The Last Local

A novel, told chapter by chapter. This is Chapter 1. It is a work of fiction; any resemblance to real people is coincidental.

---

Prologue

It was eight minutes to midnight, on a rooftop in Andheri, six months after the night this story really begins. The wind was loud up there, and the city was louder.

Somewhere far below, a wedding band was murdering an old song. A train hummed across the distant bridge with all its windows lit. On the terrace, under a string of blinking fairy lights that somebody had hung for a birthday and never taken down, a young man sat with his back against a water tank and a folded paper in his hand.

His name was Roy. He had read the paper thirty-one times. He had never once shown it to anyone.

It was a letter. It began Dear Shreya, and every line after that had been struck out, rewritten, struck out again, until the page looked like a battlefield.

Behind him the terrace door banged open, and there was laughter, two voices, one bright and one careful. He shoved the letter deep into his jacket and turned his face into a smile, as if a smile were something you could put on with a switch.

"There you are," said Riyansh, holding up two paper cups. "We were looking everywhere."

And behind him, in a yellow kurta, laughing at something Riyansh had said, came Shreya.

Roy looked at her. He looked at Riyansh. He looked at the sky.

How, he thought, did we get here?

It is a fair question, and to answer it we have to go back six months, to a railway platform at Churchgate, and a boy who was running for a train that he ought to have missed.

---

Platform Two, Churchgate

It began six months earlier, at 11:38 at night, on Platform Two.

Churchgate at night is a different animal.

By day it is a river: a hurrying, shouting, elbowing, unstoppable river of a million people who all need to be somewhere ten minutes ago. But by half past eleven at night the river had thinned to a trickle, and the platform belonged to the stragglers. A sleeping porter. A couple sharing an umbrella that was not needed. A boy selling the last of his roasted peanuts, calling garam, garam to nobody. Two stray dogs asleep on the yellow safety line, head to tail, like a small furry yin and yang.

And through the middle of it, running, with a rucksack banging on his back and a guitar case in his hand, came Anirban Roy.

He was late because of a café in Colaba, where a man who owned a great many sandwiches had asked him to play "just three songs," and had then made him play eleven, and had paid him, in the end, in sandwiches. Roy had eaten two on the way to the station and was carrying the other five in his jacket like contraband.

"Wait! Wait, wait, wait, wait, Uncle, please hold the door!"

The guard, a large, unhurried man with a moustache like a broom, looked at him, and slowly, deliberately, went on raising the green flag.

Roy leaped.

He did not so much board the train as fall into it. The guitar case hit the floor. His rucksack hit a pole. He himself hit an elderly gentleman, who said, without looking up from his newspaper, "Young man, the compartment is not a swimming pool."

"Sorry, Uncle. Sorry. Thank you. Sorry."

The train lurched forward. Roy sat down heavily on the nearest seat, breathing like a marathon runner, and looked at his phone.

It was 11:41, and this was the last fast train north, the one that would carry him back to Andheri.

If he had missed it, he would have spent the night on a bench at Churchgate, because the hostel gate in Andheri shut at half past twelve, and the warden, a frighteningly punctual man called Pawar Sir, had told him personally that any student found outside after that would be "addressed."

"Addressed," Roy had said, later, to his roommate. "Like a letter. Delivered to the wrong house."

He was twenty years old. He was a second-year mechanical engineering student. He was from Kolkata, which meant that he believed, deeply and without evidence, that he was the funniest person in any room he entered. He had come to Mumbai eighteen months ago with a suitcase, a guitar, and a single piece of advice from his grandmother: "Don't trust anyone who says the local train is not so crowded."

He had trusted no one since.

His father ran a small hardware shop off Rashbehari Avenue and had two words for Roy's future: "stable job." An engineering degree, then a posting with some large firm, then a flat, then a wife his mother approved of, then, eventually, a hardware shop of his own to inherit and pretend he had always wanted. Roy had never once argued with this plan out loud. He simply kept, in a separate, unspoken part of himself, a second plan: three chords, a good hook, and a city full of strangers on trains who would stop, just for a minute, and listen. He had not told his parents about the sandwiches-for-songs arrangement in Colaba. He was fairly sure his mother would call it "begging with a guitar," and he was fairly sure she would not be entirely wrong.

He had never had a serious girlfriend. He had been, at every wedding, every college fest, every family function since the age of fifteen, the funny one, the one who made the aunties laugh and the group photos better and was never, somehow, the one anybody thought to introduce their daughter to. He had made his peace with it, mostly, the way a person makes peace with a leaking tap: not because it stops mattering, but because complaining about it stopped helping.

