Fiction: Avdhi’s estranged mother’s death brings her back to Shimla, where the past awaits her

Shimla was still half-asleep when I arrived. The taxi climbed like someone trying to remember the end of a sentence. Mist sat in the hollows between trees; the world blurred into a soft, familiar grey. I watched the road and let my thoughts move slow; too slow to be useful, too steady to be denial.

I sat back, holding my bag, watching the city I once called home. It looked smaller somehow. Not physically, but in the way old classrooms do when you return as an adult. Like time had folded the place in half, and now it didn’t quite fit around me the same way.

When the taxi finally turned into our old lane, I felt it before I saw it, that quiet pull, like an ache waking up after too many years of sleep. The gate stood open, the paint peeling. It looked like any house that had nurtured a life inside it for years.

And there, at the door, wrapped in her shawl, was Heena Aunty, our neighbour, who had been Ma’s best friend for 30 years and was now, in small ways, the house’s keeper. She looked as if the years had pressed gentleness into her bones. When I finally...

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