Hold Music
A cheerful hold tone played in Arun’s apartment. It was not coming from the laptop. Not from the phone. Not from the small studio monitors on his desk. Not from the cheap Bluetooth speaker he had once bought during a sale and immediately regretted because it made bass sound like wet cardboard. It was just there, soft and patient, looping imperfectly under the morning sounds of Chennai: a pressure cooker from another flat, a scooter horn from the street, somebody dragging a plastic chair across tiled floor, a devotional song leaking through one wall as if someone else’s god had left the evening open and forgotten to close it.