Roy pulled out his earphones, leaned back, and finally looked at the people around him.

Not many. This far along the line, at this hour, the compartment held a handful of dozing souls. A sleepy old man. A woman with a baby wrapped in a shawl, both fast asleep. Two boys in the corner arguing softly about a cricket score.

And, on the seat opposite him, a girl.

She was sitting bolt upright, with her knees pressed together and a large, serious-looking bag on her lap, like someone waiting to be called into an examination hall. She had thick dark hair pulled into a hasty plait and a yellow kurta that had clearly been through a very long day. She was staring at her phone with the expression of a woman watching a slow disaster.

The screen was black.

She pressed the button. Nothing. She pressed it again, harder, as if it might feel guilty. She held it to her ear, for reasons known only to herself. She shook it gently.

"It is not a maracas," said Roy, before he could stop himself.

She looked up.

She had extraordinary eyes, the deep, watchful, faintly indignant eyes of a person who reads the last page of a novel first. For a second she looked him up and down, taking in the guitar, the crumpled jacket, the general air of a boy who has just been thrown out of a swimming pool.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your phone," said Roy. "You are shaking it. It is not a maracas."

"My phone," said the girl, with icy precision, "is dead. My charger is in a room in Borivali, which is a very long way from this train. My mother will call at midnight, as she has called every night for two years, and if it does not answer, she will call the police, the college, and possibly the Prime Minister."

"Ah," said Roy.

"So no, it is not a maracas."

"Understood."

Her name, though he did not know it yet, was Shreya Menon: a Mumbai girl through and through, born in the same Borivali flat her grandparents had moved into forty years ago when they came from Kerala looking for work and never left. She was in her final year of civil engineering at a college in Fort, and she had missed her usual half-past-nine train because her project group had been in the structures drawing hall since six, arguing over a truss design for a submission that was due, with the particular cruelty of academic deadlines, at nine the next morning. She was the only one in her group who had not wanted to leave until it was right.

She wanted, when all of this was finished, to work on infrastructure in places that were usually only written about after a bridge fell down: small towns, forgotten rivers, the kind of project no glossy firm competed for. Her mother wanted, more urgently and more often, for her to meet a suitable boy from a suitable family, a campaign Shreya had been deflecting since she was nineteen with the same three sentences, worn smooth from use: she was busy, she was not ready, there was time. There had never, in fact, been anyone to be ready for. She had spent so many years being the sensible one, the one with the plan, that being spoken to by a stranger about a maracas felt, obscurely, like being handed something she did not know she had been missing.

They stared at each other. The train rattled on. The woman with the baby stirred, murmured something, and slept again.

Roy sighed. He unzipped his rucksack, rummaged among a tangle of cables and a half-eaten packet of biscuits, and drew out a small, battered power bank, the size of a cigarette box.

"Thirty percent," he said. "It is all I have. You can have twenty."

"Why would you do that?"

"Because I have a mother, too," said Roy. "And she calls at twelve-fifteen. Which gives us exactly twenty minutes of friendship before I need it back."

For a moment, she simply looked at the power bank. Then, slowly, unbelievably, the corner of her mouth twitched.

"Twenty minutes of friendship," said the girl, taking it. "That is a very specific arrangement."

"I am a very specific person."

She plugged in her phone. The screen flickered, blinked, and came alive with a little red battery. She let out a breath that she must have been holding since the drawing hall.

"Shreya," she said.

"Roy."

"Just Roy?"

"Anirban Roy. But everyone calls me Roy. It is easier. Nobody in Mumbai can say Anirban without an extra a somewhere."

"Anirbaan," said Shreya, experimentally.

"See? You have added one already."

She laughed. It was a quick, startled, wonderful laugh, the kind that escapes before you can catch it, and it filled the whole shabby compartment like a lamp being switched on. The old man lowered his newspaper an inch and looked at them over the top of it, deeply and thoroughly disapproving. Then, very slowly, he raised it again.

Roy thought: Oh. That is going to be a problem.

He did not yet know how big a problem.

---

The Boy Who Was Pretending To Be Asleep

Three seats down, a young man was very carefully not listening.

