The Weight of Monsoon Flowers. Can a beautiful love story become a painful addiction? Meet Lalita, a fascinating young college girl whose charm, emotions and romantic journey draw you into a world of youthful passion, desire and love.
The Weight of Monsoon Flowers
A Novel
By
Menonim Menonimus
THE WEIGHT OF MONSOON FLOWERS
Copyright © 2026 by Menonim Menonimus
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from the author, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Preface
There is a particular hour in the Brahmaputra valley, just before the monsoon breaks, when the whole sky seems to hold its breath — heavy, grey, waiting for a permission it has not yet been given. This book was written in that hour.
It is a story about a girl who was, for a short time, extraordinarily loved, and about a love that asked everything of her and promised more than it ever intended to give. It is about rivers that carry things away without asking, and about flowers pressed between pages long after their colour has gone, kept not because they are beautiful still, but because we cannot yet bear to let them go.
I do not know if Lalita ever existed. I have come to suspect that she has existed many times, in many small towns, under many different names, and that some of you reading this will recognize, in her, someone you once knew — or, more quietly, someone you once were.
Read gently. Some weather, once it passes, never entirely leaves the ground it touched.
Chapter One: The Restroom
The rain had not yet come, though the sky over Gauhati hung low and grey, pregnant with the promise of it. Inside the Arts building of the college, the corridors smelled of chalk dust and wet umbrellas propped against the walls, and the ceiling fans turned slowly, stirring nothing.
Lalita Bora stood before the mirror in the girls’ restroom, adjusting the pin in her hair with fingers that trembled slightly — not from vanity, but from the ache of having stayed up half the night finishing an essay on Tagore that her professor would likely dismiss in two lines. She was eighteen, and she had the kind of beauty that made people look twice without quite knowing why — not the polished beauty of magazine covers, but something rawer, an intensity in the eyes, a fullness in the mouth that seemed always on the verge of saying something important.
She came from Nalbari, from a small farmhouse where her father grew paddy and areca nut and her mother wove mekhela chadors by lamplight to sell in the local haat. Lalita was the first in her family to study beyond the tenth standard, let alone come to Gauhati for a B.A. in English. Her admission had been celebrated with a small feast — rice, duck curry, and her father’s rare, awkward pride spoken aloud only once, quietly, to a neighbor: “Mor swali he porhi ase Guwahati loi.” My daughter, she is studying, all the way in Guwahati.
The restroom door swung open with more force than necessary, and a girl named Rina rushed in, breathless, her dupatta half-slipping from her shoulder.
“Lalita! Lalita, come quickly — there’s a boy, he’s fallen near the canteen stairs, and everyone is just standing around like fools staring at him!”
“Fallen? Is he hurt?”
“I don’t know, come, come!”
They ran together down the corridor, past a cluster of students clumped uselessly at the top of the canteen stairs, murmuring, none of them moving. A young man lay sprawled on the lower steps, his books scattered like fallen leaves around him, a thin line of blood at his temple where he had struck the iron railing.
Lalita did not think. She pushed through the crowd, knelt, and pressed the end of her orna against the cut, firm and unhesitating.
“Someone bring water. And call Dr. Sarma from the health center — now, not tomorrow!” Her voice cut through the murmuring crowd like a blade through wet cloth, and for the first time, people moved.
The young man’s eyes fluttered open. He was fair, sharp-featured, dressed in clothes too well-tailored for an ordinary Gauhati College boy — an ironed shirt, imported shoes, a wristwatch that caught the grey light and threw it back gold. He looked up at her, dazed, and managed a faint, crooked smile.
“Is this what they mean,” he murmured, “when they say a fall from grace?”
Despite herself, despite the blood and the panic around them, Lalita almost laughed. “You could have died, and you’re making jokes.”
“If I must bleed,” he said, “let it at least be witnessed by someone with such steady hands.”
She flushed and pressed the cloth harder against his temple, more to hide her face than to stem the bleeding, which had already slowed. “You talk too much for a man who just fell down the stairs.”
“Nabin,” he said. “Nabin Baruah. Second year, Economics.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You will, eventually.” His eyes, even glazed with the shock of the fall, held hers with an unsettling steadiness — the look of a boy who had never in his life doubted that he would get what he wanted.
Dr. Sarma arrived, clucking with mild irritation about students always finding new ways to injure themselves, and the crowd dispersed as quickly as it had gathered, the drama already old news, already replaced by gossip about someone’s engagement or a professor’s bad temper. Lalita stood, her hands stained faintly pink, her heart beating with an intensity she could not explain by the incident alone.
Rina caught her arm as they walked away. “Do you know who that is? Nabin Baruah — his father owns three tea estates and half the timber business in Tezpur. Cars, houses in Kolkata and Delhi. That family doesn’t mix with ordinary people, Lalita.”
“I only helped him because he was bleeding,” Lalita said, too quickly. “Anyone would have done the same.”
“Anyone did not do the same. You did.” Rina gave her a look that was equal parts admiration and warning. “Just — be careful. Boys like that collect girls like flowers. They wear them in their hair for a day and then let them fall.”
Lalita said nothing, but that night, lying on her narrow hostel bed while the rain finally broke over Gauhati in long silver sheets, she found herself replaying his voice — you will, eventually — with a small, treacherous warmth spreading through her chest, the kind of warmth she had read about in novels and never quite believed in until now.
She did not know yet that Rina’s warning would prove truer than either of them could imagine, nor that the boy she had bent to save on a canteen staircase would one day be the reason she could no longer bear to stand at all.
Outside, thunder rolled over the Brahmaputra like something ancient clearing its throat, and the city of Gauhati, indifferent as ever, went on with its rain-soaked evening, unaware that it had just become the first page of a story that would not end kindly.
Chapter Two: Fancy Bazaar
It began, as these things often do, with a book that was never returned.
Three days after the incident on the stairs, Nabin appeared at the door of Lalita’s tutorial class, his temple still marked with a thin, healing line, holding out a copy of Chokher Bali with unnecessary formality, as though presenting a treaty between two nations.
“You dropped this,” he said. “That day.”
“I dropped nothing. You’re lying.”
