Chapter 2 – The Voice Between the Lines
Sleep was a stranger that night. Though Ananya had promised herself she would rest, the black diary kept tugging at her mind, its presence on her desk heavier than the pile of textbooks beside it. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw those words again—“Some loves are not meant to be spoken aloud…”
Finally, surrendering to temptation, she threw off her blanket, pulled the lamp closer, and opened the diary once more.
The second entry stared at her like a secret meant only for her.
“I don’t know why I write. Maybe to survive the silence. Maybe because I fear if I don’t, her laughter will vanish from my memory. She doesn’t belong to me. She never will. But these pages—they are mine. And in them, she is mine too.”
Ananya exhaled sharply. The loneliness in the words gripped her chest. She ran her fingers over the ink, as though she could touch the writer himself.
The entries grew deeper as she read on. Some pages were smudged with faded stains—drops of rain or perhaps tears. The handwriting sometimes neat, sometimes rushed, seemed to mirror his emotions.
“She walked past me today, so close I could have reached out. But what would I have said? That I’ve memorized the sound of her anklet when she climbs the stairs? That when she looks at the sky, I forget the ground beneath me? No. Such confessions live only here.”
Ananya closed her eyes. She could almost see him—an unnamed young man, hiding in plain sight, notebook in hand, his eyes following someone he loved but could never have.
Hours slipped away, the silence of her room broken only by the ticking of the wall clock. By the time her eyes grew heavy, she had forgotten the world outside. The diary remained open on her desk when she finally drifted into uneasy sleep.
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The next morning, sunlight spilled across the pages, warming the ink. Ananya woke with a start. For a terrifying second, she imagined her mother finding it, opening it, discovering what had kept her daughter awake. Quickly, she shut the diary and slid it into her drawer before rushing to class.
But all through the day, the words followed her. During lectures, her pen moved, but her thoughts were elsewhere. On the bus, she stared out the window yet heard the whisper of ink. Even while eating lunch with her friends, she kept thinking of him—the faceless writer whose voice now lived inside her head.
Her friends noticed her distraction.
“Anu, you okay?” Priya asked, poking her arm.
Ananya forced a smile. “Haan… bas thoda thak gayi hoon.”
They accepted her excuse, but inside, she knew the truth—she was hooked.
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That evening, when the house quieted again, she returned to the diary like a secret lover. She read carefully this time, not just the words but the spaces between them, searching for clues.
One entry mentioned waiting outside a library for hours, pretending to study. Another spoke of a campus courtyard where he watched her laugh with her friends. Once, he described attending a poetry club, only because she was there.
Ananya’s heart skipped. These weren’t random places—they sounded eerily familiar. Her own college had all of these: the library steps, the courtyard near the banyan tree, the poetry club that met on Fridays. Could it be possible that he had studied here, years ago?
She grabbed her own notebook and began jotting words:
Library. Courtyard. Poetry club. Girl in yellow dress.
The “girl in yellow” appeared in several entries. The writer described her dupatta catching the wind, her smile on festival days, her voice humming a folk song. He never mentioned her name, but he wrote about her as though she were the only star in his sky.
Ananya paused, staring at the notes she had scribbled. It felt less like she was reading a diary and more like uncovering a hidden trail.
The writer had not signed his name anywhere, only ending entries with a simple “—R.”
Who was R? Why had he never confessed? Where was he now?
She leaned back, diary open on her lap, and whispered aloud, “I’ll find you.”
The words startled her. She hadn’t meant to say them, yet they slipped out, soft and certain.
The diary was no longer just an object. It was a map, a voice, a challenge. And Ananya had unknowingly taken her first step into its labyrinth.
That night, she closed the diary carefully, holding it against her chest before locking it away. But sleep did not come easily. For the first time in her life, she felt her heart racing not because of an exam, a result, or even her own secret crushes—but because of a man she had never seen, a ghost who had left his heart pressed between yellowed pages.
And she knew one thing with dangerous clarity—she wasn’t going to stop until she discovered the truth.
