Each story is a mystery. Each story, a confession. Each letter… unfinished. The Aranya Letters: I. The Last Letter She Never Sent
~by Ishani Ganguly
---
They say love letters are for the brave.
But Aranya Roy didn’t believe in bravery. Only in precision. The art of timing. And how silence, if applied correctly, could be louder than confession.
Vivaan Das received the envelope on a Tuesday that pretended to be mundane.
It arrived not by courier, nor post. It appeared—wedged between the spines of books on his desk. Tucked like an afterthought into the geometry of his loneliness. He stared at the handwriting on the front. He knew it the way one knows the taste of blood from a bitten lip.
“Come to Room 413. One night only.
No questions.
—A.”
The wax seal had melted into a crimson smear, as though the envelope had wept through the years.
Aranya.
Six years. No contact. No closure.
The woman who vanished after her brother’s death.
The woman the media paraded as a suspect.
The woman Vivaan last saw walking barefoot along a hotel ledge, eyes wide open, spine impossibly still.
The woman he testified against.
---
Room 413 didn’t exist on the booking register. It was the kind of room that wasn’t offered, only requested in whispers. He didn’t ask. He was simply handed a key by a man with no name tag, and a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
The corridor smelt of cardamom and decay. Velvet lined the walls like forgotten theatre curtains. The key turned easily, like it had missed him.
Inside, time had no direction.
And there she was.
Aranya Roy stood at the window, silhouetted in a city that forgot how to sleep. She wore a gown the colour of dried blood and burning garnet. Her hair was longer, but the spine—still impossibly still. She looked over her shoulder and blinked slowly, as though nothing had passed. As though years hadn’t split them open.
“You’re late,” she said.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” he replied.
She smiled. Tired women smile like expired gods—half-luminous, half-liar.
“Sit.”
He did.
She poured coffee from a porcelain pot he knew she’d stolen from her therapist. It smelt like rosemary and regret.
“Do you remember what you said in court?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You said I cried before it happened. That I looked afraid.”
“You did.”
“I wasn’t afraid of him, Vivaan,” she whispered, “I was afraid of what I was about to become.”
---
They talked like people who hadn’t unspoken enough. About the night of her brother’s fall. About the silence afterward. About the fact that someone had stolen the CCTV footage. And how Aranya, once so meticulous, had burned every journal except one.
Then she handed him an envelope.
“My therapist said to write letters I’d never send. This one’s yours.”
He opened it with the soft violence of someone bracing for ruin.
It was blank.
Perfectly. Deliberately.
Blank.
“I never knew what to say to you,” she said. “I still don’t.”
Vivaan closed his eyes. When he opened them, she kissed him.
They kissed like unfinished poems.
The kind that only make sense when read backwards.
---
When he woke, it was morning. She was gone. The cup still smelt of rosemary.
But Room 413 was no longer there.
The receptionist blinked at him. “Sir, this hotel has only three floors.”
“Check again.”
“I’ve worked here eight years. There is no Room 413.”
---
That evening, an envelope appeared on his windshield. No address. No seal.
Inside: a photograph.
Vivaan asleep. Aranya beside him, eyes open, watching the camera. Her finger resting on his throat—not choking. Not comforting. Just resting.
On the back, in her handwriting:
“I only haunt those who deserve me.”
The Aranya Letters: II. The Letter He Never Burned
Vivaan Das didn’t dream anymore.
Not since Room 413 vanished with her.
Not since the kiss that felt like punctuation—final, precise, devastating.
But two weeks later, the insomnia cracked.
He woke at 3:14 a.m., throat dry, name in his mouth like ash.
“Aranya.”
She wasn’t in the room. But something else was.
The air felt threaded—stitched tight, as though someone had sewn silence into the corners of his apartment.
His bookshelf was slightly ajar.
The third one from the top.
The one that held nothing but her journals—the ones she’d made him promise never to read.
The ones she claimed were “written for her memory, not for truth.”
And there it was.
An envelope.
Old. Slightly yellowed. But the ink was recent.
To: Vivaan Das
From: Vivaan Das
Dated: March 14, 2028.
