The letter she never posted

 

The Letter She Never Posted

A Romantic Tale of Memory, Partition, and Unspoken Love

By Faraz Parvez

Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal
Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA
(Pseudonym of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal)

Lahore, 1945

Her name was Ameena, and she lived in a haveli with green latticed windows in Anarkali.
His name was Rajan, a Hindu boy with soft eyes and sharpened Urdu, who came every afternoon to tutor her younger brother in mathematics.

Ameena watched from the jharoka. Always from behind the veil.
He never looked up, or if he did, it was as if he didn’t dare.

But eyes speak languages that words can’t.

The First Letter

It wasn’t love at first sight. It was slower, softer—like ittr soaked into muslin.

One monsoon afternoon, while the streets drowned in jasmine-scented rain, she wrote her first letter.

“I don’t know if I love you, Rajan ji. But I know my heartbeat says your name when you speak equations and I don’t understand a single number.”

She folded it, pressed it into an Urdu digest, and kept it under her pillow.

She never posted it.

The Letters Multiply

By 1947, she had written seventeen letters.

Each one was a fragment of her heart—wrapped in poetry, bits of Faiz, and the rustling scent of longing.
Each one carefully hidden—inside books, behind cushion covers, beneath rosewood drawers.

Then Partition came.
And Rajan was gone.

The day riots flared near their street, she ran to the veranda. There was blood in the bazaar and silence in the haveli. But she didn’t cry.

She went back inside.

And wrote the 18th letter.

“Today Lahore has forgotten how to breathe. They say you’ve crossed to Amritsar. If you ever return, even in another lifetime, my letters will be waiting.”

Lahore, 2024

Seventy-seven years later, the haveli was now a school.
A boy named Arjun Rajan Sharma came from Delhi as part of a heritage delegation.

He wandered into a dusty library room, untouched since the 60s.

There, behind a broken wall panel, in a tin box sealed with a rusted clasp—
he found seventeen letters, wrapped in an old scarf, still scented with the ghost of attar.

One read:

“I don’t know if I love you. But maybe I already do.”

Arjun’s hands trembled.
His grandfather’s name was Rajan Sharma.
He had never spoken of Lahore.

The Answered Silence

Arjun took the letters back. He translated them to Hindi.
He read them aloud to his grandmother, who stared long at her puja lamp.

And then he lit a diya for Ameena.

Not every love is written in blood.
Some are inked in silence.

Some never get posted.
But they still find their way home.

By Faraz Parvez

Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal
Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA
(Pseudonym of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal)

📖 For more unforgettable stories of love, memory, identity, and longing, visit:
🌐 farazparvez1.blogspot.com

Where every untold love story waits to be read.


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