A Letter Without a Name

The first letter arrived on a Tuesday, tucked between the electricity bill and a wedding card from Faisalabad. It had no stamp and no name, only her own, written in the same careful blue ink as the note on the kite.

Zoya carried it upstairs unopened and sat with it on her bed for a long time, the way you sit with a cup of tea that is still too hot to drink.

When she finally opened it, the first page was about the weather. It was about the fog that had settled over the Ravi that week, and how the bridge looked as if it ended halfway across, and how his father refused to switch on the heater until December on principle.

The second page was about the book he was binding, a book of poems for a woman in Model Town who wanted it covered in green leather with her late husband’s initials on the spine. He wrote about the smell of the glue and the way the gold leaf lifted if you breathed on it, and she found that she was holding her breath as she read.

The third page was only four lines long.

I don’t know what you like to read. I would like to find out. If you want to write back, leave it under the loose brick by the bindery door. If you don’t, I will understand, and I will still say salaam when I pass your gate.

She read it three times. Then she took a sheet of paper from her chemistry notebook, which was the only paper in the house that nobody would miss, and began to write about the weather.

Downstairs, her mother called her name. Zoya folded the page in half, slid it under her pillow, and went down to help with the dinner, and for the rest of the evening she could not remember a single word anyone said.