“Am I?” He smiled, and the smile had a practiced ease that should have warned her, though at eighteen, practiced ease can look very much like sincerity. “Then consider it a gift. For the hands that stopped my bleeding.”
She should have refused it. Instead, she took the book, and by the following Sunday, she found herself walking beside him through the crowded lanes of Fancy Bazaar, the old heart of Guwahati’s trade, where the air smelled of jasmine garlands, frying jilebi, and the diesel of idling rickshaws.
“I come here for the smell of the spice lane,” Nabin said, guiding her past a shop where sacks of turmeric and dried chillies sat open to the street like offerings. “My mother sends the driver, usually. This is the first time I’ve walked it.”
“Then you’ve been rich and blind your whole life,” Lalita said, immediately regretting the sharpness of it.
But Nabin only laughed, delighted rather than offended. “Say that again. No one talks to me like that.”
“Then you’ve kept bad company.”
“Perhaps I have. Perhaps that is about to change.”
They wandered without direction — past the silk shops of Paltan Bazaar where bolts of muga silk gleamed gold-brown in the shopfront light, past an old man selling hand-bound notebooks who called out to Lalita, “Nika kitap ase, khuri, bahut sasta!” — fine books here, cheap, cheap — past a tea stall where the owner, a wiry man named Anil-da with a face creased like old leather, poured two glasses of liquor tea with the theatrical flourish of a man who has made ten thousand such pourings.
“New couple?” Anil-da asked, setting the glasses down, eyes flicking between them with the frank curiosity of a man who has seen every kind of romance pass through his stall and judged none of them harshly.
“Just friends,” Lalita said quickly.
“Not yet,” said Nabin, at the exact same moment.
Anil-da laughed a short, knowing laugh and moved off to serve another customer, leaving the two of them in a silence that was somehow louder than words.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Lalita said finally, staring into her tea.
“Why not, if they’re true?”
“Because you don’t know if they’re true. You’ve known me four days.”
“I knew my father’s business would one day be mine the day I was born,” Nabin said, turning his glass slowly in his hands. “I knew I would study economics before I could spell the word. Some things, Lalita, a person simply knows. This is one of them.”
She wanted to laugh at the grandness of it, the sheer performed confidence — and yet some small, unguarded part of her, the part that had grown up watching her mother weave silence into the same cloth night after night, hungry for a life with more color in it, wanted very much to believe him.
They walked on. Near the flower market, where marigolds and tuberoses sat in great damp heaps waiting for temple offerings and wedding functions, Nabin bought her a single stem of bogori phool — small, white, and startlingly fragrant — and tucked it, without asking, behind her ear.
“In my village,” she said, “a boy doesn’t do this unless he means something serious by it.”
“Good,” Nabin said. “Because I mean everything seriously. I simply don’t always show it seriously.” He looked at her sideways, the setting sun catching the sharp line of his jaw. “Tell me, Lalita Bora of Nalbari. What do you want from your life? Not what your family wants. What you want.”
No one had ever asked her that. Not her professors, who wanted essays; not her parents, who wanted a respectable marriage after her degree; not Rina, who wanted only company for her own restlessness.
“I want to see things,” Lalita said slowly, surprising herself with the honesty of it. “I’ve read about Kolkata, Bombay, even Dubai, in magazines Rina brings from her cousin’s house. I want to know if the world outside Assam is as large as the books make it sound, or if it’s just Guwahati with better lighting.”
Nabin was quiet for a moment, and something moved behind his eyes that she would only understand much later — not tenderness exactly, but the quick, cold calculation of a man who has just located precisely where a person is soft, and filed it away for future use.
“Then I will show you,” he said. “Kolkata first. I have business there next month with my father’s associates — you could come. As my guest.”
“My family would never allow it.”
“Your family need not know every detail of your education,” Nabin said smoothly. “A college trip. A literary conference. There are a hundred honest lies a smart girl can tell for one true experience.”
It should have alarmed her, this ease with deception. Instead, standing in the fading gold light of Fancy Bazaar with a white flower behind her ear and the whole unlit avenue of her future stretched ahead like an unread book, Lalita only felt the thrill of being chosen — chosen by someone who could, apparently, arrange the entire world around her wanting.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
“Think quickly,” Nabin said, smiling that same practiced smile. “The world doesn’t wait long for anyone. Not even for you.”
They parted at the mouth of the bazaar, and Lalita walked back to her hostel alone, the smell of jasmine and diesel and turmeric still clinging to her clothes, the small white flower still tucked behind her ear, wilting slightly in the humid evening air — though she would not throw it away for three more days, pressing it eventually between the pages of the very book he had given her, where it stayed, flattening and browning, a small dead thing kept for the memory of having once felt so alive.
Chapter Three: The City of Joy
The lie, when it came time to tell it, was smaller than Lalita had imagined. She told her parents that the college English department was sending a group to a literary seminar in Kolkata — two days, supervised, entirely respectable — and her father, who trusted the world of education the way he trusted the rains in Bhadra month, blessed her with a touch of his palm on her head and pressed four hundred rupees into her hand “for books, and for eating well.”
She carried that guilt with her all the way to Kolkata, tucked somewhere beneath the excitement, the way a stone might sit at the bottom of a river without stopping the water from moving.
Nabin met her at Howrah station, and the noise of it swallowed her whole — the shouting of porters balancing impossible towers of luggage on their heads, the shriek of trains arriving and departing in a rhythm that never seemed to pause, the great iron ribs of the station roof holding up a sky of soot and pigeons. She had thought Guwahati was a city. Kolkata made Guwahati feel like a large village playing dress-up.
“You look like you’ve swallowed the whole station with your eyes,” Nabin said, taking her single small suitcase from her before she could protest.
“I didn’t know a place could be this loud and this beautiful at the same time.”
“Wait till you see the river at night,” he said. “It’ll ruin every other river for you.”
They stayed, properly, in separate rooms of a modest heritage hotel near Park Street — a fact Lalita clung to almost superstitiously, as if the mere geography of separate doors could keep something from happening that some deeper part of her already suspected was inevitable.
That first evening, they walked along the Maidan as the sky turned the color of a bruise healing, purples bleeding into orange, and the Victoria Memorial glowed white and enormous against it, like something built by people who had never once doubted their own permanence.
