There are, as any student of the human animal will tell you, precisely four ways a friendship may begin: with a handshake, with a borrowed match, with a mutual enemy, or with a misdirected parcel. The fifth was invented quite recently by the telephone companies, and it goes like this: a woman you have never stood within ten yards of sends you a song at ten minutes to seven in the morning, before she has so much as said good morning, and lets the tune do the talking.
The man who received this song was a writer, which is to say he earned his living, when he earned it at all, by noticing things and then complaining about them in a pleasing order. We shall not burden him with a name. Writers have too many already: the one their mothers gave them, the one on their books, and the one their editors use behind their backs.
The woman’s name was Switlana.
He knew her as a man knows the weather from the morning paper: in bulletins. A photograph. A name. A voice note that broke off mid-laugh because she had pressed the wrong button, so that for a whole week he possessed exactly half of her merriment and had to imagine the rest.
“What does it mean?” he typed, of the song.
She explained, with the earnestness of a lawyer reading out a will, that it was about a friend who wishes to live in your heart. In the small things. The daily things. Even when you are not thinking of her.
Ambitious terms, thought the writer, for a contract not yet notarised beyond WhatsApp.
He told her the words were as fine as the melody. She agreed before he had finished typing.
Every new acquaintance runs on some kind of currency, and theirs, in those early days, was a curious one. He paid in compliments; she gave change in exclamation marks. Neither of them kept books, and both of them knew the balance to the last paisa.
By afternoon they had wandered from music into that back room of talk where a person keeps the things they only say once they’ve decided a stranger won’t steal the furniture. Switlana told him of a boy she had once taught, a lad with a stammer. She did not say I loved teaching him. She kept returning, instead, to one small particular: the very word the boy could never quite bring to its finish. She was still holding it out for him, after all these years.
The writer had a theory, stolen from somewhere and long since unattributed, that you learn more about a person from where their attention snags than from any autobiography they recite. Switlana’s attention snagged on children. Every time. Like a sari on a nail.
She also disagreed with him on every conceivable subject, and did it so sunnily that a full hour passed before he noticed he was enjoying it.
“Women are better than men,” she announced, somewhere past noon.
“Evidence?”
“Me.”
“One specimen is not a pattern.”
She returned a laughing emoji which managed, by some science unknown to the makers of the telephone, to look smug.
He let her win. Not because her case was sound (a first-year law clerk could have dismantled it before tiffin) but because he had begun to suspect that losing to this woman might become a habit, and a man ought to cultivate at least one harmless vice.
By evening the conversation had acquired a shadow, as conversations and Calcutta trams both do toward six o’clock.
There was a man, she said. Not her husband; an old friend, older than the marriage. He had deleted her number from his phone, though she still knew his by heart, a fact she reported as one reports the time of the last train. They were at war. She was not going to telephone first.
“Let him wait,” said the writer, who had never in his life been on the side of whoever telephoned first.
“Will he call eventually?” he asked.
“The thirty-first of December,” she said. “Perhaps the thirtieth of June.”
“Does the gentleman work for the postal service? The delivery schedule is suggestive.”
She laughed. He could tell, even in text. Her punctuation loosened its collar.
Then, as a sort of footnote, she offered a fact about herself: that for the handful of people who truly mattered, she set her pride down eventually, the way one sets down a heavy bag on a railway platform.
“I am not built that way,” the writer replied, with the satisfaction of a man describing a fine old family failing. “Once a thing breaks between me and somebody, I let it lie broken. Sometimes it gives me something to write.”
She thought this very funny. She had not yet learned that a writer can spin a bruised ego into a whole chapter and then sulk because nobody applauds the bruise.
Here the writer unveiled, with some pride, his System. Every new acquaintance was placed on a probationary period of four months. Standard terms. No exceptions. He had devised it after enough disappointments that he had begun to treat people the way a cautious bank treats a new clerk.
Switlana told him, quite cheerfully, that she did not believe in trial periods at all.
“What flows, flows,” she wrote. “What crashes, crashes.”
He read it twice, smiled, and filed it under philosophy.
“And the verdict on us?” she asked.
“The trial is over.”
“And?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She did not push, this time. She only wrote: “You say that a lot.”
“Say what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because I don’t.”
“Good,” she wrote. “Most people lie by noon.”
He took it for a joke and sent back a joke of his own. It did not occur to him to wonder what else she had been counting.
Then she asked the question that really signified.
“Will we even talk this much if we meet in person?”
The writer sat with that longer than he intended. They had grown skilled, alarmingly skilled, at an intimacy that worked only because it came furnished with an undo button. A clumsy sentence could be struck out before it ever reached her. But across a table, with an actual face opposite? There is no deleting a thing said in a room. It simply hangs there, doing whatever mischief it was born to do.
