Nishita hadn’t meant to call him. It had started as a joke — a radio host’s silly challenge on her morning drive:
“October thirtieth — Text Your Ex Day! What’s the worst that could happen?”
Forty years since they’d parted ways. 1985. She had turned off the radio, laughed, and said aloud to no one, “What the hell.”
Her fingers moved before she could think.
Hey, Satish. Strange day. Thought of you. Hope you’re still as impossible as ever.
She didn’t expect a reply. But three hours later, in the hum of her office, her phone buzzed.
Still impossible. Still alive. You calling from Delhi or somewhere more exotic?
Nepal. You?
Bhutan. Monastery guesthouse. Don’t ask.
Now I have to ask.
Come see for yourself.
The monastery lay folded into the lower Himalayan foothills — cloud-gray, quiet, resinous with pine and juniper smoke. She hadn’t imagined Satish as the monkish type. He’d been the academic topper, the boy who read philosophy for mischief and wielded dark humour like a scalpel. “Handsomely ugly,” her friend Mira used to say — like a Mills & Boon hero who missed his cue.
Yet there he was, sitting cross-legged in the cloistered hallway, a chipped teacup beside him, an open laptop blinking in sleep mode. His hair was silver, his smile half-guarded, familiar.
“You came,” he said simply.
“I didn’t promise.”
“You never did. You just… arrive.”
She laughed, awkwardly, the way one laughs at a memory suddenly made flesh. “This is surreal.”
“Everything is, if you’ve been quiet long enough,” he said.
They walked through the monastery garden, past marigolds and prayer wheels turning lazily in the wind.
“So,” she asked, “why a monastery?”
“I was supposed to write a book about silence,” he said. “Ended up needing to learn it first.”
“That’s very you,” she said. “Study the mountain before climbing it.”
He smiled. “And you? Still building empires?”
“Empires?” She shrugged. “More like sandcastles. I run a creative therapy collective now. Help people recover from burnout. Lately, I think I should sign up as my own client.”
“Burnout?”
“Jealousy, mostly. Watching younger people do what I used to, with twice the sparkle. I tell my students not to compare, but sometimes it feels like they took what was mine.”
Satish paused beside a low wall of prayer stones. The wind tugged gently at his shawl. “They didn’t take it. You just left it out in the open.”
“That’s comforting,” she said dryly.
“No,” he said. “It’s freeing. You didn’t lose a thing. You just stopped showing up where your voice belonged.”
They sat on the wall, the valley below trembling with mist. Somewhere, a bell rang — long, low, forgiving.
“I keep telling myself visibility isn’t finite,” she said softly. “That every new voice expands the room. But some nights, I still ache.”
“Jealousy’s just longing in disguise,” he said.
She turned to him. “That sounds rehearsed.”
“It is. I’ve said it to myself a hundred times — every time someone publishes something I wish I’d written.”
She smiled. “So even the monk gets jealous.”
“Of course,” he said. “The difference is, I use it as direction now. Jealousy points to what’s still alive in me.”
She looked out toward the ridgeline, pale as a watercolor. “I think I’m starving for visibility — to be seen again.”
“Then show up,” he said. “Don’t wait to feel serene first. Serenity isn’t stillness — it’s clarity.”
She tilted her head. “You still talk like a professor.”
“And you still listen like a rebel.”
They sat a while in silence. The air smelled of butter tea and incense.
“You know,” Satish said finally, “you always had this quality. Even when you were angry, people found peace in your presence. You carried it without knowing.”
She blinked, surprised. “Peace? Me?”
He smiled. “The voice of happiness,” he said, “is quite often the sound of peace. You had that voice then. You have it now.”
Something in her chest loosened, a long-held knot of guilt and striving. She felt herself breathing again.
A group of novices passed by, their sandals whispering across the stone.
“Do you ever miss it?” she asked. “The rush, the ambition?”
“Every day,” he said. “But I’ve made peace with it. I let ambition walk beside me instead of pulling me.”
She laughed. “You should put that in your book.”
“Maybe you should write it with me,” he said, eyes gleaming.
“Us? After forty years?”
“Why not? Two jealous people learning peace — it’s a good story.”
Dusk folded gently around the monastery. She felt an ease she hadn’t known in years.
When she stood to leave, Satish handed her a folded scrap of paper.
“What’s this?”
“A practice,” he said. “Something for people who think they’ve lost their voice.”
She unfolded it. His neat handwriting read:
Each day, do one act that grounds you, and one act that expresses you. When envy visits, say — ‘This feeling is a messenger, not an enemy.’ Then create something small before it fades.
She folded it carefully. “You’ve gotten wiser.”
He shook his head. “Just quieter.”
“Maybe that’s the same thing,” she said.
“Maybe,” he smiled. “Text me next year. Same day.”
“Text Your Ex-Day?” she asked, laughing.
“Exactly. Make it an annual ritual of reckless honesty.”
She waved, tucking the note into her pocket. The wind lifted — full of incense, bells, and something unnameable.
And for the first time in years, she felt visible — not to an audience, but to herself.
Author’s Note: A quiet meditation on jealousy, memory, and rediscovery — where two old souls learn that the voice of happiness is often the sound of peace.
This post was written as a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.
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