A gentle, long-form romance set in Baksa, Bodoland—where a blue house, river bridges, and ringing brass bells witness the slow blooming of love between Jimi Goyary and Akash Boro.
Part I: The Blue House and the First Petal
The sky over Baksa was the color of wet slate, and the house behind the garden shone with a stubborn, cheerful blue that refused to dim even under the monsoon. Jimi Goyary tucked a small pink flower behind her ear—a ritual she never spoke about but always honored on the first week of the rains. The flower, plucked from a bush her late grandmother had planted, felt like a tiny lighthouse above the sea of green paddy, guiding her back to the everyday miracles the year had taught her to notice.
That afternoon she returned from the Saturday market with a string bag of vegetables, a small brass bell, and a bundle of notebooks. Some people collected shells or coins; Jimi collected notebooks. She liked the promise of blank pages, the way they greeted her with the same patience every time, the way they made no demands. The marketplace had been a river of colors—areca baskets gleaming like honeycomb, shawls with borders like migrating birds, and pyramids of oranges snug in their green leaves. Vendors spoke in threads of Bodo and Assamese and Hindi, and if one stood still long enough, the languages braided themselves into a music no one had composed but everyone understood.
As she approached the blue house, Jimi slowed her steps. The garden on the right side of the path had grown wild while she was away at nursing school in Guwahati. Marigolds had staged a quiet coup, elbowing the beans and conspiratorially winking at the okra. Beyond the fence, a bamboo thicket leaned toward the lane as though to listen for news. She was not alone. A bicycle rested against the outer wall, and a young man stood near the gate, reading a notice her uncle had pinned there about flood relief volunteers.
He was rain-damp, hair flattened into docile waves, holding his phone like a compass. He glanced up when the brass bell in Jimi’s bag chimed, and the look on his face shifted from curiosity to apology. “I thought no one was home,” he said. “I’m looking for Mr. Basumatary—the relief camp needs a list of available nurses.”
“He is my uncle,” Jimi said. “He’s at the block office right now, but he’ll be back by tea. Are you from the camp?”
“From the school that became the camp,” he replied with a crooked smile. “Akash Boro. I teach history to Class VIII. Or I used to teach history. Lately, I’ve been teaching floodwater the meaning of boundaries.”
Jimi laughed despite herself. “I’m Jimi. I’m a nurse-in-training and a chronic collector of notebooks.”
“Notebooks?” His gaze briefly dipped to the bundle in the string bag. “Then you must approve of what I do to them.”
“You tear pages?”
“I write bad poems,” he admitted. “Sometimes I rewrite them so hard the old ones vanish under the new ones, like second chances.”
They stood for a moment in a companionable silence, the rain making a soft grammar of the afternoon. Akash pointed toward the dark line of clouds pushing over the fields. “There’ll be a heavy downpour in an hour,” he said. “The camp asked me to collect additional blankets and water purifying tablets. Your uncle said this house keeps extra supplies from last year.”
“We do,” Jimi said. “Come in. The verandah is safer than the lane if the clouds decide to turn dramatic.”
They walked past the hibiscus, and the brass bell in her bag chimed again, as if to announce an arrival not entirely accounted for. Inside, the house smelled like turmeric and old books. She poured them black tea sweetened with jaggery. Akash accepted the cup with grateful hands and stood by the open window. Through the bars the rain began, first as an argument and then as a decision. Beyond, a blue heron lifted from the paddy field, its wings carving a thin road through the wet air.
“Do teachers always predict rain like meteorologists?” Jimi asked.
“Only the ones who cycle every day,” he said. “We learn to read the sky with our skin, the way farmers do.” He sipped the tea and closed his eyes briefly, as though he were memorizing its warmth. “Thank you. Today has been a quiz I did not study for.”
Jimi took him to the back room where her uncle kept the camp supplies. Together they made a tidy mountain on the verandah: blankets, water purifying tablets, bars of soap, a carton of sanitary pads, candles, matchboxes. When Akash bent to tie the blankets with twine, the pink flower slipped from Jimi’s hair and fluttered onto a notebook in her bag. Without thinking, Akash picked the flower up and placed it back behind her ear. His fingers brushed her hair, light as a message from another hour.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t ask.”