He was slumped against the window with his eyes shut, in the posture of an exhausted person who has fallen asleep on public transport. But a person who is actually asleep does not keep one finger tapping on the strap of a camera bag. A person who is actually asleep does not smile, very slightly, at the phrase "It is not a maracas."

His name was Riyansh Malhotra, and he had been awake since five.

He was twenty, too. Second-year computer engineering, from Jaipur. He was the kind of student that teachers describe with the words "very sincere," which is what teachers say when they mean "very quiet, and slightly frightening at mathematics." He had come to Mumbai on a scholarship, sharing a tiny room with two other boys, and he had a habit that his friends had never quite understood: he photographed everything. Doors. Puddles. Old men sleeping on benches. The way the light fell across a train seat at four in the afternoon.

He never showed the photographs to anyone.

Tonight, he had been shooting a night-time exhibition at a gallery in Kala Ghoda, for a friend, for free, for love. He was carrying eleven thousand rupees' worth of borrowed lens on his shoulder and the emotional weight of a person who has just done something that took all his courage and that nobody else will ever notice.

He was on a full scholarship, the kind that came with a quiet, permanent pressure attached: a widowed mother in Jaipur who took in tailoring work, a younger sister who wanted to study medicine, and an unspoken understanding that four years from now there would be a campus placement, a software job, a salary that made all of it worth it. Photography was not on that list. It had never been on that list. He owned no camera of his own; every frame he had ever taken was on borrowed equipment, in borrowed hours, between assignments, a habit that felt, even to him, faintly illicit, like reading a novel under the desk during a lecture on thermodynamics.

He had never had a girlfriend either, though for a different reason than Roy's. He was not funny. He was watchful, and careful, and said most of his best lines a full ten seconds after the moment for them had passed. He had liked exactly one girl in his life before tonight, in his final year of school, and had spent eight months working up the courage to say so, by which time she had moved to Pune. He had decided, somewhere in that silence, that he was simply not a person things happened to quickly. Tonight, for reasons he could not yet explain to himself, felt different, and that frightened him more than the flooded tracks ever could.

He opened one eye, just a crack.

The girl was laughing.

He had not planned to look. He wanted to be clear about that, later, when he thought about it. It was the laugh that did it. It cut across the dull rattle of the train like a bright thread, and something in his chest answered it, a small, quiet, ridiculous click, like a shutter.

Do not, said the sensible part of Riyansh's brain. You are tired. It is midnight. She is a stranger. Close the eye.

He closed the eye.

He opened it again.

She had turned slightly, telling Roy something that clearly involved her mother, and the light from the overhead tube fell across the side of her face, along her cheekbone and the curve of her plait, exactly the way the light falls in the kind of photograph that he never took because it would have felt like stealing.

His fingers found the camera. He lifted it an inch.

No, thought Riyansh, appalled at himself. No, no, no.

He put it back, closed both eyes very firmly, and pretended to sleep for the next twenty-two minutes, which is a very long time to pretend to be asleep, and is, incidentally, how most great romances begin.

---

The Train That Stopped

The train had not gone far.

It had crept out of Churchgate, and slid through the wet dark past Marine Lines, and then, somewhere beyond the rooftops and the rain, it had slowed, and sighed, and stopped altogether, in the middle of nowhere, with a small apologetic jolt, like a very old man sitting down. For twenty-two minutes it stood there. The lights flickered. The rain hammered on the roof. Somewhere up ahead, a great deal of Mumbai was under water, and nobody in the compartment knew it yet.

At four minutes past midnight, the loudspeaker crackled and a tired voice announced, first in Marathi, then in Hindi, then in an English that seemed to have been assembled from spare parts, that owing to water on the tracks at Grant Road, the train would go no further. All services were cancelled. Passengers were requested to alight, to walk back carefully along the track to Marine Lines station, and to "kindly cooperate."

So they cooperated. The compartment emptied. The old man folded his newspaper and climbed down with dignity. The woman with the baby lifted her sleeping bundle and shuffled after him. The two cricket boys vanished into the rain. And the three of them, Roy with his guitar, Shreya with her heavy bag, and Riyansh with his camera pretending to be an ordinary shoulder-bag, picked their way along the wet ballast in a long, damp, grumbling line of strangers, and climbed onto the platform at Marine Lines, under a display board that blinked one line in orange:

ALL SERVICES CANCELLED.

"No," said Roy.

"It says cancelled," said Shreya.

"It is lying."

"It is a display board. It cannot lie."

"It can. It is government property." He pointed at the arrivals board, which was showing a train that had, apparently, left in the previous decade. "See? Look at that. Proof."

