THE IPS

Chapter 1: Her House Was Too Quiet

The cupboard still held his old aftershave bottle.
It hadn't been touched in six years, but Meher swore she could still smell him when the rains came.

Their home in Civil Lines, Lucknow, had wide verandas and pale blue walls. Government quarters, once filled with her father’s laughter, now echoed with footsteps that didn’t lead anywhere. He was an officer in the Indian Engineering Services. Sharp, principled, impossibly kind. Gone too soon — a cardiac arrest on a winter morning. He was cremated with state honours. They came with salutes, wreaths, and words like "irreplaceable." But no one came the week after.

Now, it was just Meher and her mother — two women suspended in time.

Her mother, Shalini Chaudhary, taught English at a government school. Elegant, soft-spoken, with eyes that never fully smiled anymore. She still set two teacups each evening. One for herself. One where his used to be.

Meher had always been quiet. Not shy — just inward. The kind of girl who didn’t post selfies, who read more than she spoke. Her handwriting was straight, her notebooks pristine.
She topped her college in Economics, but success never felt like hers to own.
Boys had found her beautiful — many said so — but she never belonged in their stories. Her first crush had moved on with a louder girl from another department. He didn’t even know he’d broken her heart.

Meher smiled at his new photos, said congrats in the group chat. Then she quietly unfollowed him and deleted Instagram.
It hurt.
Not the rejection — but the silence after.
She wasn’t missed.
She wasn’t remembered.

So she poured herself into her Master's degree — lost in demand-supply curves and equations that never lied. At night, she read. She wrote journal entries like they were secret letters — always unsigned, always unsent.

And then the world shut down.

Lockdown came without warning. No lectures. No streets. No noise.
Just a house that now felt even more like a museum of what used to be.

It was during one of those quiet nights — when the ceiling fan was the loudest sound — that Meher opened a new website.

She didn’t expect anything.
Just something to read. A place to post.
A corner of the internet where strangers wrote about things they couldn’t say out loud.
She signed up. No photo. No name. Just a username, a blank space, and her first post:

> “I think grief ages us in invisible ways.
We grow up in hours where others take years.”

She hit publish.
Then shut her laptop.

She didn’t know…
Somewhere, a man in uniform would read that line, and pause.

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