Esssrnre: Emotional Fiction / Contemporary Drama
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1. Stillness Before the Turning
There are days in a person’s life that slide past unnoticed — quiet, obedient, unremarkable. Days filled with schedules, ordinary greetings, and familiar tasks. Revathi believed most of her life was made up of such days. She found comfort in them. In their sameness. In the predictability that gave her a sense of safety.
The school where she worked was not extraordinary. It stood on a modest street in Madurai, surrounded by half-faded compound walls, old trees, and the smell of sun on stone. Its classrooms were filled with chalk dust, faded charts, and the echoes of laughter and forgotten rhymes. She had worked there for six years now. Long enough to know every crack in the staff room ceiling and every child’s handwriting in her class.
She lived with her father — a man of few words and fewer expressions. Their conversations at home were functional. The news, the water bill, and the need to buy rice. They never spoke about her mother. Revathi never asked. The silence had shaped itself into a routine. A gap that became part of the wall rather than a hole in it.
That morning had begun like any other. She was helping students prepare for the school’s annual day function. Children were darting around with cardboard crowns and glitter stuck to their fingers. Some were practising speeches in the corridors, and some were arguing over props. The day pulsed with the warm chaos of celebration.
Revathi liked such days. They gave her tasks to hold on to. Distractions that kept her mind from wandering toward thoughts that served no purpose.
It was sometime past noon when she saw the woman.
She was standing near the staff notice board, holding a bag in one hand and a cream-colored envelope in the other. There was nothing particularly striking about her at first glance. She wore a plain blue saree with a dull silver border. Her hair was thin, tied back neatly. Her skin was weathered, and her eyes carried the stillness of someone who had seen far too much to be in a hurry.
Revathi might have walked past, had the woman not spoken.
> “Ma’am… if you don’t mind…”
Revathi turned, automatically polite. The woman stepped forward.
> “Could you post this letter for me?” she asked softly. “I forgot to, and… I don’t think I’ll have the strength later.”
Her voice was steady, but something in it trembled. Not with age. With restraint.
Revathi, caught off guard, nodded without thought.
> “Yes, of course,” she said, and took the envelope.
She slipped it between the pages of a spiral-bound notebook in her bag and continued with her day. The woman smiled, almost with relief, nodded once more, and walked away.
Revathi didn’t see where she went.
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2. The Letter Waited
The rest of the day slipped away. As the sun softened into golden angles and the school began to empty, Revathi made her way home on her scooter, balancing her bag against her back. Her mind was already thinking of lesson plans, what to cook for dinner, and whether her father had bought the vegetables she had asked for.
The letter didn’t come to mind.
Not when she reached home.
Not when she reheated the leftover sambar.
Not when she graded notebooks under the yellow light of her room.
It waited, undisturbed, folded inside a notebook, sandwiched between reminders and worksheets. It waited through the night.
And the woman who gave it to her never woke up the next morning.
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3. The Weight of an Envelope
Revathi found out about the woman’s death two days later. It came as a passing remark from the principal during a staff meeting.
> “Poor lady. Came from Chennai, said she had a granddaughter here. She died in her sleep at the lodge near Meenakshi Amman temple. Heart failure. The police notified us since she had the school’s visitor pass in her bag.”
Revathi’s mind blanked for a moment. A strange coldness rose in her arms.
She excused herself, walked to the empty staffroom, and sat down slowly. She unzipped her bag, pulled out the notebook — and there it was. The envelope. Still unposted. Unopened.
She stared at it.
Cream-colored. No stamp. No address.
Just one handwritten line on the back:
> "To the girl I should’ve never let go."
Revathi’s fingers tightened.
Something pressed down on her chest. Not guilty—not yet. A kind of discomfort. A quiet knock at the door of a room in her mind she’d never dared to open.
She should’ve posted it. She should’ve asked more questions.
Why had the woman chosen her? Why hand a stranger such a personal-looking note?
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4. The Envelope Opens
That night, when the house fell silent and the world outside softened into cricket song and still wind, Revathi sat at her desk. The envelope lay before her. For the first time, she noticed the handwriting — shaky but deliberate. Like someone who still believed in the weight of every word.
Her fingers hovered above the flap.
She had no right to open it.
But the woman was gone. And the letter, unposted, was now a secret held in limbo.
She opened it.
There were only two pages inside. One folded tightly. One loose.
She began reading.
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> “To the girl I should’ve never let go…”
> “If this letter reaches you, I am either very brave or no longer alive. Maybe both.”
> “I have lived a full life — at least by the world’s measures. I ran a household, raised children, and buried a husband. I was praised for my strength, admired for my sacrifice. But there’s one truth I never dared to face.”
> “When I was 21, I gave birth to a girl. She had eyes like mine and a cry that broke something inside me. I wasn’t married. The child’s father left before she ever took her first breath. My parents, ashamed, forced me to give her away. I didn’t fight them. I was scared. Weak. I watched my daughter be taken by a woman I never saw again.”
> “I never knew where she went. I never heard from her. All I knew was that she was safe. That’s what I told myself.”
> “A few months ago, someone told me there was a schoolteacher in Madurai. Her name was Revathi. That she looked like someone I might have been, once. That maybe — just maybe—she was my blood.”
> “I came hoping to see her. Hoping to feel something. Hoping to find you.”
