The Road Revisited.

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Sangeetha Rao

Homechef @ Little Treats

Instagram

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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both…

The train hummed steadily as it sliced through the countryside, fields blurring into soft washes of green and gold.

Sheetal rested her forehead against the cool glass of the window, watching the world pass her by. Robert Frost’s words played on a quiet loop in her mind, as insistent as the rhythm of the tracks beneath her feet.

Thirty years ago.

She could still see herself—fresh out of college in Pune, clutching her first appointment letter with equal parts excitement and fear.

That first job had felt like a threshold, a doorway into adulthood. And it was there that she had met Varun.

He hadn’t been striking in any conventional sense—average height, unremarkable features—but there was that cocky smile, softened by an unexpected sweetness.

He welcomed her into his group as if she had always belonged there.

For the first time at work, she felt at ease.

Safe.

Seen.

It was just friendship, she told herself. She poured her energy into learning, growing, and excelling.

And she did—so well that another opportunity soon pulled her away. It was only after she left that the absence began to ache.

The silence of her phone felt louder than any office buzz. She missed the smile, the easy conversations, the attention she had pretended not to need.

She waited for his calls. For weekends. For stolen hours where the world narrowed to just the two of them.

When he held her hand for the first time, her heart skipped—an absurd, storybook cliché she had never believed in until it happened to her.

But ambition has its own momentum.

Promotions came.

Cities changed.

Life accelerated.

Varun tried to keep up, but long days and longer expectations slowly eroded what they had built. Without drama or blame, the relationship thinned until it slipped quietly into memory.

Then came Kaushal.

He was everything Varun was not—charming, confident, dazzling in his attention. With him, she felt chosen. Extraordinary.

Marriage followed swiftly, as did two beautiful children. For a while, she believed she was the luckiest woman alive.

But time, relentless and honest, revealed the cracks. Kaushal’s charm turned conditional. His affection became transactional.

He demanded attention, bent conversations to his will, measured people by their usefulness.

As his career consumed him—deadlines, always deadlines—Sheetal’s world shrank. She stepped away from her own ambitions, telling herself it was temporary, necessary, noble.

She stayed for the children.

Years passed. The children grew, as children do—into independent adults with lives of their own, carrying both joy and heartbreak in equal measure.

She had made her peace with Kaushal, the kind that settles not from forgiveness but from exhaustion.

They shared the house the way strangers share a train compartment—polite, functional, brief. Words were replaced by chores, affection by efficiency. Outside, she began to stitch herself back together.

She met friends, returned to long-abandoned hobbies, and discovered that the quiet she feared, had been waiting all along to save her.

Somewhere along the way, Varun resurfaced—not dramatically, just gently. Birthday messages. Festival greetings. Polite, distant warmth.

Over time, the messages grew longer. The conversations deeper.

And without realizing it, Sheetal felt herself soften into the woman she had once been—someone who noticed the sky, who found beauty in small things.

Now Varun was coming to Pune. Then Mumbai.

She had glanced at Kaushal, absorbed in his own world, his screen glowing brighter than any shared moment between them.

He wouldn’t miss her. Perhaps he wouldn’t even notice.

Some might call her selfish. But what was a life without happiness? Without love?

Her fingers hovered for a moment before she typed:

Meet me at Casa’s. Same table.

As the train slowed, another line from Frost surfaced, tender and unresolved:

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.

Sheetal smiled.

It felt like half a lifetime had slipped away, but life—unpredictable, stubbornly kind—had offered her another crossing. Another choice. Perhaps the poem didn’t need to end where it once had.

Some roads, she realized, wait patiently to be walked again.