"Roy." She was pale. "Do you understand what this means? I live in Borivali. You live in..."

"Andheri."

"...Andheri. We are at Marine Lines, at midnight, at the wrong end of the city, and the last train has gone nowhere. There are no buses at this hour and the taxi strike began today. I read it on the way here." She lifted her phone, which had now reached twenty percent, and which, at that precise moment, began to buzz. She looked at the screen and closed her eyes. "It is my mother."

"It is twelve-oh-five. She is early."

"She is never early. She is late, and then she is furious. She is early only when she has a premonition."

The phone buzzed. And buzzed. And buzzed.

"You have to answer," said Roy.

"I cannot. What do I say? Mama, I am stuck in the rain at midnight with a boy who has a guitar."

"Say you are with a friend."

"I do not have a friend. I have a stranger with a power bank."

"A friend," said Roy, with great dignity, "is a stranger who has lent you a power bank. It is the second stage of the relationship. It is in the textbook."

She stared at him. The phone buzzed. And then, from somewhere behind them, a quiet, slightly embarrassed voice said:

"There is a hostel just outside the station. Very close. Quite decent. They have a night desk."

They turned.

Riyansh Malhotra was standing three feet away, holding a camera bag and a small, apologetic expression. He had clearly not planned to say it. He looked as if it had escaped.

"Sorry," he said. "I was sitting behind you. On the train. I was not... I was not listening." A faint flush was climbing up his neck. "I mean, I was listening a little. It was a very small compartment."

Shreya looked at him. Roy looked at him. It was a long, level, forty-second look, the look of two people deciding whether a boy is a hero or a serial killer.

"You were pretending to be asleep," said Roy.

"Yes."

"For twenty-two minutes."

"...Yes."

"That," said Roy slowly, "is the most suspicious thing I have ever seen in my life. I love it. What is your name?"

"Riyansh."

"Riyansh. Are you a serial killer?"

"No."

"Is that what a serial killer would say?"

"Almost certainly," said Riyansh gravely. "But no."

Shreya laughed again. It was the second time, and Riyansh, who had heard the first, felt the same small click somewhere behind his ribs, and stood very still, like a man who has stepped on something that might be a landmine or might be a coin.

The phone buzzed. She answered it.

"Hello, Mama? Yes. Yes, I am... yes, I am in a hostel. No. With friends. A group. Yes, there is a girl also. Two girls. Very big group. Mama, I will call you in the morning. I love you. Bye."

She ended the call. Her hand was shaking a little.

"I have just lied to my mother," said Shreya, with an odd, dazed, exhilarated expression, "for the first time in my life."

"How do you feel?" said Roy.

She considered it.

"Fantastic," she said. "Horrible. Fantastic."

"That," said Roy, "is exactly what it is supposed to feel like."

---

The Hostel That Was Not

By twenty to one they had found the hostel outside the station. It was decent. It also had, according to the sleepy man at the night desk, no rooms.

"Full," he said, without opening his eyes. "Exam season. Everyone sleeps here. Even the corridor is booked."

"We are not asking for a room," said Roy. "We are asking for a chair."

"Chairs are also booked."

"You have booked out chairs?"

"Chairs, benches, floor space." The man opened one eye and looked at them with the flat, bottomless, serene contempt of a person who has said no forty times tonight. "Go to Marine Drive. Sit by the sea. Wait for the morning train. The police do not disturb. It is a Mumbai tradition."

He closed the eye.

They stood on the pavement outside, three strangers under a yellow streetlight, with the rain that had threatened all evening finally deciding, with a small polite sigh, to begin.

"Well," said Roy. "That is that. We shall be addressed."

"Addressed?"

"Never mind. Long story. It involves a warden."

Shreya pulled her dupatta over her head. She looked at the sky, which was a low, thick, orange-grey dome, and at the two boys, and at the long dark road that ran, glistening, toward the sea.

"I have never stayed out all night in my life," she said.

"Never?" said Roy.

"Never. Not once. Not even at my cousin's wedding." She took a slow breath. "Do you know what my mother says about girls who stay out at night?"

"What?"

"She does not say anything. She just looks at me. It is much worse."

There was a small silence. Riyansh, who had not spoken for some minutes, cleared his throat.

"We do not have to," he said, gently. "There is a twenty-four-hour café near the station. It is safe. Well-lit. We could go there. I could... we could sit there until the first train. Nobody will bother you."

