Nameless Skies

The voice was familiar.

Warm like winter sun on old skin.

It came from a low-lit room in a small, sleepy town called Rewa, where time didn’t move. It sighed.

Aman lived there. Fifty-four. Unmarried. Untroubled by it in public, disturbed by it in the shadows of his heart.

He had grown to accept solitude like an arranged marriage you don’t fight.

His world was a small, curated playlist—old friends, old records, older memories.

He made music. Not to perform. Not to impress.

Just to whisper into his own silence.

He made his living doing voice-overs for educational videos and radio jingles, his baritone voice more travelled than him.

Flying? No.

The sky was too uncertain. Planes too loud. Airports too foreign.

He would rather walk a hundred miles than sit on a seat that might never land.

But love, love has a sound.

Aman once heard it many years ago in Chhindwara, in the spring of 1996.

She was 16. He was 25. 

She wore her school uniform like a rebellion.

He saw her sketching on a public bus window with her finger on the fog.

They spoke. For three months. Every day. In whispers. In glances.

Until whispers turned to letters. Letters to touches. Touches to kisses.

And then her parents found out. And she was gone.

Left the town without a forwarding address.

He kept writing anyway, as if words could reach her like rain finds lost rivers.

Now it was 2025. 

Facebook suggested a friend.

Naina Choudhary.

Widowed.

Lives alone in Chhindwara now.

Hair streaked with silver. Eyes still sketching foggy windows.

She accepted his request.

And a message came:

“Do you still write songs?”

He did.

And so he sent them. Audio clips recorded on his aging home setup.

Each song had a line just for her. Like it had been waiting 25 years.

In return, she sent him pages from an old poetry diary she’d tucked away.

Written in stolen time between marriage and motherhood and mourning.

Words so raw they bled on screen.

Sometimes they laughed.

Sometimes they cried.

But mostly, they waited for the next message.

She said she still believed in fate.

That if life had kept them apart all these years, maybe it was for a reason.

Maybe destiny is not a mistake, but a mirror.

He didn’t believe in fate.

He believed in decisions.

And he made one.

“I’m coming,” he said.

She replied with a single word:

“Don’t.”

He booked the flight.

Bhopal via Delhi.

Took anti-anxiety pills. Held his guitar like a child holds a teddy bear.

Boarded with trembling hands and a beating heart.

Somewhere above the clouds, the aircraft disappeared from radar.

Somewhere in Chhindwara, Naina waited.

In a yellow kurta, with trembling hands.

She had opened the poetry diary.

She had lit an incense stick.

She had kept a cup of tea for him.

The news came the next morning.

Flight G4 1314 had crashed in Madhya Pradesh.

No survivors.

She didn’t cry.

She didn’t scream.

She simply placed the diary back into the cupboard.

And closed it. Her belief in fate sadly reaffirmed.

Love is not always what you hold.

Sometimes it’s what you lose, again and again.

Sometimes it’s a flight that never lands.

A note never played.

A diary unread.

Naina still walks every evening to the tea stall near her lane.

Sometimes she hums.

The tune is familiar.

Aman had once sung it.

To her.

In another lifetime.

In another sky.

The wind whistles through an empty diary.

Pages flutter, but never turn.

Copyright (c) Pratik Majumdar, 2025. Any article, story, write-up cannot be reproduced in its entirety or in part, without permission. URL links can be used