Jaipur never really sleeps.
It just changes its heartbeat after midnight.
The old pink stone of the walled city glows faintly under sodium lamps while the new glass towers on the Ajmer Road pulse blue and violet like they're trying to pretend they belong somewhere else. Between these two worlds—crumbling havelis and steel-and-neon—there is a narrow strip of asphalt called Ghat Gate Road where money changes hands without receipts and where reputations are measured in grams and gunshots.
Vikram "Vicky" Shekhawat owned most of that strip.
Not on paper, of course. On paper he was a twenty-nine-year-old importer of "marble handicrafts and Rajasthani textiles." The marble came in white bricks wrapped in cling film. The textiles arrived vacuum-sealed and odourless. Everyone who mattered knew the truth; everyone who didn't matter was too afraid to ask.
He was tall the way old Rajput blood sometimes still grows them—six-three, wide-shouldered, long-limbed. The kind of height that makes people step aside without thinking. A thin scar ran from the outer corner of his left eyebrow down to the cheekbone; people said different things about how he got it. Most versions ended with someone else dying.
Tonight he sat in the back of a matte-black Fortuner with blacked-out windows, engine idling outside a small, brightly lit juice centre called "Gulab & Gangour." The sign was new. The girl behind the counter was newer.
She was maybe seventeen.
Hair the colour of burnt jaggery, braided in one thick rope that reached past her waist. She moved like water poured slowly—never hurried, never clumsy. When she smiled at a customer (which was often), two small dimples appeared exactly symmetrical, like someone had pressed thumbs gently into wet clay and left them there.
Vicky had noticed her three weeks ago.
Three weeks ago he'd stopped for black coffee at 1:17 a.m. because the meeting with the Jodhpur people had gone longer than expected and his throat tasted like gunpowder and disappointment. She had handed him the paper cup with both hands, the way elders teach children to give things, and said,
"Careful, it's hot from the stove."
Ordinary sentence. Thousands of people say it every day.
But the way she said it—soft, serious, like she was personally responsible for the temperature of every liquid in the world—hooked something behind his ribs and refused to let go.
He came back the next night.
Then the next.
He never ordered the same thing twice. Sometimes black coffee. Sometimes kesar-laced badam milk. Sometimes just water in a tall steel glass so he had an excuse to stay four extra minutes watching her wipe the counter in slow, perfect circles.
He never spoke more than six words.
She never asked his name.
Tonight the Fortuner's rear window was cracked exactly three inches. Cool February air carried the scent of crushed sugarcane and her jasmine hair oil into the car. Vicky leaned his temple against the leather headrest and watched.
A college boy—maybe first year, nervous swagger—leaned across the counter and said something that made her laugh. The laugh was small, surprised, like she hadn't expected to make the sound herself. The boy's friends hooted from the bike parked crooked on the footpath.
Vicky's index finger tapped once, twice, against the armrest.
The driver—Lalla, thirty-seven, three children, no tongue (literally; someone had taken it years ago as payment for a debt)—glanced at the rear-view mirror. He knew that rhythm. One tap = irritation. Two taps = decision being made.
Vicky's voice came out calm, almost bored.
"Plate number of the Splendor. The red one."
Lalla nodded once. He didn't need to write it down.
Inside the juice centre the girl was now pouring pomegranate juice, the red liquid catching the tube-light and throwing bloody coins across her knuckles. She looked up suddenly—as if someone had whispered her name—and her gaze travelled straight through the tinted glass and landed, somehow, on Vicky's face.
For three heartbeats neither of them moved.
Then she blinked, gave the smallest frown—like she was trying to remember where she'd seen him before—and turned back to the customer.
Vicky exhaled through his nose.
He didn't know her name yet.
He didn't know where she lived, who her father was, whether she had brothers who carried knives, whether she prayed at the small white temple near the gate or at the big one near Hawa Mahal. He knew none of those practical, useful things.
What he did know, with the same bone-deep certainty that told him which cops would take cash and which ones would take bullets, was this:
She was already his.
Not in the way poets mean it.
Not in the way decent men mean it.
In the way territory is his.
In the way the city after dark already belonged to him before anyone signed the papers.
He tapped the armrest once more—final.
"Tomorrow," he said quietly. "Find out everything."
Lalla dipped his chin.
The Fortuner pulled away from the kerb, slow and soundless, swallowed by the pink-and-blue night.
Behind the counter the girl wiped her hands on her dupatta, looked toward the road again, and murmured to herself—so softly no one heard—
"I've seen that car before."
She didn't know why the sentence made her stomach fold inward.
She would learn.
(to be continued)