Chapter 3: Paper Moons and Steel Skies

“Even in black and white, the sky feels wide enough to carry a secret.”

After school, the hallways burst with voices—bright, messy, full of colors I’ve never seen.

I pass through them like I’m walking underwater, each laugh and shout bouncing off me without ever quite touching.

I climb the staircase to the rooftop, the one place that never tries to be more than it is. The steps groan like an old friend clearing its throat. Above Rajshahi, the sky hangs low again—dull, thick with smoke-colored clouds. The kind that never fully rains.

And there she is.

Jyoti.

She’s by the old water tank, sitting with her knees up and shoes off. Her white socks are already dust-stained, like she’s been there a while. Her bag’s half-open beside her, a sketchpad open on her lap. She doesn’t look up. Just keeps drawing.

I hover for a moment, unsure if I’m interrupting something. Then the breeze flips a corner of her page, and I catch a glimpse.

She’s sketching the sky—her sky.

All shadow and light, no color, no make-believe.

It looks like mine.

For a second, it’s like staring into a part of myself I didn’t know could exist outside of me.

She glances up and smiles. Not surprised. Just soft. “You came.”

“I said I would.”

I sit down beside her, close enough to feel the quiet but not break it.

She brushes some graphite from the page. “The clouds look different up here. More honest, maybe.”

“Yeah,” I say. “They don’t try to be anything else.”

She tilts her head, amused. “Didn’t think you’d get that.”

I unzip my bag and pull out my sketchbook. “I think we’ve been drawing the same world this whole time.”

She leans closer as I turn to a recent page—last week’s sketch. Steel-gray sky. Radio towers like broken fingers. A ghost-moon fading into haze.

“Why do your clouds look like paper?” she asks.

I blink. “Paper?”

She nods. “Like… fragile. Like they’d tear if you touched them too hard.”

I pause, looking at the drawing again like I’ve never really seen it before.

“Maybe because I keep thinking the sky’s going to fall apart someday,” I say. “And maybe then, we’ll finally see what’s behind it.”

She’s quiet for a second, staring out at the clouds.

“When I was a kid,” she says, “I used to think there was another world behind them. A colorful one. Just waiting.”

“Do you still think that?” I ask.

She exhales slowly. “Sometimes. Less now.”

The silence that follows isn’t empty. It feels lived-in, like an old quilt. Somewhere below us, a rickshaw bell rings. A burst of laughter from the field. Life moving on without needing us to keep up.

Then she asks, “Have you ever tried to describe a color to yourself?”

“All the time,” I admit. “I’ve memorized what people say. ‘Blue like the ocean.’ ‘Red like fire.’ But they’re just… metaphors built on more metaphors.”

She nods slowly. “To me, blue sounds like silence.”

“…Silence?”

“Yeah. Like the quiet between raindrops.”

I look at her, and for a moment, she seems like a poem I’ve only half-read.

“And red,” she continues, “feels like a sudden touch. Warm. A little too much, but not in a bad way.”

I glance at the pale sky. “What about green?”

Jyoti smiles at the clouds. “Green… feels like hope that doesn’t say too much. Just enough to stay.”

Another silence. But this one feels like a bridge being built, slowly, word by word.

I want to tell her something—something that means more than it sounds like. But all I manage is,

“I think we should keep drawing this world. The way we see it. Just us.”

She looks down at her sketch again, then rips the page out gently and hands it to me.

“Then start with this,” she says. “Our first shared sky.”