The Bridge

Luvv A Sanwal
Sep 18, 2025
5 min read

Bridge over railway tracks - Luvv It Short Stories

Short Story Summary

This heart-wrenching short story explores rejection and loneliness. Set against the backdrop of urban despair, it delves into themes of survival, identity, grief, and the unexpected power of human connection. A moving narrative for readers seeking emotional short stories about life, acceptance, and hope.

They had closed doors for me long before the world got loud with its indifference.

First the work then polite refusals, then blunt ones.

“Not qualified.”

“We don’t have openings.”

Eyes that skimmed past me as if my skin carried shame. Then family: a door shut so final I could still feel the echo.

“You bring trouble,” my sister had whispered into the yard one afternoon, the words like a lock. After that there were cousins who once smiled and now pretended not to know me, and a mother who folded her grief into habits that no longer left room for me.

So I learned the city’s unmapped life. Station platforms at night. Park benches before dawn. A blanket that had been someone’s laundry and then, one winter, my only warmth. Policemen shuffled me along wherever the municipality found me inconvenient.

There were days when hunger made my hands tremble, and evenings when the sky seemed stitched shut, denying even the smallest star. When sleep came, it was the heavy kind that flattened every ache, and waking was worse than hunger because waking meant the same day again.

I cursed God once, loud enough that a drunk man asked if I’d lost my marbles. I cursed humanity softer, because the faces that had loved me — or pretended to — were gone.

I cursed my own existence in a voice that surprised me with its rawness. The word “why” tasted like a stone in my mouth.

Night after night, I imagined an end it quick: a bridge over the hollow tracks where trains thinned to whispers at two in the morning. The bridge had iron rails cold enough to numb thought. I found a place at the edge, balled my sari in my fist like an old friend, and stared at the black ribbon of tracks below.

There is a certain silence before everything - the air stretches, the mind rewinds its worst scenes like a film no one wanted to watch. I had already rehearsed the apology in my head: for a mother who had learned to look away, for a world that taught me to be a ghost.

Then a small footstep, light and hesitant, by my elbow.

“Don’t jump, please,” a child said, voice so small it cracked. A hand reached and gently pulled the pleat of my sari. He had the blunt, honest audacity of a child who believed adults still knew what to do.

I turned. The boy couldn’t have been older than seven. His hair stuck out in untameable tufts, and his eyes were a storm of questions and something older than his years.

“Why not?” I asked, because if I spoke at all, the world would hear my voice and find me small.

He blinked hard. “Because it makes me cry.”

“Mom used to tell me not to look at sad things. But she left. She jumped too. She left me. She told me the sky needed her.” His words landed like stones. My chest convulsed.

He shuffled closer, “She said she went to God. She wanted God to be her new home. I looked for her every day. I waited by the bridge. I waited at stations. I cried so much. The police man told me to go home. There is no home. My aunt says she doesn’t know me. I thought maybe if someone else comes to jump, God has given her back in new person. And you’re here. Will you be my mum? Please. I want a mum.”

For a moment the city — the iron railings, the distant hum of a sleeping town, the drizzle beginning to blind the streetlamps — receded into a place that had never touched us.

Words I had not earned rose to my throat; shame, and the old, wet ache of being discarded, and a fierce, impossible tenderness. How could this small, rag-wrapped hope ask me, the one everyone had thrown away, to be the whole of his world?

I sank to my knees without meaning to. The old iron felt unforgiving, but the boy didn’t flinch. He placed his small palms in mine as if we were exchanging promises.

“Why me?” I asked, voice frayed. “I can’t give you a house. I can’t give you money. I am a person the world refuses.”

He peered at my face — really looked. For the first time in months another human being saw me without disgust or fear. “You’re the only one god had send.”

The world was a narrow thing then. Rain specked our faces and washed the dirt into patterns. I smelled the city’s night: diesel and chai and something that remembered the sweet of my mother’s hands. I bent until my face touched his hair and the boy draped his tiny arms around my neck as if we’d done this forever.

Somewhere on the tracks, a train sighed like a sleeping whale. The decision did not arrive all at once. It came in a thousand small mercies: the way the boy’s breath matched mine, the way his grip was fierce and honest, the way his small fingers clasped the sari and did not let go.

I thought of all the times people had spat words like knives. I thought of the slamming doors and the blank stares, the policemen’s batons and the parks where I had folded myself smaller and smaller. I thought, too, of the woman who had left the child with her grief and an empty promise of God.

I let the tears come then, hot and unashamed, and the boy began to cry too — a thin, honest sound that struck at the wall I’d been building. He cried because he had lost his mother, and because now he had, improbably, found another.

“Stay,” he sobbed into my sari. “Please be my mum. Don’t go.”

I held him, and in holding him I felt something shift that no sermon or job application had shifted: a reason. Not a grand one, not a future of neat papers and steady wage, but a reason small and ferocious enough to tether me to the world. I would find work. I would scrub floors and fold laundry and clean at dawn.

Above us the city kept its indifferent watch, but under the bridge, against the iron, two lives braided themselves into something fiercely alive. I kissed his damp hair until my lips tasted of rain and fear and an odd, blooming hope.

If the world had disowned me just because I am transgender, the boy’s small, trusting eyes had not. He had offered me a place to stand. I buried my face in the sari I clutched and whispered, to the boy, to God, to whatever had the power to listen: “Yes. I will stay. I will be your mother.”

He hiccupped a laugh between sobs and hugged me tighter. The train passed, and its sound was no longer the sound of an ending but of movement — of somewhere to go, together.

-Luvv A Sanwal

The Bridge

Short Story Summary

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