Present time

POV of Ishaan Randhawa:

The student body count of this school had been in a few hundred for the past some generation. Most faces that I saw in the hallways were familiar ones. I either knew that person or if not, then someone in their immediate family. 

Ours was a small and close-knit community that had mostly witnessed people leaving rather than coming here. So when the old government house off the Last Street was bought by some outsider, an interest was sparked. Manya wouldn't know this but we had been talking of her before they had even arrived in the town.

The first time I noticed her was when she was on her way to the library on her cycle. Wouldn't lie, I was also intrigued by her but it was just an out-of-the-mill curiosity. Curiosity about where she came from in the world, the experiences she had, the people she had met.

We shared most of the classes which made it easier for me to observe her. She always sat at the front of the class with her head in her notebook. She kept silent and neither asked any doubts or answered any questions. The only time I heard her speak was when she would apologize to the teachers for coming late, which was most of the time. Her voice was soft and yet distinctive. Within a few days, I was sure I could recognize her by her voice alone.

So when the first words she ever spoke to me were 'I asked you to kill me. I am supposed to be dead,' I was rattled, to say the least.

However, my reaction was nothing compared to my classmates as their cacophony grew louder as chairs were pushed back, and shoes shuffled. Ms. Alvina broke through the crowd and kneeled next to me.

"What did she just say?" She was alarmed.

"No one told to kill anyone. This is the first time I am even talking to her." I tried to assure my classmates as they gathered around us.

At no fault of Ms. Alvina, my attention was on the new girl rather than on her lecture. This time she had taken a seat back in the class, closer to me. I was the first one to notice Manya drowsing. Her head lowered little by little until it was resting on her arms. I had assumed she had a headache but a few minutes later as she swayed in the seat, I realized she had lost consciousness. My first thought was to stop her from falling as I shot out of my seat.

I covered her head with my hand just seconds before she hit the ground. In my arms, I shook her gently, urging her to open her eyes. When she finally let me see her coffee-brown eyes, she accused me of not killing her and then fainted.

Despite my heroic efforts, she did injure her head.

I picked her limp body up and let everyone know that I was taking her back to my house. My dad was a doctor so she was in good hands.

I stepped out of the school and under the clear blue sky. The strong sunlight made her turn her face towards my shoulder. She was not totally out of it.

Within a few minutes, we were walking through the enormous oak doors of my house. These were ridiculously big but original from when the house was first built. We mostly used a smaller door at the side but it must have been cleaning day as they were open.

I carefully placed her down on the sofa of the closest sitting room. I supported her head with a cushion and looked down upon her. After one last try to wake her up, I walked over to the windows and called my father.

He accepted on the first ring.

"Hello, son. Is everything alright?" It was not often that I called him in the middle of the day.

"Yes, Dad, everything is fine with me. Only that a girl in my class had fainted. She is unconscious. I have brought her home. Can you once come by and check her out?"

"I have an appointment now. At the latest, I can be there only after an hour. Is it an emergency?" My father was a good man and an even better doctor. He would never turn down any patient.

"It is okay," I looked at her as some sounds escaped her mouth. "I will take care of her for now. You try to make it here as soon as possible."

I cut the call and pushed open the windows. The fresh air might arouse her. With little movements and murmurs, she seemed to regain her senses. This time as her eyes fluttered open she saw me and disappointment filled her eyes.

"You are not... It is you." Her eyelids lowered, pained by the light shining upon her face. I stood in front of her to block it.

I needed to admit disappointment was not the reaction I had hoped for after this impromptu rescue session. Nevertheless, I helped her sit upright and went to the kitchen to get her a glass of water. I returned to find her missing from the sofa. Worried I rushed out into the hall, afraid to find her lying somewhere on the ground. Instead, I find her standing in front of the grand staircase awestruck.

Yes, it was too much but nothing I would get out of bed for in case I was unwell.

