That night, I didn't turn on any lights.
The apartment remained in shadows, pale outlines drawn by the city's sickly sodium glow. Even the fridge hum seemed embarrassed, softening itself to not intrude. I sat by the record player, though I didn't dare play the vinyl again - not yet. It felt like asking a dream to repeat itself. You already know it won't.
Instead, I listened.
And in that listening, I began to notice something strange about the silence.
It wasn't empty.
It was layered.
At first, it sounded like a barely audible tremor - somewhere between the hiss of old tape and the static of an untuned radio. But the longer I listened, the more it resolved itself, like watching fog become faces. There were textures to it. Tones. Fragments.
A chord, sustained but broken.
A voice, inhaling but never exhaling.
And beneath it all, a steady, almost affectionate hum. Like something was… waiting.
I closed my eyes.
And suddenly, I was back in my school's dusty music room—the one with the rusted harmonium and the badly tuned tabla. Mira was there. She had convinced the teacher to let her play a vinyl someone's uncle had mailed from America. We sat on the cracked wooden floor, and she told me:
"Sound is what memory wants to be when it grows up."
I remember laughing. She had that effect - saying strange, beautiful things like they were facts in a textbook only she had access to.
But now, decades later, in this dark apartment, I finally understood what she meant.
The silence wasn't just ambient absence. It was the presence of paused memory, suspended in frequencies I couldn't quite decode.
I stood up. Walked toward the window. Outside, the city moved in its usual tired rhythms—late-night delivery vans, unbothered autorickshaws, cigarette-glow conversations. But the hum was louder now. Not external. Internal. As though my own nervous system had tuned into a different frequency.
And then I felt it: a vibration in my spine, subtle and melodic.
Almost like someone humming an old lullaby just beneath my skin.
I whispered her name.
Not because I expected a response, but because the air felt too full to remain wordless.
"Mira."
And in that moment, a streetlight outside flickered and went out.
The hum stopped. All at once. Like someone unplugged the universe.
And in the silence that followed, I didn't feel alone.
I felt heard.