Two Minutes

Morning arrives in pieces: a foggy edge, a kettle whistle, two alarms that do not negotiate.

7:30 pulls Priya out of sleep. 7:45 confirms it, like a stamp on the day.

The lane outside is white and close. Fog hangs low enough to make the neem tree look like it is standing inside a storybook illustration. The cold is the kind that doesn’t shout. It just refuses.

Rakesh has come back from a night shift late, and the house has already adjusted around him. Sunita’s footsteps are careful. Arjun’s voice tries to be quiet and fails in small ways.

Priya washes her face at the hand pump. The water is sharp. It makes her fully hers again.

Inside, chai is ready. Ginger, sugar, steam.

Sunita pushes a steel tumbler toward her and watches her drink as if watching is another kind of care.

“Fog?” Sunita asks.

“Morning only,” Priya says, repeating the phrase she has been hearing on every phone.

She eats quickly—two rotis rolled with leftover sabzi—and then takes out her phone and keyboard.

The OTG connector clicks. The phone announces Physical keyboard connected. Priya sets the timer.

Fifteen minutes.

She practices numbers first. Pin code. Dates. The kinds of digits that turn a person into a file.

226301

30/01/2026

She types them slowly, and when the timer ends she stops even though she wants to do one more line. Stopping on time is part of her new honesty.

Before leaving, she checks her bag like she is assembling ingredients.

Plastic folder, flat.

Water bottle.

Small cash.

Two pens.

And, in her mind, the sentence that has begun to feel like a rope she can hold: don’t guess.

At the bus stand, the fog smells like damp dust and frying oil. People stand closer to the tea stall than they need to, because warmth pulls like gravity.

Chai Uncle sees Priya and lifts his chin in greeting.

“You are regular now,” he says.

Priya hears the word regular and feels it land inside her like a coin.

He pours her a sip without asking—just enough for the throat.

“Bas (enough),” he says, and his tone makes it sound like a lesson and a joke.

On his phone screen, a press note is open. English lines. Numbers.

“See,” he says, tapping. “Fog in morning, later clear. Cold day talk also.

Maximum twenty-something, minimum ten.

You wear sweater in morning, then you carry it like burden.”

Priya smiles because it is true.

The shared auto comes, crowded as always. Priya holds her bag on her lap with both hands, like she is holding a promise.

By the time she reaches the canal-road lane, the fog has already started thinning. The clinic shutter is up. The waiting room is full enough to feel like a bus.

Inside, the desk woman is already at her chair.

Priya doesn’t speak first. She stands beside the desk with her folder held flat and waits for the day’s first command.

“Sit,” the desk woman says. “Register.”

Work begins.

Names.

Ages.

Villages that are pronounced one way and written another.

Phone numbers poured out quickly by people who think speed will make illness cheaper.

Priya writes the first six digits of one number and pauses.

“Number theek se boliye (please say the number clearly),” she says.

The man frowns, then repeats, slower.

Priya repeats the digits back, not loudly, just enough to check herself. The desk woman’s pen keeps moving. Her silence is the closest thing to praise.

At 10:55, the clock above the doctor’s door clicks toward eleven.

The waiting room is noisy: coughs, slippers, the low anxious talk of people comparing symptoms like vegetables.

Then something changes.

A small radio somewhere—maybe in the compounder’s room—announces a reminder. A voice says it is 30 January, and there will be two minutes of silence.

Priya has heard of it. Everyone has. School assemblies, government offices, that one day when the nation pretends it can be quiet together. The word for it is heavy even when you don’t speak it.

At exactly eleven, the desk woman stops writing.

So does the compounder.

A patient mid-sentence falls quiet, surprised by his own mouth.

Two minutes is not long.

It is smaller than her fifteen-minute practice.

But inside it, the clinic feels like a school again—people sitting still, looking at the floor, remembering something bigger than their own fever.

Priya’s hands rest on the register.

She thinks of how many kinds of silence there are.

The silence of not waking Rakesh.

The silence of not guessing.

The silence of two minutes.

When the two minutes end, the waiting room exhales and becomes itself again.