"It is something out of a fairytale right?" I stood next to her, ready to catch her in case she fainted again.

"Yeah, a fairytale indeed. You live here?"

"Yes." Ostentious was one word to describe this mansion but it has housed generations of Randhawa clan. It was home to us. Most of my closest friends had grown up within these walls as we played and studied together, so in a way they were used to it. But I understood that to Manya my childhood house was a source of awe. She must be used to the tall buildings of the city.

Though her pure admiration of my home made my day, I needed her on a solid surface in case of any further fainting spells.

"Come on. Come with me. Once my father checks you out, I promise you a tour of the house."

As we crossed the floor-to-ceiling sliding doors of the hallway, her gaze caught on the solarium. It was a unique feature of the house and no one in the village had one. It was like having an indoor garden. The hallway connecting the rooms snaked around the solarium. Some of the rooms, including the master bedroom had access to it through a balcony. It was at its glory during the rainy season. One had a front-row view of the rain falling on the trees.

It kept the house cool during the summer and boasted of many old trees. The oldest one was planted over a thousand year back. When it died, a few hundred years back, its wood was used to create wooden benches, placed all around the solarium.

Another tree was planted in its place. It had grown over the years and had the largest trunk and its branches often had to be shorn to stop it from breaking the walls. But the old man stood tall and even had a plaque carved by the builder of the house.

"Is that..." She had her eyes set upon the trees. She must have been shocked to see an indoor garden.

"Yeah, that is a solarium. It is a cool place to hang out in." I had climbed every tree in there at one time or the other. I was expecting praises or surprised comments, tears were the farthest from my mind.

"Hey, come on you, why do have to cry over them? It is beautiful, I shall agree but really not worthy of tears." I gripped my nape, racking my brain on how to console her.

Her reactions to my house were, for a lack of better word, peculiar. The house was beautiful, better than the castle, I would say. It was an unwritten and spoken rule that this house needed to be maintained and passed on in its original state as much as possible. Parts of the house had undergone renovation, but the overall layout remained the same as it was built in the 12th century.

"Is the door taller than two people combined?"

"Yes."

"Columns all around the house?"

"Yes."

"And a library two-storeyed tall? Mirror in every room?" Her words ran into each other. Her eyes widened as if in a trance.

Our house was well-known for its historic characteristics and had been featured in my many blogs and articles. So the library and doors would be common knowledge but she would not have known about the mirrors in every room.

Her intimate knowledge about my home and her weird actions unsettled me. I started questioning my decision to bring her here. But the moment I saw her faint, it felt as if my body was on autopilot. My home was the only place that I could think of bringing her.

"If you are still not feeling well, I could call your father. You could take the rest of the day off." Maybe she would be better off at her place. She whirled around to face me.

"No, please can I stay here for a few more minutes? I just need to find something." Her tearful eyes pleaded into mine.

Alarms started ringing in my head. I should not have brought her here. My father was not going to be able to make it here soon enough, so I called my mother. She was at her shop at this time of the day but I did not what else to do.

I instructed Manya to stay at her place and called my mother. She was already on her way home.

Knowing she was just a few minutes away from the house, I returned in a lighter mood. But she was nowhere to be found. That wretched girl had wandered off yet again. Did the girl not understand me? I was fuming, getting ready to find her again when the sound of sobs reached my ears.

I followed the sound to find her crying her eyes out at the base of the oldest tree. She reached out and caressed the plaque carved with the name of the first owner of the house. Inder Randhawa.

A fresh set of sobs rocked her bony shoulders. I was conflicted between consoling her or calling some other people to have her taken out. These city folks were surely weird.

I turned my eyes away from her when my mother entered the solarium from the kitchen.

"I cannot believe my eyes. It is her."

"Huh?" I was aware that my mother knew of Manya as she had given her my unused cycle just days before. But it was no reason to be so flabbergasted.

"The girl, Ishaan. From the letters."

