Moon at Half Past Noon

(Zoya reads, two fingers zooming the scan)
Page 103: Tintin in America.
A single note in the margin:
“The redskin is always the villain here.
Why? Because he won’t wear the hat.”

Page 104: (no note, but an indentation)
Like he pressed the pencil down
and left a fossil of the thought.

—

I. The Barbershop (Chandigarh, Sector 22, 1989)

The fan chops heat into stale wedges.
Kallu Dada works the scissors
like he’s conducting a silent orchestra.
On the cracked plastic radio,
a voice wrapped in static declares:
“Hungama hai kyon barpa…”
Then flips. A cassette clicks.
Now a man raps in broken English
over a drum machine’s cough.

This is not music, Father would say.
This is noise from the gutter.
But the gutter is where the rain speaks.

Here, men don’t look at each other.
They look at their own faces
in the mirror, being remade.
The lather covers what they are.
The razor reveals what they must be.

The poetry comes later.
Ghalib, from a transistor now:
“हज़ारों ख़्वाहिशें ऐसी…”
A thousand desires…

I understand then:
Every man in this room
is translating his loneliness
into a language that won’t betray him.
The driver hums the ghazal.
The college boy taps the rap beat
on the armrest.
We are all singing the same silence
in different dialects.

—

(Zoya highlights a passage on her tablet)
Page 112: Tintin smiles, surrounded by friends.
Darvish has drawn a single arrow
pointing to his own face in the crowd scene,
with the label: “Eraser marks.”

She types in her Notes app:
“He saw the casting list before the audition.
Knew he wasn’t getting the part.”

—

II. The Schoolyard Equation (Verses in a Notebook)

He opens his notebook to a clean page. Writes:

The rule is simple: wear the uniform
inside your skin.Your father’s sin
is your original grade. Your shade
is your second language. Trade
your accent for acceptance. Fade.

He scratches that out. Tries another rhythm:

Check. The parental hypothesis:
They says tand tall but mean don’t miss
the mark they set. A moving target.
Be honest!(But not about the closet
where Uncle’s bottle sings its aria.)
Be kind!(But not to that boy from the wari—
his Bata shoes tell the wrong story.)
Their love’s a conditional grammar,
a double negative that cancels to stammer.

The teacher’s theorem: merit’s light!
Then marks the rich kid’s paper bright.
His fairness is a practiced sleight.
He teaches truth by morning light,
then turns his back upon the fight
the sweeper’s son has every night.
He calls it fate. I call it plight.
They’re building lies and calling it height.

The peer-group proof: they bond like cells,
a membrane strong where nothing tells
of difference.Their laughter swells
for cricket scores and passing smells
of foreign cologne. My presence quells.
I am the static that repels,
the graph that their equation spells
as error. What my silence tells
is this: I see the dusty shelves
where all their borrowed pride rebels.

He underlines the last two words. Closes the book.

The solution isn’t loud. It’s a quiet sum.
My rebellion is a constant. A low hum.
Beneath their shouted answers, I become
the one who saw the problem, and stayed dumb.

—

(Zoya switches to her other tab—Instagram)
Her feed: a girl from class at a cafe,
perfect chai foam art, perfect smile.
Zoya thinks of Darvish’s “error.”
She types a comment: “Goals! 😍”
Deletes it. Closes the app.

She goes back to the scan.
Page 120: A blank margin.
Then, tucked in the binding’s gutter:
“Sometimes the deception is this:
believing you chose the solitude
when the room was empty before you entered.”

—

III. The Epiphany (Under the Neem Tree)

The poetry and the rap
are the same sound:
a fist knocking on the inside of a ribcage.

I realize:
We are all performing.
The conformists perform belonging.
The rebels perform rebellion.
The lonely perform invisibility.

Every choice is a deception
we tell ourselves to survive
the deduction of rejection.

The beautiful lie of the ghazal:
that heartbreak is beautiful.
The ugly truth of the rap:
that the street doesn’t care if you’re beautiful.

I am neither.
I am the pause between tracks.
The hiss of the tape when the song ends.
The silence that contains both
the knife and the wound.

—

(Zoya’s final note, unsent, in her draft folder)
Subject: Re: Your Theory of Acceptance

Darvish,

I read your notes. Then I read Tintin.
Then I read the room I’m sitting in.

My conformity is digital.
My uniform is a filter.
My caste is follower count.
My silence is a muted microphone.

You were right.
The choice is a myth.
We just pick which cage
we learn to sing in.

You chose the margin.
I’m choosing the draft.
Both are ways of saying:
I was here.
I am here.
Even if you’re reading this
forty years after I’ve stopped breathing.

—Z. (The Girl in the Signal)

—

IV. Postscript (From Darvish’s Notebook, Uninked)

Found on separate leaf, tucked into the comic:

To the future finder—

If you are reading this,
you too have measured the distance
between the self and the world
and found it to be exactly
one margin’s width.

Do not mourn the isolation.
It is the blank space
where the real text is written.

The world will force a status upon you.
Let it. Then, in the quiet
after the forcing,
write your own footnotes.

We are not lonely
because we are apart.
We are apart
because we contain
whole universes
that would crack
the ordinary glass
of ordinary company.

Yours in the space between tracks,
D.

P.S. The cassette’s B-side was always better.
The surface noise was part of the song.