Every winter the electricity failed in our lane before the first heavy snow, as if the wires knew and gave up early. Ammi lit the kerosene lamp and the room turned the colour of old brass. That was the winter Imran and I were seventeen and forbidden, which meant we were nothing yet and already everything.
We had no way to meet. His house was four rooftops east, close enough that on clear nights I could see the smoke from their bukhari rise straight up, a grey thread stitching his home to the sky. So we invented a language of light. One lamp in his window meant he was thinking of me. Two meant he was reading the book I had lent him, the one with my pencil notes in the margins that he pretended not to have found. Dark meant his father was home and we should both be careful, both be good.
I watched for his window the way farmers watch for rain.
The snow came the night his family decided about Jammu, about the job, about the leaving they had not yet told me. I did not know any of this. I only knew that his window stayed dark for three nights, and I lay awake blaming his father, blaming the cold, blaming everything except the truth, which was that some absences are not punishments but goodbyes wearing the mask of an ordinary evening.
On the fourth night his window filled with light. Not one lamp. Not two. Every lamp they owned, all of them, burning at once, so bright it hummed across the white rooftops and reached my window like a shout in a silent house.
I understood. There was no signal in our small language for this. He had run out of numbers. He had emptied the house of flame to tell me the only thing left to tell.
I took our lamp to the glass and held it there until my arm ached, until Ammi asked what I was doing standing in the cold. Keeping something warm, I said, and she let me be.
In the morning the snow had buried the lane and his window was dark, truly dark, the family gone before light. But I have carried that blaze in me for eleven years now. Whenever the power fails and the lamps come out, I feel it again, the whole east sky burning to say a word we never learned to spell.