Chapter 7: Letters to Nowhere Part 2
803 Words
Aarav read the letter every night for a week.
Not because he didn’t remember its words, but because each time he read it, the world seemed to settle into place—a world where he hadn’t been erased, where his name still lived in the voice of his sister, where his mother still called him beta with pride and irritation in equal measure.
He began to walk differently.
Straighter.
More grounded.
Like a man carrying both the weight and the light of his past.
One morning, as Aarav finished organizing pages for the new pamphlet, Ramesh called him aside.
“There’s someone here to see you.”
He looked up to see a woman in a faded cotton sari standing in the doorway. Her eyes were tired but sharp, her face drawn by years of hard sun and harder life.
“Aarav?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Savita. Your mother sent me.”
His heart lurched. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” she said, pulling a bundle from her cloth bag. “She sent food. She said, ‘He won’t listen to me about eating, but maybe he’ll listen to homemade theplas.’”
Aarav took the parcel, stunned.
“Thank you,” he said. “Is she okay?”
“She is stronger than anyone I know,” Savita said. “She doesn’t want you to come back out of guilt. Only when you’re ready.”
He nodded slowly. “I want to. I just don’t know when.”
“She said you’d say that too,” Savita smiled. “She knows her son.”
That night, Aarav opened the bundle carefully.
Inside were six theplas wrapped in banana leaf, a small pouch of jaggery, and a folded piece of cloth. When he unfolded it, he found a hand-stitched square—his name sewn in red thread.
Just his name.
But it hit him harder than any book ever could.
Inspired, Aarav began a new project.
He called it “Letters to Nowhere.”
The idea was simple: every worker, student, or laborer at the community center could write one letter—to someone they’d lost, someone they missed, or even to a future version of themselves. The letters would be placed in a wooden box at the entrance.
Some would be posted if an address could be found.
Others would never leave the box.
But all would be read aloud—anonymously—at the end-of-month gathering.
Aarav built the box himself using scrap wood and leftover nails. He painted the words “Your voice still matters” across the front in blue ink.
By the end of the week, the box was full.
The first gathering took place on a Friday evening.
The classroom was packed—workers, teachers, cleaners, children, even a few guards from nearby buildings who had quietly joined the classes over the past few months.
Ramesh stood at the front, holding a stack of letters.
One by one, they read them aloud.
“Dear Father, I still look for your face in the crowd. I don’t know why. You left ten years ago. But part of me thinks you never meant to.”
“Dear Meera—this is not Aarav, but another boy who also left a sister behind. I’m sorry. For both of us.”
“To my unborn child: I wanted to bring you into a better world. I’m still trying.”
The room was still. Not silent—but still. Like the whole world had paused just long enough to listen.
No one clapped.
No one needed to.
Afterward, people came up to Aarav—not to thank him, but to hand him more letters.
It became a ritual.
Every Friday, stories were shared. Words unburied. Wounds aired and, somehow, gently dressed with language.
Aarav never claimed the idea. He didn’t have to.
This was no longer his movement.
It belonged to everyone now.
One evening, Shyam approached him with something different.
A sealed envelope.
“This one,” he said, “needs to go somewhere.”
Aarav took it, turning it over.
“To my daughter,” it read.
No address.
Just a name inside: Anjali.
“I’ll find a way,” Aarav promised.
Shyam nodded, eyes shining. “Maybe she doesn’t need to read it. Maybe just writing it was enough. But… I still hope.”
Aarav placed the envelope in a new section of the box.
Not “To Be Sent.”
Not “To Be Read.”
But simply: To Be Remembered.
And with that, the letters continued.
To nowhere.
To someone.
To themselves.
To the silence they once feared.
And as Aarav wrote his next one, he knew—
Every story mattered.
Even the ones that never found their way home.
- Writer
