The phone rang at 3:03 a.m.
It was the kind of hour where reality thins out, becomes transparent at the edges. I was dreaming of an aquarium suspended in mid-air - a single goldfish looping through a glass maze that had no beginning or end. The sound of the phone interrupted the rhythm of its swim. I opened my eyes, half-certain water would spill from my ceiling.
I live alone in a 1BHK flat on the eleventh floor of a building shaped like a tuning fork. It wasn't designed that way intentionally, but when I first saw the blueprint in the real estate brochure, the resemblance struck me. I had a feeling that the building, like me, resonated at a frequency no one else could hear.
The phone rang a second time. I picked it up.
No one spoke.
I didn't speak either. Sometimes silence is more revealing than noise. I could hear faint static—like wind pushing against old glass. Then a voice emerged, quiet and deliberate.
"He's awake now."
The line went dead.
I sat for a moment, letting the words settle in the air around me. The sentence didn't ask a question, didn't deliver news, didn't require response. It simply stated something that only I should've known. I was awake. Yes. But who else cared? And who was "he"?
I made coffee. The kind I grind myself, slow and steady, like a ritual to keep the edges of my mind from fraying. It filled the apartment with that deep, earthy smell I imagine gods must have inhaled before deciding to create the first tree. I drank it black, facing the window, looking out at the city that looked back like a half-forgotten dream.
Across the road, there's a billboard that used to advertise a failed startup - something about renting umbrellas via app. Now it's just a blank white canvas. Sometimes I see birds perched on it, looking like misplaced punctuation marks in an unwritten sentence.
At 3:47 a.m., the power flickered and all the clocks reset to 00:00. The kind of thing that shouldn't mean anything, but felt like a glitch in some larger, unseen code. That's when I heard it: glass breathing.
Not cracking. Not shattering. Breathing.
As if the windows had lungs, and something behind them was exhaling.
I turned off the kitchen light. The sound stopped. I turned it back on. It started again.
I stood there, staring at the fluorescent bulb humming above, trying to remember if I had ever heard glass breathe before. I hadn't.
But somehow, it felt familiar.
Not frightening. Not yet.
Like something I had once promised to forget.
Tomorrow, I will go down to the old record shop in Dadar where time slows down and the shopkeeper with the missing finger always gives you one answer too many. He knows things. Even when he says he doesn't.
That's where this story starts, I think.
Not with the phone call.
But with the decision to listen to what silence was trying to say.