I Fed Pigeons With a Man Who Never Spoke
Every Sunday, same bench, same silence, strangely enough company.
For fourteen months, the most dependable relationship in my life was with a man whose voice I never once heard.
We met the way city people meet, which is to say we did not meet at all. It was the November after my marriage ended, when I had moved into a rented one-bedroom in Delhi with four boxes and a mattress, and my Sundays had become a problem to be survived. Married Sundays have furniture: the late breakfast, the argument about whose turn it is to call the plumber, the nap. Divorced Sundays are just twelve hours in a row.
So I started walking to the park near my flat, the small scruffy one with the broken fountain, because a man can only stare at his own ceiling for so long before the ceiling starts staring back.
He was already there the first time. Far end of the green bench near the amaltas tree, grey cardigan buttoned to the top, shoes polished like he had somewhere important to be, which he did not, because his appointment was pigeons. He had a cloth bag in his lap, the kind that once held two kilos of atta, and he threw grain in slow, generous arcs, like a farmer in a film about the importance of farmers.
Every other bench was wet from the night's rain. I sat on his, at the far end, the regulation metre and a half of strangers.
He did not look at me. He did not greet me. He threw his grain, and the pigeons boiled around his shoes, and after twenty minutes I went home feeling, for reasons I could not explain, four percent better.
The next Sunday I came back without ever deciding to. He was there. He nodded, one centimetre of nod, the kind of acknowledgment you give a fact rather than a person. The Sunday after that, the nod came with half a second of eye contact. By January, the far end of the bench was mine the way a groove in a temple step belongs to a particular foot.
He never said a word.
Not one, in fourteen months.
I studied him instead. The ironed handkerchief in his breast pocket. The old HMT watch, its face fogged. The way he fed the birds in a rotation, deliberately tossing a little grain to his left, into the quiet zone, where a lame pigeon with one curled foot waited because it could not fight the healthy ones in the scrum.
He never let that pigeon go hungry. Fourteen months, and I never once saw him forget it.
One Sunday in February he held the cloth bag out to me. No ceremony. Just held it out, eyes still on the birds.
I put my hand in and took a fistful of bajra, and when I threw it, badly, a pigeon landed on my wrist, and I laughed. It startled me, the sound. I realized I had not heard my own laugh since sometime before the lawyers.
After that, the bag sat between us like a shared newspaper.
Somewhere along the way I started talking to him. Quietly, facing the birds, the way you talk in a barbershop or a boat. I told him about the divorce, which I had told no one, not really, not the true version where I was not blameless. I told him about my mother pretending on the phone that she was not disappointed. I told him about a loneliness so specific I could have drawn its passport photo. He listened... or he did not. It made no difference, and that was the mercy of it.
Talking to him was like dropping stones into a well so deep you never hear the splash, and somehow the pockets end up empty anyway.
Some people do not want your words. They want your Sunday.
I had theories about the silence, of course. A stroke. A vow. A throat surgery. The chai seller at the park gate called him Masterji and shrugged when I asked, as if silence were a hobby some retired men take up, like tomatoes. I never asked him directly. It felt like asking a river why it does not walk.
The seasons moved. In the June heat we shifted, without a single word of negotiation, from nine in the morning to seven. How did we both know? We just did. Two people can build an entire calendar out of nods.
Then, one Sunday in the second January, the bench was empty.
I fed the pigeons from my own pocket, grain I had started carrying without noticing that I had become a man who carries grain. The lame pigeon came to the quiet zone on the left and looked at me with an accusation I could not answer. The next Sunday... empty again. I sat the full hour anyway... ridiculous, loyal, cold.
The third Sunday, a woman was sitting in his spot. Fifty or so, his same long face, the cloth bag in her lap.
“You must be the Sunday one,” she said.
I sat down slowly at my end. She told me he had passed two weeks earlier, in his sleep, which she said the way people say it when they need it to be true. Then she said the thing that undid me.
“He talked about you, you know.”
Talked... The word did not fit anything I owned. Her father, she said, had been a Hindi teacher for thirty-eight years, a man of ten thousand recitations. After her mother died, he did not go silent all at once. He rationed. Fewer words each year, as if speech were a pension that had to last. At home he still spoke, a little, at dinner, and on some nights he mentioned the park. He called me his Sunday appointment. Once, she said, he called me the boy who talks to the pigeons, and smiled.
He had heard everything.
The divorce. My mother. The passport photo of my loneliness.
He had carried it all home and kept it, the way he kept grain aside for the bird that could not fight.
“He asked me one thing at the end,” she said, and held the cloth bag out to me the exact way he used to. “Sunday ko dana daal dena. Someone should do Sundays.”
I feed the pigeons now. Same bench, same time, same slow arcs I learned by watching, the little toss to the left first, always, before the scrum. The lame pigeon is still alive, which feels like a personal favour from the universe. In the spring I finally wrote about him, or tried to, and found out that grief for a man whose voice you never heard is still the full-price kind.
I entered the poem into a monthly poetry contest, my first time showing a stranger anything I had written. It did not win. I fed the pigeons that Sunday anyway, which I believe is what he would have said, if he were the sort to say.
Last month, a young man sat down at the far end of my bench. Red eyes, phone gripped like a railing, the unmistakable posture of a Sunday that is just twelve hours in a row.
I did not greet him. I did not ask.
I held out the bag.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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