They gave me a room and wrapped the word shelter around it as if it were a blessing. It held wind and the thin, persistent rumor of other people's lives. Thin walls do not keep out the night; they simply let it rest against whatever soft thing is inside. I learned to hear the roof's laughter even when I stood two streets away.
Morning in the hostel is a different light. It wakes you in pieces and asks you to put yourself back together like a seam. I washed slowly, letting the cold water count my fingers into order. Tooba left a note folded like a paper bird on the pillow "Back late" and I liked the way she wrote without asking permission of the world. Toora hummed through the thin door like a small engine. Farid called, voice folded into habit, and did not ask whether I had wanted any of this. His questions come wrapped in the language of fathers who know how to soothe by arranging things.
I kept the small black book. I pressed the page flat and wrote nothing ornate: names, time, roof. I am not brave in headline ways. My courage is quiet; it sits in ink and in lists. Ink is patient. It remembers when voices do not.
The photograph came two days later and landed like a stone.
It was not meant for me, as if gossip prefers the nearest shopkeeper to the woman who is its subject. Someone had placed it on Tooba's counter under the glass, the way a coin is left for a till. It showed my face: a cropped sliver from a night made smaller by angle and light and intention. They had chosen a frame that flattened the context and left an accusation with a glossy edge. When I saw it I felt a small, precise cold the kind that fits into a palm.
Tooba laughed first, as she often does; laughter is a good deflector for her. Then the laugh thinned. A fitting was canceled, a usual customer looked away, and the shop's small bell sounded like a toll. A photograph is not loud, but it is honest in the wrong way: it stops people from asking questions and gives them permission to assume.
Ufaq arrived that evening with a folder like someone carrying a scalpel. She set the papers down without fanfare and pushed the photograph toward me. "Carelessness is the gift they give," she said. Her voice folds the room into order. She does not shout. She collects. Inside the folder were small things: a taxi number that liked to run short fares at odd hours, a tea vendor's note about faces he'd seen near the roof, a late-night delivery receipt stamped near where the lights had been strung. None of it glittered. Each piece had weight.
"Write everything," Ufaq told me. "Even what feels nothing." She folded her hands and looked at me like someone who has been given the responsibility of arms-length truth. The idea is not to manufacture a storm but to make sure no one can later smooth the facts into a comforting lie.
So I bought envelopes. I wrote names on them the way people label seed packets: Rehaan... roof... 10:15. Raza.... leaned in... cigarette ash. Alina.... phones....hair. Each envelope felt like a small altar. There was no theatrics in the work. It was sewing: precise, patient, insistently ordinary. I learned to like the rhythm of folding paper and writing a line that could not be easily erased.
The city shows its habits in small ways. Rehaan favors the shady stall at the corner for his chai because the owner flatters him. Raza always misses the bus that lets him off near the gate. Alina's phone lights up in the same salon every Thursday. Habits are keys people forget they have, and Ufaq taught me to look for unlocked doors.
We moved in increments. An anonymous note here, a quiet question there, a name left at the right desk. Paper feeds institutions; it binds even when men sputter and claim innocence. Bureaucracy is slow and dull and, for the first time, useful. It asks for signatures and times and the plain stuff of truth.
It is not clean. Consequence rarely is. An acquaintance moved his family out of town in a hush; a neighbor who used to wave crossed the street to avoid our door. Farid sounded older on the phone; the elders murmured like iron being flexed back into shape. The house that sent us away did not stop being present. It sat at the edge of things like a weathered signboard.
Late at night, when the shop light was a soft pool and Tooba slept with the sewing machine's hum in her bones, I would take the photograph from under the counter and study its edges. The image irritated me like a pebble in a shoe. Irritation makes you change direction. It makes you choose a path that doesn't let the pebble dictate your step. I mapped the men's motions, I wrote names until the page felt like a small map, and I pressed the ink flat with my palm until it warmed.
There is a dignity in smallness that people rarely celebrate. We were not making speeches. We were making records. We were turning rumor into something that required more than gossip to stand up: receipts, notes, a taxi number, a witness who would speak if asked the right way. Memory that can be presented is harder to sweep beneath a carpet of excuses.
When I closed the book at night I felt steadier. The no I had said on the roof had not become a slogan; it had become an axis. It turned the world in a direction I could measure. Names are not vengeance in themselves; they are anchors that keep a story from being rewritten. If the town wanted a tidy villain, it would find it harder now to fit me into the role without first answering to the facts we were putting in order.
Outside a child sailed a paper boat in a rain gutter and it took the current without thinking. We are like those boats: we do not know destinies, only how to find the flow. I would keep my small book under my pillow and the envelopes in a drawer. I would keep counting and folding and naming. The work is invisible to those who expect thunder. It is everything to those who must be seen clearly.