“Do you know what I like about you, Lalita?” Nabin asked, as they sat on a low stone wall, the grass around them dotted with courting couples and old men flying kites in the last light.
“That I saved your life?”
“That you argue with me. Every girl I have ever known agrees with everything I say within the first ten minutes. You took four days to even admit we were friends.”
“Perhaps that says more about the girls you’ve known than about me.”
He laughed — a real laugh this time, unguarded, and for a moment he looked younger than his confidence usually allowed him to appear. “There it is again.”
They ate dinner at a small Bengali restaurant Nabin claimed only locals knew about, though the waiter greeted him by name in a way that suggested it was, in fact, a family favorite for people exactly like him. Over shorshe ilish and steamed bhapa doi, he told her about his childhood — boarding school in Darjeeling, summers in Shillong, a father who measured love in the size of a bank draft and a mother who had stopped noticing the difference between affection and obligation years ago.
“Is that why you say things so easily?” Lalita asked. “Because no one at home said them to you at all?”
He looked at her for a long moment, something unguarded crossing his face before the familiar composure slid back into place. “You ask dangerous questions for a village girl.”
“I’m not a village girl. I’m a girl from a village. There’s a difference, and you know it, or you wouldn’t be here.”
That night, walking her back along the Hooghly, the city lights trembling on the black water like something spilled and not yet cleaned up, Nabin stopped beneath a banyan tree grown thick with hanging roots, and turned to face her fully.
“I don’t know how to say things simply,” he admitted. “I was taught to impress, not to mean things. But I mean this — being near you feels like the only honest hour in my week.”
“That’s a very well-dressed sentence for someone who claims not to know how to say things simply.”
“Let me try again, then.” He took her hand, and his voice, for once, dropped the polish entirely. “I don’t want these two days to end.”
“They have to end. I have a family. You have a family. This is not our world, Nabin.”
“Then let it be our world for two days,” he said. “The rest of the world can wait its turn.”
She would remember, much later, how easy it had been to believe that two days could exist outside of consequence, sealed off like a room with no windows. She would remember the particular quality of the dark under the banyan tree, and the particular way his hand had felt closing over hers, warm and certain, and the way certainty in another person can feel, when you are eighteen and starved for it, indistinguishable from truth.
What happened afterward, she would keep for herself — not from shame exactly, though shame would come later and stay far longer than it deserved to, but because some things are too fragile to survive being spoken aloud, even to oneself. It is enough to say that when she returned to her own hotel room near midnight, something in her had shifted permanently, some door quietly closed behind her that she had not fully understood was capable of closing.
The next morning, they visited College Street, wandering through the endless stalls of secondhand books stacked in towers that seemed to defy gravity, the smell of old paper and monsoon damp mingling in the narrow lanes. Nabin bought her a worn copy of Tagore’s Gitanjali, and inside the front cover, in his neat, confident hand, he wrote only: For L. — who arrived without warning, like weather.
She did not know, reading it on the train home two days later, watching the paddy fields of Assam roll past the window in their endless green repetition, that the metaphor was more honest than he had intended — that weather, however beautiful, is not obligated to stay.
Chapter Four: The Road Not Taken
The cultural function was held in the last week of the month, in the open quadrangle of a neighboring college, strung with marigold garlands and coloured bulbs that flickered whenever the generator coughed. It was the kind of evening Assam does well without trying — the air cool after an afternoon shower, the smell of wet earth mixing with frying pakoras from the stalls at the gate, a dholak keeping time somewhere behind the stage while students in borrowed finery waited their turn to perform.
Lalita had gone with Rina, half-reluctant, still tired from the long train journey back from Kolkata, still carrying the private, unspeakable weight of what had happened there. She had not meant to dance. But when a folk number rose up — a Bihu-tinged tune dressed in modern clothes — Rina pulled her by the wrist into the circle forming near the stage, and something in Lalita, something starved for lightness after days of secrecy, gave in.
She danced without performance, without calculation, the way people dance when they have briefly forgotten to be watched — and it was precisely this, the unguarded honesty of it, that caught the attention of a young man standing near the tea stall with a plate of jalebi going cold in his hand.
His name was Pradip Talukdar, a classmate from the same B.A. batch, though from a different college across town, there that evening only because his cousin was performing. He did not approach her immediately. He watched — the way a person watches something they are afraid to disturb — and it was two days later, in the college library, that he finally gathered the nerve to speak to her.
“You dance,” he said, without preamble, “like the song owes you nothing and you owe it everything.”
Lalita looked up from her notes, startled by the strangeness of the compliment. “That’s an odd thing to say to someone you haven’t been introduced to.”
“Pradip,” he said. “I saw you at the cultural function. I’ve been trying to think of a way to say that for two days, and this is the best I could manage.”
He was nothing like Nabin — an ordinary boy in an ironed but clearly hand-washed shirt, from a schoolteacher’s family in Barpeta, studying on a partial scholarship, the kind of quiet sincerity in his face that asked for nothing and therefore, strangely, asked for everything.
Over the following weeks, without her quite choosing it, Pradip became a fixture at the edges of her days — waiting near the library steps with a book he thought she’d like, walking three extra streets out of his way to accompany her partway to the hostel, never presuming, never demanding, only present, steady, patient as monsoon rain that falls without asking whether the earth wants it.
“I’m not a rich man’s son,” he told her once, plainly, as they sat on the library steps in the fading afternoon light. “I can’t take you to Kolkata or Bombay. I can only offer you a life I already know the shape of — a small house, books, a teacher’s salary, and someone who will never once make you feel like you have to earn his attention.”
Lalita’s chest tightened at that, because some quiet, exhausted part of her recognized the offer for what it was — safety, plainly spoken, without decoration. She thought of Nabin’s practiced sentences, his hundred honest lies, the door under the banyan tree that had closed behind her without her full understanding. And she thought, treacherously, of how different her life might feel if she let it.
“Pradip,” she said carefully, “I think you are the kindest boy I have met in Guwahati. And that is precisely why I cannot let you go on thinking there is a future here.”
“There’s someone else.” It wasn’t a question.
