The first sign that something was wrong came on a Tuesday.
Arjun didn't recognize it as a sign. That was the cruelty of fate — it didn't announce itself with thunder and lightning. It arrived quietly, wearing ordinary clothes, hiding behind coincidence.
It started at the warehouse.
Banerjee called him into the small, cluttered office at the back of the building — a room that smelled of bidi smoke, sweat, and old paper. The supervisor sat behind a desk that was more paperwork than wood, his round face glistening with perspiration despite the fan grinding overhead.
"Sit, Malhotra."
Arjun didn't sit. He had never been invited to sit in this office before. Workers stood. Workers listened. Workers left. That was the hierarchy, and any deviation from it meant something was either very good or very bad.
Given the way Banerjee was avoiding his eyes, it was not very good.
"There's been a restructuring," Banerjee said, shuffling papers he wasn't reading. "Corporate decision. New management. They're cutting the evening shift workers by forty percent."
Arjun's stomach tightened. "I'm evening shift."
"Yes."
"Am I being let go?"
Banerjee looked up. His expression carried the particular discomfort of a man delivering a death sentence while pretending to discuss the weather. "Not immediately. But your hours are being reduced. Three days a week instead of six. Effective next Monday."
Three days.
Half his income.
Half of nine thousand was four thousand five hundred. Minus rent — three thousand. That left fifteen hundred for his mother's medication, Priya's school, food, bus fare, everything.
Fifteen hundred rupees.
The number sat in his chest like a fist.
"Is there a reason?" Arjun kept his voice level. Engineers solved problems. They didn't panic. "My performance reviews —"
"Your performance is fine, Malhotra. Better than fine. But the decision came from above." Banerjee gestured vaguely upward, as if God himself had issued the termination order. "New owners. Some big company bought a controlling stake last month. They're restructuring everything."
"Which company?"
Banerjee rummaged through his papers. Found a letterhead. Squinted at it.
"Rathore Industries."
The name meant nothing to Arjun. It was just a name — two words on a letterhead, printed in expensive font. He had never heard of Rathore Industries, had no reason to connect it to a man in a glass tower, a crystal whiskey glass, a file with his photograph clipped neatly at the bottom.
"Can I appeal?" he asked.
"You can try. There's a new regional manager starting next week. Maybe talk to him." Banerjee shrugged — the shrug of a man who knew appeals went nowhere but felt obligated to suggest them. "I'm sorry, Malhotra. You're one of my best workers."
"But not good enough to keep."
Banerjee flinched. He opened his mouth, closed it, then looked back down at his papers.
Arjun left the office.
He stood in the loading bay for three minutes, watching trucks reverse into docking positions with mechanical precision. The afternoon sun hammered the concrete. Dust swirled in the diesel-heavy air. Workers shouted, machinery groaned, the world continued its relentless, indifferent operation.
Four thousand five hundred rupees a month.
His mother's medication alone cost two thousand.
He closed his eyes. Breathed. Counted to ten. Opened his eyes.
Then he went back to work, because crates didn't stack themselves, and the world didn't care about his arithmetic.
He didn't tell Meera.
This was his first mistake — though he wouldn't recognize it as a mistake until much later, when mistakes and their consequences had piled up like bodies after a war.
He didn't tell her because telling her would mean admitting that the fragile architecture of his life was cracking. That the man who had promised her father he would never cause her a tear was already struggling to cause himself a meal. That the boy who had walked into the rain for her couldn't afford the bus fare to walk back.
So he lied.
Not with words — Arjun was a terrible liar with words. He lied with silence, with omission, with the careful curation of what he shared and what he buried.
"How was your day?" she asked that evening, sitting on their steps, the courtyard golden around them.
"Fine. Normal." Two lies in three words. Efficient.
"You look tired."
"Always tired. It's my default setting."
She studied him. That searching look — the one that saw through walls, through skin, through all the careful architecture of his denial. He held her gaze and prayed that for once, for this once, she wouldn't see.
She didn't.
Or maybe she did, but chose not to press. Meera understood the geography of pride — its mountains, its borders, its minefields. She knew when to explore and when to step back.
"I brought you something," she said instead.