The desk woman flips the page of the register and says, “Next.”

Work returns, brisk and ordinary.

At 12:10, during a brief lull, the desk woman opens the drawer and pulls out Priya’s cardboard file.

It is still thin, still a little shy.

“Photo?” the desk woman asks without looking up.

Priya’s stomach tightens. She remembers yesterday’s instruction: Bring one more photo if you have.

“I will bring,” Priya says.

The desk woman nods once, as if the matter is settled.

Then she adds, “Bring photocopy also next week. PAN. Aadhaar. Keep ready.”

Priya nods again. Yes. Ready. Flat.

By 1:55, the desk woman closes the register with the same slap as always.

“Go,” she says.

₹300 lands in Priya’s palm.

The sun is out now, but it doesn’t feel warm. It feels honest and a little rude. The sky is clear enough to make the road look exposed.

Instead of taking the auto straight home, Priya gets down near the market lane.

The photo studio is a small shop tucked between a stationery place and a shop that sells cheap bangles. Its signboard is faded, as if faces have used up all its colour.

Inside, the air smells of electricity and dust. A ceiling fan turns slowly, pretending to be useful.

The photographer is a man who doesn’t smile with his eyes. He gestures at a plastic chair.

“Passport photo?” he asks.

Priya nods.

He adjusts the curtain behind her and tells her to lift her chin.

Priya does.

A flash pops—white and sudden, like being caught.

For a second she feels foolish. Then she reminds herself: this is just paper that helps paper.

The man shows her the image on a small screen.

Her face looks serious. Older than she feels.

“Okay,” the man says, and prints.

Four small faces slide out on glossy paper.

Priya pays. The amount is not huge, but it stings—because ₹300 is a number she has started counting before she even spends it.

She slips the photos carefully into the plastic folder, between two sheets so the corners don’t bend.

Outside, the market lane is loud again. Someone is arguing over tomatoes. A schoolboy is running with a notebook under his arm.

Priya walks to Sharma Ji’s shop next—not because she has a form today, but because her feet have learned the route of help.

Sharma Ji is busy, of course. He looks up once, sees her folder, and makes a face that means: What now?

Priya opens the folder just enough to show the photo strip.

“Clinic file,” she says.

Sharma Ji grunts. “Keep extra. Don’t give all. Always keep one.”

Priya nods. This is exactly the kind of rule she likes—simple, practical, protective.

As she turns to leave, she remembers something else.

“BA slip,” she says quietly. “Sana is saying—study. I am not going.”

It isn’t a confession. It is just a fact with weight.

Sharma Ji looks at her over his glasses. “Sunday you come. One hour. I will show you syllabus download.

Now job is daily, so Sunday is for your things.”

Priya is surprised by the gentleness hidden inside his instruction.

“Okay,” she says.

Outside, the late afternoon light is already turning. Winter does that—it makes evening arrive early, like someone closing a shop shutter.

At home, Sunita is sorting lentils on a steel plate, picking out tiny stones with patient fingers.

Priya places the photo strip on the shelf and then lays her plastic folder flat on top of it.

Sunita looks up. “Photo?”

“For clinic file,” Priya says.

Sunita nods once, relieved, as if the file is now safer because a face has been added.

Arjun appears, sees the photo strip, and immediately leans in.

“Didi, you look like police,” he says, delighted.

Priya flicks her scarf at him. “Go study. And don’t touch.”

He touches anyway, but only with his eyes.

In the evening, the cold creeps back into the courtyard edges. Priya sets up her keyboard again.

Timer.

Fifteen minutes.

Afterward, she opens a note and types one line.

30 Jan — two minutes silence at clinic. Got extra photo for file. Spent money but kept corners safe.

She reads it once.

Today has the usual shape—work, numbers, paper.

But inside it there is a new, quiet feeling: she is becoming someone who belongs somewhere.

Not in a dramatic way.

In a drawer.

Upstairs, she puts two pens in her bag.

She sets the alarms.

7:30.

7:45.

And when she pulls the blanket up, she thinks of two minutes again—not as history, not as a speech, but as proof that even a crowded room can learn to pause.