My Neighbor and I Only Talk Through Walls
Ten years of coughs, songs, and arguments, an intimacy without names.
I have never seen my neighbor's face, but I know exactly how he sneezes: three times, always three, with a dramatic pause before the third like he is milking the suspense. Ten years of flat 4B, ten years of that sneeze through a wall so thin it should legally be called a suggestion, and I can tell you the man is a performer wasted on an audience of one.
Our building is from the seventies, when architects believed privacy was a Western concept. The wall between my bedroom and his living room transmits everything: his pressure cooker (three whistles, a rice man), his phone arguments with someone called Mummy who calls at 9 p.m. sharp and disapproves of everything, his television serials, his hummed bathroom songs, all of it delivered to me in high fidelity whether I subscribe or not.
He receives my broadcasts too. My alarm and its four snoozes. My terrible singing while cooking, which I do not apologize for. My Sunday phone calls home. Once, memorably, my 2 a.m. battle with a cockroach that involved a slipper, a scream, and language my mother does not know I know. The next morning I heard him laugh through the wall, just once, a single ha, and I nearly died of shame and also, weirdly, delight.
We have never met. This is the part people refuse to believe, but city people will understand instantly. His door faces the other corridor. He leaves early, I leave late. He gets his groceries delivered, I get mine on weekends. In ten years, the universe has not scheduled us a single overlap, and after year three, I began to suspect we were both quietly protecting the arrangement.
Because here is the thing nobody warns you about thin walls.
They start as an annoyance and become a companionship.
It began with the knocking. Year two, Diwali week, he played an old Kishore Kumar song at a volume that rattled my mirror, and I banged the wall in protest. He lowered it. Then, because the song was genuinely great, I felt guilty and knocked twice, softly, which in no dictionary means anything, but he understood. He raised the volume one notch. We listened to the rest of the song together, separately, on opposite sides of six centimeters of 1970s optimism.
That was the birth of our language. One bang: too loud. Two knocks: good one, play it again. Three knocks, which took years to evolve: are you alive in there? The three-knock protocol emerged after I had the flu one winter and did not make noise for two days, and he knocked three times with what I can only describe as grammatically incorrect worry, and I knocked back once, and I heard him walk away from the wall... satisfied.
Neither of us mentioned it. There is no way to mention it. We do not know each other's names.
I know he lost someone four years ago. I do not know who. I know because the wall went quiet in a different way, a heavier way, and Mummy's 9 p.m. calls stopped, and for months the only sound was the pressure cooker, cooking for one the way it always had, except now it sounded like it. I did the only thing our language allowed. When he played the sad songs, the really devastating ones, I never once banged the wall, no matter how loud, no matter how late. Volume, I have learned, is sometimes a form of weeping. You do not knock on a man's weeping.
Instead I started leaving my radio on old Hindi songs in the evenings, slightly louder than necessary, the happy ones. After a while, two knocks. Good one. Play it again.
We have said nothing to each other in ten years, and I am not sure I have said more to anyone.
People at my office think this story is sad. They say, just go knock on his actual door, introduce yourself, you lunatic. They do not get it. A name would ruin us. A face would ruin us. Right now he is the wisest, funniest, most musical man in the city, and I am, presumably, a charming lady detective with excellent taste and one cockroach-related incident. The wall is not between us.
The wall is the relationship.
I wrote a whole piece about this, on the theme of loneliness and its strange cousins, about how the city invents new kinds of closeness because the old kinds do not fit in the lift.
And then, this March, the turn.
Silence... Real silence. No sneeze trilogy, no whistles, no Mummy. Day one, I assumed travel. Day three, I knocked three times... nothing. Day five, I did something unprecedented in a decade of scrupulous protocol. I walked around to the other corridor and stood in front of his actual door like a criminal. Nameplate: none. Doorbell: dead. I asked the watchman, and I had to describe my closest companion of ten years the way you describe luggage: 4B, male, older, plays old songs.
Hospital, the watchman said. His heart.
His nephew had come and locked up.
I did not sleep properly that week. Grief with no name to attach to is a special bureaucratic torture: you cannot call anyone, visit anyone, ask anyone, because officially, what are you? There is no column on any form for wall-friend. I left my radio on the happy songs anyway, every evening, for a wall with nobody behind it, which is either poetry or madness, and I posted about it one night on a community wall for poets, of all places, a wall about a wall, and strangers filled the comments with their own: the upstairs footsteps they missed, the neighbor's baby they heard learn to walk, the aunty whose evening bhajans went quiet one day forever.
Eleven days later, at 7:40 in the evening, my wall sneezed. Three times. Dramatic pause before the third.
I put my hand flat on the plaster like a fool in a film. Then I knocked three times. Are you alive in there?
A pause that lasted a geological era... Then two knocks, slow, a little weaker than his usual, but unmistakable in a language only two people on earth speak. Good one. Play it again.
I played Kishore Kumar. Loud. The exact song from Diwali, year two, because I had had eleven days to think about what I would say and that was the entire vocabulary available to me. One notch louder, then another, my mirror rattling, half the building probably cursing, and from the other side of six centimeters, no bang. No bang is our word for yes.
Last month, finally, the universe made its move. The lift doors opened on the ground floor and an older man stood inside with a hospital file under his arm, and I knew, I absolutely knew, the way you know your own doorbell. He looked at me a second too long... His mouth opened slightly.
And then, may every god bless him, he looked away and pressed his floor button, and I stepped in and looked at my phone with tremendous concentration, and we rode up in perfect, disciplined silence, two strangers, four floors, ten years.
That night, through the wall, at no particular time and for no particular reason: two knocks.
I knocked back twice.
Whatever we are, we are still on.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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