There is a counter at the old GPO where letters wait for people who have no fixed address. Poste restante, the brass plate says, in English and in Urdu. My grandfather worked that counter for thirty years, and he taught me its one secret: some letters are never collected, and the reason is almost always love.
When he died I inherited nothing but his good coat and a single envelope he had kept behind the counter, unposted, uncollected, addressed in his own hand to a name I did not know. Zoon. Just Zoon, no surname, poste restante, this city.
I was young and certain, so I opened it. Inside was not a love letter. It was a list. Prices of walnuts across four decades. The date the first bus ran to the new bridge. The winter the lake froze hard enough to walk across, and the winter it did not. The year the chinar by the shrine was struck by lightning and lived. An ordinary man's ledger of an extraordinary place, kept for a woman who would never read it.
At the bottom, in fresher ink, he had written: I could not give you a life, so I kept the city for you instead. Everything you would have wanted to know. Come and collect it whenever you are ready. I will wait at the counter. I am good at waiting. It is the only thing they ever let me do.
He had left the letter uncollected on purpose. He had spent thirty years at that counter not filing other people's longing but performing his own, standing every day at the exact place he had promised to wait, in case a woman named Zoon ever walked in from wherever her marriage had taken her, in case the city she left had left a light on.
I put the letter back behind the counter where he had kept it. It is still there. I visit sometimes. I have added a few entries of my own in the margins, the price of walnuts this year, the winter the lake nearly froze. If she comes, and she will not come, but if she does, I want the ledger to be current. I want her to know we kept it going. I want her to know that in this city a man decided that waiting was not the absence of a life. It was the shape his love was allowed to take, and he filled it, all the way to the brim.