“You returned a runaway,” she replied. “That flower is a known troublemaker.”
By the time Uncle Basumatary returned, the rain had intensified into a curtain. He and Akash conferred over lists, signed forms, and cargo space on the school tractor. Jimi watched the sky rearrange itself toward evening. When Akash left with the supplies, he paused at the gate. “I’m going to the camp every day until the water recedes. If you want to volunteer, come after your shifts. We could use someone who stacks notebooks as neatly as you stack blankets.”
“I’ll come,” she said. “Bring your bad poems. The patients will need something to laugh at.”
He saluted with two fingers, half-soldier, half-clown, and pedaled away, a slim line of determination in the rain. Later that night, lying under a fan that debated whether to rotate, Jimi opened one of the new notebooks and wrote the date. She stopped, listening to the rain on the roof. Then, very carefully, as though she were placing a small boat on a large river, she wrote a single sentence: Today I met a teacher who reads the sky with his skin.
Part II: The Market of Seven Fragrances
The next Saturday, Baksa’s market opened wider than usual, as if to welcome the patch of blue that had finally torn through the cloud. People from neighboring villages arrived with their particular intelligences: women who could price rice at a glance, men who could test a bamboo pole for strength with three knuckles, children who could count money and mangoes with the same sober devotion. Jimi came with a pocket of errands—soap, thread, a packet of incense—and a private wish she didn’t write down: to meet the teacher again in a place not dictated by floodwater.
She found Akash near the spice stall where a white-haired seller measured cardamom as if he were measuring lullabies. Akash stood with two students who had joined the volunteer team. He looked sleep-thin but lit from within. “Sister Jimi,” one of the students greeted, using the affectionate honorific her patients used. “Sir says he’ll buy us jalebis if we finish by noon.”
“A ruthless commander,” Jimi said. “Come, let me help so you earn those jalebis faster.”
They divided tasks with the efficiency of a kitchen that had learned everyone’s quirks: Jimi haggled for sanitary napkins and soap, Akash cross-checked a list he had meticulously copied into a notebook, and the students negotiated for tarpaulin sheets with the courage uniquely available to thirteen-year-olds. At the brassware stall Jimi’s fingers lingered on a string of tiny bells. The stall owner noticed. “Seven bells for seven fragrances,” he declared dramatically. “Tie them to your door, and you will always know when the wind is carrying good news.”
“What are the seven fragrances?” Akash asked.
“Mustard flowers, ripe guava, smoked chilies, new books, wet soil, fried sweets, and courage,” the man replied without missing a beat.
“Courage has a smell?” Jimi teased.
“To those who need it, yes,” the vendor said, and handed the bells over. “Here, take them. Pay me next time you have more laughter than money.”
Akash protested, but the man waved away the argument, already turning to a new customer whose shawl demanded enthusiastic compliments. Jimi cradled the bells, and the moment they moved, they sang a thin, candid song that made her think of future conversations. They ate jalebis with the students by the wooden bridge, watching a bamboo raft surrender to the river’s mood and then correct itself, like a person learning a new language and then remembering their own. On the way back, Akash tied the bells to the corner of Jimi’s dupatta. “So you’ll hear good news first,” he said.
“And if there is no wind?”
“Then we make our own,” he replied, blowing gently until the bells answered.
During the following weeks they worked like pages of the same diary—parallel, sometimes overlapping, always meaning more together than apart. The camp’s schedule took a stern shape: breakfast at six, wound care at seven, counseling at ten, distribution lines at noon, fever rounds at three, meeting with block officers at five. Jimi learned Akash’s way of speaking to frightened people: never with false promises, always with specific tasks. “Hold the torch,” he would ask a child. “Count the tablets,” he would ask an elder. “Tell me your family’s favorite snacks,” he would ask a woman whose house had yielded to the water. Tasks steadied them. Tasks returned their names.