“There’s something else,” she said, unable to name it fully even to him. “A promise I’ve already made, even if it was never spoken aloud.”
“Does he know you the way I’ve come to know you? Sitting on these steps, not asking for anything?”
The question struck her harder than he could have known. “That isn’t the point.”
“It is entirely the point,” Pradip said, and for the first time, something raw broke through his patience — not anger, but a grief that seemed older than his years. “I have watched you for two months, Lalita, and in that time you have never once looked as unguarded with anyone as you did dancing at that function, before you knew I existed. I only wanted to be near that version of you a little longer.”
She had no answer that would not wound him, and so she gave him the only honest thing she had — silence, and a hand briefly pressed to his arm, which he shrugged off gently, not out of cruelty, but because a kindness offered too late can feel crueler than none at all.
He did not come to the library the following week. Or the week after. Rina, who kept better track of college gossip than either of them realized, brought the news three weeks later with the particular gravity of someone delivering something she wished she didn’t have to.
“Pradip Talukdar has left college,” she said. “Withdrawn his name. His cousin says he’s gone — Shillong, maybe, or further, no one is quite sure. He told his family he needed to ‘find something he’d lost,’ whatever that means. He hasn’t written to anyone since.”
Lalita said nothing for a long moment, staring at the pressed white flower still flattened between the pages of her Gitanjali, now brown and brittle as old paper itself.
“It’s my fault,” she said finally.
“It’s no one’s fault,” Rina said, though without full conviction. “A heart breaks on its own schedule, Lalita. You didn’t design his.”
But the guilt did not leave so easily. It took up residence quietly beside the other guilt she already carried — the lie told to her parents, the door closed under the banyan tree — and in the weeks that followed, whenever Nabin’s letters arrived describing the wonders of Bombay he intended to show her, some small, persistent voice at the back of her mind asked the question Pradip had asked her on the library steps, a question she still had no honest answer for: does he know you at all, or only the version of you that says yes?
She did not write back to Pradip, because she did not know where to send such a letter. But she kept, without quite admitting why, the small paperback of Manik Bandopadhyay’s stories he had once lent her and never asked back, tucked at the bottom of her trunk beneath her winter shawls, in the place reserved for things a person cannot yet bring themselves to throw away.
Chapter Five: Bombay Dreams
The lie to her parents this time was heavier, and she told it with less ease than before — a college excursion to study “modern Indian theatre,” organized, she said, by the English department, four days, fully supervised. Her mother, folding a fresh mekhela chador into her trunk, had paused only once, her eyes narrowing slightly.
“You’ve become someone who travels a great deal, for a village girl who used to cry at the thought of the Guwahati hostel,” she said.
“The world doesn’t come to Nalbari on its own, Aai. Someone has to go and meet it.”
Her mother said nothing further, though something in her face suggested she had noted the evasion and simply chosen, for now, not to pull the thread.
Bombay met her the way it meets everyone who arrives with borrowed dreams — indifferent, enormous, glittering with a beauty that seemed designed to distract from its own cruelty. The taxi from the airport crawled past Marine Drive at dusk, the Queen’s Necklace of streetlights curving along the black sea, and Lalita pressed her face to the window like a child, unable to reconcile the scale of it with anything she had known.
“This city doesn’t care who you were before you arrived,” Nabin said, watching her reaction with visible satisfaction, as though the city’s beauty were somehow his own achievement. “Only who you’re willing to become.”
They stayed at a hotel overlooking the sea, where the staff addressed Nabin by a surname that seemed to open doors before he had finished asking, and it was here, on the second evening, that Lalita first met people from the world Nabin had always described but never fully shown her.
At a small gathering on the hotel terrace — ostensibly a business dinner for his father’s shipping associates, though it felt more like a stage set for people performing their own importance — she was introduced to a woman named Meher Vakil, sharp-eyed, elegantly grey at the temples, who ran an export firm and looked at Lalita with an assessing frankness that made her feel, for the first time, like an item under appraisal.
“So you’re the college girl from Assam,” Meher said, swirling her wine with the ease of someone for whom such gatherings were merely weather. “Nabin’s father mentioned there was someone new. He didn’t mention you were quite this striking.”
“I didn’t realize I was being discussed,” Lalita said, keeping her voice light though something in her chest had gone tight.
“Everyone in this circle is discussed, my dear. It’s practically the entrance fee.” Meher’s eyes flicked briefly to Nabin, who was laughing at something across the terrace, oblivious or indifferent to the exchange. “A word of advice, since I have daughters your age and no patience for watching history repeat. Boys like Nabin fall in love the way they buy shares — with great enthusiasm, and an exit plan already quietly filed away.”
“You don’t know him the way I do.”
“No,” Meher agreed, not unkindly. “I know his father. Which, in families like this, amounts to the same thing eventually.” She touched Lalita’s arm once, briefly, almost maternal despite the cynicism of her words, and moved off into the crowd, leaving Lalita standing alone with the sea wind pulling at her hair and a small, cold seed of doubt lodged somewhere beneath her ribs.
Later that night, walking along Chowpatty Beach where vendors sold bhelpuri and roasted corn under strings of bare bulbs, and couples sat in the sand in postures of a freedom Lalita had never seen permitted so publicly in Guwahati, she asked him directly.
“Who is Meher Vakil to you?”
“My father’s business partner. Why?”
“She spoke of you as though she’d seen this exact story before.”
Something flickered across Nabin’s face — irritation, quickly smoothed over into practiced charm. “People like her enjoy playing prophet at parties. It makes them feel important. Don’t let an old woman’s boredom become your worry.”
“She said your family arranges these things quietly. An exit, already filed away.”
“Lalita.” He stopped walking, turned to face her, the sea behind him vast and dark and indifferent. “Do you trust her, a woman you met an hour ago, over me?”
“I don’t know,” Lalita said honestly, and it was the first time she had said something so plainly true to him, without softening it. “I only know that every time I ask you a direct question about the future, you answer with a joke, or a compliment, or a change of subject. Never with a plan.”
For a moment, something almost like fear crossed his face — the fear of a man who has always controlled the terms of every conversation, suddenly finding the ground shifted beneath him.