> “I don’t know if you are her. I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to give this to you myself. But if this letter reaches you, please know — I never forgot you. And I am sorry I wasn’t strong enough to keep you.”
> — Malarmathi
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Revathi’s hands trembled.
She read the letter again.
Then again.
Then she sat back, heart thudding, mouth dry. Her name. In a stranger’s mouth. In a confession buried for thirty years.
Her eyes moved to the second sheet of paper.
It was a birth record.
No hospital name. Just a scribbled certificate from a midwife.
Date: 26th March 2001.
Name: Unnamed Female Child.
Mother: Malarmathi.
Revathi’s birthday.
Her stomach dropped.
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5. Questions That Burn Quietly
She did not speak of it to anyone. Not even her father.
But something shifted. Everything around her — the walls of the house, the taste of the morning coffee, the school bell — started to feel strange, unfamiliar. Like borrowed scenery.
She searched old photos. There were none of her before the age of two. No pregnancy photos of her mother. No relatives ever mentioned her baby days.
When she asked her father vaguely one night, “What was I like as a baby?”, he stiffened slightly.
> “Quiet. You didn’t cry much. Your mother... she always said you were a gift.”
The next morning, Revathi opened the bottom shelf oher f thewas almirah and found an old steel box. In it, under old receipts and thread rolls, was a single black-and-white photograph of a woman in her twenties, holding a baby.
The woman wasn’t her mother.
But the eyes. The shape of her nose.
Revathi looked in the mirror.
And for the first time, she felt like someone else’s echo.
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6. The Mirror With No Frame
The days passed, and silence became Revathi’s companion. Not the peaceful kind. The kind that presses into your thoughts, that makes the smallest noise feel like an intrusion.
She went about her life—walking through school corridors, nodding at students, correcting essays, pouring tea at 7:00 p.m. sharp. But within her, something refused to settle.
It was not just about knowing she was adopted.
It was the manner in which the truth arrived—handwritten in a letter meant to be delivered by accident, carried in her own bag for days, and born from the last breath of a woman who had spent thirty years buried in guilt.
How do you make peace with a truth that did not ask to be found?
She sat alone many nights, turning over the word mother like a foreign coin. One side showed the woman who raised her—the one who had wiped her knees and fed her rasam with extra pepper during colds. The other side—faded and ghostlike—was Malarmathi, a woman who had once wept over a cradle and walked away.
Both women had carried her in different ways.
And she didn’t know whom to grieve for.
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7. The Road to Chennai
Revathi didn’t make the decision like someone finding courage. She made it like someone giving in to a pull too strong to fight.
On a rainy Friday morning, with the letter and photo sealed in a folder, she boarded a train to Chennai. She had traced Malarmathi’s address from the lodge records. The street was somewhere in Mylapore—one of those old neighborhoods where verandahs dipped into the past and the smell of filter coffee felt generational.
She wasn’t sure what she was going to find.
Family?
Closure?
Or just a locked door and echoes?
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8. The Door That Opened
When she knocked on the blue wooden door, it was a girl—around ten—who opened it. Eyes like mirrors. Not of Revathi, but of someone who might share a piece of her.
> “You’re here for Paati?” the girl asked.
Revathi nodded.
A woman appeared behind the child. Younger than her by a few years, face tirededed, skin wearing the map of recent grief.
> “You knew my mother?”
Revathi’s voice came out steady. “I met her. At my school.”
There was a pause. Understanding flickered. The woman nodded, moved aside, and let her in.
The house was quiet. Photographs lined the walls—some black-and-white, some cracked at the corners. There was Malarmathi, smiling gently in a wedding saree. Holding babies. Lighting a lamp.
They sat.
There were no dramatic revelations. No weeping confessions. Just tea, and a heaviness shared across a table.
Revathi slid the letter across. The woman—Malarmathi’s younger daughter—read it, lips tightening, breath caught in the hollow of her throat.
> “She wrote this?”
Revathi nodded.
> “She never said anything. We never knew...”
A pause. Then:
> “That means... you’re...?”
Revathi didn’t answer. Not clearly. She just said,
> “She thought I might be. But there’s no proof. And maybe that’s okay.”
The woman blinked.
> “Do you want... to come again?”
Revathi smiled, gently.
> “No. I just wanted to know... if I existed for her. That’s enough.”
They sat in silence for a while longer. And then, Revathi stood. Said goodbye to the little girl, who was now drawing something on a slate. She did not look back.
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9. Returning Without the Same Weight
Back in Madurai, nothing had changed. Not visibly.
But Revathi’s world had subtly reshaped itself. Like a river after a landslide—same path, different depth.
She began to see her life not as something stolen or mistaken, but as something that had somehow—against the odds—chosen her.
The woman who had raised her, though never pregnant with her, had loved her in the truest ways. The woman who birthed her, though absent, had carried the wound of absence till her final breath.
In a way, Revathi had two mothers.
One who let go.
One who held on.
And both had shaped the woman she had become.
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10. The Final Letter
She never told her father about the visit. Nor did she ever contact Malarmathi’s family again.
But one month later, she took out a fresh sheet of paper and began to write.
> “To the woman I never called Amma...”
She didn’t send it.
She just folded it, sealed it in a brown envelope, and placed it inside the same steel box where she had found the photograph.
A letter, never sent.
But this time, not from guilt.
From peace.
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End
Author
_ Laxthara
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