Sometimes, after the camp quieted, they sat on the school steps and shared little stories about their parallel lives. Jimi spoke of her grandmother’s morning songs, which had no tune anyone else could mimic but somehow worked as medicine. Akash spoke about his mother’s banana fritters, crisp at the edges and soft at the center, like forgiveness. He said he had once wanted to be a singer, but stage fright had bullied the dream into a smaller room. “Now I sing when I wash the blackboard,” he joked. “It’s a captive audience.”
They didn’t name what grew between them. There wasn’t time, and there were more urgent words: oxygen, dosage, fever, bridge, rations. But Jimi felt something traveling through her days like a light she could not see but which, somehow, allowed her to see. She began leaving notes for Akash at the hollow bamboo beside the school path—small sentences folded into intimate triangles. They were not love letters, not exactly. They were weather reports from her heart. The first read: Today the bells on my dupatta tell me you walked by even when I did not look up.
He replied with a note in pencil: Today I taught Meera to multiply by two and by courage. Two was easy. Courage took an extra period.
Soon the hollow bamboo became their post office. They wrote about a stray dog that had adopted the tea stall, about the way the river kept pretending to be a road, about the village tailor humming as he rethreaded his needle after every customer, as if each person required a different song. On the days they were too tired to write, they left one small object: a leaf shaped like a heart, a reed shaped like a quill, a jaggery candy wrapped in newspaper. The bamboo held their everything with the privacy of a temple.
Part III: A Lesson in Boundaries
When schools reopened for a half-day schedule, Akash returned to the classroom. The children greeted him as if he had been away for a decade, not a month. Jimi visited to teach a short session on hygiene, turning hand washing into a game of drumbeats so fervent that even the too-cool older boys played along, laughing at their eagerness. Before she left, Akash asked her to wait by the library. He brought out a thin notebook wrapped in brown paper. “This is for you,” he said. “I wrote things during the flood. They’re not exactly poems. Not exactly essays either. Maybe they’re the way a road becomes a river and back again.”
Jimi unwrapped the notebook and opened to a random page.
At the top he had written: If hope has a geography, it is wherever someone says, “I brought this for you,” and hands over something small but necessary.
She closed the book, throat tight. “Thank you,” she said softly. “I’ll read this when my brain can walk straight.”
“Read it when your bells ring without wind,” he said, and his smile carried the softness of a person learning to risk more syllables.
That same week, the water rose again. Not in the catastrophic way of last month, but in the sly, patient way of an argument that believes it is unfinished. The elders warned that the breach near the bamboo bridge might widen. The block office sent out notices. Volunteers returned to camp readiness. Jimi, tugged between the clinic and the camp, began to feel the tug inside her too—between what she knew (wounds, fevers, schedules) and what she didn’t (how much of her heart to admit had already moved toward the teacher who read the sky with his skin).
One evening the monsoon staged a rehearsal for calamity. The clouds rehearsed thunder, the wind rehearsed an absence of rules, the river rehearsed confidence. The school-turned-camp buzzed with lantern light. Children slept in pairs like commas in a sentence yet to be finished. Jimi worked triage with two other volunteers, and Akash took the role of runner, his bicycle clattering like an urgent bell. Near midnight, a rumor arrived the way rumors do—breathless and certain. A child was missing near the bamboo bridge. Her parents had carried two infants and a sack of rice and somehow the oldest had slipped free of the family’s geography.
There is a tone that emergencies claim, a pitch that transforms strangers into comrades. When it arrives, people do not debate whether to listen. Jimi and Akash left together with two torches, a rope, and the kind of faith that doesn’t ask for applause. The rain had carved new channels into the familiar path. Trees leaned like elders peering over a fence. The bridge, when they reached it, looked thinner than memory. The river growled below, offended by the rope slung around its waist.
They found the girl quickly—not in the river, as the rumor had feared, but crouched at the foot of a bamboo cluster, arms around her knees, shaking as if dodging the attention of the night. Her name was Naisha. She was eight and perpetually suspicious of adults who asked “Why are you crying?” as though the answer were not written on the world.
“We’re here,” Akash said, crouching to her level. “We brought two torches and a secret: the rain is afraid of our friend Jimi. She knows how to stare it down.”
Naisha blinked at Jimi, then at the torches. “Are the torches scared too?”
