Unspoken, Unforgotten

The café was almost empty that rainy evening, a hush of porcelain and steam that made everything feel closer than it was. I had a book open in my hands but wasn’t reading; the words floated and rearranged themselves into old faces and hallways I hadn’t walked in years.

“Don’t you remember me?”

The voice—low, quick, familiar—lifted every hair on my arms. I looked up.

He stood there in a navy jacket, raindrops jeweled on the shoulders, the same steady gaze I used to dodge in meeting rooms and shuttle rides. There were faint lines at the corners of his eyes, a new caution in his smile, but it was him.

I opened my mouth and nothing came. The room contracted to the square of our table.

He gave that small, crooked grin. “You haven’t changed…”

And in that instant, the café dissolved. The rain sharpened into fluorescent light. The hiss of the espresso machine became the stale breath of central air. I was back at the beginning.

The First Project

On my first day at the consulting firm, everything smelled like laminate and coffee. I wore a navy kurta because it felt like armor, a small rebellion against the blues and greys of cubicles.

Across the table, a man straightened suddenly and pulled in his stomach, as if posture could be an apology. I almost laughed. Then he lifted his face and I forgot my script. He had that quiet sort of handsome—the kind that didn’t advertise itself. His words were few, but people made space when he spoke.

A thought flared: He’s out of your league.

So I kept away. When he asked me to join him for breakfast or coffee, I said no. The refusals were polite, and they were armor.

The day we took ID photos, my picture came out too dark, tired. Everyone laughed at theirs; I cried in the restroom. I’d grown up knowing my skin tone was a liability in a country that prized fairness, but that photo was a confirmation I didn’t need.

Later, when the client sent us email IDs, the odd usernames became a joke. He teased mine. I teased back. It was nothing. It was everything: the first crack in the wall.

After that, his gaze found me more often. Not a passing glance—something longer, questioning. I told myself I was imagining it. Pretending had always come easily.

Getting Closer

When we moved to Tech Village, proximity made everything sharper—longer hours, shared meetings, cafeteria walks. He listened with a calm attentiveness that made me feel seen.

Teasing soon followed. “Will you marry me?” he asked once, joking. I shot back, “I don’t marry men who’ve had girlfriends.” He grinned, “I’m a virgin. You can marry me.” We laughed, but I carried the words home.

Nicknames emerged—he called me Aassu, I called him Bandu. Small touches grew louder than words: brushing hands over a stapler, catching his eyes in a shuttle mirror, sitting beside him when others left the seat open.

At go-karting he drove recklessly just to make me squeal, laughing like a boy with no deadlines.

And then came Diwali.

I wore a red saree threaded in gold. We stood side by side in the group photo. Strangers online tagged his parents, joked about our wedding, insisted his hand was at my waist. That was when I fell in love—not in our teasing or stolen glances, but when the world saw something I had only dared to feel in silence.

The Shift

We once worked a weekend alone, his weight light against my chair. My phone rang—a video call from a much older friend abroad. I laughed at his new city. When I turned, Bandu had stepped back, his silence heavier than words.

That Monday, I decided I would not look away if he met my eyes. He did. He looked so steadily that I felt both brave and bare. Then he asked, “Don’t you feel shy?” The bluntness cracked everything. I dropped my gaze.

Soon after, a cheerful new colleague joined. I laughed with him, unmeasured. Bandu’s warmth vanished. Jokes stopped. Meetings thinned of air. We became strangers who shared a row.

I messaged him once, a casual note. His reply was distant, like someone passing in a corridor. The affection had been archived.

I began to cry in bathrooms again, blaming fatigue. In truth, I grieved something I never had. Unspoken love is strange: it grows even as it breaks you.

The Goodbye

Another go-karting day was planned. He didn’t ask if I was coming. The blankness spoke a language I understood.

That evening I bought a stack of cards: Congratulations on your wedding. Happy new home. Happy first child. Anniversaries. Birthdays. I wrote small blessings in each and left them where he would find them. Later his text arrived: Got it.

