Key Pressure

Morning arrives in the same disguise as yesterday—grey fog, damp cold, and the kind of silence that makes you listen for small things: the clink of a steel lid, the cough of a distant tractor, a dog deciding whether to bark or save its energy.

Priya wakes before the alarm because her hands are already awake.

Under the blanket, she presses her index fingers down, lightly, twice. She is trying to find the bumps that belong to F and J, even though there is only fabric there. The habit is so quick she almost laughs at herself.

In the courtyard, Sunita is rinsing rice at the hand pump, the water flashing briefly silver in the fog-light.

“Subah-subah—so early,” Sunita says, not accusing, just observing, and Priya hears the fondness in it.

Priya pulls her shawl tight. “I woke up.”

Sunita lifts her eyes. “Thinking again?”

Priya could say portal, could say under review, could say confirmed like it’s a word that will obey her if she says it enough. Instead she shrugs in the way that is half honesty, half protection.

Sunita doesn’t push. She never pushes. She shifts the rice into a pot and says, “Make chai. Your father is awake.”

Rakesh is sitting on the charpai with the newspaper folded on his knee. He is not reading it. He is looking at the fog as if it’s a visitor who has overstayed.

When Priya puts the tumbler of tea in his hand, he takes it with both palms, absorbing warmth like a plant.

“Going for typing?” he asks.

Priya nods. “If Sharma Ji has time.”

Rakesh makes the same quiet sound he made yesterday—approval without drama. “Go. But don’t press those keys like you’re angry at them.”

Priya smiles. “You think I will break his keyboard?”

“He says it’s older than you,” Rakesh replies. “Old things break in their own moods.”

From inside, Arjun calls out, “Old things also shout in their own moods.”

“Arjun!” Sunita says, the warning already complete in the single syllable.

Arjun appears anyway, hair in a confused spike, rubbing sleep out of one eye like it offended him. “I’m just saying.”

Priya holds up the small practice sheet Sharma Ji gave her, now slightly soft at the edges from being carried and re-carried in her folder.

Arjun squints at it. “Today which spell? Home row?”

“Same,” Priya says.

Arjun’s face collapses in disappointment, as if she has told him the movie has no songs. “Boring.”

“It’s not boring,” Priya says, surprising herself with the firmness. “It’s training.”

Arjun lifts both hands, palms out. “Okay, madam coach.”

The day fills itself with small jobs. Priya helps Sunita roll rotis. She rinses dishes in water that makes her fingers sting. She sweeps neem leaves that come back like they have a schedule.

In between, when no one is watching, she taps her fingertips on the edge of the table: A-S-D-F with her left, J-K-L-; with her right.

She tries not to enjoy it too much, because enjoying something feels like tempting it to disappear.

By late morning the fog thins a little, but the cold stays. Sunita hands Priya a cloth bag and says, “If you go out, bring potatoes. And if you see good matar—peas—bring a little.”

Priya nods and tucks her plastic folder under her arm. The folder is starting to feel heavier than paper should. It carries receipts and acknowledgements and now, oddly, a typing sheet—like a new kind of document her life is trying to file.

At the bus stand, the chai stall is already busy. Winter has its own economy; it sells warmth in steel tumblers.

Chai Uncle sees Priya and points the kettle spout at her like a microphone. “Today also typing?”

“Haan,” Priya says—yes—and immediately adds, because she knows how information becomes stories in his hands, “only fifteen minutes.”

Chai Uncle clicks his tongue. “Fifteen minutes is enough to start a habit. Like tea.”

Priya laughs, because it’s true, and because he says it like it’s scientific.

He pours her chai with extra ginger without asking. “Soft hands,” he advises, as if keys are animals you have to coax. “Don’t fight them.”

Priya warms her fingers around the tumbler for three sips and then makes herself leave.

Sharma Ji’s shutter is open but not all the way. Half-open means maybe peace, maybe problem.

Inside, the fan is on even in winter, its sound like a tired train that keeps passing. The printer is awake too—its little green light an insult.

Sharma Ji looks up from behind the counter. His glasses are on properly today, which is already a sign he expects difficulty.

“You came,” he says, like he is mildly surprised she has followed through.

Priya sets her bag down. “You said three days,” she reminds him.

Sharma Ji makes a face. “I said three days because you said three days. Sit.”

He points at the stool. Priya sits, the plastic cold against her legs, and places her fingers where they belong. F. J.

The bumps feel like tiny promises.

“Today,” Sharma Ji says, “we do the same. But we do it cleaner. Slow is fast.”

He taps the desk with his pen, like a conductor who has no patience for musicians.

