When the email arrived, it came with the bland cheerfulness of corporate cruelty.
Subject: URGENT: Client Onsite — Need You in Bengaluru Tonight
From:[email protected]
Body: "Rakesh, you're the only one who can calm their RF concerns. Book earliest flight. Presentations in shared drive. Thanks, -A."
Rakesh stared at it for a full minute, watching the cursor blink like a small metronome counting things he had not yet understood. The afternoon light in the lab fell in pale sheets across oscilloscopes and half-disassembled dev kits. On his bench, a copper coil lay coiled around a paper cup where he had absentmindedly set it, a loop chasing its tail. He thought of the students he'd promised to meet at five for the PCB routing review, and then of the old, worn-out Udaan backpack he used for travel, the one with the broken zipper he kept meaning to fix. He thought, finally, of Shruti.
He typed: "Got it. I'll go."
His boss replied in seconds, as if the words had been waiting to fly.
"Legend. Call me from the airport."
Rakesh stretched, feeling the pockets of stiffness that came from years of stooping over breadboards. Thirty wasn't old, but the body kept arithmetic. On the corner of his desk, the lab fan made a tired clicking sound, blades struggling against heat. He tugged his ID lanyard free, shut down the lab PCs, and sent his students a rain-check text.
At home, he packed fast. Shirts rolled tight. Linen trousers. A notebook spined with copper duct tape, the one he never traveled without, full of circuit ideas that arrived in coffee queues and bus stops. He set the notebook in the front pocket, next to the small packet of sandpaper he used for cleaning battery terminals. Shruti had already messaged: "Dinner with Tanya. Don't wait :)" The smile carried no weight, like a photocopy of something once real.
He hesitated a moment, thumb hovering over the call icon. The last month had been a thicket of small wrongnesses—her phone always face down, that new expensive perfume she claimed Tanya gifted, the curt silences that came and went like monsoon showers. He'd told himself it was the new project pressure, the way people tensed when a company dangled a promotion they had to pretend not to want. He told himself a lot of things.
He didn't call. Instead he slid the phone into his pocket and zipped the backpack closed. The zipper snagged, as always, and he worked it free with a small frown, making a mental note to fix it when he returned.
The city was an oven set to "remember." Dust clung to the light like old grief. On EM Bypass the cab hit the evening wave—the long slow crawl toward the airport that turned every car radio into therapy. The driver played a devotional station set too low to hear; only a ribbon of tambourine escaped. Rakesh watched the billboards tick past: insurance plans, coaching centers, a new luxury apartment that looked like it had been airlifted from somewhere the river could not reach.
His boss called when the cab crossed the Ultadanga flyover.
"Rocky!" Arindam's voice always landed like a pat on the cheek. He'd started calling Rakesh "Rocky" the month he joined DevSys, a nickname as practiced as his suits. "Boarding yet?"
"Halfway there," Rakesh said. "You sure you can't take this one?"
"Client trusts you. They love your calm. And I'm jammed with the Delhi pitch tomorrow," Arindam said. "Listen, the deck's in Bengaluru_RF_final_final.pptx. Emphasize the isolation issue, not their antenna stupidity. Keep them from feeling insulted. You know."
"I know."
"Good. Call me from the gate."
The line clicked off. Rakesh looked out the window. A tram trundled across an old bridge like a green apology. He glanced at the hour. Tight but possible: 8:30 pm flight, boarding at 7:50. His chest eased. Things were solvable. Signals could be filtered. Noise could be accounted for.
The cab reached the terminal at 7:29. He jogged to the glass doors, the bag thumping his spine. In the check-in line his fingers worried the zipper pull, feeling the small roughness where the metal had flaked away, then let go. When it was his turn he swung the backpack onto the belt.
The scale flashed 7.8 kg in blue numerals. The agent took his ID card without looking up.
"Bengaluru at 20:30?" he asked.
"Yes."
