Monsoon Letters

When the monsoon arrived, it entered the house before the people noticed it. Damp walls darkened, wooden windows swelled shut, and the smell of wet earth slipped through every crack. Tara had come to Kozhikode only to sell the ancestral house. Instead, she found herself trapped there for a week by rain.

The attic was filled with trunks no one had opened in decades. Old saris, brass lamps, cracked photographs, and beneath them, tied in blue ribbon, thirty-two letters.

They were addressed to her grandmother, Leela.

Tara knew Leela as a stern widow who rose before dawn, read scriptures, and never laughed loudly. Yet the letters spoke to another woman entirely. They came from a schoolteacher named Dev Menon who described books, moonlight, politics, and how Leela’s silence made him restless.

One letter said, If courage were rain, I would flood this town and carry you away.

Tara read until evening. The final letters became hurried, uncertain. Leela’s marriage had been arranged elsewhere. Dev had accepted a posting in Ceylon. There was no last declaration, no dramatic ending. Only absence.

When Tara went downstairs, the rain hammered the courtyard tiles. She imagined her grandmother young, standing exactly there, hearing thunder…