“They’re brave but easily distracted,” Jimi said. “They might start looking for fireflies and forget what they’re for.”
Naisha laughed, a sound that moved the world a centimeter toward its rightful shape. They wrapped her in Akash’s jacket and walked back slowly. At the bridge Jimi paused, feeling the river’s argument under the planks. Akash must have felt her hesitation because he said, very simply, “Hold my hand.”
She did. The contact carried no drama, only proportion—as if their palms had learned a theorem together. Naisha, between them, narrated their walk with the authority of a tour guide. “On our left,” she said, “the water that thinks it is a tiger. On our right, the sky that forgot to bring the moon.”
Back at the camp Naisha’s mother cried in that quiet way mothers cry when the alternative has been neatly averted. The relief of other people landed inside Jimi like a green light. She realized she was no longer a visitor to this landscape of emergencies. It had drafted her into its citizenship. Akash found her near the tea counter, where a volunteer stirred a colossal pot of milk. “You did well,” he said. “You and your torches.”
“We did well,” she corrected. “And Naisha did well. She taught the river manners.”
He laughed, then grew serious. “I’ve been thinking about boundaries. I teach them in history—the way borders rise and fall like wheat. The way maps spend half their lives apologizing to the future. And then there are boundaries that are kinder. Like the one I try to set with my students: you can be frightened in my class, but you cannot be alone. I want to set a boundary like that with you, Jimi. I don’t know the correct sentence yet, but it starts with ‘You don’t have to be alone when the world rehearses calamity.’”
The confession was not dramatic. It didn’t rush or tumble. It appeared with the steadiness of a bridge that had been inspected thoroughly. Jimi looked at him—the ridgeline of worry smoothed by relief, the rain tracing commas on his jaw, the eyes that kept failing to pretend they were not kind. “I don’t want to be alone either,” she said. “But I also don’t want to say a sentence we cannot sustain.”
“Fair,” he said. “Then let’s say a smaller sentence we can carry. Come for tea tomorrow evening if the rain allows. I’ll bribe you with banana fritters.”
Part IV: Banana Fritters and the Door with Bells
Akash’s house sat two lanes from the main road, behind a hibiscus hedge that pretended to be as imposing as a fortress. His mother, a woman whose humor doubled as hospitality, welcomed Jimi with the insistence of a festival. The kitchen smelled like cardamom and oil. The radio was negotiating with a cricket match. On the front door hung a string of tiny bells. Jimi recognized their cousins—the same brasswork, the same earnest chime. “We’ve had those since I was small,” Akash said, noticing her gaze. “My father insisted that a door should sing before a guest sees your face.”
They ate fritters that approached holiness and discussed improbable topics: whether rain had moods, whether history was a version of gossip with footnotes, whether courage really had a fragrance. Akash’s mother listened with half an ear and the whole of her heart. “Courage smells like the first cup of tea after a bad night,” she declared as she poured more.
After tea Akash showed Jimi the garden. It was small, a deliberate disorder of useful things: coriander that had escaped the vegetable patch and begun a new government along the fence, chilies flashing their little red warnings, papaya trees that believed in altitude. He pointed to a corner where bamboo poles formed a triangle over a patch of soil. “I wanted to build a small reading hut here,” he said. “A place to sit when the rain is honest, and the world becomes legible.”
“You speak like a man who grades monsoons,” she teased.
“I’m a teacher,” he said. “We grade everything, even things that don’t need our opinion.”
They sat on the steps after the dishes were washed. Akash’s mother brought out a small tin of sweets, declared it an outrageous bribe for Jimi to visit again, and left with a smile whose architecture Jimi admired. The bells on the door rang when a breeze wandered in. Jimi touched the bells on her dupatta, a reflex now. “I like how your door announces joy,” she said.
“I like how yours carries it,” Akash replied, glancing at the bells tied to her scarf. “If you ever forget to arrive, those bells will show up on your behalf and file a complaint.”
“What would the complaint say?”
“Dear Sir/Madam,” he said in a mock-formal voice, “kindly note that the owner of this scarf has misplaced time. Please return her to the blue house where good tea is made, and a flower sometimes escapes its job.”