"ID valid," the agent said and pushed the boarding pass toward him with a neatened smile. "Gate 12B. Boarding at 19:50."
He exhaled. He texted Arindam: "At check-in. All good." His fingers added a second message to Shruti he then deleted letter by letter: Flight at 8:30. Back tomorrow. He put the phone away again.
Security swallowed him in the patient choreography of the tired: trays, belts, shoes. The metal detector beeped for no discernible reason; he stepped back and tried again. The guard waved him through. In the chaos of people repacking their lives, the small notebook slipped from his open backpack pocket and skittered under the bench like a rat.
"Excuse me," he said, stepping aside, kneeling, reaching. His fingers touched the notebook spine, and someone's wheeled suitcase caught him on the elbow.
"Ow," he said without heat, and the person muttered an apology in another language and moved on. He retrieved the notebook, tapping it against his thigh twice as if to reset it.
When he looked up again at the wall clock, it was 7:52.
He walked quickly, then jogged, then ran. Gate numbers blinked by like a countdown. At 12B, the queue had dissolved; the carpet held only the diminishing scent of people.
A ground staffer in a navy vest looked up with professional pity. "Sir?"
"Bengaluru—"
"Boarding closed at 7:50, sir."
"I'm two minutes late," he said, breathless as if he had sprinted across a decade and not a terminal. "Can you—"
"I am very sorry."
He stood for a moment, looking at the dark mouth of the jet bridge as if it might cough up a solution. The staffer's face arranged itself into a mask of compassionate immobility. Somewhere behind him a child began to cry, his crying traveling through the large emptiness of the hall like a singable frequency.
The airline rebooked him for the 10:45 pm flight. They did this without fuss, with the ease of people who had buckets prepared for these particular fires. Rakesh thanked them and drifted to a seat by the window. Outside, a plane shrugged itself into the sky, nose lifting like a promise made to someone else.
He called Arindam.
"Hey," he said when his boss picked up.
"You at the gate? Good. Listen—"
"I missed boarding," Rakesh said. He heard how flat he sounded. It surprised him.
Silence. Then Arindam made a sound that wanted to be shock. "What? How?"
"Security delay. I was at the gate at 7:52."
Arindam sighed, a sound that rustled with inconvenience. "Rocky, come on."
"They put me on the 10:45."
Another sigh. "Fine. But the client breakfast is 8 am. You'll cut it close."
"I'll still make it."
"Just do your best," the boss said, and there was a thinness in it now. "Ping me when you're boarding."
Rakesh ended the call and watched the window glass fog when he exhaled. He was thirty and missable. He thought about coffee, then didn't want any. He checked the time again, and then, without entirely deciding to, he stood.
He texted Shruti: "Missing flight, got next one. Will be late."
The message sat in the chat like a stone. Two blue ticks appeared, then nothing.
He looked at the clock again. The space between now and the next boarding stretched like an elastic band you could press a thumb into. He imagined sitting here for two hours with other people's fatigue rubbing off on him, then boarding, then trying to sleep in the artificial night of a plane while a stranger's elbow found his ribs. He imagined landing into a morning that already disapproved of him, showering in a hotel that smelled like coated air, and walking into a conference room where some client's jaw clenched at everything.
He thought: I could go home and pick up the new SMA connectors I forgot. It was a lie he told to himself as a permission slip. Another thought followed it, quieter, less belonged: I want to see Shruti's face when I walk in. I want to see what face she is wearing when I am not supposed to.
He stood and put the backpack on again, feeling the now-familiar bite of the zipper against his side.
At the taxi stand a driver with a neat mustache agreed to return him home and back again later. "Meter plus waiting," the man said.
"Done," said Rakesh.
The road back was a different city: the office crowds had thinned, and under the sodium lamps the flyovers looked like bones. He texted the driver's number and the meter reading to himself, a habit of documenting that made him feel temporarily more anchored to the world. By the time they turned into the neighborhood roads near his flat, it was after nine and the small shops were pulling down their shutters with the scrape that meant ritual done.
