Aanya soon realized this was no ordinary catalog. It was a secret emotional ledger kept by a mysterious 19th-century poetess named Zara. Each entry indexed a moment when a stranger had unknowingly touched her life: “Page 34: The fruit-seller who saved the last pomegranate for me, though I had no money. Index weight: 6.2 hearts.” “Page 112: The child who laughed while chasing a kite, and for one second, I forgot my grief. Index weight: 9.0 hearts.”
But as Aanya moved deeper into the Index , she found a section marked “Lost Entries”—pages where names had been scratched out, dates erased, and only a stain of tears remained. Those, she guessed, were the people who had once been mitwaa , then betrayed, faded, or died. index of mitwaa
She opened a fresh page and wrote: “Entry 4,231. The man with the silver beard. Date: today. Weight: 7.3 hearts. Reason: He saw nothing special in me, yet gave everything he had. Mitwaa.” She placed the paper in the chest, not knowing that across the city, the old man would wake at midnight and whisper to his late wife, “I felt it again, Janu. Someone added me to the Index.” Aanya soon realized this was no ordinary catalog
The Index of Mitwaa — mitwaa being an old word for “friend” or “beloved,” but deeper, meaning “the one who makes the heart a home.” Index weight: 6
The chest wasn’t locked, but it felt sealed by time. Inside, instead of scrolls or books, she found thousands of thin, translucent papers, each containing a single line of poetry, a name, and a date. The papers were arranged in a meticulous, obsessive order—not alphabetically or chronologically, but by what the author called “closeness of the soul.”
And somewhere, on a quiet street, a stranger is waiting to become your next entry.
