Without a Screen

Tuesday arrives with a sharper edge.

The fog is still there, but it has stopped pretending to be polite. It sits low over the lane like a thin, stubborn sheet, and the cold—returned like a person who forgot their umbrella—finds every gap around the windows.

Sunita is already awake, banging the steel dabba tins (storage boxes) softly so they don’t become loud. Sesame seeds are roasted in small batches, as if the pan itself might get tired.

“Today you’ll take the quilts down,” she tells Arjun, who is standing in the doorway with his hands inside his sweater like a kangaroo.

Arjun makes a sound that means I heard you and also I will do it five minutes later. Then he looks at the kitchen counter.

“Maa, are we making khichdi (rice-and-lentil khichdi) tomorrow?” he asks.

Sunita nods. “Tomorrow is Makar Sankranti. Khichdi tomorrow.”

Priya watches Sunita’s hands pinch and release—sesame, jaggery, sesame again. The smell of melted gur (jaggery) is warm in the nose, even when the air is not.

Priya’s own hands want to do something different. They want the predictable bumps of F and J. They want the click that means a letter has arrived safely.

She opens her notebook and flips to the page where she has been keeping her tiny new accounts.

KEYBOARD is written at the top in block letters, a little too serious for the amount of money underneath.

₹120.

She draws a line.

₹250 (needed).

₹130 (left).

She looks at the numbers the way she sometimes looks at the college portal: not for comfort, but for information.

Sunita notices.

“How much now?” she asks, as casually as asking whether the salt is finished.

“One-twenty,” Priya says.

Sunita hums. “Slowly. But it is moving.”

Arjun leans over, reads the word KEYBOARD and immediately finds it funny.

“Didi will become computer madam,” he says. “Then you’ll type my homework also. Full speed. Like TikTok captions.”

Priya nudges him with her elbow. “First learn spelling.”

Arjun laughs, but he also takes the quilts down from the rope on the roof without being asked again.

Rakesh wakes late morning, the way he always does after a night shift: not fully awake at first, just present in the house like a shadow that slowly becomes a person. He sits in the courtyard with his back to the sun and warms his hands around a steel tumbler.

“Cold is back,” he says.

“Cold never went,” Sunita replies.

Priya slides a til laddoo—a sesame sweet—toward him.

Rakesh takes a bite, chews, and then—because fathers in this house rarely say the emotional thing directly—asks, “Sharma Ji is still letting you sit?”

“Yes,” Priya says. “And sometimes… he gives work.”

Rakesh nods once, satisfied with the shape of the sentence.

By noon, Priya is walking toward the bus stand with her sweater zipped up to her chin. The lane is busy in the festival-before way: not celebration, exactly, but preparation. People carry small plastic bags that look heavier than they should.

At Chai Uncle’s stall, the stove is working like a loyal employee.

Chai Uncle sees her and taps the counter with a spoon. “Madam fingers! Today also?”

“Just practice,” Priya says. “And… maybe market.”

He pours her chai with extra ginger without asking.

“Tomorrow Sankranti,” he says, as if announcing a train schedule. “Everyone will eat khichdi and become holy.”

Priya smiles into the steam.

A man beside her is scrolling through his phone and narrating the weather to no one.

“IMD says cold wave, fog, alert—alert,” he says, repeating the word like it is itself a warning.

Chai Uncle snorts. “Alert is for people with cars. For us, it is just… sweater.”

Priya warms her palms, finishes the chai, and walks to Sharma Ji’s shop.

The shop is crowded again.

Not the Monday crowd of forms and photocopies, but the Sankranti crowd of small things that feel urgent because tomorrow is a holiday for some people and only a festival for others.

One boy wants a printout of a WhatsApp invitation card with a peacock border.

A woman wants “two copies, colour, and one with the date bigger.”

Someone’s printer job has jammed, and the paper has emerged like a crumpled apology.

Sharma Ji is moving between tasks with the expression of a man who has accepted that human beings will always need paper.

He sees Priya and points, without looking up, to the chair near the second computer.

“Ten minutes,” he says.

Priya sits. She takes a breath. She places her fingers on the home row.

F. J.

The bumps.

Her shoulders drop slightly, like they were waiting for permission.

On the screen is a blank document. She types her name ten times, as assigned.

PRIYA VERMA.

PRIYA VERMA.

Her spacing is even. Her backspace use is less panicked now. The letters are no longer strangers.

A small boy watches from behind, too close.

“Didi, you are writing without seeing,” he says, amazed, as if she is doing a magic trick.

Priya glances at him. “I am seeing,” she says. “Only… not here.” She taps her eyes lightly and then her fingers.