“My family will need convincing,” he admitted finally, the practiced ease dropping from his voice for the first time since Kolkata. “My father has certain — expectations. A certain kind of daughter-in-law in mind. It will take time. Strategy. I need you to trust the process, not doubt it at every turn a stranger opens her mouth.”
“And if the process takes longer than trust can survive?”
“Then I will make it take less long,” he said, pulling her close against the wind coming off the black water. “I promise you that, Lalita. On my mother’s name.”
She wanted, standing there with the surf hissing over broken shells and the lights of Marine Drive curving away into the dark like a necklace thrown carelessly across the city’s throat, to believe him entirely. And mostly, she did — though a small, cold splinter of Meher Vakil’s words remained lodged beneath her ribs, and in the days that followed, she found herself returning to it in quiet moments, the way a tongue returns, almost involuntarily, to a broken tooth.
On their last evening, they visited the Hanging Gardens at Malabar Hill, the city’s lights spreading below them like something spilled and gilded, and Nabin, uncharacteristically quiet, took her hand and said, softly, without his usual performance:
“I don’t know how to be simple, Lalita. I was raised in a house where every kindness came with an invoice attached. But when I’m with you, I forget to check the price.”
“That’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me since the canteen stairs,” she said.
“Then let it be enough, for now.”
She wanted it to be enough. She would spend a great deal of the coming months discovering, slowly and at great cost, that wanting a thing to be enough and it actually being enough were two very different countries, connected by no direct road at all.
Chapter Six: Dunes and Glass
Dubai arrived like something conjured rather than built — a city that seemed to have skipped the slow patience of history and simply willed itself into being overnight, glass towers rising out of a desert that, Lalita thought, watching it unspool beneath the descending plane in shades of gold and rust, looked less like land and more like the skin of some vast, sleeping animal.
The lie this time had grown almost effortless in her mouth, which frightened her more than the lie itself — a “cultural exchange programme,” she told her parents, sponsored, she said, by a friend’s family with business connections abroad. A week. Her father, increasingly puzzled by his daughter’s expanding geography, had only asked, quietly, “Xoi thakibi, ne?” — you’ll be safe? — and she had said yes, and hated, faintly, how easily the yes had come.
Their hotel stood near the marina, where the water lay flat and impossibly blue, threaded with white yachts that bobbed like idle swans too expensive to actually swim. In the evenings, the call to prayer rose from a hundred directions at once, layering and overlapping into something that sounded, to Lalita’s ear, less like five separate voices and more like a single ancient throat clearing itself across the rooftops.
“I have never in my life heard silence and sound exist together like this,” she said on their first night, standing on the balcony as the last note of the azaan faded into the hum of traffic below. “It’s as if the whole city holds its breath for a moment, out of respect.”
“You notice things I’ve stopped noticing,” Nabin admitted. “I’ve been to Dubai four times. This is the first time anyone has pointed out that the call to prayer sounds like anything at all.”
They went, on the second day, into the desert itself — a convoy of jeeps cresting the dunes at reckless speed, sand spraying gold in great arcs behind them, until the vehicles stopped and the engines died and there was, suddenly, nothing but silence and the enormous, indifferent geometry of the dunes rolling away in every direction like frozen waves in some ocean too old to remember water.
“Look,” Nabin said, pointing west, where the sun was beginning its slow collapse into a horizon the color of a wound turning to a bruise — violent orange bleeding into rose, into a bruised violet, into a blue so deep it seemed to have no bottom. “I’ve never once stayed to watch it finish. There’s always somewhere else to be.”
“Then stay today,” Lalita said, and for once, he did — sitting beside her on the ridge of a dune still warm from the day’s heat, watching the light drain slowly out of the sky while the sand beneath them cooled, grain by grain, into the coming dark. Somewhere behind them, a Bedouin camp had lit its lanterns, and the smell of grilling meat and woodsmoke drifted faintly across the dunes, mixing with a silence so complete that Lalita could hear her own heartbeat, and beneath it, faintly, the shift of sand settling under its own vast, patient weight.
“I think,” she said quietly, “this is the first time I have felt truly small in a way that didn’t frighten me.”
“Why does it not frighten you?”
“Because the desert doesn’t care what I am or what my father owns or doesn’t own. It would swallow a prince and a farmer’s daughter with exactly the same indifference. There’s something almost kind in that.”
Nabin looked at her for a long moment in the fading light, an expression on his face she could not quite name — something between admiration and a faint, uneasy recognition, as though she had said something that reached further than he was prepared to follow.
They visited, too, the old gold souk in Deira, where narrow lanes glittered under strings of bulbs with more gold than Lalita had believed existed outside of temple deities — bangles stacked like coiled honey, necklaces draped in cascading, impossible abundance, the air thick with the mingled scent of oud and cardamom drifting from the spice stalls next door. An elderly trader named Haji Yusuf, his beard hennaed faintly orange, pressed a small paper cone of dried rose petals into her palm without being asked.
“For the bride,” he said, in accented Hindi, with a wink at Nabin that made Lalita’s cheeks burn.
“We are not—” she began.
“Not yet,” Haji Yusuf said, waving a hand as though the distinction were merely a matter of scheduling. “But I have sold gold for forty years, beti. I know the look on a face before it knows itself.”
They stood atop the Burj Khalifa on their fourth evening, the city spread below them in a vast electric constellation, the Gulf a sheet of black glass stretching toward a horizon where sea and sky blurred into a single, borderless dark. Lalita pressed her palm against the cool glass of the observation deck and felt, for a dizzying moment, as though she were standing not above a city but above the entire shape of her own life so far — the paddy fields of Nalbari impossibly distant now, the girl who had wept at the thought of a Guwahati hostel reduced to a small, fond memory of someone she used to be.
“Tell me honestly,” she said, watching the tiny lights of cars crawl along distant highways like a slow current of fireflies. “When you look down at all this, what do you feel?”
“Ownership,” Nabin said, and then, catching her expression, laughed and tried again. “No — that’s not fair. I feel…” He paused, searching, and for once seemed to be reaching for something true rather than something impressive. “I feel the way I imagine my father felt the day he signed the papers for his first tea estate. Not joy exactly. More like relief that I have finally arrived somewhere I was always destined to stand.”
