Same old mattress, same dust motes swimming in the shaft of bruised noon light. No Zoya popping gum like a sniper reloading. No Mish stabbing her sketchbook with ballpoint vengeance. Just Indu's neon backpack slumped against the wall like a deflated lung.
The bookshelf leaned crooked under the window, stacked with other girls' abandoned paperbacks—romances warped by monsoon damp, thrillers missing their last three chapters, a Bengali cookbook flecked with turmeric fingerprints. Indu's fingers skimmed cracked spines until she hooked one by its fraying corner. The cover had once been scarlet. Now it was the color of chewed betel nut spat onto pavement. "Self-Help for Storm Chasers" by someone named Dr. L. Monsoon. Page 23 featured a handwritten grocery list: eggs, rat poison, forgiveness.
She read until the words bled into her eyelids. "—When the cyclone comes, do not pray. Inventory your pockets. Count on your teeth.—" The book slumped onto her face like a dead moth. Somewhere between chapter 5. It says, "Rebuilding Your House on Shifting Sands" and a cockroach nibbling her big toe, she dreamed of her grandfather's well swallowing whole dictionaries.
Zoya's gum popped like a tiny landmine next to her ear. "Wake up, Glowstick. Your face looks like a used teabag." She plucked the book off Indu's forehead, squinting at the cover. "Self-Help for Storm Chasers? Seriously?"
Indu rubbed the imprint of a cockroach leg from her cheek. "Better than staring at the ceiling fan wondering if Parsi aunty's gonna braid me next."
"That's Bed 12A's problem." Zoya kicked the door wide open—hinges screaming—revealing the hallway's grimy fluorescence. "First rule of Sub ST: Nobody leaves their door gaping like a drunk's mouth when the room's empty. Especially not today."
Indu blinked at the threshold. The corridor stretched longer than physics allowed, walls breathing in damp pulses. A single cockroach scuttled past, dragging a sequin like war booty.
"You just got here," Zoya continued, rolling her gum between thumb and forefinger. "But even fresh meat knows—doors stay SHUT. Unless you want the singing walls to invite themselves in for chai." She nodded toward the ceiling, where water stains formed Rorschach blots of screaming faces.
Indu blinked at the hallway's flickering lights. The air smelled like burnt toast and bad decisions. "What singing walls?"
Zoya rolled her gum between her teeth with a wet —click. "You'll hear 'em. Sounds like your grandma's pressure cooker full of ghosts." She leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed—her chipped nail polish the same shade as the hostel's rust stains. "Rest of the pack'll be back soon. Laleh's selling knockoff perfumes to college boys, Mish tutors rich brats in calculus until they cry." Her eyes flicked to Indu's neon backpack. "So. What's your hustle? Village prophet? Professional mourner? Don't say 'content creator' or I'll push you down the screaming stairs."
Indu blinked at her fingers—still stained with pickle brine. "I can fix radios."
Zoya's gum snapped like a gunshot. "Yeah? I can make civil engineers cry." She flicked a tuft of pink hair behind an ear studded with safety pins. "Dropped out third year. Three jobs, twelve-hour shifts, and a passport full of stamps from places that smell like diesel and bad decisions. You?"
Indu picked at a loose thread on her neon backpack. "I'm unemployed. I've never been to any traveling destinations." The truth tasted like stale train station samosas—dry and embarrassing. She'd only ever left her village in the middle of the night with a jar of pickles and her grandfather's stolen betel money.
Nah, nah," Zoya waved a hand like shooing a mosquito, "we'll fix that." She leaned in, gum snapping like punctuation. "The pack's coming back soon—Laleh with her knockoff perfume empire, Mish with her calculus victims' tears. We'll eat like kings tonight." She jerked her chin toward the window, where a neon sign across the street buzzed intermittently: "—HOTEL GLUTTONY—DAILY THALI 40RS ONLY". "Place smells like expired ghee and broken dreams, but the dal doesn't kill you. Mostly."
Indu's stomach growled loud enough to startle a cockroach off the windowsill.
"Come up, Glowstick." Zoya's phone buzzed against her thigh—she flipped it open with a thumb, squinting at the cracked screen. "Laleh's screaming at me in all caps from Hotel GLUTTONY. Says I bring your 'pickle-stained ass' or she drinks all the bad chai herself." She snapped the phone shut with her teeth. "Mish texted "on her way" which means she's already feeding some rich brat's homework to a stray dog."
Indu followed Zoya down Sub ST's screaming staircase—third step missing entirely, ninth step groaned like a dying accordion. The neon across the street pulsed "—HOTEL GLUTTONY—" in erratic bursts, the "U" flickering like a faulty IV drip. Inside, the air clung thick with cumin and desperation.
Laleh and Mish already occupied a corner booth, their table littered with stainless steel thali plates. Laleh's knockoff perfume vials glittered like stolen treasure next to a pyramid of folded napkins—each bearing phone numbers in smudged ink. Mish stabbed a samosa with her pencil, graphite dust snowing onto her calculus notes.
Zoya hip-checked Indu toward the booth. "Meet Glowstick," she announced, snapping her gum. "She fixes radios and has the survival instincts of a concussed mongoose."
Mish flipped her calculus textbook shut—trapping a samosa mid-scream—and sized Indu up like a malfunctioning equation. "You eat meat?"
Indu nodded. The way you nod at funeral pyres. The way you nod when the landlord's boot hits the door. The way Lev nodded in his crib when the moon fractured—tiny chin dipping, milk-drunk and oblivious to celestial carnage.
The roti resembled the full moon. Not tonight's ruptured abomination, but the old moon—the one from childhood stories where wolves were just animals and vampires only bit necks in movies. Laleh slapped it onto Indu's thali with a wet —thwack. Steam curled upward in a surrender flag.
"Eat," she commanded, jabbing a fork toward the roti's blistered surface. "Before it turns into a fucking metaphor."
Outside, the moon looked like a broken porcelain pot glued together with dull flour paste—clouds clotting in its cracks, uneven edges snagging on the telephone wires. A drunkard staggered beneath its fractured glow, his shadow splitting into three directions at once like he couldn't decide which gutter to collapse into.
The City hadn't noticed the fissures yet. The bankers kept texting, the street vendors kept frying, the neon kept buzzing. But the cracks multiplied, in the pavement under hurried heels, in the plaster behind peeling wallpaper, in the silence between elevator music notes. The city blinked too fast—too frantic—to see its own slow unraveling.