The letter arrived on a Thursday morning when the sky above East Ham looked like it hadn’t quite decided what colour to be. A pale, tired grey sat over the rooftops, and the air in the house felt as if it had been held in the same lungs for too long. In the hallway, the thin white envelope slid through the letterbox, kissed the worn carpet, and lay there, waiting. It might have been a bill. It might have been junk. But it wasn’t. It was heavier than that, even though it weighed almost nothing at all.
Mariam came shuffling out of the kitchen, half-wrapped in her dressing gown, the smell of weak tea clinging to her sleeves. Her hair was pulled into a messy bun that threatened to collapse. She rubbed sleep from her eyes as she reached for the shoe rack, more out of habit than need, and that’s when she saw it.
Her heart stopped for a beat.
The handwriting on the envelope was like seeing a ghost that had learned how to hold a pen. Slanted, patient letters, each curve formed as if time itself might be watching. It was the handwriting of a man who had always refused to rush his name. Her father.
She froze in the narrow hallway, staring at the envelope as though it might vanish if she blinked too hard. For a long moment, she did nothing. The ticking clock on the wall grew louder. A bus rumbled past outside. Somewhere in the upstairs flat, someone laughed at a TV show.
Her father had been dead for two years.
He had died in a ward where the walls smelled of antiseptic and boiled vegetables, where nurses moved like soft ghosts in rubber soles. She had watched the colour drain from his face, felt the warmth retreat from his fingers, heard the silence after the last machine stopped counting his heartbeats. She had signed papers. She had chosen a janazah time. She had stood by a patch of English soil pretending it was Bangladesh, because bodies are buried where they fall, not where they were born.
And yet here, on this ordinary Thursday, his handwriting had found its way back to her.
She picked up the envelope with both hands, as carefully as if it were an injured bird.
Inside, a single sheet of paper had been folded precisely in half. No creases out of place. No extra pages. Just one.
In the centre of the page, written in that same unmistakable script, were five words.
Come home. There is something you must see.
No name. No date. No address. No explanation of what “home” meant for a woman who had lived in London for half her life and carried Sylhet like a tattoo beneath her ribs.
She read the sentence once.
Twice.
A third time.
The hallway around her seemed to shrink. She could hear her own breathing—the shaky in and out of someone who had just been dropped into another life without warning.
“Oh, Baba,” she whispered, though the walls, the letter, and the air already knew.
The Weight of Five Words
The letter came to work with her without ever physically leaving her bag. It sat in the zipped pocket like a stone, shifting the weight of everything around it.
At the supermarket checkout where she worked part-time, she scanned tins and bread and plastic-wrapped cucumbers while her mind folded and unfolded the five words into a thousand meanings.
Come home.
Come home now.
Come home, at last.
There is something you must see—what? A secret? A person? A grave? A crack in a wall that looked like his handwriting?
“You okay, love?” her manager asked at one point, frowning as she handed the wrong change to a customer.
She forced a smile. “Didn’t sleep well. That’s all.”
That wasn’t all. That wasn’t anywhere close to all.
On the bus ride back, the streets of East London blurred past—the halal butchers with red awnings, the sari shops with glittering window displays, the chicken shops promising peri peri miracles. People talked into their phones in Bangla, Urdu, Somali, Cockney. Somewhere between two bus stops, she realised that for years she had been living in a city that sounded like home and felt like somewhere else.
That night she placed the letter on her bedside table, lying down with her back to it as if ignoring it would make it less real. Sleep did not come. When it finally did, it came heavy and deep and brought with it rain.
She dreamed of Bateshwar, her father’s village in Sylhet. The courtyard cracked with heat. The mango tree leaning like a patient elder. The smell of wet soil as the first drops hit the ground. She was eight again, barefoot, her hair plastered to her head as she spun in circles with her arms outstretched.
Her father stood on the veranda, watching her with that half-amused expression he wore when he was torn between scolding and smiling.
“You’ll catch a fever,” he’d call out.
“It’s worth it!” she’d shout back.
But in the dream, he wasn’t alone.
Someone else stood behind him—a thinner man, younger, his eyes shadowed. A man she half-remembered and had been taught not to ask about. When he stepped forward, she woke with her heart racing, the taste of mud and rain and unspoken names on her tongue.
By the time the sun rose over East Ham, she knew what she would do.
She booked a flight to Sylhet before she could talk herself out of it.
A Past Packed Into a Suitcase
Packing took less time than she expected.
A few clothes.
Her passport.
The letter.
She held the letter up to the weak London light one last time, as if a secret watermark might reveal itself. Nothing did. Just the same five words, stubborn and quiet.