He didn't call Shruti again. He told himself he didn't want to alarm her. But alarm and surprise share a door.
Their building was a four-story box with ideas above its budget. The lift was sulking on the third floor; he took the stairs, hand skimming the peeling paint on the railing. On their landing a neighbor's child's bicycle leaned against the wall, the bell slightly askew. He stopped outside his own door and listened.
From inside: a muffled thud like a carelessly set glass, then the faintest ripple of laughter—and another voice too low to be sure.
He told himself: Tanya. But Tanya's laugh was a high peel; this sound held belly and smoke. His mouth went dry in a way no lecture had ever caused.
He put the key in the lock and felt his own before/after divide.
The door opened on the living room they had assembled like a sentence made of compromises: his battered armchair, her plants; their shared rug bought too long ago when both had mistaken thread count for proof of love. The TV was on mute, a cricket match cornered in a small box within a bigger box, all of it speaking wildly into nothing. On the coffee table a wine glass sat with a ring of red like a bite taken and left in evidence. Shruti disliked red wine; it made her cheeks patchy. That had been true, once.
"Shruti?" he said.
No answer. From the corridor to the bedroom, a door closed with a deliberateness that hoped to be casual.
The refrigerator motor droned. Somewhere outside, a dog barked at the wrong constellation. He put his bag down without looking away from the hallway and walked toward the bedroom like the hallway might pull away if he moved too quickly.
He could hear breathing now: two registers, one higher, one deeper, both too close. In the small bathroom adjacent to the bedroom, the exhaust fan whirred—a sound intended to disguise things that shrieked. He reached for the bedroom knob and paused. A memory of leaves and—funnily—his lab fan's tired click surfaced, then sank. He turned the knob.
The curtain was closed; the room was a den of moving shadows. The AC hummed like a rehearsed alibi. On the bed the disarray was impostor-art. His eyes found the two figures with that unpleasant speed of recognition that is not intellectual but animal.
Shruti's face, when it turned, was a theater of flickers—shock, calculation, anger at being interrupted. She had thrown on his old university jersey as if costume were absolution. The other figure leaned back against the headboard as if the bed were a throne, not yet covering himself fully, the calm of long practice spreading across his face like oil.
Arindam.
Something in Rakesh's chest pinched, not where people say it pinches during heartbreak, not the heart exactly but a place to its left that keeps count of input lag. His voice, when it came, was an engineer's voice, which is to say it arrived with data where emotion should have been. "You said you had dinner with Tanya."
Shruti's hand tightened on the jersey's hem. "I—Tanya cancelled. I told you—"
"You didn't," he said, and then looked at Arindam. "The Delhi pitch is tomorrow."
Arindam smiled, the micro-smile he used when students got a concept wrong in a way that still flattered his teaching. "Rocky, you missed your flight."
Rakesh took a step forward, then stopped himself. "You sent me out of the city."
"Client needed you," Arindam said. He reached for his watch on the bedside table, the gesture precise. "It's not my fault your time management—"
"You sent me out of the city," Rakesh repeated, slower, the sentence making its own sound, like a wire pulled too tight. He looked at Shruti. "How long?"
She flinched, but her jaw tightened. "Don't ask questions you want to use as nails," she said. That was vintage Shruti—phrases polished enough to be mistaken for wisdom, except when they cut.
"How long?" he said again.
Arindam swung his feet to the floor, casual, unhurried. "Rocky, you're upsetting her. Let's all be adults here."
It was astonishing, Rakesh thought with detached wonder, how betrayal made a room smaller. The bedroom seemed to shrink until he could count each grain in the wood laminate like days in a bad month. He felt tired, and in the tiredness a clarity that frightened him. He saw, arrayed like components, every incident of the last year that had made him shrug: the late nights deliberately not explained, the promotions he hadn't chased, the jokes he reduced to physics so he could live inside them.
