Yellow Keys

Friday arrives with colour before it arrives with warmth.

In the courtyard, Sunita has spread an old yellow dupatta on the rope like a flag that has been waiting all year to be used. The cloth catches whatever weak sun exists and throws it back, stubbornly bright.

“Basant Panchami (Vasant Panchami),” Sunita says, and the word itself sounds like mustard. “Saraswati Maa ke liye (for Saraswati, the goddess of learning).”

Priya stands at the doorway, hair still messy from sleep, and watches her mother’s hands move with the serious, unhurried speed of ritual. Sunita is not the kind of woman who does big puja with loud bells. Her devotion looks like clean steel and a swept floor.

On the trunk shelf above the plastic folder, Priya’s keyboard sits wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. She can almost hear the keys under the paper, impatient, like a child who wants to show a new trick.

Arjun comes out rubbing his eyes and immediately points at the dupatta.

“Why you are drying yellow clothes like election?” he says.

Sunita flicks a little water at him. “Because today is yellow. Go wash your face. And don’t say nonsense before morning chai.”

Priya smiles and then remembers:

clinic 10.

The reminder sits in her mind the way a coin sits in the pocket—small, hard, impossible to forget.

She opens her phone and looks at her typed list from last night. The lines are plain and obedient.

tomorrow: clinic 10

Today is not tomorrow anymore.

She edits the line with her thumb and changes it to:

today: clinic 10

Then she adds another line, because her day has learned to become a list before her day becomes itself:

yellow dupatta?

Sunita sees her looking and shakes her head without asking the question.

“You wear,” she says. “It is not only for puja. It is also to look… presentable.”

The last word comes out English-heavy, as if respectability is a thing that belongs to the city.

Priya takes the dupatta and folds it into a neat square. The yellow seems too loud for her, but Sunita is already placing marigolds on a plate, and Priya knows that on festival days, you accept loudness the way you accept cold—by layering.

Rakesh is awake again today, sitting on the charpai with his shawl pulled tight and his tea held in both hands like it is heating him from the inside.

“Basant Panchami (Vasant Panchami),” he says, not as a celebration but as a fact.

“Haan (yes),” Priya replies.

He nods toward her folder and then toward the yellow cloth. “You going clinic?”

“Yes. Ten,” she says.

Rakesh takes a sip and says, very softly, “Padhai ka din hai (It’s a day for learning), no?”

Priya feels her stomach pinch.

Learning, today, is registers and pin codes.

She wants to say that she will do puja at home also. She wants to say she is trying. But her mouth only finds a practical answer.

“I will come back early,” she says.

At the bus stand, yellow has already reached the world.

A man is selling marigold garlands from a bicycle, the flowers piled like little suns. A girl in a school sweater—uniform grey, but a yellow ribbon pinned to her braid—holds a small packet of ladoos and walks carefully as if she might spill the day.

Chai Uncle has tied a thin yellow ribbon to the steel rod of his stall. It flutters against the grey air, like it is trying to teach the fog a new colour.

He looks at Priya’s dupatta and gives a satisfied grunt.

“Achha (good),” he says. “Today you look like you will pass some exam.”

Priya laughs. “What exam, Uncle? I am only filling forms.”

“Forms are also exams,” Chai Uncle declares. He pours her chai and adds extra adrak (ginger) again, as if ginger is a blessing that can be measured. “In exams you write answers. In forms you write truth.”

A man beside them says, “Holiday today?”

Chai Uncle snorts. “Holiday is for people who can close shop and still eat.”

Priya warms her hands around the glass and watches the road. The fog has thinned enough to show distance, but the cold still holds the air like a palm.

When the shared auto comes, she climbs in and sits with her folder pressed against her stomach. The yellow dupatta is folded over it like a cover, as if she is protecting her paperwork from the eyes of the world.

On the Lucknow side, the clinic board is visible from a little farther away today. Priya feels that as luck.

Inside, the desk woman is already seated, pen in hand, her hair clipped back with something yellow—maybe a plastic clip, cheap and bright.

She looks up once. “You came,” she says.

“Yes, madam,” Priya replies.

The desk woman’s eyes flick to Priya’s dupatta. “Basant,” she says—short for Basant Panchami—and it is the closest thing to a smile.

Then she taps the register. “Start.”

The morning runs like it has learned a route.

Register: name, age, address.

Computer: the same things again, but cleaner.

Print: when the doctor asks.

Priya’s fingers move faster now, not fast like a machine, but fast like a person who has stopped asking permission from her own hands. She still feels a small fear each time someone dictates a phone number too quickly.

She answers it with her rule.

“Number not clear—please tell again,” she says, and her voice comes out steady.

A patient rolls his eyes, but he repeats.

Another patient—an old woman with a shawl pulled tight—leans closer and says the digits slowly, like she is feeding them one by one.

“Good,” the old woman tells Priya, after Priya repeats the last two numbers back.

The word good lands in Priya’s chest like a small coin.

At eleven, a boy arrives holding a slate and a handful of marigolds. His mother says, half apologetic, “We have to go puja also.”

The desk woman does not look up. “Sit,” she says. “First registration. Then puja.”

Priya writes the boy’s name and date of birth and thinks: this is how the world works. Worship waits behind a token number.

When the printer runs out of paper, the desk woman points at the tray without even turning her head.

