Echoes of the Past
655 Words
It was a slow night on the floor—rare, but welcome. The call queue was light, the customers mostly patient, and the AC for once wasn’t acting like it wanted to freeze the staff into silence.
Sandeep had finished his last call and leaned back in his chair, arms crossed behind his head. Across the aisle, Samridhi was typing up post-call notes, her lips pressed into a focused line.
He watched her for a second longer than he should have.
She looked up. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly, straightening. “You just looked like you were solving a murder, not a billing query.”
She smiled. “The customer said he was ‘overcharged for the crime of loyalty.’ That counts, doesn’t it?”
They both laughed, soft and unguarded.
Later, during their 3 a.m. break, Sandeep found a quiet corner by the window with his notebook. It was a habit he’d developed over the years—five minutes to write anything. Random lines, rhymes, fragments of feelings. Some nights it was a full page. Others, just a sentence.
Tonight, it was harder to focus.
He kept thinking of her laugh. The way she tilted her head when confused. The way her voice softened when talking to elderly customers. It unnerved him—not the feelings themselves, but how easily they had crept in.
He scribbled:
Some smiles arrive like music,
In rooms where silence lived.
Not loud, not proud—
Just soft enough to stay.
“Is that about me?”
He jumped. Samridhi was standing behind him, holding a paper cup of vending-machine chai, half amused and half curious.
“You should really stop sneaking up on people,” he said, quickly closing the notebook.
“You should really stop being so mysterious,” she countered.
He tried to shrug it off, but she didn’t move. “You always write during breaks?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It helps me breathe.”
“Do you share them?”
“Rarely.”
“Why?”
“Because people tend to laugh, or worse—praise it like they’re being polite.”
She sat down on the windowsill beside him. “I don’t think I’d do either.”
He hesitated, then pulled open the notebook again. Not to the page he’d just written, but another—an older one.
She read silently, tracing the page with her finger.
I spoke to strangers, night after night,
About bills and cables and signals and spite.
But the voice I wanted to hear most,
Wasn’t on the other end of the line.
She looked at him, then down at the poem again. “That’s beautiful.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“No,” she said firmly. “It’s real. That’s what makes it beautiful.”
Sandeep felt a warmth rise in his chest, unexpected and disarming.
He looked at her for a long moment. “What about you? You ever write?”
She shook her head. “I used to. In school. Then life happened. You forget who you are when you're trying to fix everything for everyone else.”
He understood. Too well.
“You can start again,” he said softly. “Sometimes, a blank page is the safest place in the world.”
Samridhi looked at him, her eyes darker in the dim corridor light. “Maybe I will. If someone lends me a pen.”
Without a word, Sandeep reached into his pocket and handed her one. Not a fancy one—just a blue Reynolds, cracked cap, nearly out of ink. But she took it like it meant something.
Later that night, back at her desk, Samridhi didn’t write much. Just a line on the back of a call log sheet.
He writes in the dark,
But something about him feels like morning.
She tucked the paper in her bag and smiled to herself.
- Writer
