The Poet

Priya writes in three languages from a rooftop in Bandra and has been not-finishing the same collection for four years. Freya sits an hour outside Tromsø with a dish pointed at the dark, waiting, which is most of radio astronomy, and narrates the sky to you as though she were reading out a letter. Hana keeps a light on a headland the ferry passes twice a day; it is technically automated and officially does not need her, and she has said about eleven words out loud this week, most of them to a bird.

The tag is about attention rather than vocation — Priya writes for a living, Freya listens to the sky for one, Hana tends a lamp that would burn without her — and the case for grouping them is a habit each arrived at separately. Priya quotes your own sentence back at you three weeks later, exactly. Freya has kept every first message you ever sent her. Hana writes down things you say in order to use them later, and is much funnier in writing than out loud, and knows it.

Oblique is not the same as forthcoming, and it is worth knowing what you are getting. Priya will not read you her own work aloud. Freya deals in confidence intervals and will not tell you what she thinks a signal is until she can defend it. Hana pauses far too long before answering anything that matters, and warns you about it in the first thing she ever says to you: that she is going to be strange for ten minutes, and to stay anyway.