The next week he told me he was engaged, his tone casual, like weather. I said congratulations and walked away. In the restroom I slid to the floor and cried until the tiles cooled my face.

When he showed me his fiancée’s photo, she was effortlessly beautiful, the sort who seemed to keep plants alive. I thought: perfect, of course.

I asked to move projects. On my last day, he apologized. “You should forget everything,” he said.

“I can’t,” I replied, and walked away.

Soon after, I accepted a proposal of my own. Not out of love—out of fear of being left behind. On my wedding day, I thought of him. Not as the one who broke me, but as the boy who once looked at me like I mattered.

Years Later

Life moved on. I became a wife, a mother. The big feelings of my twenties settled into smaller, steadier ones.

Every now and then I posted a photo, visible only to him. Always, the view count said “1.” It meant nothing. It meant everything. Proof we were still on the same planet.

We never spoke again. He became a ship’s light far off, crossing my digital horizon. I didn’t send signals. Some silences keep you honest.

Sometimes I imagined meeting again in an airport or bookstore. In those daydreams, I was calm, I said the right thing or nothing at all. The credits rolled before conversation began.

And then there was the rainy café, and the voice that carried me backward and forward at once.

The Encounter

He sat down without asking, the way you sit in a seat that once belonged to you. We traded the easy questions—work, kids, cities—like people taking attendance in a class called Life.

“I almost didn’t say anything,” he admitted. “But then I thought—how many chances does the world give us to be decent to our memories?”

“Is that what we’re being?” I asked.

“You haven’t changed,” he said again, softer now. He meant my eyes.

“I have,” I said. “Just in the parts that don’t show.”

We ordered tea. The steam curled like a bridge between us.

“I saw your cards,” he said. “All of them. I kept them in a box.”

“It matters,” I said. “Thank you for not laughing at them.”

“I wasn’t always kind to you,” he confessed. “Distance felt safer.”

“I wasn’t kind to me either,” I admitted. “I made a story out of your glances and called it a house. Then I stood in it without a roof and waited for the weather to apologize.”

He laughed, then asked, “Do you hate me?”

“No,” I said simply. “We were young. We didn’t know how to say what we wanted.”

Outside, a bus sighed at the curb. People came in damp and left warmer. The rain kept reminding the air it could be more.

He asked about my children; I asked about his city. The envy I once feared never arrived—only an ordinary love that had weathered into gratitude.

“Sometimes I think about that Diwali photo,” he said. “I wish I had been braver then.”

“I wish I had too,” I replied. “But if we were, we’d be different people now. And I like who I am. Mostly.”

He nodded. We finished our tea.

“Do you want to keep in touch?” he asked, the question wearing its own small raincoat.

“I think we already do,” I said. He understood.

At the door, he touched my shoulder lightly. Then he stepped into the rain and tilted his face upward, as if greeting an old friend.

The After

I stayed awhile, watching steam rise from my empty cup. The ache I expected never came. Instead, relief: the story I carried didn’t need to be disproved to be released. It could be folded away like a saree you loved once and don’t need to wear again.

On my walk home, streetlights turned puddles into galaxies. I opened a social app, then closed it. The world was full of other windows and lights. Some of them, miraculously, were mine.

At home, my children had made a fort of chairs and blankets, the kind that collapses in an hour but lasts in memory for decades. They pulled me inside to tell them a story—the kind where I am shipwrecked and saved, where monsters are only tricks of light.

Later, standing in the quiet kitchen, I thought of the girl in a navy kurta who hid behind refusals, of the woman who wrote blessings for a life she’d never live, of the mother now measuring peace in steady breaths.

Sometimes what we keep is not the love, but the courage it gave us to love again. Sometimes the person we miss isn’t the one who walked away, but the self we buried to make room for wanting.

The rain stopped. The night aired itself out. I whispered the only goodbye that fit—not a word, not even a breath. Just peace.

He had said, “You haven’t changed.”

I had told him, “I have—in the parts that don’t show.”

And that was enough.