"Leave," he said to Arindam, and the calm in his voice startled both of them. "Put your clothes on and get out of my house."
Arindam laughed. It was a burr of a sound. "Your house? You can't even pay the mortgage without overtime, Rocky. You're—"
"Leave," Rakesh said again. "Or I will call the police and explain everything."
Something moved under Arindam's mask. He slipped on his shirt, not buttoning it, and stood. Shruti stood too, pulling the jersey around herself like a small weather.
"This is not a scene," she said, and it was so absurd that if Rakesh had owned a different kind of heart he would have laughed. "It doesn't have to be a scene."
"You sent me texts about curtains this morning," he said, bafflement finally muscling into orbit around the hurt. "You wanted to know whether to pick the teal or the ash ones. You sent me swatches."
"That was before you—before the flight. Before—" she gestured at the air, unable to find a noun for the shape of her life.
Arindam stepped closer. "Look," he said, lowering his voice into a persuasive register he had used to make project managers sign off on bad schedules. "You're exhausted. You've been working nonstop. We didn't plan—" he shrugged "—this. It happened. Adults handle it."
Rakesh looked at him and saw something he had never allowed himself to see: not charisma but appetite wearing a borrowed coat. He thought of all the small favors granted, all the praise withheld and then given like water to a plant just before it died. He looked at Shruti and saw how she'd learned to stand in a room with this man and find herself lit, and how that light had seduced her because his had dimmed by habit.
He took a long breath that ached between his shoulders and said, "Get out, Arindam."
His boss's eyes flickered, then stilled. "No," he said softly. "I think we'll talk. Because if you call the police, I'll call HR and say you've been harassing your subordinate," he nodded toward Shruti, "for months. That you've been unstable. There are emails that can be interpreted."
"There are also emails that cannot," Rakesh said before the fear could enter the room and set up its tent. "You've sent me late-night messages about her in language that could strip wallpaper."
Arindam smiled, genuinely this time. "You'll find they were sent from a compromised account. IT will discover that, regretfully. Might even trace back to yours. You're a whiz with networks, Rocky. Too much of a whiz."
"Stop," Shruti said suddenly, and they both turned.
Her face had changed—the bone under the flesh had come forward. "Stop talking like this. Rakesh, you are not well. You didn't sleep for two nights. I saw you. You're shaking. You should leave. Get some air."
He looked down at his hands. They were steady. He found that fact disappointing, as if shaking would have absolved him of having to take the next step.
"No," he said. "I live here. You both leave."
Arindam moved then, almost lazily, picking up the empty wine bottle by its neck, looking at it as if checking its weight. The quiet sounded like the moment in a lab when a machine is turned off and for a second you can hear the absence of noise. Rakesh's body noticed the bottle before his mind did; he took a half step back, bumping into the chest of drawers with its edge polished by a thousand socks.
"Careful," he said, and heard the absurdity of it. It was what you said to students near a soldering iron.
Arindam smiled without humor. "Careful, then."
"Don't," Shruti said—too quickly, like a reflex that had not checked with the rest of her. "Arindam, he'll—"
"He'll what?" Arindam turned the bottle in his hand, a man assessing a tool, not a weapon. "He'll blab? He'll cry? He'll go to the police and ruin your name, Shruti? You think your mother will take that well?"
She flinched. Rakesh said, quietly, "Put the bottle down."
Arindam stepped forward, and Rakesh reached out, catching his boss's wrist—awkwardly, not as a fighter but as a lab rat shocked into reflex. The two men stood in a clumsy knot. Rakesh felt, absurdly, the pulse under Arindam's wrist skin—a fast, competent thrum. Then Shruti moved—a blur past them both—and Rakesh saw the small glint in her hand before he understood it: the paperweight.