He blinked. It was only 2025.
His breath stilled as he pulled it open, hand trembling with a fear more instinctive than logical.
Inside: three things.
1. A photograph of a woman he didn’t recognize—her face half-covered, standing in front of Aranya’s old school, holding a knife like a bouquet.
2. A matchstick, unused.
3. And the letter.
---
> You will find this in time.
You always do.
You always did.
Her name is Misha Sen. She will call herself your patient. She is not. She is mine.
Do not let her into your apartment. Do not listen when she says Aranya was never real. She’ll try to make you forget.
She has the journal. The one with the truth. The one you refused to burn.
You’ve always loved puzzles more than people, Vivaan. That’s how she got in.
Burn this letter.
Don’t wait for the blood.
— You.
---
He dropped it.
He didn’t know whether to laugh, scream, or call someone sane.
The letter was in his handwriting. Down to the slant of his ‘t’, the quiet aggression of his punctuation.
He checked the date again: March 14, 2028.
Three years from now.
Was this a trick? Had Aranya planted it to torment him?
But then he remembered—the last thing she said before vanishing.
“I was afraid of what I was about to become.”
---
Three days later, he met Misha Sen.
She arrived at his clinic. Pale. Soft-spoken. Claimed to have gaps in her memory. Said she kept seeing a woman in her dreams—a woman who looked like Aranya but called herself “Aanya.”
Vivaan swallowed the scream that rose in him. He nodded. He listened. He prescribed melatonin he knew wouldn’t work.
Misha left behind her scarf.
Inside it—folded perfectly—was a journal.
Aranya’s.
The one he never burned.
The Aranya Letters: III. The Letter She Sent to the Wrong Man
The journal had no title. No name. No index.
Just pages—some stained, others scribbled into as though her hand had trembled from too much remembering.
But on page 34, under a smear of what could’ve been ink or something far more human, was a single line:
> “The first letter was never meant for Vivaan.”
And then—
> “He opened it too soon. He always did.”
---
Vivaan read the words with the same nausea one reserves for déjà vu that hits too hard.
What did she mean? Who was it meant for?
And more importantly: Who else was playing this game?
He scanned the pages until a loose envelope slipped out—aged, creased, the corners weathered like an apology too late to matter.
There was no name on the outside. Just a date.
October 12, 2022.
The day before her brother’s death.
The handwriting inside wasn’t Aranya’s.
It was precise. Rigid. Masculine.
> Aranya,
If you go through with this, you’re not just ending him. You’re ending us.
I can’t be part of your rehearsed grief, your wide-eyed innocence, your performance of pain.
You always said we were the same. But I would have died for you.
You? You just needed a story to survive.
Don’t send me anything else. Burn this. And yourself, if there’s any justice left.
— A.
---
Vivaan stared.
Another A.
It wasn’t him.
It wasn’t Aranya.
It was someone else.
Another man. Another player in the game of letters, deaths, and disappearances.
He flipped the page.
Aranya’s handwriting continued beneath it—fast, almost feverish:
> “He thinks I chose my brother’s death over love. But love doesn’t keep records. Death does. And I needed the autopsy of both.”
And then, boxed in red ink:
“If he finds this before Vivaan does—run.”
---
That night, Vivaan found his apartment door open.
No signs of a break-in.
No signs of a struggle.
Only one thing changed:
The photograph of him and Aranya—the one from the night in Room 413—was gone.
In its place:
A single Polaroid.
A man’s back, facing the camera. Lean. Elegant.
Staring into a mirror.
But the reflection wasn’t his own.
It was Aranya.
And she was smiling.
The Aranya Letters: IV. The Letter That Wasn’t Written in Ink
He hadn’t cried when Aranya left.
But the body does what the mind postpones. Grief doesn’t knock. It leaks.
Vivaan woke to blood under his fingernails.
Not metaphor.
Not dream.
Real.
He stumbled to the bathroom, heart rattling like a drawer half-open in a storm, and scrubbed until skin flaked. But it stayed. Under the nails. In the cracks.