Her mother, who lived alone in a flat in Whitechapel, called that afternoon. Mariam almost told her everything. Almost.
“How are you, Ma?” she asked instead. “How’s your knee?”
“As old and stubborn as your father was,” her mother replied dryly. “Where are you? It sounds… echoey.”
“I’m at home,” Mariam lied. “Just cleaning.”
“Hmm,” her mother said, hearing something but not knowing what. “Remember to rest. You work too much. London eats people who don’t rest.”
They talked about small things until the silence grew too big. When she hung up, guilt settled in her stomach like cold rice.
She justified it to herself. If she told her mother, there would be tears, prayers, warnings, maybe even a last-minute attempt to stop her at the door of the airport. Her mother had not returned to Sylhet since her husband’s death. For her, the country was a wound she visited only in dreams and WhatsApp calls.
For Mariam, it had become a ghost she had stopped visiting altogether.
She didn’t tell anyone else she was going. No friends. No colleagues. No social media. The journey felt too thin and holy to be wrapped in emoji reactions and casual comments.
When the plane lifted off from Heathrow, she watched London shrink beneath the clouds, its grey edges dissolving into white. She felt like she was flying backwards through time.
Flying Backwards Through Time
On the flight, she traced her father’s handwriting with her finger, again and again, the paper softening under her touch. She remembered his hands—how he would hold her school reports like they were delicate works of art, even when the grades were just average.
“You did your best?” he would ask.
“Yes,” she’d say, even when she wasn’t sure.
“Then we are happy,” he’d reply, and actually mean it.
He had been a man of small expectations and deep gratitudes. Even cancer had not turned him bitter. Just quieter. As if he was slowly packing away his emotions, one by one, into invisible suitcases.
He hadn’t left many physical things behind. A watch with a cracked strap. A worn wallet. A small notebook of Qur’an verses written in his own hand. He had never mentioned any unfinished business. No hidden assets. No land disputes. No secret children. Nothing that had suggested a letter like this would ever arrive.
So why now? Why her? Why that one sentence that refused to explain itself?
By the time the plane descended through thick clouds over Sylhet, the questions felt ready to burst through her skin.
The House That Remembered
Osmani International Airport was smaller than she remembered, but the air hit her with the force of a memory. Thick, warm, fragrant with diesel, wet soil, and something sweet she couldn’t name. Her lungs ached with recognition.
A cousin met her at arrivals, holding a sign with her name spelled incorrectly. She almost laughed.
“Mariam apa?” he asked, uncertain.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m Mariam.”
He looked older than she remembered, but then so was she. They exchanged awkward pleasantries in a mix of Bangla and English. He asked if London was cold. She asked if the road to Bateshwar still flooded in heavy rain. They both pretended not to notice the years that sat between their questions.
The drive to the village felt like slowly peeling back one layer of herself at a time. Tea gardens rolled past like green oceans. Children played cricket next to ponds. Women in bright salwar kameez walked with bundles balanced perfectly on their heads. Each sight tugged at a thread of memory.
When they turned onto the narrow lane leading to the family home, her chest tightened. The house appeared at the end of the lane like something hesitating between standing and collapsing.
The once-white walls were stained with time and monsoon. The veranda pillars leaned a little. The courtyard was a patchwork of cracked earth, stubborn grass, and small puddles where last night’s rain still clung. The mango tree towered above it all, older and more twisted than she remembered, its branches reaching out as if searching for someone.
She stepped out of the car slowly.
Her feet touched Sylheti soil for the first time in twelve years.
Something shifted inside her, an uncomfortable mixture of belonging and betrayal.
Inside the house, the air smelled of dust, turmeric, and old prayers. On the wall, a faded clock had stopped at some forgotten hour. In her father’s room, the bed stood neatly made, as though expecting him to lie down at any moment.
His prayer rug lay folded in the corner. She knelt, picked it up, and pressed it to her face. It smelled faintly of him—or maybe that was just memory insisting on being kind.
The Caretaker and the Door
A woman appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on the edge of her sari. She was thinner than Mariam remembered, with more grey in her hair, but her eyes were the same—sharp, observant, carrying a tired kindness.
“Mariam,” she said simply.
“Khala,” Mariam replied, recognising her at last—the caretaker who had looked after the house long after everyone else left.
“You came,” the woman said. “We weren’t sure if you would. Letters take time to arrive. People take longer.”
Mariam didn’t bother asking how they had got her London address. In Sylhet, addresses were less about streets and more about people. Someone always knew someone who knew the cousin of a neighbour whose brother lived two doors down from you.