She pulled a small notebook from her bag. It was simple — blue cover, lined pages, nothing expensive. But on the first page, in her fierce, small handwriting, she had copied a poem.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
"Bol, ki lab azad hain tere
Bol, zabaan ab tak teri hai
Tera sutwan jism hai tera
Bol, ki jaan ab tak teri hai"
Speak, for your lips are free.
Speak, your tongue is still yours.
Your upright body is yours.
Speak, your life is still yours.
He read it three times. Each time, the words cut deeper — not with pain, but with something sharper. Recognition. The poem was a mirror, and it reflected a man who had been silencing himself for so long that he had forgotten the sound of his own voice.
"Why this poem?" he asked.
"Because you go quiet when something is wrong." She pulled her knees to her chest. "You think silence protects people. But silence is just loneliness wearing a mask."
The accuracy of this statement hit him like a physical blow.
"I'm fine, Meera."
"I know you are." She leaned against his shoulder. "But when you're not — whenever that is — I'm here. That's all. I'm here."
He put his arm around her. Pulled her close. Pressed his face into her hair, which smelled of coconut oil and the jasmine flowers she tucked behind her ear every morning — a habit inherited from her mother, she had told him once, the only inheritance that didn't require paperwork.
"I know," he whispered.
But he didn't tell her.
He held his silence like a shield, not realizing that shields don't just block attacks — they also block the people trying to reach you.
The second sign came four days later.
Arjun was walking home from the bus stop — a fifteen-minute walk through narrow lanes that grew darker and narrower as they approached his neighborhood. It was nine-thirty at night. His engineering class had run late. The streets were mostly empty — a few tea stalls still open, their kerosene lamps casting yellow circles on the ground, a group of men playing cards on a plastic sheet, a dog sleeping in the gutter with the specific contentment of creatures who expected nothing from life.
He was thinking about the water purification project. His professor, Dr. Basu, had praised the design but pointed out flaws in the filtration mechanism that would require additional components — components that cost money Arjun didn't have. He was mentally redesigning the filter when he noticed the car.
It was a black SUV. Expensive. Tinted windows. Parked at the end of his lane, engine idling. In this neighborhood — where the most expensive vehicle was Gupta-ji's fifteen-year-old Maruti — a black SUV was as subtle as a gunshot.
Arjun slowed.
The SUV's rear window lowered an inch. Then closed. The engine revved once — a low, deliberate growl — and the car pulled away, disappearing around the corner with the smooth, silent efficiency of something that didn't want to be remembered.
Arjun stood still for a moment. The lane was quiet. The card players hadn't noticed. The dog hadn't woken.
He looked at the spot where the car had been. Tire marks on the dusty road. Nothing else.
Coincidence, he told himself. Rich person lost in the wrong neighborhood. Happens all the time.
But something cold settled at the base of his spine — the instinct of a man who had grown up in streets where coincidences could get you killed. An animal awareness. A primal recognition of being watched.
He walked home quickly. Locked the door. Checked the windows — a pointless exercise, since the windows were held together by hope and oxidized hinges.
His mother was asleep. Priya was studying by the light of a desk lamp, her face scrunched in concentration.
"Dada, what's the atomic number of selenium?"
"Thirty-four."
"Thanks." She scribbled, then looked up. "You okay? You look weird."
"Weird how?"
"Like you saw a ghost."
"No ghosts. Just tired."
"You're always tired. That's your answer for everything." She narrowed their father's eyes. "Is Meera okay?"
"Meera is fine."
"Then what's wrong?"
"Nothing. Sleep."
"It's nine-thirty."
"Then study. Quietly."
She muttered something about tyrannical brothers and returned to selenium. Arjun sat on his mattress, his back against the wall, and stared at the locked door.
The cold feeling didn't leave.
He pulled out his phone and texted Meera.
"Goodnight. I love you."
Her reply came in twelve seconds.
"Goodnight. I love you more. And yes, that's a competition. I intend to win."
He smiled. The cold receded slightly. Not entirely, but enough to let him breathe.
He fell asleep with his phone in his hand and her words glowing on the screen like a nightlight in a dark room.
The third sign came a week later, and this time, there was no mistaking it for coincidence.
Meera called him during his lunch break at the warehouse. Her voice was different — not scared, not yet, but unsettled. Like a lake whose surface was calm but whose depths were stirring.
