Written by Ankita Dhar
It was 2020, during the lockdown. I was staying near Itanagar, where my classes were being conducted online.
On my birthday, I received a gift from a friend. She had three sisters and a little brother. You might find it hard to believe, but it was the first time a friend had ever given me a cup as a birthday gift.
That day, my mom made delicious biryani for all of us. We enjoyed the meal together, followed by some sweets. It was one of those days when nobody needed to plan anything extraordinary. We were simply together, enjoying the moment.
The next morning, when I used the cup, I discovered something unusual about it. It was a magic cup. The cup looked black, but when hot water or milk was poured into it, a hidden picture and its message gradually appeared. I watched the black shade disappear, revealing three words:
“You are the best.”
I had received the gift the previous day, but it was only the next morning that I discovered its secret.
I stayed near Itanagar for a year and a half. My classes continued online until things gradually returned to normal and schools began reopening. Eventually, I had to return to Kolkata to continue my studies.
When I left, I took many memories with me. But among the things I carried back was that cup.
Travelling is a wonderful thing. It introduces us to new places, new people, and new experiences. Sometimes, we discover parts of ourselves that we never knew existed.
But there is another side to travelling. Every time we leave a place, we also leave behind the possibility of making more memories there. We leave familiar roads, ordinary conversations, and people we might never meet again in the same way. We move forward, but a part of us remains attached to the places we once called home.
Perhaps that is why I kept the cup.
Years passed. By 2026, I was working while occasionally travelling for shoots. Eventually, I settled somewhere near Gujarat.
Life had become busy. There were things to do, places to reach, and responsibilities to manage. Sometimes, late at night, I would hurriedly make myself a cup of tea or coffee before returning to whatever needed my attention.
The cup had become part of my routine. I no longer thought about the day I had received it every time I used it. It was simply there, sitting in my kitchen, being used again and again.
Until one night, I looked at it carefully.
The colour had faded. The words, too, were beginning to lose their clarity. I held the cup and looked at it for a while. Then, suddenly, a thought crossed my mind.
What if this cup breaks one day?
It was not an ordinary question for me. This cup was the only physical reminder I had of those people and the time we had spent together.
Back then, we did not take photographs of everything. We lived through the moments without thinking about how we might preserve them. And now, years later, this cup was still with me.
I could not imagine losing it.
I pushed the thought aside and told myself, Stop overthinking.
But something strange happened over the following weeks. Without consciously deciding to, I began taking extra care of the cup. After using it, I would put it away safely. Whenever I noticed it sitting somewhere, I would move it to a safer place.
I was not deliberately following a routine. It happened almost automatically.
Without even thinking about it, I had started putting the cup away carefully.
Months passed.
Then September arrived, and it was time to move out of the place where I had been living. I was packing everything carefully. My cab had arrived, and the driver was calling repeatedly, waiting for me to come downstairs.
I checked my room one last time.
And then I remembered the cup.
I do not know how I had forgotten to pack it. It was in the corner of the kitchen. In a hurry, I picked it up and placed it in a bag.
I was already carrying a suitcase when the driver began helping me load my luggage into the car. I did not notice that the bag’s zip had not been closed properly.
Then I heard a sound.
A sharp, sudden sound.
Something breaking.
I was still holding my suitcase. I turned around and looked down.
The cup lay on the ground, broken into pieces.
For a moment, I could not believe what I was seeing.
The same cup I had carefully protected for years. The same cup I had worried about losing. The same cup I had kept safe almost without thinking.
And suddenly, it was broken.
My mind returned to that night months earlier.
What if this cup breaks one day?
I had imagined it happening. I had pushed the thought away. I had even become more careful with the cup afterwards.
Yet there it was, lying in pieces.
I do not know what hurt more: seeing the cup broken or remembering how much I had wanted to keep it safe.
The cab was waiting. The driver was there. My luggage was being loaded. Life was asking me to leave, just as it had asked me to leave other places before.
But for a few seconds, my attention was still on the ground, on the pieces of a cup that had travelled with me through different years, different routines, and different versions of my life.
I had kept it because I did not want to lose the memories attached to it. But now, the cup was broken.
Sometimes, a thought comes to us casually, but when it keeps returning, we begin to take it seriously without even realising it. We start behaving differently, becoming careful about the very thing we once imagined losing.
In my case, it was a cup that held memories of people and a time I did not want to forget. The thought of it breaking had crossed my mind before, and gradually, I found myself taking extra care of it, even though I had never done so before.
Yet one day, the very thing I had imagined happened.
The cup broke.
It was not that my thoughts had predicted or caused the future. Perhaps it was simply a coincidence that stayed with me because the thought had meant so much.
But the experience left me wondering: perhaps the strangest part is not that what we feared happened, but that, for a while, we had already been living with the possibility of losing it before it became real.
And sometimes, it is only after something is gone that we truly understand how much it meant to us.
A Note from LekhHub
In this article, Ankita Dhar beautifully captures how an ordinary object can hold extraordinary memories. This heartfelt story reminds us that sometimes, the smallest things carry the biggest emotions.