“And where do I stand, in that picture?”
He turned to her, and in the reflected glow of the city lights his face seemed, briefly, unguarded in a way she had not seen since the banyan tree in Kolkata. “Beside me. Where else would you stand?”
“You’ve never once said ‘married to me.’ Only ‘beside me.’ I’ve begun to notice the difference in your sentences, Nabin, the way a farmer notices the difference between clouds that will rain and clouds that only pass overhead to look impressive.”
He did not answer immediately, and in the silence that followed — filled only by the hush of the air conditioning and the murmur of other tourists pressing close to the glass — Lalita felt, for the first time with real clarity, the cold draft of a doubt she would spend the coming months trying, and failing, to outrun.
Their final night, they walked along the Marina promenade as fountains outside a shopping complex rose and fell in choreographed arcs, lit gold and blue and rose against the dark water, drawing small gasps from the crowd gathered to watch. Lalita watched the water climb and collapse, climb and collapse, in patterns too perfect to be anything but engineered, and thought, with a small ache she did not yet have words for, that it was a fitting image for what she and Nabin had become — beautiful, illuminated, perfectly timed, and entirely dependent on machinery she could not see and had no control over.
“I could stay in this city forever,” she said aloud, though she meant something else entirely, something closer to I want the feeling I have tonight to last forever, which was not, she was beginning to understand, the same wish at all.
“Nothing stays anywhere forever,” Nabin said, watching the fountains rather than her. “Not cities. Not feelings. That’s rather the whole trouble with wanting things, isn’t it?”
She would remember that sentence longer than almost anything else he ever said to her — not for its cruelty, which was mild and probably unintentional, but for its accuracy, which she would only fully understand once it was far too late to make use of the warning.
Chapter Seven: The Capital
Delhi in that season wore its heat like an old grievance, dry and unrelenting, the kind of heat that seemed to have opinions about everyone who dared walk beneath it. Lalita had noticed, on the drive in from the airport, how different this city’s arrogance felt from Bombay’s — where Bombay’s confidence came from the sea and its endless, restless hunger, Delhi’s came from stone: forts, tombs, the long red walls of empires that had learned, over centuries, exactly how permanent power liked to be photographed.
She had not told her parents a story this time. There had been no invented seminar, no borrowed excuse. She had simply said she needed three days for “documentation work” related to her final year project, and her mother, folding the mekhela chador with hands that had grown quieter with each of Lalita’s departures, had not asked further, though something in her silence carried the particular weight of a question deliberately not spoken aloud, out of a fear, perhaps, of the answer.
Lalita had known, boarding the flight, what she needed to tell him. She had known it for eleven days, ever since the small home testing kit purchased with trembling hands from a pharmacy two localities away from her hostel, chosen deliberately far enough that no familiar face would see her buying it, had returned its answer in two solemn pink lines that did not care, in the slightest, about her final year project or her father’s blessing or the four hundred rupees pressed once into her palm for books.
She told him on the second evening, at Lodhi Gardens, among the crumbling sandstone tombs of forgotten sultans where couples strolled in the cooling dusk and squirrels darted between the roots of ancient banyans that had outlived every empire they’d witnessed.
“Nabin.” Her voice did not shake, though everything beneath it did. “I’m pregnant.”
He stopped walking. For a long moment he said nothing at all, and in that silence Lalita watched something move across his face in quick succession — shock, then something that looked, unmistakably and for only a fraction of a second, like fear, and then, worst of all, a kind of swift mental arithmetic, as though he were a man reviewing a contract for an exit clause he had, perhaps, always known he might one day need.
“How certain are you?”
“Certain enough that I bought a second test to be sure the first wasn’t wrong. Certain enough that I have not slept properly in eleven days, Nabin, wondering how to say four words to you without the ground opening beneath both of us.”
“There are things that can be done,” he said carefully, not looking at her, looking instead at the ancient dome of the tomb ahead of them, its stone worn soft and pale by five centuries of monsoons. “Discreetly. Quickly. No one need—”
“Say the word plainly, if you mean it,” Lalita said, and now her voice did shake, though with anger rather than grief. “Don’t dress it in ‘things that can be done,’ as though it’s a matter of rescheduling a train ticket.”
“I only meant—”
“I know exactly what you meant.” She stopped walking, forcing him to stop with her, forcing him, for the first time in their entire acquaintance, to actually look at her rather than past her toward some more comfortable middle distance. “I am asking you a different question, Nabin. Not what can be undone. What will you do. Will you marry me?”
The silence that followed felt, to Lalita, longer than the entire six months that had preceded it — longer than Kolkata, longer than Bombay, longer than the whole trembling architecture of promises he had built between them, one poetic sentence at a time, like a man constructing a house entirely out of doors and no walls.
“You know my family,” he said finally, and his voice had lost, for the first time since the canteen stairs, every trace of its practiced music. “My father has already begun discussions with the Choudhury family in Tezpur. Their daughter. Land. Business alliance. It has been — understood — since I was in school.”
“Understood by whom? You never once mentioned an understanding to me. Not in Kolkata. Not under that tree by the river. Not in Bombay, with the sea behind you promising me the tide would turn in my favor eventually. Not in Dubai, standing above the whole lit-up world telling me I stood beside you.” Her voice broke, finally, on the last word, though she did not let the tears fall, not yet, not in front of him. “Was any of it ever real, Nabin, or was I only ever a very well-arranged detour?”
“It was real,” he said, and to her lasting confusion, she believed that part of it even then, even as everything else in him was visibly retreating behind walls she had never before been permitted to see. “That’s the trouble, Lalita. It was entirely real, and entirely impossible, at exactly the same time. Some men are permitted to marry for love. I was born already spoken for.”
“Then you should have told me that in the restroom, before I ever pressed my scarf to your bleeding head. You should have told me before Fancy Bazaar, before the flower, before you asked me what I wanted from my life as though my answer mattered to your plans, rather than merely to your amusement.”
“I didn’t know, then, that it would become this.”
