Light Travels Faster Than Sound - A Short Story

Every evening, after long hours in a grey, dull office, Dia climbs up the narrow stairs of her building to the terrace. It wasn’t much, just a few broken chairs, peeling paint, and the hum of faraway traffic. It was nothing dramatic. It was quiet enough for a woman who wanted nothing more than one small ritual - a good way to end a long, tiring day. She carried a petite lamp with a glowing yellow bulb along with her whenever she went upstairs and would set it near the edge. Dia sat with a steaming cup of chai and let the day unwind. The lamp was not for anyone but her; it was a small, steady permission to breathe.

A little far off, in a different building, Kavya lived a life that looked nothing like Dia’s. Where Dia's days were tidy and measured, Kavya's were knotted with silences and pockets of forgetting. Sometimes she would wake in the middle of the night and not remember if she'd eaten or which room she had left the water jug in. She kept journals because they could hold the pieces for her. Her apartment had a single long window that opened onto the rooftops; through that window, on most evenings, she would find the yellow dot that became her compass.

Kavya did not know Dia’s name. Dia did not know Kavya existed. But a thin, persistent line of yellow light connected them. 

Night after night, Kavya would draw her curtains a little and watch the far roof where the yellow bulb appeared. “There,” she would tell herself, as if naming it held it steady. In moments when words grew slippery and faces blurred, the yellow glow did not change. It kept something small and stubborn inside her from dissolving.

She wrote about it in the journals she loved so much: the paper absorbed the ink and remembered when she could not. And, when she won’t be here, there will be these pages that will remember, these pages will be her one day. 

She hoped that one day she might meet the person who kept this light. “If I meet them,” she had written, “I will tell them that the light gave me a strange kind of peace in the form of extra minutes, extra days, extra weeks to live.”

Weeks became months. The arrangement of two strangers being connected through that one small thing became a part of both their evenings.

Then the letter arrived.

It came in a plain white envelope, the paper slightly heavy. Dia read the name aloud when she opened it: Kavya Mehra - An Invitation to a Memorial Service. Dia stared at the printed date and the address and felt a strange, breathless surprise: she did not know a Kavya. She held the envelope like a foreign object all that evening, and kept imagining reasons it could have landed there, an address mistake, a neighbor’s error. She sat on her terrace longer than usual, lamp on, tea cooling, thinking.

She decided to go.

The room where people had gathered smelled of incense and flowers. Dia sat between a woman with tired hands and a man who kept smoothing the white cloth over his knees. There was a photograph of Kavya on the table, smiling, with soft hair and eyes that seemed to listen. On the small table near the photograph lay a stack of journals tied with a ribbon. The lady who sat beside Dia told her about the journals, about her illness, and how she wanted those pages to reflect who she was as a person, as she knew she wouldn’t live long. 

Right then, she heard it, someone reading out one of the journals - “There is a yellow light that comes every evening. It makes me remember that I am still here. I do not know who it belongs to, but I thank them for every borrowed minute.”

Dia felt the room tilt. She had come thinking this would be absurd, an address mistake. Now she heard her own light called by a woman who had never touched it. Later, Kavya’s family explained how her siblings followed the description and the building details and traced the yellow light back to Dia’s roof.

After the formal prayers, when most people had stood and spoken to the family and the tea had been poured and poured again, Dia found herself stepping forward toward the photograph. The room seemed both full and hollow; there were so many faces she did not know, and yet she felt like she carried the most private thing in her hands: an ordinary habit that had travelled farther than she could imagine.

She stood before the photograph, and for a long time, nothing came out. Then, in a voice that was half-sob and half-whisper, she said:

“I wish we could have met,” 

“I wish I had known sooner. 

“I wish my voice could have reached you before you left.”

She laughed; a tiny, stunned laugh. “Light travels faster than sound,” she said, “Your light found me before my words could find you. Thank you for letting my little lamp sit in your evening. Thank you for telling us that it mattered.”

Later, that evening, Dia walked home under a sky that had the raw, indifferent scatter of city stars. She climbed her stairs slowly, the lamp waiting like an old friend. The light looked the same, smaller than the thought that now lived inside her, and yet everything had changed.

She stayed with her tea until it went cold, thinking of Kavya’s notebooks and the idea that one small thing, one tiny, consistent habit could be the shore someone clung to in a sea of forgetting.

“Goodnight, Kavya,” Dia said softly. “I will always keep the light on.”