My daughter said 'baba' clearly for the first time and I heard it from my wife's voice note at 4am, standing in a cold stairwell on my break. Cried a little, fixed my headset, took the next call. Some joys arrive on delay but they still arrive.

My wife leaves my dinner covered on the table and a note in Bangla under the plate. Most days our love is asynchronous, messages crossing between her day and my night. But that note, that little note, is the most romantic thing I own.

Living upside down does things to the mind. I sleep when the sun is loud and wake when it leaves. Some weeks I forget what a normal Sunday feels like. Trying to be gentle with myself instead of calling it weakness.

A customer today called me a machine because I followed the script. I wanted to say sir, this machine has a daughter who is teething and a mother in a village who thinks I have an office job with a window. We absorb so much just to keep the line polite.

3am belongs to a strange brotherhood

At 3am the office is just the hum of ACs and men from every corner of the country pretending we aren't sleepy. Outside, one chaiwala keeps the whole night shift alive. We don't know each other's full names but we know each other's tiredness. That is its own kind of family.