She looked at him.

It was a strange look, the look of a person discovering that the boy she had been briefly and unfairly suspicious of had just quietly offered her the one thing that she had needed all evening and had not known how to ask for: permission not to be afraid.

"You are very kind," said Shreya.

"I am not," said Riyansh, going crimson. "It is only that... it is only common sense."

"It is kindness," said Shreya. "Do not argue with me. I read the last page first. I know how things end."

Roy, watching them, felt a small, odd, unwelcome twinge somewhere near the third button of his jacket. He did not have a name for it. He put it away, with the guitar, and said, brightly:

"Alternatively! We could go to Marine Drive."

"Roy," said Shreya.

"Hear me out. It is one in the morning. It is raining. It is the most romantic place in the entire country and we are three strangers who will probably never see each other again. It is exactly the right time."

"For what?"

"For a mistake," said Roy, with great and shining dignity. "I have a very good feeling about it."

Shreya looked at Riyansh. Riyansh looked at the sky. And then, unbelievably, they both began to laugh.

---

The Necklace of Light

Nobody who has seen Marine Drive at one in the morning in the rain will ever forget it.

The great curve of the sea wall runs for three kilometres along the edge of the Arabian Sea, and along its length, strung between the tall old streetlamps, the lights burn in one unbroken golden arc, curving away into the dark like a necklace laid across the throat of the bay. They call it the Queen's Necklace. On a clear night, they say, it looks as if some giant, careless queen has dropped her jewels on the shore and left them lying.

And tonight, in the soft, warm, slanting rain, every light had a halo. Every puddle held a second necklace. The road shone like black glass. The sea beyond the sea wall was a huge, breathing, invisible presence, pulling in and letting out its slow, enormous, silver sighs against the black rocks.

They walked along it, three small figures in a long wet gold.

Nobody was around. A tea vendor at the far end, dozing under an enormous umbrella. A pair of policemen in a parked jeep, sharing a flask, who looked at them for a long, cold, professional moment, and then, evidently deciding that three drenched students were not worth the paperwork, looked away.

"I cannot believe I am here," said Shreya.

She said it softly, as if she were afraid the night might overhear and take it back. She had taken off her sandals. She was walking barefoot along the wet stone of the promenade, holding them in one hand, with her dupatta streaming and her plait coming undone, and she looked, to both boys, in that moment, like something that had wandered out of one of Riyansh's photographs.

"You look like you are in a film," said Roy.

"Do not say things like that."

"Why?"

"Because then I will believe them."

She turned, walking backward for a few steps, laughing, looking at them both. And the rain lay bright on her lashes, and for one second, Riyansh Malhotra, who had promised himself he would not, lifted the camera from his shoulder, framed, and pressed the shutter.

The click was small. But she heard it.

"Did you just take my photograph?"

"...No."

"Riyansh."

"...Yes."

"Show me."

He could not. He knew, with the total, helpless certainty of a boy who has been caught doing the most private thing in the world, that if he turned that screen around, everything in his face would be on it.

"It is not very good," he said. "It is dark. It is only... a test. For the aperture."

"Show me."

He turned the screen around, very slowly, and looked at his own shoes.

There was a long, long silence, broken only by the sea.

The photograph was extraordinary. It was a blur of gold and rain and dark, and in the middle of it, half-turned, laughing, hair coming loose, a girl walking backward toward the camera, caught in the exact moment before she knew that anyone was looking. It was the kind of photograph that makes a person go quiet.

"That is me?" said Shreya.

"Yes."

"I do not look like that."

"You do," said Riyansh, very quietly, still to his shoes. "That is exactly how you look."

Nobody spoke.

Roy, who had been about to say something clever, found that he could not. He stood there in the rain, with his guitar case in his hand and his mouth slightly open, and looked at the photograph, and at Riyansh's ears, which were glowing like traffic lights, and at Shreya, who was staring at the screen with an expression that he had never in his life wanted to be pointed at himself so badly.

Oh, no, thought Roy, very clearly. Oh, no, no, no. This is a disaster.

And then, because he was Anirban Roy, and because it was the only thing he knew how to do, he did what he always did when his heart got too loud.

He unzipped the guitar case.

---

The Song

They sat on the sea wall.

It was wet, and cold, and utterly uncomfortable, and none of them would have traded it for anything. The rain had eased to a fine silver mist. The great waves, out beyond the rocks, broke in long white lines and sighed back into the dark. Far down the promenade, the tea vendor's little lamp glowed like the last star on earth.

