounded handwriting, across a page meant for meeting notes:
“Phool jo band hai, panno mein tum... usko dhool bana dena.”
I didn’t ask her what she meant. Neither of us believed in postmortems.
The song was still playing. That final verse.
“Phir wahi kaanto ka safar, wahi phoolon ki gali…”
She loved this line the most. She once closed her eyes and whispered it like a prayer. Then stayed quiet for five minutes, breathing deeply, like she was letting the words settle somewhere under her skin.
Now, sitting in this room with the glow of the laptop screen flickering against my face, I could still feel her next to me, on the floor, barefoot, holding a cushion to her chest, looking at me like I didn’t need to speak.
I turned back to the screen. The spreadsheet was untouched. Cells half-filled. No progress. No guilt. Some nights are like this. You don’t get work done. You don’t move forward. You just sit with people who are no longer there. People who never asked to be remembered. But stayed anyway. Like a petal, closed in some forgotten page. Not quite a wound. Not quite a cure. Just…
Aruhi.