“Did you write it?” she asked instead.
The woman shook her head. “No. Your father wrote it before he died.”
Mariam’s heart thudded painfully.
“He gave it to me,” the caretaker continued. “Said, ‘Send this when I am gone. Not before.’ He didn’t say why. Only that it was important.”
Mariam swallowed. “Important enough to bring me across continents.”
The caretaker studied her for a moment, then nodded as though confirming something she already suspected.
“Come,” she said. “There is something you must see.”
The words matched the letter exactly.
She led Mariam down a narrow corridor at the back of the house. The air grew cooler. The walls felt closer. At the end of the corridor stood a door she had never noticed before. Perhaps she had been too young. Perhaps it had always been invisible in that way certain secrets are.
The wood was swollen with age. The paint had peeled away in flakes, revealing layers of colours beneath—each layer a different story of the same door. A rusty padlock hung from the latch.
The caretaker pulled a key from a pocket at the waist of her sari. Her hand shook slightly as she turned it.
“I must warn you,” she said softly without looking at Mariam. “What you see… may not be easy.”
Mariam nodded, though every instinct inside her screamed that she was walking toward something that would rearrange her life.
The lock clicked open.
The door creaked inward.
The Brother the River Kept
The room inside was dim, lit only by a small oil lamp resting on an old stool. The flame shivered as the door opened, casting shadows that moved like uncertain thoughts.
The smell hit her first—a mix of stale incense, damp clothes, and the metallic tang of bodies that had not seen enough sunlight. It was not an entirely unpleasant smell. Just… heavy.
Her eyes took a moment to adjust. Then she saw him.
In the far corner, a man sat cross-legged on a thin mattress. He was not old, but time had carved too much into his face. His hair hung around his shoulders in tangled curls. His beard was uneven, more salt than pepper. His clothes were clean but threadbare.
What struck her most were his eyes—dark, enormous, and filled with a kind of weary alertness, as if he had spent years listening to the world on the other side of the door.
He stared at her.
She stared back.
Something in the angle of his cheekbones, the line of his jaw, the slope of his nose tugged at her. Recognition came slowly, like light spreading across a hillside.
“Chacha…?” she whispered. “Uncle?”
His lips trembled. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, rusty from disuse, but the shape of it—its rhythm—was her father’s voice turned slightly sideways.
“Mariam,” he rasped.
Her knees almost gave way.
This was him. Her father’s younger brother. The man everyone said had drowned in the river when he was barely twenty-two. The uncle whose photo she had seen once in an old album, then never again. The name that floated at the edges of adult conversations when the children were supposed to be asleep.
He was alive.
Or something close to it.
“How…?” she began, then realised there were too many ways to finish the question.
He gestured faintly toward the caretaker. She stepped into the room and closed the door gently behind them.
“The river took him,” she said quietly. “But it didn’t keep him.”
Her uncle took a shuddering breath.
“I remember the water,” he said slowly, each word emerging like a stone from mud. “The current pulling… the bank breaking… people shouting. Then darkness. I thought I died.”
He described waking on a muddy shore far from the village, his body bruised, lungs burning, voice gone. How he stumbled through fields and trees, avoiding people out of shame and shock. How he finally made it back to Bateshwar days later, thinner, half-invalid, unable to explain himself.
“The villagers saw a drowned man walking,” the caretaker said grimly. “And they were afraid. They whispered. Some called him jinn-touched. Some said the river had returned him wrong.”
“So Baba hid me,” her uncle added. “He found me near the bamboo grove at night, shaking. He brought food. Clothes. Medicines. He said, ‘You stay here for a few days. Then we will tell them together.’”
The “few days” had stretched into years.
“He tried,” the caretaker said. “At first he tried to talk to the family. But people love talking and hate listening. They said your father had lost his mind. They said grief had made him see ghosts. So he stopped telling them. But he never stopped coming here.”
Her uncle’s eyes grew wet.
“Every month,” he whispered. “In rain, in heat, when the road flooded, when his bones ached—he came. He brought rice, fish, medicine. Stories about you. All the little things you did in London. The first time you wrote your name in English. The time you failed a maths test and cried. The time you got a job at the supermarket and he came home so proud he kept saying ‘Mariam has a badge with her name on it’ for days.”
Mariam’s throat closed. She had never known he shared her life with anyone. She had thought her father carried his pride silently, folded up in his chest like a letter he was too shy to post.
“He said one day he would bring you here,” her uncle continued, voice cracking. “But then… his breath grew shorter. His visits grew slower. I saw death growing behind his eyes. The last time he came, he held my hand and said, ‘If I cannot do it, she will. I have raised her to be braver than me.’”