On the mirror, fogged not by steam but time itself, were six letters:
S-C-R-A-P-E-D
Not written. Etched.
Like someone had clawed them in—slowly, deliberately, while watching him sleep.
---
The next letter didn’t come in an envelope.
It came as a tremor in his wrist.
Vivaan couldn’t stop shaking. Couldn’t write prescriptions. Couldn’t even sign his name without the pen slipping into chaos.
So he did what doctors aren’t supposed to.
He examined himself.
In the soft skin between wrist and elbow, just under the surface, something glinted. Not bone. Not blood.
Metal.
Vivaan bit back a scream. Took a scalpel. And as he sliced the skin gently, he saw it:
Thin wire.
Connected to a chip.
With a barcode.
He scanned it.
The result:
Document 17-B: Transcription of Aranya Sen’s Final Letter (unsent).
Access Level: RESTRICTED
Location: Mira Institute for Cognitive Anomalies
Status: Patient Presumed Deceased.
---
There was no hospital by that name in Delhi.
But there was one—abandoned—in Manali.
Burned half-down. Shut in 2023.
The same year Aranya disappeared.
Vivaan packed nothing. Took no photographs. Not even the letters. Only the chip, taped to his chest like a second heart.
---
In Manali, snow is cruel. Not beautiful.
White, yes. But it hides graves.
He found the Mira Institute.
Found the door pried open.
Found dust on the beds, ash in the sinks.
And in a filing cabinet half-scorched, beneath burnt folders and splinters of someone else’s diagnosis—
A letter.
In red.
Not ink. Not paint.
Blood.
> To the man who called it love when it was only a mirror—
I’m not gone. I’m rewritten.
Every time you remembered me incorrectly, I changed.
You didn’t love me.
You solved me.
But puzzles don’t bleed.
I do.
Come to Room 3B. Bring nothing. Not even your guilt.
This time, I’ll be real.
— A
---
Outside, the wind howled. But inside—
Inside Room 3B, the light was on.
And someone was waiting.
The Aranya Letters: V. The Letter That Couldn’t Be Read Out Loud- Room 3B was breathing.
Not metaphorically.
It inhaled.
Vivaan stood at its edge, spine brushing the rusted doorframe, unsure if the tremor in his hand belonged to him or the walls. The light inside flickered not like electricity—but memory.
There was no sound.
Just the weight of something unspoken.
---
A woman sat at the far end. Draped in a shawl too familiar, too precise.
Her face was turned away.
But her posture—yes, he knew that slope of grief.
That was Aranya.
“Say my name,” she whispered.
Vivaan opened his mouth.
Nothing.
He tried again.
Still, silence.
He touched his throat.
Something was missing.
---
On the table before her lay an envelope. No ink, no name, no seal. Just a crimson fingerprint pressed like a kiss on its corner.
She gestured to it without looking at him.
> “It’s the letter you wrote before you ever met me.”
Vivaan’s fingers trembled as he picked it up. The paper burned cold—yes, burned cold, like a reversal of heat.
He unfolded it.
The words were there. But his mouth refused to shape them. As though speaking them would unmake the room, the woman, his entire memory of her.
He read the letter, silently. But the voice inside his head? It wasn’t his.
It was hers.
---
> You don’t believe in ghosts.
That’s why you became one.
You’ll diagnose me. You’ll dissect me.
But you won’t dare admit what I really am.
Not your patient.
Not your lover.
Your pattern.
You said I vanished.
I didn’t.
You rewrote me into absence.
But absence leaves letters, Vivaan.
And some of them are alive.
---
He looked up.
She was gone.
The shawl lay folded on the chair.
Still warm.
---
He turned to leave. And then—
A mirror. On the wall behind him.
Cracked. Dusty.
But the reflection?
It wasn’t his.
The man in the mirror had blood on his hands.
On his coat.
And in his mouth—letters. Torn, chewed, swallowed.
Behind the mirrored glass: dozens of letters floating in water.
And in the corner, a new note scribbled backwards:
“Speak her name, and drown.”
~ S. Oindrella Martreus ✍🏻
