It was raining this morning when I rang Mr. Halder’s doorbell.
It was not a dramatic downpour what Mumbai usually experiences, it was just that soft, persistent kind of drizzle that feels like the sky can’t quite bring itself to cry properly. I wore the yellow raincoat which Mira had gifted me. It still smelled faintly of lavender and old books with old charms.
I had rehearsed the moment quite about a thousand times. I have practiced what I would say, how I would smile, how I would look him in the eye. But I couldn’t behave the way I prepared, rather I chose my heart as I stood at his door, holding the small wooden box she’d trusted me with.
A year. It had been one year since Mira passed. She wasn’t family. She was not even a close friend, by traditional standards. I was just a girl she met in a hospital waiting room, a stranger sitting beside mother’s bed. But who knew that two people sometimes fit together in unexpected ways.
The door creaked open a few inches.
He looked much older than in the photos Mira had shown me long back. He looked tired in a quiet, deeply rooted way. His eyes were cautious, but kind.
“Mr. Halder?” I asked.
He didn’t speak. Just watched me like I might vanish if he blinked.
“I believe this belongs to you,” I said, and held out the box towards him.
His hands trembled as he took the box.
“Your wife, Mira… she gave it to me. Long back.” I told him after a bit of hesitation.
He looked like my words didn’t bother him; he didn’t speak. He just stared at the box like it might explode anytime. I could see thousands of questions in his eyes, mostly in confusion.
“She told me to bring it to you,” I said, softer now, “on this particular date. If she wasn’t around anymore.”
He stepped back and opened the door wider. He said, “Come in.”
The house smelled like a mix of spices and old paper. It was warm yet silent, like time had stopped here after she left. He made tea, two caps, I noticed, and I waited quietly, just like she told me I should. She said he might not ask questions at first. She suggested that grief might take time to fix and trust someone so quickly.
We sat at the kitchen table. I noticed that the wood was scratched and seemed familiar. Mira had described this room in detail, she has mentioned this during our first meet and I clearly remember that she called it her “tiny kingdom of sunlight and books.”
“My name is Ananya,” I said finally. “I met Mira at the hospital. My mother was a patient there.”
He nodded slowly. He clearly had no idea about me.
“She used to read poetry to my mom. Neruda. Rumi. Mary Oliver. Then after my mom passed, she kept coming. For me.”
His eyes softened this time.
“She told me stories about you. About how you met. The bookstore. The Hemingway note. How you burned her toast the first morning she stayed over.”
That drew a faint smile from him. A fragile one, but it seemed real.
“She told me about the list.”
He blinked. “List? Which list?”
“She said you had prepared a list of places you wanted to see together.”
He looked away and sighed. “We only managed two of them.”
I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the paper she gave me. Her list. Their list. I’d carried it folded in the same spot for three years. It was old, but had the same authenticity till date, I slid it across the table.
He opened it slowly. I saw his eyes flicker over this, I knew this would happen, from at least what Mira had told me.
“Riding a hot-air balloon in Cappadocia. Dancing barefoot in the streets of Paris. Watching Northern lights. Sit for hours beside the quiet lake in Japan. Kiss in the rain in Lisbon.”
Each had a check mark. Some with dates. Some with tiny notes.
“She asked me to do them,” I said, “for her. For you.”
He looked up, and his eyes were glassy with grief. “What?”
“She said if she couldn’t live those moments with you, maybe I could. And if I did, maybe one day you could feel them too. Through me.”
He stared at the list like it held her voice.
“She told me you’d stop living when she was gone. She didn’t want that.”
He reached for the box then, as if remembering it existed somehow. His fingers shook as he opened the lid.
Inside was the photograph of her wearing that ridiculous sun hat, the one I’d worn in her memory in Tuscany. He flipped it over.
“Life doesn’t stop. It waits for you.”
Beneath it was the flash drive. He stood, moved to the laptop on the side table, and inserted it.
The videos played.
Me, on a rocky path in the Dolomites, gasping for air and laughing loud. Me, drinking espresso in a Paris train station Mira had once described to me in vivid detail. Me, soaked from a Lisbon storm, twirling in the street in a blue dress which she gave me.
In each video, I carried a piece of her, sometimes a scarf, sometimes a book and the sunhat, a pressed flower.
“She asked me to film all of them,” I said. “To show you what they looked like. What they could have been like.”
His face broke then. I don’t mean just his expression, I mean his whole face shifted into a cry too big for words. He sat down, both hands pressed over his mouth, and wept.
I let him. I didn’t say a word.
Grief is a river. Sometimes, you have to let it carry you.
When he finally looked up towards me.
“But, why you! You only knew her for a short time,” he whispered.
“She saved me,” I replied. “She taught me how to carry the weight.”
Epilogue (Ananya, one year later)
We went to Iceland together.
He asked me, timidly, a few months after I delivered the box. Said he didn’t want to impose, but… would I show him one more memory?
We stood under the northern lights. I wore her scarf. He held the old camera she used to carry on vacations. We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to.
Later, by a fire, I asked him something I’d been wondering for a while.
“Why do you think she trusted me with all this?”
He looked into the flames for a long time.
“Because she knew,” he said, “that you wouldn’t carry her memory, you’d live it. And that maybe, just maybe, you’d help me live too.”
Sometimes, strangers walk into our lives and hand us pieces of ourselves we didn’t know were missing.
Mira was that for me.
And I hope, in some strange and quiet way, I’ve become that for him.
React
