There's a man on the L train who reads Saadat Hasan Manto in English translation, and for three weeks now we've boarded the same car at Bedford at roughly the same cursed hour, and this week I almost said hi.
Almost. The great tragic verb of my life.
I clocked the book first. You don't casually read Manto on the L train to Manhattan. That's a specific person. That's someone who has thoughts about Partition and probably owns a record player and definitely has opinions about how bad the film adaptations were.
So I built an entire friendship in my head across three weeks of commutes. We'd get chai. He'd introduce me to his weird brilliant friends. I'd finally have someone to talk to about the things I only ever text into the void.
And this week, the L train stranger and I ended up shoulder to shoulder near the doors, and I opened my mouth, and the whole speech was right there — "I love Manto, sorry, I'm not a creep" — and then the train hit Union Square and he got off and I said nothing.
Nothing. I said the great Indian nothing. The good-girl nothing. The one my mother would approve of and my heart would not.
Here is what nobody tells you about New York. The loneliness isn't the empty apartment. It's the full train. It's standing eighteen inches from someone who reads your favorite writer and choosing silence because your throat forgot how words work.
I think about how many almost-friends I've let ride past me on the L, the J, the 1. A whole imaginary social life, all of it lost to my inability to just say the sentence.
So. New goal. Next time the L train stranger boards with his Manto, I'm going to say hi. Out loud. Like a person who believes she deserves to take up a little conversational space.
Probably. Ask me next week.
Say the thing. The worst they can do is get off at Union Square.
Love,