– a Talesmith Short by Rajesh Muthuraj
It was an ordinary evening, the kind that feels longer. Rohit returned home, tired and distracted, when the doorbell rang. A delivery boy stood outside, handed over the package, and should have left like they all do.
But he didn’t. “Anything else?” Rohit asked.
The boy hesitated, then said quietly, “Can I stand here for a minute?”
It was an unusual request. He did not ask for money or help, just some space to stand.
Rohit stepped aside. The boy didn’t enter. He didn’t speak. He simply stood there.
After a while, Rohit asked, “Everything okay?”
The answer came slowly. “I just didn’t want to go home yet.” And then, more softly, “Someone passed away today. My uncle… he raised me.”
Rohit’s grip on the food packet loosened. The boy continued, “If I stay there, everyone is crying. Asking me to be strong. But I don’t feel strong.”
So he had come to work. To keep moving. To not think. “But when there are no orders,” he said, “there’s nowhere to go.”
That sentence lingered. There’s nowhere to go. In that quiet doorway, Rohit saw him differently; not as a delivery boy, but as someone carrying something heavy, with no place to set it down.
“Take your time,” he said.
A minute later, the boy straightened to leave. “Thank you,” he said.
Rohit stopped him. “Have you eaten?”
The boy shook his head. Rohit handed him an extra packet. “Take it.”
The boy refused. When he walked away, he didn’t look like someone escaping. Just someone continuing.
That night, one thought stayed with Rohit:
How many people are just looking for a place to stand… for a minute?
Closing Lines:
Sometimes, people don’t stay because they have to. They stay because they don’t know where else to go.
And sometimes, the smallest kindness, a minute, a doorway, a quiet presence, becomes the only place where their world feels a little less heavy. So, be kind because we do not know what people are going through.
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