THE BLUE ROOM

"The Blue Room"

The blue room had not changed in seventeen years. It still smelled faintly of jasmine and talcum powder, like it had when Zahra used to sit by the window, writing letters she never sent. The curtains—sun-bleached and threadbare—still fluttered like ghostly wings whenever the wind crept in. And the record player in the corner, long silent, was gathering dust under the weight of unwound melodies.

Ayaan stood in the doorway, fingers brushing the chipped wooden frame. He hadn’t been back to his ancestral home in Kolkata since his mother’s funeral. His father, ever distant and steel-eyed, had called once to tell him that the house was his now, and that he could do what he wanted with it—sell it, burn it, live in it. It made no difference to him.

But for Ayaan, the house was a vault. A museum of silences. And that room? That was where Zahra used to dream.

His sister had vanished seventeen years ago. No note, no trace. Just... gone.

Some said she ran away to become a poet in Paris. Others whispered darker things—that she had fallen in love with someone forbidden, or worse, that she had drowned herself in the Hooghly on a rainy June morning.

Ayaan never believed any of them. Not really.

Because Zahra wouldn’t have left him. Not willingly. She was the only person who had ever seen him—truly seen him.

Chapter 1: Of Stolen Moments and Paper Moons

When they were children, Ayaan and Zahra used to sneak onto the roof at night, where she would read him Neruda under the stars. “You can love someone with verses,” she used to say. “But losing someone? That’s a poem you never finish.”

Ayaan had been eleven when she disappeared.

The police came. The neighbors gossiped. His father withdrew behind finance reports and single malt, and his mother faded like a photograph left in sunlight. She barely spoke afterward, only wandering from room to room humming an old lullaby. The one she used to sing to Zahra.

For years, Ayaan dreamed of her return. He used to imagine a knock at the door and her silhouette in the afternoon sun, smiling with secrets and sunburns from wherever she'd been.

But the knock never came.

And eventually, life demanded he carry on.

Chapter 2: Ghosts in the Archive

Now thirty and a history professor in Toronto, Ayaan had come back not because he wanted to, but because he couldn't stand it any longer. The not-knowing. The ache that had outlived his parents, outlived the memories, outlived the hope.

He was sorting through Zahra’s old journals, still stacked neatly in the blue room. Poetry, mostly—soft, fierce, lyrical. But one journal stood out. The cover was navy leather, embossed with tiny gold stars. Tucked inside was a map—a hand-drawn sketch of their old neighborhood with red markings circling a railway station.

And one sentence scribbled hastily:

“I won’t be gone. Just somewhere else. Wait for me.”

His heart stopped. He sat there, breathless, tracing the letters with trembling fingers.

Could she have left a breadcrumb trail all along?

Chapter 3: The Whispering Track

The next morning, he walked to the railway station marked in the journal. The place had changed—new walls, brighter signage, louder everything. But beneath the noise was a rhythm he remembered: the wail of trains arriving like sighs, and the smell of warm peanuts in old newspapers.

Ayaan showed the sketch to a few vendors. Most shook their heads. But one old bookseller squinted at it and muttered, “This spot. Near Track Three. Girl with silver bangles used to come here. Wrote poems, sold little booklets. Long time ago. You her brother?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

The bookseller pulled out a box from under his stall. Faded chapbooks, slim and handmade. On the cover: “Z,” written in violet ink.

Inside were poems. Zahra’s poems.

“I buried my name beneath the banyan tree

And stitched silence into every goodbye…”

Ayaan read through tears he hadn’t shed in years. Her words burned like incense—bitter, sweet, lingering.

She had lived. Somewhere. Somehow.

Chapter 4: The Café of the Almost

The bookseller said she used to frequent a tea café down the road—one of those old ones with mismatched tables and the smell of memory steeped in cardamom. Ayaan followed the trail.

The café was dim and cluttered, but cozy. A wall of Polaroids stared back at him. Travelers, artists, musicians. People who left pieces of themselves behind.

And there—tucked in the bottom corner—was a picture of Zahra. Hair longer. Eyes just as wild.

“She used to write here,” the owner said gently. “Left poems in sugar jars. Wrote letters to no one. Then one day… stopped coming.”

“Do you know where she went?”

The man shook his head.

“But she always said she was saving one letter. For someone she owed her life to. Maybe that was you.”

Chapter 5: Letters in the Light

Back in the blue room, Ayaan searched again. Days passed like pages flipping themselves.

And then, inside an old radio beneath the desk, he found it.

An envelope addressed to him. Sealed with violet wax.

He opened it slowly.

“Ayaan,

If you’re reading this, you found me. Or enough of me. I never wanted to leave you—not really. But the world didn’t give me choices. Not when you’re a girl with dreams too big for the walls built around her.

I needed to go. To breathe where no one called me dramatic for feeling things too deeply.

I’ve been a ghost, yes—but a living one. I wrote. I wandered. I lived in quiet corners of cities where no one knew my name. But I’ve carried you with me—always.

If you still remember our rooftop verses, then know this: the stars haven’t changed.

Come find me beneath them.

Love,

Z.”

It wasn’t an answer.

But it was enough.

Epilogue: The Longing That Became a Compass

Months later, Ayaan stood on a rooftop in Istanbul, reading poetry under the stars. In his hand: a new chapbook, bound in navy blue.

He hadn’t found Zahra. Not yet.

But he’d found her trail.

In the faces of street poets. In whispered lyrics on train rides. In laughter in smoky cafés. In every language where longing had a name.

And as he looked up at the sky, he whispered the old line she used to say:

“You can love someone with verses.”

And sometimes, just sometimes, you can follow those verses home.