He looked at her, his eyes pleading and hopeful and afraid all at once.
“And you came.”
What Baba Carried Alone
Mariam sat down on the edge of the mattress. The room seemed to tilt around her.
Her father had carried this secret alone for thirty years. A brother rescued from the river but drowned in the fear of others. A life tucked away in a back room. Monthly journeys no one questioned. Money that stretched thinner than anyone knew because it had to feed two mouths.
She remembered him coming home late some months, mud on his trousers, smelling faintly of wet earth and river water. He would say he’d gone to see someone ill in another village, and she had believed him without thinking.
She felt anger rise for a moment—anger at the village for its cowardice, at her father for his secrecy, at the years stolen from her and her uncle. But the anger evaporated as quickly as it came, leaving behind only sorrow and a fierce tenderness.
“I should have been told,” she whispered.
“What could you have done,” the caretaker asked gently, “as a child in London, with homework and part-time jobs and another life to survive?”
That was true. Maybe there had never been a good time. Maybe there would always have been a reason to wait.
Her uncle watched her with a mixture of shame and longing.
“I am sorry,” he said. “That you have to see me like this.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Like someone who never learned how to live properly,” he replied. “Like half a man.”
She shook her head so hard it made her dizzy.
“You are my father’s brother,” she said. “That is enough.”
His shoulders shook. He covered his face with his hands and began to cry—not the loud, dramatic sobbing of someone wanting to be heard, but the broken, quiet weeping of someone who hasn’t cried properly in a very long time.
Mariam looked at him and saw her father in flashes—the way Baba would wipe his eyes quickly when a film became too emotional, the way he would turn his head slightly when he was embarrassed, the way he held his hands when he prayed.
She reached out and covered his hands with hers.
“Baba wanted me to see you,” she said softly. “So I can carry this with him. Not instead of him—because he’s done his part—but with him. Across whatever worlds there are now.”
Teaching a Man to Stand in Daylight
It took time to coax him out of the room.
He had lived inside these four walls for so long that the idea of stepping into the courtyard felt like standing at the edge of a cliff. His ankles wobbled when he stood. His shoulders curled inward as if expecting a blow from above.
“Just to the veranda,” Mariam said. “For today.”
The first time, he only made it halfway down the corridor before turning back, his breath coming too fast. She didn’t push.
The second time, he reached the doorway but flinched at the brightness flooding in, retreating as though the light was a living thing.
On the third day, she waited until late afternoon, when the sun had softened, and the courtyard was bathed in a gentle gold that forgave more than it revealed.
“Come,” she said, extending her hand.
His fingers hovered above hers for a long time before finally resting in her palm. Together, they walked slowly toward the open air.
The veranda tiles were cool under his bare feet. He squinted, eyes adjusting. The mango tree rustled as if greeting him. Birds chattered in the branches. A goat bleated somewhere beyond the wall.
He stood there, trembling, and then—almost imperceptibly—straightened his back.
“I used to climb that tree,” he murmured. “Your father would shout from the veranda, telling me I’d fall and break my neck.”
She smiled. “He never told me that story.”
“He never told you many things,” her uncle said, and there was no accusation in his voice. Just fact.
Day by day, he ventured a little further. First the veranda. Then the steps. Then the courtyard, where he stood under the mango tree and lifted his face to the sky as if learning a new language.
At night, they talked. She told him about London—the cold, the buses, the way the city never truly slept. He told her about the river, before it turned greedy, when it still whispered kindly to the banks.
Sometimes they said nothing at all and listened to the insects singing in the darkness.
Letters That Aren’t on Paper
One evening, as they sat under the mango tree, Mariam took the letter from her pocket and smoothed it on her lap.
“Do you want to see it?” she asked.
Her uncle nodded.
He read the five words over and over, his lips moving silently: Come home. There is something you must see.
“It’s like he wrote to both of us,” he said.
“Ink for me,” she replied. “Memory for you.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“I used to envy him,” her uncle said suddenly. “Your father. After I… disappeared. He had a family. A daughter. A life that moved forward. I thought the river had stolen mine and left his untouched.”
He shook his head.
“I was wrong. It took from him too. Only not in a way people could see.”
Mariam thought of the quiet sorrow that lived behind her father’s smile. How sometimes he would pause in the middle of eating, his eyes drifting to somewhere miles and years away.
“Maybe this letter was his way of saying he doesn’t want to keep carrying things alone,” she said.
“Even in death,” her uncle murmured, “he is still trying to make things right.”
