India, March 2 -- The remarkable thing about a city is that you are almost always in the company of strangers. That is both its promise and its curse. It is the reason why a city feels liberating and also why it is crushingly atomistic. Strangers are a distinctively urban species. In a city, they are our dwelling and companions. We communicate with them in many ways. In a crowd we may ask someone to move to the side. In a train we may push politely or nastily. On a beach we may request someone to click our photograph. But the most unintended, the most common and the most surprisingly fruitful way in which we communicate with strangers is by eavesdropping. Eavesdropping makes you the unofficial archivist of the city. We collect things which enter our ears, intentionally or accidentally. The city turns into a field of stage whispers. We carry these aural imprints of a sprawling and difficult urbanness within us. We store them in the shelves of our memory. Things we hear. Things which perhaps we were not meant to, or ready to, hear. Things which accost us and stop us in our tracks. Things from which we learn something new. In my first month in the MMR (Mumbai Metropolitan Region), my broker in Kalyan and I hopped from one high rise to another, asking landlords for keys, making quick surveys of possible homes. By the end of the day, having seen eight to nine houses, having climbed up and down multiple elevator shafts and asked an army of guards for permissions, both of us were left a little disoriented and aloof. But going down from the 18th floor, the broker suddenly turned to the lift attendant and said 'mi visarlo'. My ears pricked up. I'd never heard the word before. I did not yet know what it meant, being new to Marathi. But because his body had taken the shape of apology- the way he shrugged, the way his eyes squinted to beg pardon- I surmised that he'd forgotten which floor we had to get off at, where he'd parked. Later at home, a dictionary search told me 'vismrit' is that which is outside 'smriti', memory. Eavesdropping gave me the bridge from the language I knew to the language I wanted to learn. I also tentatively discovered that it is precisely in language that no one is a complete stranger to the other. We're all different trees of the same wild forest. Our roots often intersect. I had eavesdropped my way into a reassuring insight. Eavesdropping is often epiphanic. It is an invitation into the world of others and this encounter, and its frisson, is often revelatory of things you hadn't considered. One evening, I got off at Currey Road station, intending to walk around in a neighbourhood I wasn't very familiar with. While I walked down the footbridge steps, a young man on his phone crossed by. On his phone, his tone was both impatient and imperious. He said "Arrey usko phone ghuma na" ("Oh just call him"). But that ghuma na - spin it; rotate it; make it go round. A penny dropped in my head. The rotary dial phone, long gone now, persisted only in language. In fact, language is that last place in the world where we live before we are each fully and finally forgotten. Before we are vismrit, language is our last resting place. A moment of eavesdropping had led me into the capacious shelter of language. The man had impatiently walked on. People say the wildest things. You could be passing by and suddenly find yourself in their little theatres of love or cruelty, piety or cunning, bluster or defeat. Long ago, in my neighbourhood in Delhi, in Bhogal market, I'd heard a mother scold her child, saying, in Hindi, "Do not eat those seeds or they will sprout like trees from your belly." How in the world that little boy, shaking like a leaf at what his mother just said, must have slept that night. Your guess is as good as mine. Years later in Mumbai, I overheard a far more redemptive exchange between a parent and child. One Sunday noon, I was walking to the Vile Parle station on that long footover bridge. A mother and daughter, seemingly middle class, who seemed like they were returning after a spell at the beach (were their shoes still scattering specks of sand on the metal floor?) were walking just ahead of me. Then, very nonchalantly, the seven or eight year old cleared her throat and prepared to say a long sentence. When she said it, it turned her mother's world upside down. Her words, said with the unquestionable sincerity of children, and in that stylish English-medium cadence was: "Ma, I will always remember this day." Her Ma, briefly stopped, then started, didn't know what to say. It was as if her sky, suddenly aflush with birds, had completely run out of words. Children say the darnedest things. The daughter had bequeathed the most unexpected gift to the mother, as I listened from the wings. The noun 'eavesdropper' meant someone who stood under the eaves of the house to listen to conversations inside. The 'eaves' are the edges of the house's roof which stick out from the walls, under which the rainwater collects. To live in a city is to always live under a great rain shower of other people's words....