She laughed in a way that felt like unlocking. He turned a little serious. “Jimi, there is something else. I am applying to a teacher exchange program in Kokrajhar. It’s only for a few months, but if I get it, I’ll be away during the winter term. I wanted to tell you before someone else did.”
She knew then what kind of sentence they were building: one that allowed for distance without declaring defeat. Her first instinct was to push the topic into another room, to pretend the house had no such room. But she remembered the boundaries he had spoken of—kind ones that allowed room for truth. “Thank you for telling me,” she said. “I don’t own your hours, but I would like to reserve a few. Leave me some letters. Teach me your shortcut through the days.”
He nodded, relief a softening across his face. “You’ll have a stack so high you will need a ladder. I will write about the oddities of new classrooms—the chair that squeaks in the tone of a stubborn violin, the boy who always wears a red thread around his wrist, the girl whose handwriting could persuade a river to change its mind.”
Part V: The Winter Gap
He left two weeks later, carrying a small suitcase and a large reluctance. Jimi stood at the bus stop watching the old bus judge the road. They did not make grand promises. They did not rehearse a goodbye they had no intention of performing. He touched her shoulder, and she touched his hand, and something understood they were both learning to be equal to hope.
Winter practiced being a season. Schools swaddled their students in layers of shawls and determination. Jimi’s clinic intensified its vaccination drives. On her rounds she carried a stack of small cards to write notes for children who had been brave with needles. She kept one card for herself, where she wrote down small bright incidents to mail to Akash: an old woman who stayed after her injection to teach Jimi a folk rhyme, a boy who declared that vaccines were the “superhero password” against “villain germs,” a toddler who insisted on clapping for everyone else’s bravery.
Akash kept his promise about letters. They were exactly as he had predicted—domestic epics about chalk dust and friendships and the alarming appetites of teenage boys. He wrote about a student named Bidyut who annotated his textbooks with jokes and managed to score decently despite his defiance of the margins. He wrote about the sunset that turned the staff room windows into polite fire. He wrote about missing the bells on her dupatta even when he didn’t intend to admit such a thing. The letters arrived in threes and fours, then as a hefty stack that demanded its own shelf. Jimi stored them in the same cupboard where her grandmother had kept festival saris, as though the letters, too, were occasions that deserved ceremony.
Sometimes she read the letters to her uncle after dinner. He listened with amusement and occasional skepticism, the way elders listen when they are deciding whether to ask difficult questions. “He writes well,” Uncle Basumatary said one evening. “Teachers who write well often love their students properly.” He paused. “How does he love you?”
“Like a field that doesn’t pretend to be a forest,” she said finally. “Like a map that owns its blank spaces.”
Uncle nodded, satisfied in the way of a man who trusted evidence he could not name. “Then keep writing to each other,” he advised. “Few bridges survive without letters.”
In January, on a day so clear it could have been ironed, Jimi received a phone call from Akash that tore a small hole in her composure. His father had fallen ill—nothing frightening, just a stubborn fever that required attention. He would visit home for a week. The relief she felt surprised her. It arrived not as a cheer but as a quiet instruction: There you are. Continue.
Part VI: A Festival Invented for Two
They met again in late January, when winter was beginning to rehearse its exit. The blue house stood in its particular certainty, and the garden had resumed negotiations between the lawful beans and the revolutionary marigolds. Jimi waited by the gate with the brass bells looped around her wrist, a bouquet of familiar sounds. Akash walked up the lane with an expression that mixed disbelief and gratitude, the expression of a man who had walked far inside his own thoughts and found the door still open upon return.
“You look taller,” she said, hands unable to decide whether to be shy or celebratory.
“I stood on a desk to fix a fan,” he said. “The fan did not return the favor.”
They laughed in the relief of resumed grammar. Jimi took him to the back of the house where a mango tree presided over a patch of earth like a patient god. She had planned a small surprise: a low table, two cushions, a flask of tea, slices of guava, and a paper lantern she had painted with a clumsy sky. “Today,” she declared, “we will celebrate the Festival of Returning. Its customs include tea, guava, and a lantern that pretends it knows how to be the moon.”