“Eyes on screen,” he repeats.

Priya inhales and begins.

A-S-D-F. J-K-L-;.

She keeps her eyes on the letters appearing on the monitor. The first line goes reasonably well. The second line is where her fingers begin to get ambitious. She hits K when she means L. She hits S when she means D. The wrong letters show up like small betrayals.

Her chest tightens the way it tightens when a form asks for a document she didn’t bring.

But then her thumb finds the long bar at the bottom—the spacebar—and her finger finds backspace. She deletes. She continues.

Sharma Ji watches for a moment, then surprisingly doesn’t comment. He has gone quiet in that rare way adults sometimes do when they decide to let you learn without their voice sitting on your shoulder.

A schoolboy enters, asking for a printout. Sharma Ji handles it with one hand while Priya keeps typing with both.

After a few minutes, Sharma Ji slides a new sheet onto the screen. It’s still not words, but it’s not just straight lines of letters either. It’s pairs and patterns.

as as as.

df df df.

On the right:

jk jk jk.

kl kl kl.

Priya blinks. “This is English?”

“It’s fingers,” Sharma Ji says. “English will come after fingers.”

Priya nods. She understands that. Nothing becomes language until it becomes habit.

She types the patterns slowly. She hears the soft clack of keys, the tiny sound of effort.

When her fifteen minutes end, Sharma Ji looks at the clock and says, “Bas—enough. If you overdo, you will hate it.”

Priya flexes her fingers. They feel warm—warmer than they have any right to be.

Sharma Ji tears off a corner of an old paper and scribbles something.

“Take,” he says, pushing it toward her. “Write these patterns at home. You don’t have keyboard, but you have brain. Brain also needs practice.”

Priya looks down. He has written:

• as df
• jk kl

in big letters, underlined twice as if underlining makes it more true.

“Thank you,” Priya says.

Sharma Ji grunts, which is his version of you’re welcome, don’t make it emotional.

At the counter, as she is putting her coins away, Priya’s eyes slide—without meaning to—toward the monitor where the college portal bookmark sits.

Sharma Ji notices. “Don’t ask,” he says immediately.

“I didn’t ask,” Priya replies.

He softens by half a degree. “Still under review. These people will not die if they confirm one day earlier.”

Priya exhales, not quite relief, but something like acceptance.

Outside, she buys potatoes from the market lane, choosing the firm ones the way Sunita taught her. At a pea cart she hesitates—matar are small, green, hopeful—and buys a little anyway. The peas rattle softly in the bag like they are impatient to be cooked.

On her way home, she passes the cyber shop’s neighbor—the small photo studio—and sees her own face on someone else’s ID card sheet inside the window, ghostly and official. It makes her want to laugh and also makes her want to stand straighter.

At home, Arjun meets her at the door like a guard. “So? Level up?”

Priya pulls the scribbled paper from her folder and waves it at him. “New training.”

Arjun takes it and reads, lips moving. “as df… jk kl.” He looks up. “This is not even words.”

“It becomes words,” Priya says.

Arjun taps the table dramatically. “a s d f,” he says in a bored voice, then, because he cannot help himself, tries to go fast and immediately messes up. He frowns at his own fingers as if they are disloyal employees.

Priya watches him and feels something light rise inside her.

“See?” she says. “It’s harder than it looks.”

Arjun glares, then mutters, “Okay.” It is the smallest surrender.

Sunita takes the potatoes, nods at the peas approvingly, and begins planning dinner out loud the way she plans everything—like a person laying a road so everyone can walk it.

In the afternoon, the electricity stays on. That itself feels like a gift. The fog returns in the late evening, softening the edges of the neem tree and the neighbor’s wall until the world looks gently unfinished.

Priya sits near the doorway where the light is best and opens her squared notebook.

She writes:

• Typing practice: Day 2 (15 minutes)

She draws a box. She ticks it.

Beneath it, she adds another small line:

• Patterns: as df / jk kl (home)

No tick yet. A promise for later.

Before she sleeps, she checks the portal once—only once. Still under review.

She doesn’t feel the same sharp frustration. The waiting is still there, but it has been moved to a different shelf in her mind, one that can hold it without everything toppling.

She slides Sharma Ji’s scribbled paper into her plastic folder, behind the receipts, behind the acknowledgement, behind the status printout that says “Payment received. Application under review.”

Somewhere in that neat stack of proof, a new kind of proof is forming too—one made of warm fingertips and soft key pressure.

When the blanket settles over her, she presses her index fingers down gently again, twice.

Not looking.

Just feeling.