I Knew How to Speak
Our PG was nothing fancy. A four-storey building tucked behind a row of shuttered shops, hardware, Xerox, and mobile recharge types. Unisex, but barely. Boys on the second and third floors, girls on the first and fourth. We shared the same entryway, the same water cooler, the same rooftop. But rarely the same conversations.
Most nights, the rooftop was a mix of leftover dinner smells, people on phone calls, and the occasional birthday cake-cutting noise from someone’s group. That day, I went up later than usual. Not for any reason related to her, at least, not consciously.
My office laptop had crashed around 6 PM. Deadline at 9. I’d spent two hours trying to fix a PPT that refused to save, and finally mailed it in without animations. I wasn’t hungry. Just tired in the kind of way that makes you want air. The kind you can’t get inside your own room.
So I walked upstairs around 10:30, expecting the usual emptiness. A couple of cigarette butts near the railing. Some leftover plates near the corner water tank. The bench was rarely occupied post-dinner. But that night, she was sitting there.
Wearing a loose yellow kurti and pajama pants, curled up with a steel plate in her lap. Maggi and ketchup. She looked up once, didn’t say hi, just shifted a little, enough space for me to sit if I wanted. I nodded and sat.
She talked first.
Something about how the cook had burned the dal again. How Maggi was safer. How her roommate was trying to diet and had taped a sticky note on the fridge that said, “Are you really hungry or just bored?”
I smiled, quietly. She kept talking. A little about work. A little about why she preferred rooftops to cafés.
“I don’t like closed spaces,” she said. “Even elevators freak me out. Glass ones are the worst. Why do they exist?”
I didn’t know what to say. So I asked if she wanted water.
“Already drank,” she replied. “You can get yours, though. I’m gonna be here a while.”
The moon was just behind the water tank. The kind of night where the wind isn’t cold, just aware of your skin. I sat down again with a bottle, and we kept talking. Well, she did. I listened.
She spoke about her school farewell. About how her teacher cried, and she didn’t know what to do, so she started crying too. About how she once wrote a poem for a crush and then got caught because she’d written his name in the acrostic.
“Stupid, na?” she laughed.
“No,” I said. And meant it.
The next night, I didn’t have a deadline. Or any excuse. But I still went up at 10:30.
She was there.
This time with a mug of tea and a book that she didn’t open once while I sat there.
That became a pattern. Late dinners, shared silences, her voice filling the quiet that used to weigh heavy. She talked freely about the songs her dad played on Sunday mornings, her fear of lizards, her college roommate who once tried to set her up with someone who pronounced "genre" as "yanra."
And slowly, something shifted in me, too.
I started talking. Not replying, talking.
Told her about my boarding school. How I used to walk extra slow after assembly just so I could trail behind this girl I never spoke to. About the time I skipped Diwali at home and told everyone I had work, but actually just didn’t want to feel like a guest in my own house.
She never judged. Never interrupted.
She just let me talk the way she once had, freely, unevenly, like language wasn’t about being correct, just being honest.
And that’s when I understood,
But she taught me how to talk.