Talabgaar

The painter’s studio stood at the end of an alley no one entered by accident. Its walls were lined with portraits that no one came to collect. Faces smiled from old canvases, laughed from faded sketches, and watched silently from gilded frames. Some looked familiar, though no one could say why. People often mistook the studio for an art gallery. It wasn’t. The painter never painted strangers.…

The tailor’s shop had no mannequins in its window. Instead, tiny wooden shelves held spools of thread in colours no one could quite describe. Some shimmered like morning light after rain. Others looked like moonlight folded into silk. Each spool carried a small handwritten label. Hope. Patience. Wonder. Forgiveness. People often walked past the shop believing it sold clothes. It didn’t.…

The first letter arrived on a Tuesday morning. There was no stamp. No return address. No indication of where it had come from. Only my name was written neatly across the envelope in handwriting I recognised immediately. It was mine. I turned it over several times, convinced there had to be an explanation. A forgotten note. A prank. Some strange coincidence. But when I opened it, the date at…

The bookshop appeared wherever it was needed. Sometimes it stood between a bakery and a tailor. Sometimes beside a flower stall. Once, it was found at the end of a street that didn’t exist the day before. No one could explain how it moved. No one questioned it either. People were usually too distracted by the shelves. The first thing visitors noticed was that they never stayed where they were…

The train arrived at 12:07 every night. No one knew where it came from. No one knew where it was going. It wasn’t listed on any of the schedules. No maps showed the station. No signs pointed toward it. And yet, people found it. Not because they were searching for it, but maybe because they had been carrying something for too long. The station stood at the edge of the city, where the…

The café stood quietly between a flower shop that never opened on time and a bookstore that smelled like old rain. Most people walked past it without noticing. The sign above the door had faded long ago, and the windows stayed fogged even in summer. But somehow, people always found it on the days they needed something they couldn’t explain. There was no menu inside. Only a small handwritten…

She came quietly, and everyone in the city knew her, though no one could ever tell what her name was. She lived at the end of a narrow street where the streetlights flickered like they were unsure of themselves. Her windows were always dimly lit, never dark, as if the night itself lingered inside her home. People said she collected unslept dreams. Dreams that arrived but were never entered.…

It didn’t arrive like a storm; it slipped inside me quietly and stayed, as if it had found a home.  I looked up, and Heartbreak sat across from me with an honest half-smile “Why did you stay longer, than love ever did?” I asked.  “Probably because you had kept your fingers tightly around me…, like somehow you believed that holding onto something was better than holding onto nothing at all.”…

I met you somewhere, between rugged breaths and a breakdown.  It wasn’t a dream but I wasn’t awake either. You looked like me, only lighter, somehow, like you haven’t been carrying the heaviness I did for years. It didn’t look like the weight had done a number on you.  “You survived,” you said first. It wasn’t a praise or an accusation but an observation.  “I did,” I replied.  “Barely, some…

There are nights when the world grows quiet in a way that doesn’t feel peaceful. The phone is face down, the notifications have stopped, and somehow the ceiling feels too far away.  I think those are the nights Loneliness knocks, not loudly, just firmly enough that I can’t pretend I don’t hear it. That night, I was too tired to run from it. “Come in,” I muttered, half to myself. Loneliness…

There are places we visit in our dreams without knowing their names. There are rooms we enter only when we’re too tired to pretend we’ve forgotten. The Museum of Almost is one of them. You don’t find it on maps. You migrate there, you arrive there by accident, usually on nights when your chest feels too full, or too empty, or both. The entrance looks different for everyone. For me, it appeared…

The keeper led me through the quiet aisles as the lamplight softened into amber, each flicker stretching shadows across the endless shelves. The air smelled faintly of dust and memory, that peculiar scent of things that have waited too long to be remembered. We stopped at the farthest corner, where the shelves curved inward like a secret held too close. A single table stood there, draped in…

I thought libraries were meant for choosing, you walk in, pick a book, and carry it with you. But here, you don’t decide. The stories decide. I wandered past shelves holding quiet grief, next to others trembling with confessions that never found a voice. Some glowed faintly, as though hope still lived inside them. Others faded into the dimness, they have been untouched for too long. Then I felt…

I don’t remember how long I walked before I saw them. The light in the library never dimmed, but it wasn’t bright either, it moved like breath, flickering softly between the shelves, as if time itself had forgotten how to pass here. They stood at the far end of an aisle, arranging books with the kind of care one reserves for fragile hearts. Their hair carried the same shade as dust caught in…

It happened on an ordinary evening, though nothing about what I found could ever be called ordinary. I was walking home, the rain still clinging to the air, when I noticed a door where no door should have been. It wasn’t grand or ornate; it was just a quiet wooden frame tucked between two shuttered shops. Yet something about it pulled at me, the way unshed words sometimes sit at the back of your…

The rain had stopped by the time I returned to the café. The window still carried its stains, faint reminders of a storm that had passed. I half-expected them to be there again, notebook open, sitting silently, waiting to be heard. But the corner was empty. A chair pulled close to the glass, as though someone had been sitting there long enough to forget the world. Maybe they had been here.  For…

That evening, as the sky dimmed and the world seemed to soften, I finally moved closer. Not with questions, not with explanations, just presence. They looked up from their notebook, eyes meeting mine like an unspoken promise. There was no surprise, no judgment, only an invitation. A quiet understanding passed between us, heavier than words, lighter than regret. The hum of conversations…