It was a gift from DevSys the year he'd joined: a thick glass rectangle with a copper coil embedded inside, pretty in a way that made engineers uncomfortable. She had moved it from the study to the bedroom last month to make a charging station "look less messy." Now she swung it, a desperate arc, not at Arindam but at the small hygiene of space between them and himself.
It hit his temple with a sound that in another context could have been a spoon against a bowl.
Light collapsed, expanded, then came back into a thinner world. He stumbled, hand on the dresser top, catching the corner of the photo frame of them on their Fort Kochi trip. Their smiling faces inside the rectangle watched their three bodies outside it rearrange themselves into a problem.
"Rakesh," Shruti said, and it was half his name and half an instruction to the air.
He put a hand to his forehead and felt the wet. Blood is not hot right away; first it is a surprise of viscosity. He looked at the red on his fingers and thought, blankly: So that is the color manufacturers can never get right in LEDs. He blinked, and the room smeared, and then reassembled as if a child had put it back together and left out a piece.
Arindam wrenched his wrist free. "Idiot," he spat—not at Rakesh but at Shruti, and there was a crack in the word. He looked at the paperweight in her hand with something like respect and something like fury. "Now we have a situation."
"Arindam," she said. "He—he slipped. He—" Her breath was coming high now, like a kettle. "He should sit. Rakesh, sit. You'll be okay."
Rakesh sat because gravity asked. He sank onto the edge of the bed, the old jersey's cloth against his forearm, and felt the thinness of the world like a pulled skin. The hum of the AC drilled into his ears, and under it the smaller, quicker hum of the fridge, and under that a hum he didn't know how to name.
Arindam was moving around the room, swift and efficient, like someone reconstructing a failed demo. He moved the wine glass from the table to the kitchen and rinsed it, the sound of water bright as tinfoil. He wiped the edge of the glass and said, "No prints." He pulled down the bedsheet, rearranged the pillows, turned off the TV with the remote and then wiped the remote. In the bathroom he switched off the exhaust fan; the sudden quiet made the apartment's other noises come forward.
Rakesh tried to stand up and the room sank a little. He sat again. Shruti knelt in front of him with a clean towel and pressed it to his temple. "You're okay," she said, and in the relief of saying it she sounded briefly like the girl he had fallen in love with when they were both poorer and more inventive. "It's a small cut."
Her hands shook. He could feel the tremors through the towel. "Shruti," he said, finding strength by arranging syllables. "You hit me."
She made a small wounded sound. "I—" she began, and didn't finish, because Arindam, returning from the kitchen, said, "The neighbors didn't see me. Half of them are at puja at the community hall. If we do this, we do it now. If we don't, we—" He cut himself, looking at Shruti. "Choose."
Rakesh sat very still. The hum in his head wasn't just noise anymore; it had some pattern to it now, like distant machinery aligning. He was a decent man in unheroic ways. He loved students who built circuits wrong in ingenious directions. He made chutneys from scratch. He folded laundry into rectangles that pleased him. He had believed that life was a sequence of increasingly complex labs with institutional safety protocols and a janitor to mop up after. He had not accounted for this.
"Do what?" Shruti asked, voice like paper.
"Stage a break-in," Arindam said promptly. "Or an accident. He's always tinkering with electronics. The bathroom—water, power—"
"No," she said at once, and something in Rakesh unclenched for an instant at the speed of that refusal. "No, not the bathroom."
"The balcony," Arindam said. "He slipped. Happens. The plants, the wet tiles. He hit his head. The blood—" he glanced at the towel, practical again, mocking again "—already started."
Rakesh found the edge of the bed and stood. The world titled, then righted. "No," he said, not to the plan but to the grammar of it. His voice was calm in ways he had not yet earned. "You're not going to murder me and then write me a one-line email to the world."
Arindam made that small smile again, the one that flattened skin instead of lifting it. "I am trying to save you from a worse scandal, Rocky. Think. Think about what you'll do tomorrow if we stop now. You'll go to HR? To the police? To Tanya? And what will they say? They'll say deviant professors make up stories. That you attacked me. That you attacked her."
