Title: “Letters She Never Posted”
—A Tale of Ink, Regret, and the Rain that Came Late
By Faraz Parvez
Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal
Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA
(Pseudonym of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal)
Lahore, 2003. A Small Flat. A Stack of Blue Envelopes.
Every afternoon at 4:15 p.m., Mrs. Tabassum, a retired Urdu teacher, would walk to the old GPO in Anarkali.
Not to send anything.
Just to sit on the stone bench beside the red mailbox and read letters—her own.
She had written 272 of them over 18 years.
All addressed to one man: Rauf Ahmed, now probably dead or someone else’s husband.
She had never posted a single one.
The Love That Lived on Paper
They had met in 1985. She was a trainee teacher. He was a guest lecturer in Persian poetry. He had eyes that softened when he read Hafez and a voice that turned even Mir’s sadness into song.
They exchanged glances. Then couplets. Then letters.
Until one day he vanished—married off to a cousin in Multan.
She waited. A year. Then another.
But letters became her therapy.
She wrote of politics. Of her mother’s stroke. Of her own hair turning white.
Some letters were sarcastic. Others soaked in tears.
But none bitter.
And every few weeks, she added to the stack in her cupboard.
“Dear Rauf… You should see how the bougainvillea has rebelled this year. It reminds me of you.”
When the Rain Came
One summer, Anarkali caught fire.
A shop selling pirated novels exploded in the heat.
Flames reached her flat. Most things burned.
Except the steel trunk where she kept the letters.
A young reporter covered the incident. He interviewed her.
“You never posted these. Why?”
She smiled.
“Because some loves must be preserved, not pursued.”
He wrote about her in The Friday Times. Called it “The Widow of Ink.”
That week, a man in Multan read it.
Widowed. Childless.
And old.
He posted one letter.
Just one.
To her.
“I read your words. Every one of them. I never deserved them then. I don’t now. But if you still write, I will read.”
By Faraz Parvez
Professor Dr. (Retired) Arshad Afzal
Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA
(Pseudonym of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal)
📬 Stories like these live on paper and in pixels. They are drawn from hearts that never healed and from lovers who never stopped writing.
Visit our blog for more romantic echoes from the subcontinent:
🌐 farazparvez1.blogspot.com
Because not every story needs a wedding to be called a love story.