"Something strange happened today," she said.
"What?"
"A man came to the bookshop. In Shantiniketan."
Arjun's hand tightened on the phone. "What man?"
"He said he was from a publishing company. Very polite. Expensive suit. He said they wanted to partner with Baba's shop for some literary festival." She paused. "But he wasn't interested in the books, Arjun. He kept asking about me. My studies. My schedule. Where I live in Kolkata. What hostel I stay in."
The cold from the SUV night returned — not at the base of his spine this time, but everywhere. Every nerve. Every cell.
"Did he give a name?"
"Saxena. He said his name was Saxena."
The name meant nothing to Arjun. But the pattern meant something. The warehouse restructuring. The SUV in his lane. Now a stranger asking questions about Meera.
Three data points.
Engineers didn't believe in coincidence. Engineers believed in patterns.
"Meera, listen to me." His voice was calm. Deliberately, forcefully calm. The calm of a man packing sandbags before a flood. "Don't talk to that man again. If he comes back, tell your father. And stay at the university hostel at night. Don't walk alone."
Silence on the line.
"Arjun, you're scaring me."
"I'm being careful. There's a difference."
"Is there something you're not telling me?"
Yes. My hours were cut. A black car was watching my house. Someone is asking about you. And I have no idea who, or why, but every instinct I have is screaming that something is coming.
"No," he said. "I just want you safe."
Another silence. Longer this time. He could hear her breathing — measured, steady, the breathing of a woman who wanted to believe him but whose intelligence wouldn't quite let her.
"Okay," she said finally. "I'll be careful."
"Promise me."
"I promise." A beat. "Arjun?"
"Yes?"
"Whatever it is — whatever you're not telling me — we face it together. That was the deal. Remember?"
The deal. The unspoken contract signed on rain-soaked steps. No secrets. No shields. No silence.
"I remember," he said.
He hung up.
Stared at the warehouse ceiling — corrugated metal, rust-spotted, indifferent.
Then he pulled out the notebook Meera had given him. Opened to the first page. Read the Faiz poem she had written in her fierce, small hand.
Speak, for your lips are free.
He closed the notebook.
His lips were free, but the words were trapped — caught between what he knew and what he feared, between the man he was and the man he needed to become, between the light of their love and the shadow that was gathering at its edges.
Who is watching us?
Why?
And how do I fight something I can't see?
The questions circled like vultures. Patient. Hungry. Waiting.
That evening, in the presidential suite of the Grand Oberoi Hotel in Kolkata, Vikram Singh Rathore reviewed Saxena's report.
"The father is protective but manageable," Saxena summarized, standing at attention by the window. "The girl is intelligent. Cautious. She deflected most of my questions."
"And the boy?"
"Still at the warehouse. His hours have been reduced as instructed. Financial pressure is building. His mother's condition is worsening."
Vikram nodded. Slowly. The nod of a chess player watching his pawns slide into position.
"Increase the pressure," he said. "But subtly. I don't want him suspicious. I want him desperate."
"And the girl, sir?"
Vikram stood. Walked to the window. Below, Kolkata spread out like a map of chaos — lights, traffic, millions of lives moving in patterns they believed were free but were, in reality, controlled by men like him. Men with money. Men with power. Men who understood that the world wasn't a democracy — it was an auction, and everything had a price.
"The girl," he said softly, "is not to be touched. Not yet. She is to be watched. Protected, even. I want her comfortable. I want her happy."
He turned from the window. His green eyes — cold, calculating, empty of everything except hunger — met Saxena's.
"I want her happy," he repeated, "so that when I take her happiness away from that boy and offer her mine instead, she understands the difference."
Saxena said nothing. There was nothing to say. He had seen this before — the calm, methodical destruction of anyone who stood between Vikram Singh Rathore and his desire. It always started slowly. It always ended the same way.
With ruin.
"That will be all," Vikram said.
Saxena left.
Vikram returned to the window. Pressed his palm against the glass. The city pulsed below him like a living thing — breathing, struggling, surviving.
Somewhere down there, in a room with cracked walls, a boy was holding a notebook with a poem written by a girl who loved him.
Vikram pressed harder against the glass.
The glass didn't break.
Nothing broke.
Not yet.