A sudden roar. A single round of fire, tearing through metal, sky, and breath—all at once. There was no time to think. No time to scream. Just one blinding flash, and everything I knew was gone.
For a split second, I felt heat—sharp, unbearable—and then nothing. No pain. No fear. Just silence.
I floated, confused. The world below me was chaos. The aircraft lay like a broken toy, blackened, smoking, unrecognizable. People rushed, screamed, cried. Some stood still, unable to understand what had just happened.
And there—there I was. My body. Curled and crumpled into itself, burnt beyond recognition. A shadow of who I had been.
That was me.
It took a moment, or perhaps something longer than time, to realize. I wasn’t inside that body anymore. I was free. But not in the way I ever wished to be.
Around me, other souls wandered too—hovering between confusion and grief. I remember her, the young woman who sat next to me. Just hours ago, we had spoken at the boarding gate. She had been married six months ago, her hands still soft with the stain of mehendi. Her eyes carried the glow of dreams—the life she had just begun. Her husband was waiting in London. They were supposed to start their life together. A second honeymoon of sorts, she had said with a smile.
Now she too stood beside me—silent, stunned.
All of us had boarded for a destination.
But this was a landing none of us had imagined.
And me—I had just come from home. My hometown, where the air smells like jackfruit leaves and old rain. I had returned on a short leave, just four days, to see the faces that made my life whole. My children—my daughter in seventh grade, with questions too big for her age. My son in tenth, always scribbling notes, always pretending he wasn’t scared of growing up.
And my mother, who had raised me with hands roughened by sacrifice.
For seven years, I had worked far away, in another country’s hospital, where the language felt strange and the nights colder than the desert should be. I had taken them with me then, unwilling to be apart. But time has a way of scattering the ones we love, and this time, I had to go alone.
I had been working in London—nursing strangers with wounds and fevers that mirrored my own longing. And yet, even that had changed. A government job had finally come through, back home. I was going to return. For good. No more waiting rooms in foreign cities. No more missed birthdays. No more calls that ended in silence.
This flight was supposed to take me back to my work, just one last stretch before home became mine again.
I didn’t know I had already taken my last leave. The last rice I would eat from Amma’s hands. The last kiss on my daughter’s forehead. The last time I’d fold my son’s shirt and complain about how he always left the buttons open.
Now, nothing mattered but them.
The noise around me—the sirens, the shouting, the news reporters, the cries of families, the fire still eating through metal—all faded into nothing. I could hear only the quiet breathing of my children in my mind.
And I began to move. I don’t know how a soul travels, but I travelled. Across smoke and cloud and sky. Across borders and time. Until the rooftops of home appeared again.
Until I saw them.
My daughter, curled into Amma’s lap, her eyes swollen and red, cheeks pressed against the faded fabric of a sari that still smelled of turmeric and talcum powder.
My son, sitting upright, his notebook open, but his pen frozen. Staring at a wall as though the answers he needed were hidden there.
Amma, silent, unmoving, holding them both like the world had ended—because it had.
I sat beside them. They didn’t see me. But I touched my daughter’s hair, and she flinched gently, as if the wind had kissed her. I laid my hand on my son’s head. He didn’t move, but something in his shoulders softened. A mother knows. A mother always knows.
I couldn’t speak. I had no voice now. But every beat of my presence whispered: I am here. I never left you. I never wanted to.
I stayed like that, rocking them without arms, holding them without flesh. Through the stillness. Through the sorrow. Through the first light of morning that broke through the curtains as if nothing had happened.
Yes, she is a soul.
A mother soul.