A Quite Beginning
"Sometimes, the softest voices leave the loudest echoes in our hearts."
Winter had just begun settling over the campus, a crisp chill brushing against the trees, leaving faint frost on the edges of the old stone pathways. Meera sat on her hostel bed, phone in hand, staring absentmindedly at the screen. Her thoughts kept drifting back to the small celebration earlier that day—the birthday of their friend, Raghav. She wanted a keepsake from that day, a memory frozen in pixels.
Her fingers hovered for a moment before typing.
But first, she needed Aarav’s number. She reached out to Raghav.
"Take Aarav’s number from the WhatsApp group," Raghav replied.
Meera scrolled through the group, copied the number, and finally typed her message:
"Hi… Are you Aarav?"
A reply came almost instantly:
"Yes."
"It’s Meera," she typed.
"Can you please send me the selfie we took today?"
Aarav paused, then replied:
"Is this your number?"
"Of course it’s mine. Why would I text you from someone else’s number?"
A few seconds later, the photo arrived. The selfie of the three of them: Meera, Aarav, and Raghav.
Smiles frozen in time, laughter caught mid-air.After that, there was silence. No more messages that day. No calls. Just the soft echo of a new connection, budding quietly, almost unnoticed.
The days passed. The winter deepened. December rolled into January, and before the world outside changed completely, Meera suggested a small outing. She spoke to Tara, a friend of theirs, and proposed they visit the Gurudwara.Meera wanted Aarav to come along, quietly hoping for his company. She asked Tara to call him. And so, they walked together from the college to the Gurudwara—four of them in total—but Meera and Aarav didn’t speak a word the entire time. Silence carried its own meaning, and she felt closer to him in that quiet companionship than she had in hours of conversation.
It was a small, almost imperceptible start. But for Meera, it was enough. Enough to feel the first stirrings of something she didn’t yet have words for. A connection that didn’t need public attention, that didn’t need witnesses.
A quiet beginning.
"Some things are felt, not spoken; some connections are built in silence before words catch up."
