They give you a room and call it shelter.
Shelter is a neat word for a place that keeps the wind out. The hostel kept the wind out. It did not keep the story out. Stories pass like drafts through thin walls. The night before, the roof's laughter sat under my ribs. Now it rode the radio in the common hall and smelled of frying onions.
Morning here is smaller than morning at home. The sun finds the cracks differently. It makes dust look like soft gold and the corner of the mirror show an unpracticed face. I washed quickly, like someone trying on a public self. The water ran cold and woke the part of me that counts things into order.
Tooba left a note folded like a small bird on the pillow. "I'll be back late," it said. Her handwriting leans like a person stepping forward. She went to a client who needed a bridal lining patched, and the work was honest and slow and it made her body calm. Toora hummed behind the door. She hums when she wants to hold the house in one piece.
I sat with the notebook on my knees and turned the page. Names. Times. What each man did with his hand when he laughed. The list looks silly to someone who does not need proof. To someone else it is inconvenient. Proof is not loud. Proof is stubborn. It sits on a shelf and waits.
The hostel has a woman who makes tea like she is composing a letter. She is called Mrs. Hashmi and she knows how to tell a hush with her eyes. On the third day she poured me tea and said, "You write?" as if the two things must go together. I said yes because it was easier than explaining why. She nodded and left a chipped pen on the saucer. Small gifts are sometimes the size of an exit.
Outside, the city moves under a thrift of laundry and a hawker's call. Men with ironed collars pass by like marching reasons. I learned my first lesson about power there — it is not always the loudest voice. Sometimes it is the one who holds the right paper at the right time. A stamp. An order. A signature. They call it bureaucracy and believe it dull. I have come to think bureaucracy is paper with teeth.
Ufaq came to see me that evening. She walked in like a shadow carrying a bag of facts. She did not use many words. She never does. She sat on the windowsill and looked at the street as if reading it letter by letter. "They are careless," she said at last. "That is the thing." Her voice always makes the small dangerous.
Carelessness is a gift if you know how to keep it. I told Ufaq about the cigarettes, the joke, the angle of the lights. She nodded like someone filing a file behind her eyes. "You keep writing," she said. "Write everything. Even what you think is nothing." She paused and looked at me. "Then we will find a way to turn the nothing into something that cannot be smoothed away."
I want to say I accepted her plan with courage. I did not. I accepted it with the slow arithmetic of someone who knows which pieces of a life can be folded into a pocket and which must be held open. Still, I felt the small thrill of agency. It is like the first spark you see when rubbing two stones. The spark is ridiculous. But it is also truth.
That night I walked to the market to buy envelopes. It felt almost transgressive, like stepping into someone else's script. I bought cheap ones brittle, white, the kind that crack if you press too hard. I wrote names on each, the way you might label seeds. There was no swagger in the work. It was exacting. It required my eyes to slow down.
I learned to watch the street for patterns. Rehaan takes the second lane when he thinks no one follows. He stops at the stall with the broken scale to buy spice for his mother. Raza favors the bus that stutters and is late because he likes delaying consequences. Alina prefers the salon near the post office, her hair returning to its practiced shine like a ritual. The world gives away habits. Habits are maps.
Ufaq taught me a small trick. "Get them where they are proud," she said. "People don't guard their pride the same way they guard their money." I did not understand at first, not because the idea was complex but because it felt like a tightening in my throat the recognition that we will use their own mirrors to show them themselves. It felt like a theft, but not a violent one. It felt surgical.
I started to compose things in my head the way Tooba composes linings. She thinks of fabric, where seams hide, where a stitch can be both invisible and holding. I thought of words the same way where they fold, where they show. A photograph is not only an image. It is a promise that someone else will take it seriously. A message sent to the right person is a small decision handed over like a sealed envelope.
One afternoon, a boy from the lane recognized me across the market. He blinked and I saw the roof in his eyes, the echo of the laughter. His face was a map of the night. He turned away quickly and pretended to consider tomatoes. For a second I felt like dropping everything then and there and returning to the old house, to the warm argument of family, to hands that would decide for me. That thought passed like a weather cloud. The notebook held me steady.
That evening Tooba came back with a small packet of sweets. She laughed too hard when she saw the envelopes on my table. "What are those?" she asked, half-joking. I told her they were seeds. She frowned the way she always does when sewing is delayed and said, "Seeds grow, yes?" Her hope is practical. She thinks in stitches.
I do not know yet what will grow from the seeds. I am not naïve. I know people will be hurt, including people I do not want to blame. I know we will push against the room that wants to iron us flat. I know that my father's name will be used like an apologetic coin in the mouths of men who fear change. I know that power sleeps sometimes behind an old newspaper and wakes when it must pretend righteousness.
But under the bead-string that Tooba tied back in place, under the humming of Toora's small prayers, I prepared envelopes and wrote names and folded little notes that fit like secrets. The work itself was a kind of relief. It was a small machine I could operate. It required no speeches, only patience and precision.
In the dark, when the hostel's radiators clanked like dull hearts, I pressed my palm to the notebook and felt the small circle I had made for myself. "Remember who laughed," I wrote again, underlining the line until it looked like a crack. The book answers back in ink. It keeps my small, stubborn facts.
Outside, the city kept its appetite for routine. Inside, I made envelopes that would one day loosen a net. I am not fanciful enough to call this destiny. I am realistic enough to call it intent. Intent is a small, dangerous thing. It learns how to wear patience like a coat and conceal its tools in the pockets.
I sleep now sometimes like someone who has practiced walking a tightrope. The rhythm is steadying. The notebook sits under my pillow like a talisman and a tool. The no lives there, quiet and sharpened. It is no longer only a word. It is a workbench where I keep the instruments of a life I am learning to take back.