“The Man in the Rain”

The monsoon had arrived in Kolkata, painting the city in shades of grey and green. The rain was constant—sometimes heavy, sometimes a drizzle—but always there, like a persistent whisper from the sky. On one such rainy morning, Rini stood by the window of her second-floor apartment in South Kolkata, a cup of chai warming her hands. She watched the droplets race down the glass pane, her mind wandering back to another rain, many years ago.

Back then, she had just turned twenty. The air was filled with youthful dreams, college classes, Rabindra Sangeet in the background, and the intoxicating feeling of first love. His name was Anirban. He wasn’t the most talkative guy, but there was something about his presence—calm, reliable, like the silence that follows a storm. He would wait for her outside the college gate every evening, always carrying a blue umbrella. That blue umbrella had become a symbol of their love—simple, unassuming, yet always there when needed.

They met at Presidency College during a poetry reading. Rini had been reading Tagore’s “Unending Love” when her voice cracked slightly, not from nervousness, but from the overwhelming beauty of the poem. Anirban, sitting at the back, had come up to her afterward and said, “It’s not easy to read Tagore without feeling him.” That one sentence had started something that would define the rest of her life.

Their love blossomed through endless addas at Coffee House, tram rides with intertwined fingers, and letters slipped into borrowed books. Anirban would write her poems—short, abstract verses that made little sense to others but meant the world to her. He wasn’t afraid of loving her out loud. And yet, when it came to talking about the future, he always grew quiet.

“Do you see us together, Rini?” he had asked one evening as they stood beneath his blue umbrella. She had smiled and replied, “I already do.”

But life has a cruel way of testing love. Anirban got a scholarship to study in the UK. It was a dream he couldn’t ignore, and Rini, though heartbroken, didn’t ask him to stay. “Go chase your dream,” she said. “But promise me, you’ll come back.”

He kissed her forehead and whispered, “Always.”

Letters flew across oceans for the first few months. Long phone calls, even with time zone struggles, kept their hearts tethered. But slowly, the letters stopped. The calls became infrequent. And then, silence.

Rini waited. A month turned into three. Then a year. No explanation, no goodbye. Just... absence.

Friends told her to move on. Her parents tried to set her up with suitors. She even tried to date someone else once, but her heart wouldn’t cooperate. No one else could fill the space Anirban left behind.

Years passed. Rini became a literature professor, just as she’d always planned. She poured her heart into teaching, surrounded by the very poems that once brought her love. But every monsoon, when the rains came, she found herself remembering the man with the blue umbrella.

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Now, fifteen years later, on a particularly wet afternoon, Rini was invited to speak at a literary festival in Shantiniketan. As she stepped off the train and felt the red earth beneath her feet, something in her heart shifted. This place, soaked in culture and drenched in nostalgia, felt like a beginning and an ending all at once.

After the session, she wandered through the Rabindra Bhavan Museum, losing herself in the pages of Tagore’s handwritten letters. She was about to leave when someone called her name.

“Rini?”

She turned slowly.

He stood there, older but unmistakably him—Anirban. His hair now had streaks of grey, his eyes looked tired but familiar. And in his hand, still, that same blue umbrella.

She stared at him, unable to speak.

“I didn’t know if you’d recognize me,” he said, voice hesitant.

“How could I not?” she replied, her voice barely above a whisper.

They sat under a banyan tree as the rain began to fall gently. He told her everything—how his mother had fallen critically ill just weeks after he left, how he had to work multiple jobs to support her treatments, how guilt and shame had kept him from reaching out when the silence grew too long. And then, his own battle with depression that followed her silence in return.

“I thought I had lost you forever,” he said.

“You had,” she said softly. “But I never stopped hoping I’d find you again.”

He took out something from his bag—an old letter, yellowed with time. “This was the last one I wrote but never sent. I kept it... all these years.”

She opened it with trembling fingers. It was a poem.

"If the rains return and you're still there,

Look for the man who never learned to forget.

The one with the umbrella, waiting,

Always waiting."

Tears welled in her eyes.

They didn’t speak much after that. Words seemed unnecessary. Some stories are written not in sentences but in silence—in eyes meeting after years, in shared laughter through tears, in a familiar umbrella held between two people who once promised forever.

That evening, as they walked side by side beneath the grey sky, the rain poured again. But this time, it felt like a blessing. The city had changed, they had changed, but some things—like love—endured the seasons.

Rini slipped her hand into his, and he didn’t let go.

After all these years, she had finally found her a

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