Priya pulls it out, stacks the new sheets, taps them against the table edge the way Sharma Ji taught her—paper has to become obedient before it becomes useful—and slides the tray back in.

The printer whirs and continues.

No one claps.

No one notices.

And yet Priya feels a thin line of pride, quiet as a pencil line, inside her.

Around noon, the clinic slows for a few minutes the way even a river slows when it hits a bend.

The desk woman opens a small packet and eats two yellow sweets with the speed of a person who refuses to call anything a break.

She pushes the packet toward Priya.

“Take,” she says.

Priya hesitates. “Madam—”

“Take,” the desk woman repeats, impatient.

Priya takes one sweet. It tastes like sugar and cardamom and something slightly burnt, like it was cooked quickly.

The desk woman watches her chew and then says, in the same tone she uses for printing slips:

“From Monday you come daily. Ten to two.”

Priya’s throat tightens.

Daily.

Not tomorrow also you come. Not then we see.

Daily.

“Yes, madam,” Priya manages.

The desk woman continues as if she is discussing a medicine dosage. “Pay we will decide. For now, you come. You do work properly.”

Priya nods.

The desk woman points her pen toward Priya’s file drawer. “PAN you make soon. Next week you bring receipt. Understand?”

“Haan, madam (yes),” Priya says.

The desk woman taps the pen once, satisfied. “Good. And don’t guess,” she adds, like she is repeating Priya’s own prayer back to her.

Priya’s face warms.

The phrase has travelled from Sharma Ji’s moody shop to this clinic desk and come back as instruction. It feels like proof that her life is starting to have continuity.

At the end of the shift, the desk woman counts notes again. Today the stack is slightly thicker.

“Three hundred,” she says.

Priya takes the notes. The paper is crisp, not as soft as the two-hundred notes from the last two days. It feels less like travel money and more like wage.

Outside, the light has a pale honesty. The fog has retreated to the edges again, letting the day show its shape.

On the way home, Priya does not go to Sharma Ji’s shop. She has the sudden, fierce need to carry the news to her own courtyard first, like you carry a hot roti so it does not get cold.

At home, Sunita has arranged a small puja corner on the floor—an old calendar picture of Saraswati, a few marigolds, a bowl of yellow rice, and Arjun’s school books stacked neatly.

“Don’t touch before puja,” Arjun warns Priya immediately, as if he has become the priest.

Priya holds up her hands. “Okay, okay.”

Sunita looks at Priya’s face and reads it without needing words.

“Madam said what?” she asks.

Priya places the three notes in Sunita’s palm.

“From Monday,” Priya says. “Daily. Ten to two.”

Sunita stares at the notes and then at Priya.

For a second, her mouth does something dangerous—almost a smile too big.

Then she tightens it into something practical and says, “Achha (okay). We will manage.”

Rakesh, sitting on the charpai, shifts his weight like he is trying to sit on the news without breaking it.

“Daily,” he repeats.

“Yes,” Priya says.

He nods once. “Good,” he says quietly.

Arjun interrupts with the most urgent question a sixteen-year-old can ask. “Will you get ID card?”

Priya throws a cushion at him. “First let me work.”

Sunita lights a small diya. The flame steadies quickly, like it has practiced.

“Come,” she says. “Puja.”

They sit on the floor. Sunita murmurs the few lines she knows, half prayer, half memory. She touches the marigolds to the picture, then touches them to the books.

Priya watches Arjun bow his head in a way that is half sincere and half performance.

When Sunita’s eyes fall on Priya’s keyboard—still wrapped in newspaper on the shelf—she lifts her chin.

“Bring that also,” she says.

Priya’s hands hesitate.

The keyboard is not a book. It is not a pen. It is a thing she bought second-hand with small folded notes.

But it has become, in her mind, a tool for a different kind of learning.

She brings it down carefully, unwraps it, and places it beside the books.

The keys look suddenly humble next to marigolds.

Sunita touches the corner of the keyboard lightly and says, “Saraswati Maa, dekh lena (Saraswati, please look after it),” as if she is asking the goddess to bless a utensil.

Priya feels a strange ache behind her eyes.

It is not sadness.

It is the feeling of something ordinary becoming important without becoming dramatic.

After the puja, Arjun tries to steal the sweet first, gets scolded, and eats it anyway. The day becomes itself again—tea, talk, the lane outside calling marigold prices.

In the evening, Priya picks up her phone out of habit.

Her fingers hover over the keyboard cable.

She thinks about her timer. Fifteen minutes. The small discipline that has carried her like a handrail through foggy weeks.

Then she looks at the puja corner, where the keyboard still sits beside Arjun’s books, marigold petals stuck between two keys like tiny yellow commas.

Today, she decides, her hands can rest.

She opens her notebook instead and writes one line in pen, slow and careful—because writing by hand feels allowed in a different way:

Monday: ten to two. Don’t guess.

She closes the notebook, and the sound is soft, like a door shutting gently.

Outside, the fog begins to gather again, collecting itself for night.

Inside, the yellow of the day lingers in small places—the dupatta on the rope, the marigold petals on the keyboard, the three crisp notes in the tin.

Priya sits for a moment with her hands on her knees, feeling the faint, imaginary bumps of F and J under her fingertips.

Not typing.

Just knowing they are there.

Like a promise that has finally learned a time and a place.