He looks at her hands with new respect, the way people look at a musician’s fingers.

Sharma Ji drops a thin bundle of papers onto the desk beside her.

“Type these names,” he says. “For tomorrow’s distribution list. In English. Correct spelling. Don’t make someone become someone else.”

Priya picks up the top sheet.

It is a list of shop customers—names and mobile numbers—written neatly but with the kind of handwriting that makes ‘u’ and ‘n’ want to exchange clothes.

She nods. “Okay.”

The work is not hard like lifting sacks, but it is heavy in a different way. Each name is somebody’s identity. Each digit is somebody’s phone, somebody’s argument if it goes wrong.

Priya types slowly and checks each line twice.

She is halfway through when Irfan walks in.

He pauses at the door, as if deciding whether to enter a temple or a crowded bus.

When he sees Priya at the keyboard, his face changes—just a fraction—into a smile.

“Working?” he asks.

Priya keeps her eyes on the screen. “Working,” she says.

Irfan nods as if that answers a question he has been asking quietly for weeks.

He waits near the counter, hands in his jacket pockets, not hovering. Priya appreciates that.

When she finishes, Sharma Ji prints the list and scans it quickly with his eyes like a man checking a fence.

“Hmm,” he says. Then he pulls out notes, counts, and pushes ₹50 toward her.

“Only fifty,” he says, as if apologizing to his own wallet. “But you were careful.”

Priya takes it.

₹170 now.

Only eighty left.

Her stomach does a small, quiet dance.

On the way out, she stops at the market lane.

The second-hand shop is open, and the keyboards are still there, stacked like black loaves.

The same one she saw on Sunday sits on top. A little dust in the corners. One key slightly shiny from overuse.

The shopkeeper lifts it, shakes it like a watermelon.

“Two-fifty,” he says, as if the number will not change even if she looks at it hard.

Priya looks at the keyboard.

She thinks of her envelope.

She thinks of Sunita’s hands rolling laddoos without complaining.

She thinks of Rakesh’s one nod.

She thinks of the boy behind her saying: you are writing without seeing.

“I have one-seventy,” she says, truthful, but also strategic. “I am saving. If you keep it for me, I will take.”

The shopkeeper laughs, not unkindly. “Everyone is saving. Everyone wants discount.”

Priya doesn’t laugh. She waits.

The shopkeeper looks at her face and realizes she is not playing.

“Come tomorrow?” he says.

“Tomorrow is festival,” Priya says. “I will be at home.”

“Then day after.”

Priya nods. “Day after.”

She leaves without buying.

Her steps feel light and heavy at the same time.

At home, Sunita has wrapped til laddoo in small pieces of newspaper—carefully, so the print doesn’t smear onto the sweet. She is making a plate of offerings for tomorrow morning: sesame sweets, peanuts, a little jaggery, and the ingredients for khichdi (rice and lentils) set aside like a promise.

Arjun is folding paper into a kite shape, badly.

“It will fly,” he claims.

“It will fall,” Priya says.

Arjun points at her bag. “Did you buy keyboard?”

Priya takes out her notebook first. She shows him the ₹50 folded inside.

Arjun whistles. “Didi is earning.”

“Don’t whistle inside the house,” Sunita says automatically, even though she doesn’t fully believe the superstition. It is more like keeping the air disciplined.

Priya goes to the shelf and opens the KEYBOARD envelope.

₹120 + ₹50 = ₹170.

She writes it down in her notebook.

Then she writes another line below it:

₹80 left.

It looks smaller on paper.

In the evening, the lane smells faintly of smoke. Somewhere, someone has lit a small bonfire—maybe because of the cold, maybe because they have heard of Lohri from a neighbour who worked in Punjab once, maybe just because fire is always convincing.

Arjun stands at the gate and warms his hands like an old man.

“Lohri today,” he announces, as if he is in charge of the calendar.

Priya raises an eyebrow. “Since when do we celebrate Lohri?”

Arjun shrugs. “We are celebrating ‘hands warm’ festival.”

Sunita laughs once, sharp and quick, then returns to her work.

Priya sits on her bed with her notebook open on her lap.

She checks the college portal once.

Still: under review.

She doesn’t refresh.

Instead, she puts her hands on the blanket and imagines the keyboard.

F and J.

The bumps.

A screen is helpful, yes. But she is learning something older than screens: where her fingers belong when she wants to make a thing real.

Outside, the smoke drifts and the winter night tightens its shawl.

Priya closes her notebook.

Tomorrow there will be khichdi, and sesame sweets, and the small movement of festival inside ordinary life.

And the day after, she thinks, there might be a keyboard.

Not yet.

But close enough now that she can hear it.