Aastha: In The Prison Of Spring Updated -

The garden was a lie.

He told her about his own life—how he had run away from an engineering college, how he had learned to love soil more than circuits, how he believed that even broken things could grow if you gave them enough light.

The crack came on the last day of spring. aastha: in the prison of spring

“Aastha.”

That was the first thought that crossed Aastha’s mind every morning as she watched the cherry blossoms drift past her iron-barred window like pink snow. Outside, the world was a symphony of rebirth—the air thick with the scent of jasmine, the sun soft as a blessing, the birds stitching the sky with their songs. But inside, the seasons had stopped. Inside, it was always the same cold, unchanging gray. The garden was a lie

Over the next few weeks, Kabir became her secret spring. Every afternoon, while the major slept, she would meet him at the wall. He brought her stolen things: a pencil stub, a wrinkled page torn from a poetry book, a single orange marigold from his own garden. In return, she gave him cuttings from her mother’s rose bushes and told him stories of the woman she had lost.

Her name was faith. And faith, she finally learned, is not the absence of walls. It is the courage to bloom on the other side. “Aastha

Her name meant “faith.” And for twenty-two years, she had lived up to it. Faith in her family. Faith in the future. Faith that love, once given, would never rot. But then her mother had died—quickly, quietly, in the middle of spring—and the man who had raised her had turned into a warden.