He said her like a prize.
"Stop," Shruti said again, weaker. "I can't—"
"You don't have to do anything," Arindam said. "I'll handle it. Sit with him. Cry convincingly later."
Rakesh looked at the two of them and felt precise, tiny things click into place. He felt—absurd to admit—sorry for a version of Shruti that had thought she was choosing an exit into more light, only to find herself here with a glass paperweight she could not take back. He felt a small anger at himself, old and tired, that he had made ordinary kindnesses into a schedule and then handed her the schedule instead of his face.
He walked past them toward the living room. The towel fell from his temple; he let it go. Blood ticked from his hairline to his jaw in a warm metronome. He reached for his backpack by the door and unzipped it, the zipper snagging, the familiar stutter. He pulled out the copper coil, the one that had sat around the cup on his lab bench, and felt its weight in his hand. He did not have a plan. He had a coil.
"Rocky," Arindam said warningly.
Rakesh turned. "You're a manager," he said. "You think everything is negotiable because the whiteboard makes it so. But electrons do not care about narrative." He lifted the coil a little, not as a weapon but as a proof. "There are truths that do not want to be your friend."
"Put that down," Arindam said, and took a step. In the small movement was a decision: if this man would not be steered, he would be removed. Rakesh saw the decision and, with a strange webbed calm, accepted it as an output of an input he had not designed.
He backed into the hallway. On the left was the small utility closet where they kept the mop and the bucket and the World War II-era extension board with the cracked plastic that he had promised Shruti he would replace. He opened the closet and reached for the board. The naked wires near the plug looked like bitten straws. He was suddenly, acutely aware of the foolishness of the human body, its unrecoverable wetness.
"Stop," Shruti said, panic sharp now, her voice a new instrument. "Rakesh, what are you—"
"Staging a break-in is too much work," Arindam said flatly, coming closer. The bottle was back in his hand. "We'll do accidental electrocution. He's always been sloppy. Everyone will believe it. Even his mother will believe it. She thinks he's brilliant; brilliant people are always messy."
Rakesh paused with the extension board in his hands. There is a point in every experiment where you decide whether to keep going or kill the power. He had taught this to first-years as a metaphor for avoiding sunk-cost fallacy. He looked at the cracked plastic and thought, ruefully, that sunk costs won.
He stepped back into the living room, the coil in one hand, the board in the other, and said, "No."
It happened in a small, stupid way as most fatal things do. Arindam lunged, not with grace but with confidence born of lifetime. Rakesh half-raised the coil without intention to threaten, only to create space. The coil snagged the bottle, the bottle slipped, Arindam's weight carried him forward, the two collided. Shruti screamed, and the scream existed as pure frequency; you could have recorded it and analyzed it for harmonics.
They went down in a tangle that turned the rug into a complicit witness. The bottle cracked against the floor and rolled toward the sofa with a lazy intelligence. The copper coil bit into Rakesh's palm. The extension board skidded under the coffee table and, in some quiet cosmic joke, sparked briefly where naked wire met the switch plate, a tiny star in cheap plastic daylight.
Arindam's knee found Rakesh's ribs. Pain is a math the body does without you. The world narrowed to the size of the space between their faces. Rakesh smelled the other man's cologne, lemon and something synthetic. He thought, wildly, of exam invigilation, of how quiet rooms can be when rules are made of air.
Arindam's hand closed over Rakesh's throat. Not tight. Not yet. Test pressure. He whispered, "Sleep. Be smart."
Rakesh lifted the coil higher, more a shield than an offense. The coil thudded against Arindam's forearm. The boss grunted, annoyed now, tired of play. The hand on Rakesh's throat tightened. The room went water.