“What are the rules?”
“Rule one: no big speeches. Rule two: we will ask the wind for our favorite news. Rule three: we will listen when the bells tell us to.”
“I approve of this government,” he said gravely. “It has fewer taxes than reality.”
They sat and exchanged the kind of news that matters: how his mother’s new prescription was working; how her uncle’s knee had recovered; how his students had submitted essays about their “future hometowns,” a phrase he had invented to make them imagine not only job titles but also mango trees and neighbors who knew their names. He showed her a photograph a student had taken of him writing on the board. In the picture his hand hovered mid-sentence in chalk dust, and his face had the absorbed, almost foolish happiness of a person entirely inside his work.
“This is how I like you,” Jimi said. “Mid-sentence.”
“Then don’t ask me to finish,” he replied, “because I don’t want the period yet.”
They stayed in that invented festival until the lantern began to sulk about its lack of authority. When he left, he paused at the gate. “I will go back for two more months,” he said. “When I return in March, if you have time, may I ask your uncle if I can come here and read on the verandah after school sometimes? I think better when your blue house is nearby.”
“You may ask,” she said. “And if the blue house says yes, I will serve the tea in our best cups.”
Part VII: The Bridge and the Blessing
March arrived with a patient suitcase. Fields reorganized themselves toward harvest. The river forgave and forgot at the speed of a child. When Akash returned, the school’s morning assembly sounded louder, as if the building had been holding its breath. He brought Jimi a new string of bells—lighter, brighter, with a subtle sound that suggested good secrets. He began reading on the blue verandah in the afternoons, a habit that domesticated both of them into a shared future without announcing its construction. Sometimes neighbors walked by, nodded at the teacher absorbed in a book, and felt steadied by the sight, as if the village itself had decided to resume a paragraph.
One evening, before the first harvest festival, Akash asked Jimi to walk to the bamboo bridge. The path was thinner than before, but the river was gentle, like a big animal that had eaten well. They stood in the middle, the water a soft history beneath them. “I have a sentence I think we can sustain,” he said. “It begins with a question.”
She waited, the bells quiet in the considerate wind.
“Would you let me love you in the way a school loves the first day of term? With sharpened pencils and repaired chairs and a hope that applies to everything?”
Jimi looked at him with the calm of someone who had practiced naming her heart aloud. “Yes,” she said. “On the condition that we keep our letters even when we can speak. I don’t want our future to forget how to write.”
They held hands, not to stabilize the bridge but to thank it. The river made its low counsel. A flock of egrets punctuated the horizon with neat white commas. Above them clouds rehearsed rain, but it felt like a blessing, not a threat. She took the pink flower from her hair and held it between them. “For your notebook,” she said. “For the page where you keep beginnings.”
“You’ll have to help me,” he said. “Some beginnings are heavier than they look.”
“We’ll carry them together,” she answered. The bells on her dupatta stirred, very slightly, as if the wind itself had leaned in to listen.
Epilogue: A Door That Sings
Years later, people in Baksa would say that they always knew the teacher and the nurse would make a home together because even before they married, their doors had learned the same song. The blue house acquired a porch swing and a shelf for letters. A reading hut grew in Akash’s garden, a triangle of bamboo that made the monsoon feel literate. They worked their usual works—fevers and lessons, bandages and essays—and in the evenings they sat under the mango tree counting guavas the wind meant to deliver to the ground.
On the festival of returning—which they kept every year without telling anyone—Jimi would tie fresh bells to her dupatta and hang a pink flower on the door. Akash would bring out the banana fritters and read a new page from the notebook he still titled Beginnings. They never stopped writing letters, even when they lived under the same roof. The letters became a habit of attention, a proof that love speaks best when it shows its work.
Sometimes, when the wind carried seven fragrances—mustard flowers, ripe guava, smoked chilies, new books, wet soil, fried sweets, and courage—the bells on their door and on her scarf and in the garden would ring in an accidental chorus. The neighbors would smile and say, “Good news is visiting.” And in the blue house by the fields, Jimi Goyary and Akash Boro would look at each other and agree: the bells were rarely wrong.