Two Laptops, One Broken Chair
Get Malik Haris’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Meera and Farah had been roommates for exactly four days when they lost their jobs on the exact same afternoon — different companies, same round of layoffs sweeping through the city’s startup scene that month. They found out within an hour of each other, sitting in the same tiny apartment, staring at two different termination emails that used almost identical corporate language.
Neither of them cried. They ordered chai from the stall downstairs and sat on the floor because they only owned one chair between them, and it had a crack running down the armrest that neither had gotten around to fixing.
"I’ve always wanted to try content writing properly," Meera said, mostly to fill the silence.
"I can do social media management. I did it for free for my cousin’s boutique," Farah replied.
That conversation, half joke and half desperation, became a freelancing business three weeks later — though calling it a "business" felt generous when their combined income for the first month was less than what either of them used to make in a week at their old jobs.
They took turns on the one working chair. Whoever had a client call got it; the other sat cross-legged on the mattress with her laptop balanced on a pillow. They split the WiFi bill down to the rupee. When Meera landed her first paying client — a small edtech company that needed blog posts — she did a little dance in the kitchen that woke up their neighbor, who banged on the shared wall.
Farah’s first client ghosted her after the second deliverable, disappearing along with eight thousand rupees she was owed. She didn’t tell Meera for two days, ashamed, as if it were somehow her fault that someone else had decided not to pay her. When she finally said it out loud, Meera didn’t offer sympathy. She opened her laptop and said, "Okay, let’s write the follow-up email together. And then let’s find you three new leads by Friday."
They did.
Over the next year, the apartment slowly turned into something between a home and an office. A whiteboard appeared on the wall, tracking deadlines in two different handwritings. A second chair arrived, secondhand, still slightly wobbly but functional. They started referring clients to each other — a boutique needing both a website description and Instagram management became one project instead of two separate hustles.
The turning point wasn’t a big client or a viral post. It was smaller than that. Six months in, a client emailed Meera specifically asking if "the person who does the social media for your other clients" could also help with theirs — meaning Farah. Someone had noticed their work was better together than apart, without either of them ever saying it out loud.
Today they still share that apartment, though there are three chairs now, and a second monitor Farah bought when she got her biggest contract yet. The cracked armrest chair is still there too, pushed into a corner, because Meera refused to throw it out.
"That chair sat through our worst month," she says. "It gets to stay for the good ones too.