In the water, sound is different. The AC hum became a long vowel. Shruti's voice became a movement in a field. Rakesh's own pulse became an oscillation he could almost diagram. He saw, with the precision of good instruments, the small constellation of lights in the hallway—the red LED on the router, the green blink on the surge protector, the tiny amber on the mosquito repellent. The world was a circuit, wired badly, trying anyway.
He tried to pull the hand away and found his arms slow. He tried to push the coil between them and found friction. He tried to say Shruti's name and found that air had been repossessed.
"Almost," Arindam whispered, and the word was a stair.
It is a terrible thing to die in your own living room, Rakesh thought, in a room that is not grand enough for drama, surrounded by objects you chose for their ability to be ignored. He felt a fury at the smallness of it, not just the act but the staging, the way it would be explained afterward as if he were a subplot in other people's calendars. He tried once more to pry the hand away and the hand did not move because it had decided not to.
He heard Shruti say, "Stop, he's—" and then, softer, more to herself, "Arindam, stop," and the second "stop" had no engine.
Dots came into the edge of things like a design you're too close to see properly. He was suddenly most aware of his own hands, which had done so many gentle tasks—aligning paste, lighting stoves, cupping an old terracotta cup of tea in Shobhabazar while rain gnawed the world. He thought absurdly of a thought he'd had at the airport: electrons do not care about narrative. He thought equally absurdly of the copper coil as if it were a friend. He thought of his mother's voice saying his name the way mothers say names, like a refrain built into bone. He tried to build a circuit from these pieces and failed, not for lack of design but for lack of power.
Something gave. The world tilted, then slid.
In the last small window before everything went wide, he saw Shruti's face very clearly—not the guilt or the adrenaline but the thin hard line of fear that runs in people who know they went down a wrong road and do not know how to undo the asphalt. He wanted to say "it wasn't all your fault" and "you also had a choice" and "we were starving and didn't say it," which are incompatible sentences, and his mouth made a shape and made no sound.
Dark came. Not the dark of sleep. The dark that lies under noise.
In that dark, a hum found him again. It was not the AC or the refrigerator or even the blood trying to organize itself. It was a hum like a large room behind a wall where someone was testing the lights. It frightened him less than everything that had preceded it. If he had had a notebook, he would have written: New frequency. Unknown source. He surrendered his grip on the coil, and somewhere very far away it struck the floor and made a sound as precise as a point plotted on an axis.
He fell into the hum. It caught him, as river water catches, both indifferent and absolute.
Later, the neighbors would say they had heard nothing. The security guard would say he saw no stranger. The landlady would say she always wondered about that nice young man who worked too much and smiled not enough. Tanya would say nothing at all.
But all of that was later. In the now that would soon be a then, Shruti shook Arindam's shoulder and said, too loudly, "He fainted," as if the volume could wrestle truth into its shape. Arindam pressed two fingers to Rakesh's neck and found the silence there. He moved quickly in the new grammar, like a man who had practiced sentences in the mirror.
"Balcony," he said.
"No," she said, but he was already lifting, and and an old lamp on the console table tilted and fell and the bulb broke with a grin of glass, and for a moment the room was lit only by the router's heartbeat. The apartment smelled of copper and exhausted cologne and a little like rain about to happen on a river he had not yet seen.
Outside, a tram took a corner and in doing so sang a long lonely note. Inside, the men who had not been boys for a long time made a simple plan and mistook it for fate.
The hum continued, louder now, or perhaps it only seemed louder because one man was gone from its other side. If there had been another listener in the room, a very quiet and peculiar one, they might have heard that the hum was layered—one frequency like wire, another like water, another like breath. They might have guessed, if they had unusual senses or an unusual childhood, that the hum was not sound at all but the world composing itself in a different meter. They might have written in a small, precise hand: Compile event detected.
Rakesh did not write it. He fell through.
And elsewhere, in a world one thousand times larger where empires held their breath and counted their banners, a boy in an ashram by a river gasped like a diver breaking water.