The first time she saw him, he was leaning against a wall on the roof, smoking a reefer, looking more at ease than anyone she had seen since she arrived eight months ago. His form had a transparent quality, and through his body she could see the parapet, and the road beyond. It was just an illusion, of course. He was made of real flesh and bone.

Besides, there were no ghosts in Savoy Suites, one of the older apartment complexes in the area; the rent had plateaued decades ago because the structure was flanked by two highways. It wasn’t noise as much as constant movement that characterized the two four-lane highways; the vehicular rivers, one flowing eastward, the other, westward, never slowed down, liquid metal by day, exhausted jaguars prowling the suburban jungle with bloodshot eyes by night.

Spending all those months in that frightfully boring town on the West Coast of America had altered Gulkan’s sense of perception. In winter, the sky was black soon after lunchtime, and in summer, dusk arrived well past bedtime. It never rained. In every season, though, time always moved slowly in that town. Speed was everywhere. People, mostly tech nerds and engineers, rushed to work in the morning, drove at ninety miles an hour, ran around grocery stores filling their crates and carts with local produce before dancing around their kitchens to prepare dinner, then rushing to bed and repeating the cycle the next morning. Even so, time moved slowly in that town. Or maybe it seemed that way to Gulkan because she had migrated from a bustling metropolis in South Asia, where time was the costliest and most elusive commodity one could own. The familiar laws of space, distance, and time stood suspended in this place.

Spending all those months in that frightfully boring town on the West Coast of America had altered Gulkan’s sense of perception.

The man on the roof was the only one who seemed to be in tune with the real frequency of the township. His movements were slow and laidback, and he neither looked like he had come from someplace nor like he had anywhere to go. Every time Gulkan went to the top floor of the building, he was there—aborigine of the terrace.

It wasn’t really a terrace. It wasn’t a roof either. It was a parking lot—sky-clad, inconvenient, empty, exposed to the elements. Thick white marks demarcated parking slots and the absence of cars gave it an abandoned, has-been look. Residents had yet to begin using it. A few discovered it by accident while looking for a trash shoot or some such, but they never returned. Some inadvertently wandered there while speaking on the phone, too preoccupied with gadgets that measured the number of steps they’d walked that day to care about taking in the view. Others came in twos or threes to spend a few awkward minutes, poke around curiously and leave. But he, lord seigneur of the roof, looked like he was always there, at one with the place. His presence threatened no one, nor did it make the place any safer. Yet, without its flaneur, the roof would have been a very different place.

Gulkan was a writer in limbo. Her mind used to be fertile farmland, with new ideas ripe enough for harvest at all times. Her casual observations, baggy conversations with neighbors, and day-to-day activities like walking down a childhood street, buying bread from the bakery behind her house, or riding the local taxi, was all it took to sow seeds in her literary soil. But after moving here, her well of ideas was dry, her mind, a salt basin. So caught up was she in getting acquainted with the colors, moods, and climes of this new continent that she forgot to make a passport for the writer inside.

She walked the corridors of the circular building for hours, looking at the highways from the third floor, where her apartment was, then from the fourth floor, then from the second floor, and finally, from the roof, a fractured journey around her pathetic new microcosm.

For company, she had the dismembered voice of an old man narrating an audiobook; she’d begun listening to Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni over a decade ago and kept coming back to the tape every few years, stretching the nineteenth-century Italian story across epochs in her own life, which gave the novel and its fictive characters an elastic existence. Staring at the same view from different levels, she saw sorcery in the angles, inclines and curves of the highway, and literature, combined with the concrete ramps cars used to get on and off, helped stir her imaginative pot. But inspiration came like a bird in the distant skies, disappearing before she could identify the shape of its wings or the color of its tail.

…inspiration came like a bird in the distant skies, disappearing before she could identify the shape of its wings or the color of its tail.

The old ideas marinating in her head kept changing form; some gathered mold, some stayed the same. Some began fermenting. She walked past her neighbors’ doors, reading the slogans on their doormats, haunting the corridors and staircases of the apartment complex, wondering whether the houses with video cameras on the door could see her as she passed.

Even her dreams had othered her since she migrated. Back home, she would wake up and recall every detail of a dream. But here, the minute her eyes opened, she was expelled from the universe of the night. Sometimes, she would try to close her eyes and re-enter the dream, but the doors were shut. She was locked out, trapped in the world of wakefulness.

Yet somehow, stories flowed in the aqueducts of her mind when she saw the man on the roof — middle-aged, shabby, his unwashed clothes like an extension of his body. Looking at him, standing there, belonging to everything and nothing, brought the first drops of dew to her parched playground. Within a fortnight, she had written two poems and half a story.

The man on the roof had brought her back home. Seeing him even brought back her usual nightmare, something she hadn’t experienced since she moved. In the dream, one that always came at dawn, the slum behind her old apartment in her hometown was on fire. The entire establishment, deserted somehow, went up in flames. Strangely, the sun was always overhead and she squinted while she watched the phantasmic spectacle from her balcony. When she woke, she remembered every detail.

Everything was alive again in Gulkan’s world. With foul breath that passed through stained teeth, the man on the roof had breathed fuel into the writer’s tank. He wasn’t her muse, she didn’t write about him. He was whatever she wrote about—thief to pharaoh to hawker to conqueror to pauper to ghost to gravedigger to God…he became the character she was writing about, living in the infinite space between her fingers and her keyboard. 

The man on the roof had started noticing her patternless visits and looked forward to seeing her upstairs. Initially, he thought it was a different woman each time, but soon realized it was the same person, the young sunburnt lady with dark hair who kept coming back.

That evening, he was tired. He returned to his lightless apartment a few hours after midnight and walked straight to his desk. It looked as fatigued as its owner. He dipped two stained fingers in a pot of deep red and gave masterful finishing touches to his first oil painting in years—an urban sunset with a highway in the foreground and in the corner, a female silhouette. He was thinking of naming it after the person who, with her casual, lonely presence, ended the drought in the recesses of his right brain.

“Girl on the Roof.”

Ashwini Gangal is a California-based journalist hopelessly in love with the written word. She is the author of two chapbooks, Hormonal House (fiction) and Yersinia Pestis (poetry). Ashwini grew up in Mumbai, India. She loves reading about microbes and mental health.