I waited until the street outside was completely silent. Not just quiet - but emptied of sound. No car horns, no dogs barking, no kitchen pans clanging in faraway balconies. Just a blankness. That's when I placed the record on the turntable.
It didn't spin.
I checked the belt. Fine. The motor. Fine. I tried another record - an old Talat Mahmood EP - and it played perfectly, crackling warmly like a fire in a long-forgotten monsoon. But when I replaced it with the black vinyl from The Archivist, the turntable simply froze, as if something in the record was refusing the world's logic.
So I gave in.
I didn't push it to spin. I just let the stylus drop. It landed on the record with a faint click, and then—nothing.
But not nothing in the way silence usually feels.
This was a dense, humid nothing. A pressure. A presence. Like someone standing just behind you, close enough for your skin to notice, but silent enough to make you question if you imagined it.
Then I heard it.
A soft exhale.
It didn't come from the speakers. It came from the walls. From the glass. From the air. A long, deep breath out—not mine, not mechanical, but something intimate. Like the sound someone makes when they remember something painful and beautiful at the same time.
Then came her voice.
"Mira," I said aloud, not realizing I had.
She was laughing. Not from the present, but from some distant summer afternoon. Her laugh was lighter than I remembered—less tangled with regret.
I saw us, not like a memory, but like a projection: sitting on the cracked steps behind the old cinema in Matunga. She was eating boiled peanuts, tossing shells into the breeze. I was telling her something stupid, something about how music and memory use the same keyhole in the mind.
"You think you're so deep," she said, flicking a peanut shell at my face. "But you're just sad with style."
I smiled—then realized I was crying.
The laughter faded. The projection dissolved.
The record continued to not spin, and yet the room remained saturated with resonance. I was certain: it wasn't playing sound - it was unlocking memory. Or maybe it was replaying a version of me that still existed somewhere else, where she hadn't left, where time had chosen differently.
I sat with it for a long time, until even the silence turned thin again.
Before bed, I placed the record back into its sleeve. As I slid it in, I noticed something I hadn't before: etched faintly into the outer edge, almost invisible -
"Side A: Before the Forgetting."
Which meant… there was a Side B.
I turned off the lights. And again, the windows began to breathe.