“I might say something terrible,” he warned her. “Without meaning to.”
“I might not talk as much as I type,” she confessed instead. “I was shy as a girl. I’ve opened up a great deal since. But I was never one who talked easily.”
“Then I won’t push you, when we meet.”
“Bad idea.”
“I am very good at avoiding people.”
“Karke toh dekho,” she wrote. Go on, try it. I dare you.
It is a curious brand of courage, reader, that keeps office hours only behind a screen. The bravest people in the world, nowadays, are all sitting in their nightclothes.
He told her of another friendship he had ended in just that fashion: a person he had admired without reservation, until one disagreement froze him solid for months. There had been apologies afterward. Tears, even. But the thing never set right again, like a cup that has been glued and will hold water but not tea.
“Would you do that to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“What have I done to deserve such a warning?”
He had no answer. It was growing harder, with each message, to keep up the handsome fiction of himself as a man difficult to reach. Fortresses are expensive to maintain, and his was beginning to show damp.
Presently she had to go and cook dinner. Her husband, she noted, did not.
Within the hour they had found their way back, as people do once a conversation has become a room they keep wandering into for no reason they could give a magistrate.
She asked when he wrote.
“When I feel something.”
She told him she had reread a piece of his and liked it better the second time. He thanked her.
“No thanks. No sorry,” she wrote, and it took him one full heartbeat too long to recognise the line from a film he had, it seemed, forgotten he loved.
Then came the Arithmetic.
An acquaintance had flung at the writer one of those problems beloved of schoolmasters: two persons, a piece of work, a differing number of days, and five hundred rupees riding on the answer. The writer did what any sensible man does with a problem he does not wish to solve. He handed it to somebody who would.
Switlana took it with a gravity he had not foreseen. She found a notebook and a pen, worked it in her own hand, and photographed the page for him, as though submitting it to an examiner of stern reputation.
“Understand any of it?”
He considered pretending. It would have been easy; she could not see his face.
“Not one line.”
A pause, longer than the question deserved. Then: “Okay. Let me try properly.”
She got there. Ten days, and fifteen. He collected the five hundred rupees on Thursday.
He told her she had won. She informed him, with the promptness of a moneylender, that winning meant he owed her a coffee.
He refused. She insisted.
“I shall teach you to make it yourself,” he offered magnanimously. “Then you may imagine I bought it.”
Three rolling-eye emojis arrived by return post. He entered this in the ledger as a victory. Men who keep ledgers of that sort are seldom rich.
It was getting late. She talked of wanting to go home, of Rajasthan, of the price of onions and the quiet economics of pakodas. He mentioned that he had found onions cheaper somewhere.
“You certainly got a special rate.”
She was not wrong. She seldom was, which is a tiresome quality in a friend and an indispensable one in a mathematician.
And then, without so much as a knock, the conversation changed its shape.
“I’m upset,” she wrote.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m a good listener.”
“I know you are.”
People, she said, probably had a hundred reasons to go on living. She had only one.
My family.
Nothing after it. No emoji. Only the white space, which is the loudest thing a telephone can say.
He looked at the screen for a long time. He typed several things and deleted them all. The undo button, for once, earned its keep.
“Take ninety-nine more,” he wrote at last. “Mine. You may have them.”
For a while, nothing. Then a single character: the smallest curve of a smile.
He did not think much of that exchange at the time. He had not yet learned how little of a person’s true weather comes through a telephone, or how much Switlana had just handed across without either of them giving it a name.
They were still strangers by every measure a stranger can be measured: no shared room, no shared silence, only text on two screens in two houses. And yet, somewhere between a song and a sum and a woman typing my family at eleven at night, they had begun to keep a small, unclaimed corner in each other’s days, the way two lodgers will keep a chair on the landing that belongs, by unspoken treaty, to neither of them and both.
Near midnight she asked whether he would remember to wish her a happy new year, a full month in advance.
“I don’t know,” he said, honestly.
She laughed at that, the way one laughs at someone one has already decided to forgive on credit.
Then it was midnight, and November folded itself into December with no ceremony at all: only a phone in his hand going dark at the edges, and a woman on the other end of it to whom he owed a coffee.
He did not know, that night, that they would meet, or how much of two lives would end up folded into each other like letters in the wrong envelopes.
It was years before he understood the arrangement. He had not been conducting a trial that evening. He had been sitting one. The song at dawn, the dare, the sum he would not pretend to follow, the “I don’t know” she had been counting all day: these were the examination papers, and she had marked every one. On honesty, it turned out, he had done rather well.
But every examination has a practical, and hers was a cup of coffee: forty rupees out of the five hundred she had won him, a table, an actual face opposite, and no undo button anywhere in the room.
He never paid it.
The writer, who prided himself on letting broken things stay broken, has been trying to settle that one small account ever since.