“You knew,” Lalita said quietly, and this, more than her anger, seemed to land somewhere he could not deflect. “You have always known exactly how these things end. You told me yourself, on the terrace in Bombay — a family that arranges its exits quietly, in advance. I only refused to believe Meher Vakil, because I wanted so badly to believe you instead.”
They stood in silence beneath the great dome of Sikandar Lodi’s tomb as the evening call of a koel rose somewhere in the gardens, indifferent and untimely, and the last of the daylight drained slowly from the old red stone, turning it, for a few minutes, the exact colour of embers cooling toward ash.
“What do you want me to do?” Nabin asked finally, and for once the question seemed genuine rather than rhetorical — the question of a man who had, perhaps for the first time in his sheltered life, arrived at a door he could not simply have opened for him by his father’s name.
“I wanted you to want to marry me,” Lalita said. “Not to be talked into it, not to be managed into it by some clever arrangement your family could eventually be made to swallow. I wanted it to be as simple for you as it has been complicated for me. That was never going to happen, was it? Not for one single day since the canteen stairs.”
He did not answer, because there was, they both understood, no answer that would not confirm exactly what she had already said.
She left him standing beneath the tomb, walking alone back through the darkening gardens where courting couples continued their evening as though the whole world had not just quietly ended for one girl among them, and it was only once she reached the gate, out of his sight, that she allowed herself, finally, to weep — not loudly, not for long, but with the particular, exhausted grief of someone who has just understood, completely and for the first time, the exact shape and weight of what she is about to have to carry entirely alone.
That night, in her hotel room, she took out the pressed white flower from Fancy Bazaar, brittle now and the color of old tea, still kept between the pages of the Gitanjali he had given her in Kolkata, and read again the inscription in his confident hand — for L., who arrived without warning, like weather — and understood, finally and completely, that weather, however beautiful while it lasts, owes the earth beneath it nothing at all once it has passed.
She flew back to Guwahati the next morning, alone, carrying inside her a secret with no father willing to claim it, and a doubt about her own worth that would prove, in the difficult months ahead, far harder to abort than anything a pharmacist could ever have offered her in a small paper packet, two localities from her hostel, eleven days before.
Chapter Eight: Return to Gauhati
The city received her back the way it always had — indifferent, humid, going about its business of rain and traffic and evening markets, entirely unaware that the girl stepping off the train at Kamakhya station was no longer the same girl who had once left it four days earlier with four hundred rupees folded into her palm for books.
For the first weeks, Lalita told no one. She continued attending her classes with a hollow, mechanical diligence, answering questions in tutorials with the same sharpness she always had, so that even Rina, who knew her better than anyone in the hostel, noticed only a certain new quietness, a tendency to stare out of windows a beat too long before answering.
“You’ve been strange since Delhi,” Rina said one evening, watching Lalita fold and refold the same shawl without purpose. “Did something happen with Nabin?”
“Nothing happened,” Lalita said, “that hasn’t been happening quietly for six months already. I only finally saw it clearly, that’s all.”
She wrote to Nabin twice in the following month. The first letter was measured, almost businesslike, laying out with a clarity she had not managed in Lodhi Gardens exactly what she needed him to decide, and by when. The second, written after three weeks of silence, was shorter, and far less measured, and she tore it up twice before finally sending a version stripped down to a single line: I am not asking you to love me anymore. I am only asking you to be honest about what you intend to do.
His reply, when it finally came, arrived not in his own hand but relayed through a mutual acquaintance from the economics department — a boy named Diganta, visibly uncomfortable with the errand assigned to him, who found her outside the library and delivered the message standing, unable to meet her eyes.
“Nabin says—” Diganta cleared his throat. “Nabin says his family has finalized the arrangement with the Choudhury family. The engagement will be announced next month. He says he’s sorry. He says you’ll understand, in time, that it was never in his hands.”
“Everything has always been in his hands,” Lalita said quietly, “except, apparently, the one thing that mattered.”
She did not cry in front of Diganta, who left as quickly as decency allowed, clearly relieved to be free of the errand. She walked instead to the hostel roof, where the evening’s first stars were beginning to prick through the grey monsoon haze over the Brahmaputra, and stood there for a long time, feeling something inside her — some last, stubborn thread of hope she had not even realized she was still holding — finally, quietly, give way.
Word travels in small circles the way water finds every crack in old stone, and within two months, enough of it had reached her family in Nalbari that her father arrived unannounced at her hostel on a grey Tuesday, his face carrying an expression she had never once seen on him in eighteen years — not anger exactly, but a bewildered grief, the look of a man watching a harvest he had tended his whole life fail overnight from a blight he could not name.
“Is it true?” he asked, standing in the hostel’s visitors’ room, refusing the chair offered to him, as though sitting would make the conversation more permanent than he could bear.
She did not lie to him. She had run out, somewhere between Delhi and this grey Tuesday, of the capacity for it.
“Yes, Deuta.”
He said nothing for a long moment, and when he finally spoke, his voice was quiet in a way that frightened her far more than shouting would have. “Your mother has not slept properly in a week, since the rumor reached Nalbari through your aunt’s letter. She asked me to come and hear it from your own mouth, so she could stop hoping it was someone else’s daughter being spoken of.”
“I’m sorry, Deuta. I never meant for—”
“I did not raise you,” he said, cutting her off, not unkindly but with a finality that closed the conversation as surely as a door, “to apologize for what a rich man’s son has done to you. I raised you to read, and think, and stand taller than the field we grew you out of. I do not know, anymore, what to tell the village when they ask why my daughter has come home from Gauhati carrying a shame none of us chose for her.”
He left that evening without touching the tea Rina had brought in, without embracing her, though at the doorway he paused, and said, so quietly she almost missed it over the sound of the rain beginning outside, “Come home when your college term allows it. Your mother needs to see your face is still your face, at least.”
She did not go home that week, nor the next. Shame, she was discovering, has its own peculiar gravity — it does not simply weigh a person down, it curves the very space around them, so that even kindness, when it finally arrives, seems to arrive from an impossible distance, bent and refracted by everything that came before it.