The Choice to Stay
Her original plan had been to stay for one week. Attend to whatever the letter demanded. Scatter the weight of it into the courtyard. Return to London before the supermarket rota swallowed her absence.
By the fifth day, the idea of leaving felt absurd.
Her uncle still stumbled when he walked. He still startled at sudden noises. He still ate as though unsure when the next meal would come, even with full bags of rice stacked in the corner.
“Come back with me,” she said one night, the words surprising her as much as him. “To London.”
He stared at her, wide-eyed.
“I don’t belong there,” he said. “I barely belong here.”
“You belong where you are loved,” she replied. “That’s all belonging is.”
He went quiet, turning the idea over in his mind like a small stone.
“What would I… do there?” he asked. “Stand in your kitchen and forget your language? Get lost on your trains?”
“We would learn,” she said. “Together. You’d learn the city. I’d learn the parts of our history I’ve been pretending not to need.”
The caretaker listened from the doorway, wiping her hands on her sari.
“He’ll need papers,” she said. “Doctors. A proper bed. But you could do it. Your father would want that.”
Mariam knew the road ahead would not be simple. There would be forms, questions, sceptical officials, possibly even accusations of fraud. Try explaining to someone behind a glass window that a man who “drowned” thirty years ago needed a National Insurance number.
But she also knew something else.
Her father had reached his hand into a river and pulled out his brother. The least she could do was reach her hand into a system and try to pull him free of a room.
“I’ll stay for now,” she said. “As long as it takes. London will still be there. Maybe for once, it can wait for me.”
In that moment, the house seemed to breathe easier. The mango tree swayed. A gecko scuttled along the wall, unbothered.
A New Letter
Months later, when the monsoon gave way to cooler winds and the fields began to dry, Mariam sat at the wooden table in her father’s old room with a pen in her hand and a piece of crisp paper in front of her.
Her uncle lay sleeping on a proper bed now, under a ceiling fan that hummed steadily. He had gained weight. Colour had returned to his cheeks. Sometimes he laughed—a sudden, startled sound that made everyone in the house turn and smile.
The paperwork was still a battle. Every week, she travelled to town, clutching documents and stories, trying to convince people that some lives did not fit neatly into forms. Some believed. Some did not. She kept going.
On the paper in front of her, she began to write in her own handwriting, the letters not as graceful as her father’s, but honest.
“Ma,” she wrote, “by the time you read this, you will know I have come to Sylhet. I am sorry I did not tell you sooner. I needed to understand something before I could explain it.”
She told her about the hidden room. About her uncle. About the river and the years and the visits her father had made without telling anyone. She wrote about the letter. About the five words that had rearranged everything.
At the end she wrote, “Baba did not leave us with money or land or a big house. He left us with unfinished love. I am trying to finish it, Ma. Not instead of him, but for him, with him, wherever he is now.”
She folded the letter carefully, addressed it to Whitechapel, London, and handed it to a cousin heading into town.
As she stepped back out into the courtyard, her uncle was standing under the mango tree, leaning on a stick but upright, watching the sky.
“Writing letters?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I think it runs in the family.”
He smiled—properly this time.
“Whom did you tell?” he asked.
“Everyone,” she replied. “Slowly. One person at a time.”
She looked up at the tree, at the house, at the sky that had watched everything and held its tongue.
Then she slipped the original letter from her father out of her pocket, the paper soft from being handled so much. She did not burn it, or bury it, or press it into a book.
She simply held it up to the light and whispered, “I saw it, Baba. I saw what you wanted me to see.”
The wind rustled through the leaves like an old man clearing his throat.
And far away, in a graveyard in East London, under a grey stone carved with a name that had crossed oceans, something in the earth seemed to loosen—in relief, in gratitude, in rest.
Some letters are written with ink.
Some are written with what we do afterwards.
This had been both.
And somewhere between Sylhet and London, between river and road, between room and sky, Mariam finally understood that “home” was not a place you returned to once.
It was a promise you kept, one person at a time.
Disclaimer
This story, published on mujiburrahman.com is a purely fictional work. All characters, places, communities, and events described are products of imagination or used in a fictional context. Any resemblance to actual individuals or real-world events is entirely coincidental. The purpose of this content is storytelling and entertainment only and should not be taken as factual or representative of any real person or community.
💛 Support My Writing
If this story inspired you, moved you, or entertained you, you can support my writing journey here:
👉 Support Me on Buy Me a Coffee
Your contribution helps me reach my goal of raising £100,000 to take two years off and write a full-length novel.
Shop on Amazon UK using my affiliate link – This may earn me a small commission at no cost to you.