Date: 11/06/2025
The next evening, I saw him again — same bench, same white kurta.
He looked at me, as if expecting I’d return.
“You came back,” he said.
“So did you,” I replied.
He chuckled. “When you grow old, you don’t travel much. You revisit. This bench is my only journey now.”
I asked him about the person he was waiting for.
“My daughter,” he said softly. “She left for the city 12 years ago. Promised to write. She never did. But I still come here. In case…”
The silence that followed was heavy, sacred.
“Maybe she’s too broken to return,” I whispered.
He nodded. “So I heal here, for both of us.”
When my train came, I didn’t want to leave.
He smiled, “Come tomorrow. I’ll tell you what love feels like after it’s gone.”
Rajat Chandra Sarmah
Guwahati, Assam, India
musingofrajat.wordpress.com 