The line to Delhi was bad the way distance is always bad, a half-second delay that turned every conversation into two people arriving late to each other. Say something, wait. Hear it, answer. By the time the answer came you had already started to worry.
Junaid took the engineering seat in Delhi because there were no seats here worth having, not that year, not for a boy from our lane. We were promised to each other in the soft way of two families who liked one another and said nothing official. I was to wait. I was good at it, everyone said, as though patience were a talent and not just a thing you are given no choice about.
We spoke on Sunday nights. The delay meant we were always interrupting, always apologising, our two voices climbing over each other in the dark. No, you go. No, you. For three years the most honest sound between us was that little pause, the gap the wires could not close, the exact width of the country lying down between his mouth and my ear.
I began to hate the phone. Then I began to understand it. The delay was not the enemy. The delay was the truth the rest was hiding. There really was a half-second of India between us, mountains and plains and a river or two, and the phone at least did not pretend otherwise. It made us feel the distance in our own throats every Sunday, and I came to think that was a kind of honesty, even a kind of tenderness. The line would not let us forget how far apart we had to love.
He came home the winter he finished. I heard the taxi in the lane and I did not run, because I had learned to wait and did not know how to stop. He stood at the gate in the snow, close enough now that there was no delay, no half-second, nothing between his voice and my ear but the cold clean air of home.
Say something, he said. And smiled, because it was our joke, the thing we always said to fill the pause.
And I found I could not. Three years I had wanted the distance gone, and now it was gone and my throat had nothing to climb over, no gap to fall into, and the silence was so total and so near that I finally understood we had never been apart at all. We had only been a phone call long, the whole time. I closed the last half-second myself, and there was no delay in it, none, for the first time in three years.