The Later Flowering


 

Aarohi had always been the girl who arrived late.
Late to speak. Late to walk. Late to be heard.

She was not slow―just different. At school, when others gathered friends and gold medals, tales in the margin of note-books were all that reassured her. When all drove ahead in affairs of loving, working, and children, Aarohi quietly waited at the far end of life's long queue, clutching on to such tenuous dreams which could not be confided.

Her twenties passed in a blur of rejection—job interviews ended in polite refusals, stories published unread as far as page five, and a broken heart when the only man she ever loved married another.

Others called her unlucky. Lazy. “Too sensitive.”
She smiled the whole way. But on some nights, the quite hollered.

She was still living in her parent's home at thirty-five, worked on a part-time schedule in a library, and refined novels for writers whose style was all that she was interested in writing.

But she refused to give up.
She sat down every evening. Story after story. Her world was held together with people who suffered more and still stood their ground. Perhaps, perhaps, she would be in their ranks one day, if holding on was the answer.

Then arrived a telephone.
She heard her tale read from an old contest submission made years ago from a small publisher.
They wanted to print it.

She stared at the screen, frozen in place. She was thirty-nine. That was much too old. But maybe, just maybe, this was where she was beginning.

The book was issued without fanfare. No limelights. No stardom. But readers reacted. They cried. They felt understood. Her words touched places she could not even imagine.

Months later, when invited to read at a Shimla literary festival, she was uneasy and doubtful and would hardly have agreed. But something urged her on.

At the convention, as she walked across the stage, eyes locked onto a face in the front. Familiar. The greying-haired man, holding her book.

Ragh

The very man who once said her dreams "too slow for this world."

Then he stood up and walked towards her—with tears in his eyes and words of apology on his lips.
“I read your book. Breaks me. Heals me.”

They spoke for hours under a snowflake-filled sky and second chances.

Years later, Aarohi would be holding in one hand, her second book, and in the other, Raghav's.

She was not the girl who got things immediately.
But she got all that mattered—the moment she was ready.
And at last, she knew:
Anything which was late,
Came for a reason.

 

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