The engagement of Nabin Baruah to Priyanka Choudhury of Tezpur was announced in the local papers three weeks later, a small photograph showing him in an ironed kurta, smiling the same practiced smile she had once mistaken, in a canteen stairwell, for something entirely his own. Rina found the clipping first and hid the newspaper before Lalita could see it, though word reached her regardless, the way all such things eventually do, carried on the ordinary cruelty of casual conversation between people who did not know, or did not care, that they were delivering a wound.
That final evening, the rain had returned to Gauhati in earnest, drumming against the tin roof of the small room she now rented alone, having quietly withdrawn from the hostel two weeks prior when the whispered attention of the other girls became more than she could carry alongside everything else. She sat by the single window, watching the rain blur the streetlight outside into a soft, trembling halo, and wrote one final letter — not to Nabin, whom she no longer had the strength to address, but to her mother, three pages long, asking forgiveness for a shame she had never intended, and love for a daughter her mother might, in the difficult months ahead, need reminding was still worth loving.
She did not finish the letter that night. Grief, when it has been carried silently for long enough, eventually exhausts even the instinct toward survival that usually holds a person upright without their noticing, and in the particular darkness of that rain-drowned evening, alone with a bottle intended to blur an unbearable night into something more survivable, Lalita drank far more than her body, already fragile with months of grief and poor sleep and the private, exhausting labor of a pregnancy no one but Rina yet knew of, could withstand.
Rina found her the next morning, when Lalita did not appear for the tutorial they had agreed to walk to together, and the college, and then the city, and then eventually the whole small, gossiping province of people who had once whispered about the farmer’s daughter who had reached too far above her station, fell suddenly and permanently silent on the subject, the way a village stream falls silent once it has finally, irreversibly, joined the wider river and cannot be called back to its source.
Epilogue
They buried her in Nalbari, beside the paddy fields her father still tended each season out of habit more than hope, and for a long time afterward, the village spoke of her only in careful half-sentences, the way people speak of things they do not yet know how to hold without cutting themselves.
Rina kept, for the rest of her own life, the brittle white flower pressed inside the Gitanjali — the one physical remnant of a courtship that had once seemed, from a canteen stairwell in Gauhati, like the beginning of something worth every risk it demanded. She never showed it to anyone, though she thought, often, of the inscription inside the cover, written in a hand she had come to despise: for L., who arrived without warning, like weather.
Nabin Baruah married Priyanka Choudhury the following spring, in a wedding attended by four hundred guests and reported, with photographs, in three regional newspapers. If the marriage brought him the ease his father had always promised such arrangements would provide, no one who knew the full story ever heard him speak of it.
And in Nalbari, each monsoon, the paddy still grew green and patient in the fields Lalita had once been so proud to leave behind, indifferent, the way all growing things eventually are, to the particular human griefs that had once passed briefly and violently through the soil above which they now quietly, endlessly, continued to rise.
— THE END —
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List of Books by M. Menonimus:
Poetry Books
- Rainbow Tomorrow Night
- A Heart Full of Golden Hopes
- Evergreen Loves
- For My Countrymen
- If You Go Away
- In Search of a White Heart
- In the Light of Candle
- In the River of Blood
- Lovelia
- My Dear a Heart
- My Native Land
- The Lost Reminiscence
- Under the Starry Sky
- The Little Girl and the Stars
- Loves and Songs
- My Casual Poems
- An Orphan and Other Poems in Prose
Literary Criticism
- World Short Story Criticism
- World Poetry Criticism
- World Drama Criticism
- World Novel Criticism
- World Essay Criticism
- Indian English Poetry Criticism
- Indian English Poets and Poetry Chief Features
- Emily Dickinson’s Poetry-A Thematic Study
- Walt Whitman’s Poetry-A Thematic Study
- Critical Essays on English Poetry
- Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Novel: Return of the Spirit-An Analytical Study
- Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Novel: ‘Yawmiyyat Naib Fil Arayaf’-An Analytical Study
- Analytical Studies of Some Arabic Short Stories
- A Brief History of Arabic Literature: Pre-Islamic Period (500 AD-622 AD)
- A Brief History of Arabic Literature: Early Islamic Period (622 AD-661 AD)
- Reviews of William Shakespeare’s Works
- Reviews of Charles Dickens’ Works
- Reviews of John Milton’s Literary Works
- Reviews of Some Iconic Travelogues
- Shakespeare’s Sonnets-Critical Studies
- Analytical Studies of Selected Poems of Sarojini Naidu
- Analytical Studies of Selected Poems of Rabindranath Tagore
- Analytical Studies of Selected Indian English Poems
- Reviews of Selected Motivational Books
- Origin, Evolution & Functions of Literature
- Essays on Shakespeare and His Time …
Linguistics
- A Brief History of the English Language
- Essays on Linguistics
- Learners’ English Dictionary
Short Story Books
- The Fugitive Father and Other Stories
- The Prostitute and Other Stories
- Neha’s Confession
- Juvenile Stories and Essays
Autobiography
- A Few Pages of My Lost Diary
Biography
- The World Writers-Brief Biographies
- Introduction to World Writers
- Introduction to World Personalities
- Love of Reputed Persons
- Brief Biographies of Prominent Bengali Writers
- Brief Biographies of Eminent Monarchs
- Brief Biographies of Ancient Thinkers and Writers
- Brief Biographies of Eminent Generals and Conquerors
- Biographies of Writers Around the World
- Introduction to Men of Letters
Non-Fiction
- Love Letters to Liza
- Let’s Look Into
- Articles on Contemporary Affairs
- Gleaned Essays
- Educational Psychology: A Comprehensive Study
- The Human Psychology: A Comprehensive Study
Science & Technology
- Select Essays on Technology
- Essays on Science and Technology
- Interactive SEO Guide
- Tips For Best SEO
Motivational Books:
- Earn One Million Dollars a Month
- Earn Million Dollars Using ChatGPT
- The Millionaire Mindset
Academic (Educational) Books
- Advertisement Writing
- Amplification Writing
- Note Making
- Paragraph Writing
- Notice Writing
- Passage Comprehension
- The Art of Poster Writing
- The Art of Letter Writing
- Report Writing
- Story Writing
- Substance Writing
- School Essays Part-I
- School Essays Part-II
- School English Grammar Part-I
- School English Grammar Part-II
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