Oh boy, here we went again. My mom was a bit of a jack of all trades. There was not a single role she had not mastered. She was a seamstress and sometimes the librarian. Professionally, she was hired to be a nurse to my father. But we all knew how that turned out.

Her one true love besides our family would be our family history. Ours was deeply integrated into the tapestry of time. Our ancestors had inhabited this land for centuries and had fought for it several times over the long course of history. It was because of their unwavering efforts that we were able to call this mansion home. Or else, it would have been lost in the pages of history, reduced to skeletons of walls and overgrown mosses. While I was proud of our long-standing heritage and culture, my mother was obsessed.

When a part of the house had served as the village clinic, my parents had just a professional relationship. My mother had spent so much time here that my father let her rent a room. It sounded a bit too much to me, but that was how their love story started.

Her accommodation gave my mother unhindered access to the mansion and its long-lost secrets. Her hidden historian emerged, and she would often be found spending late nights in the library poring over family records. That was how she first came to know about the prince who fell in love with a girl from the future.

During office hours, she was next to my father, but after hours she talked to all the family members who once inhabited this house. Now, only we remained, with most of them dead and their descendants settled abroad.

None of them except my father's grandmother, my great-grandmother, knew anything about the letters. She was a scholar in Sanskrit and helped my mother to translate the letters. 

The letters were some nine hundred years old and written on a mixture of fabric and paper that made them readable to this day. They were not any letters, containing trivial matters of day-to-day life or war decrees. They were love letters, written specifically to stand the test of time.

They never had any address on them. My mother believed that was because they were meant to travel time instead of physical distance. They carried the words of the departed king for centuries and would not be read by the one intended.

My mother often told me about their story as a bedtime tale, filling in the blanks with her own imagination.

It was the age-old story of the royal member's life being in danger and a commoner saving their life, just in this case there was a gender reversal. I never believed the time travel part, the prince was probably high when he conjured up that tall tale.

However now looking at Manya cry over a tree she had never visited in her entire life, as if she had lost a dear one, I could not help but wonder.

My mother slowly approached her and talked softly to her. I did my best but I was not able to hear them. Whatever she said made Manya seek solace in her arms and cry freely on her shoulder. After a few minutes, my mother guided her towards the library. I followed them wordlessly.

I hung back and observed them as scrolls of paintings and sketches of a woman were unfurled on the large table. They did not resemble her in the slightest but she kept pointing to them and then to herself.

I had nothing to contribute to their interaction and was contemplating returning to school when the bell rang. I opened the door to my father, glad to have another sane person in the house.

"Mother has gone crazy again. She thinks the new girl is the girl from the letter."

"First of all, don't talk about your mother like that. And second of all, that is a problem indeed."

When we returned to the library, Manya had taken her shoulder-length hair out of the tight elastic band and it loosely hung around her face. Her slender and tall frame sat rigid on the chair as my father checked her pupils and asked her general questions like the last time she ate or if she had any medications. He took her blood pressure and told her to wiggle her toes.

She tugged on the skirt she had on as if she was suddenly uncomfortable showing all that skin. Though she did not say anything, I caught her taking surreptitious glances at her chest. I shook my head.

If she was not such an oddball, she would definitely be a looker.

My father's chuckle beside me made me realize I had spoken my thoughts aloud. I felt my face grow warm. I chose to not acknowledge what he just heard but he had different plans.

"I thought the same of your mother when I first met her and we all very well know how that turned out. You never know what fate has stored for you." He joined me to look at the two women engrossed in their private conversation.

"Yes, but this girl is as crazy as it gets. Timetravelling maid. What do you do with that?"

Author's Corner

We have come a full circle. Manya's back in her time. Will she stay?

Please do let me know your thoughts and feelings through your comments. Besides giving me direction, they are really a great boost of motivation.

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If you have hung around till this last sentence, know that you are the best and the writer of this story just wishes you nothing but the best of the best story for your life.