M.K. Singhal

People ask me, usually with a raised eyebrow and a cup of tea in their hands, how someone who has spent a working life in meeting rooms came to write a novel about a signal from beyond the galaxy. I tell them it is more or less the same job with better scenery. In both, the real work begins when everyone stops talking.

For fourteen years I have worked with people in the middle of change: in banks, in busy shops, in glass-walled offices where a single decision about how a company is organised can quietly rearrange ten thousand ordinary lives. I have sat across tables from people on the best day of their careers and on the very worst, and I learned, slowly and without meaning to, that almost nobody says the important thing first. They say it third, or last, or in the pause after the question you were about to ask. The ones who changed my thinking were rarely the loudest in the room. They were the ones who had learned to wait, and to notice, and to hear what had not yet been said.

I never put any of that into words, not properly. Then one night I began to wonder what it would be like to be someone who had never been able to say anything at all, and what that person might hear in a world that mostly isn’t listening. Her name turned out to be Tara. Her town turned out to be Kozhikode. And the question she carried turned out to be a very large one: if something, somewhere out in the dark, had been trying to reach us for a very long time, who would be quiet enough to answer?

That is Miyara: Where Silence Speaks, and it is the book I have wanted to write for most of my life, though I did not know it until I started.

I have loved books for as long as I can remember, and I have never entirely recovered from the first story that made me look up at the night sky and feel small in a way that was somehow also a comfort. Space has been my quiet obsession for nearly as long. I follow the long, patient journeys of spacecraft the way other people follow their favourite cricketer, and I would give up a great deal for one clear look at the Earth from orbit. Every few weeks a new image or a new signal arrives, and I find myself standing outside at an unreasonable hour, whispering “wait, look at this” to nobody at all.

Weekends are for going where the phone signal ends. I drive out to India’s national parks in the dark and wait in the early light for something to walk out of the trees, and it almost never does when I want it to. Tracking wildlife is the best education in listening I know: the alarm call of a langur, the sudden hush of a forest that has noticed something you haven’t. I play casual chess badly, table tennis aggressively and cricket with far more optimism than talent. I take all three seriously, which is exactly why none of them has improved.

I write because there are things that are easier to express on paper than across a table. Everything in these pages is a work of fiction. Almost everything. If you ever wonder how I know what silence sounds like, or how an ordinary person comes to understand so much about waiting, the honest answer is that some lessons take years to learn. Miyara: Where Silence Speaks is where those lessons finally found their voice.

I hope Miyara stays with you the way the best stories have stayed with me: quietly, at odd hours, long after the last page. If it does, I would love to hear from you. Some of us have been listening for a very long time.