Every day, music travelled to him from her apartment until eight or nine in the evening. It would seep through to him from the building’s inner atrium that the kitchen looked onto, and Saniya would be annoyed by this music that intruded as she cooked, or as they ate at the marble dining table in the kitchen. ‘That deaf b***h,’ she would complain. ‘Does she have to make all that racket?’ And if she saw he was listening attentively to the music, she would frown. Sometimes, she would tie a scarf around her head and complain of a headache.
The old woman wasn’t deaf, but it was definitely lucky for him that her hearing worsened at each landing, since that meant she needed to turn up the volume. After the conversation on the staircase, she started to exchange greetings with him whenever they me