Roy played.

It was not a famous song. It was not even a very good one. It was something he had written himself, six months before, on a night when he had been very homesick and the whole city had smelled of somebody else's dinner. It had a simple melody, and a chorus that went up on the third line and then came down like a hand being gently lowered, and the words were about a river, and a long train journey, and a friend you have not met yet.

"And somewhere on the line, Between the stations of the rain, I'll find you, or you'll find me, And nothing will be the same."

He sang softly, with his eyes half closed, the way he sang when he thought nobody could see how much he meant it. His voice was not polished. It was warm, and slightly cracked at the high notes, and utterly true.

Shreya sat with her knees drawn up and her chin on her arms, watching the fingers on the strings.

Riyansh sat beside her, with the camera in his lap, not photographing, for the first time all evening, because there are moments too full to be held in a frame.

And then, without warning, in the middle of the second line, the rain came back.

It did not announce itself the way it had earlier, outside the hostel that was not. It came softly this time, a fine, warm, sudden scatter, as if the sky had simply changed its mind. Roy did not stop playing. His eyes were half closed, and the song had him, and he did not feel the first drops land on his own shoulders at all.

Shreya felt them in her hair.

One drop, caught somewhere in the loose crown of her plait, ran slowly down, following the line of a strand that had come free hours ago on the sea wall, and traced the curve of her temple, and slid, unhurried, the whole cool length of her cheek, and hung, for one suspended second, at the corner of her jaw, silver under the streetlamp, before it fell.

Roy opened his eyes.

He did not mean to look at her the way he looked at her then. It was not a decision, the way a decision is a thing you choose; it happened the way a held breath happens, before the mind has caught up with the body. The streetlamp above the sea wall threw its old gold light down through the fine rain, and for one unguarded moment she was not the girl with the dead phone, not the girl who had lied to her mother, not even, quite, a stranger from a train. She was something out of the paintings his grandmother kept in a steel trunk in Kolkata — an apsara caught mid-descent, wet silk and gold light, too lovely to be entirely of this world, and entirely, helplessly, of this one particular midnight on Marine Drive.

His fingers slowed on the strings. The song did not stop, exactly. It simply forgot, for four or five bars, where it had been going.

Shreya felt the look before she understood it.

He is staring, she thought. Why is he staring like that.

It was not an unkind look. That was, somehow, the frightening part. A cruel look she would have known exactly what to do with — she had a whole lifetime of practice at that, on buses, at bus stops, in the eyes of strange men on escalators. This was not that. This was worse, in a way she could not yet put into words: it was a look that saw her, entirely, the way no one had looked at her before, and she had absolutely no idea, sitting wet and half-lit on a sea wall at one in the morning, what a girl was supposed to do with being seen like that.

Where am I, she thought. What am I doing here. I do not know these boys. I have known them for three hours.

The rain kept falling, soft and silver, into the silence Roy's guitar had left behind.

"Stop," said Shreya, very suddenly, and her voice had gone thin and strange.

Roy's hand froze flat against the strings.

"Shreya—" he began.

"No." She pulled her knees tighter against her chest, her arms wrapped around them, a small closed shape on the wet stone. "I need to say something, and I need both of you to just — to just listen, please, and not say anything, because if I stop now I will not be able to say it at all."

Neither of them moved. Even the sea, for one unfair, theatrical moment, seemed to hold itself quiet.

"I am a girl," said Shreya, and her voice was shaking now, in a way she clearly hated and could not stop, "in the middle of nowhere, in this city, at midnight, with two boys I met on a train three hours ago. I do not know either of you. I do not know your families, I do not know if the things you have told me tonight are even true, I do not know a single person within ten kilometres of this sea wall who could come if I called out." She was not looking at either of them now. She was looking at the black water beyond the rocks, at the small white lines where it broke and did not break. "I do not know what might happen to me. I do not know if you could — if either of you could —" Her voice caught, hard, on the next word, and did not find it. "I do not know if I would be able to do anything at all."

And then she stopped, because she had heard, in her own voice, exactly how much she had just accused them of, and could not, now, take it back.

The silence that followed was the longest of the whole long night.

Roy sat with his hand still flat on the strings, his mouth slightly open, and said nothing at all, because for once in his life he could not find a single word, funny or otherwise, that would not make everything worse.

It was Riyansh who spoke.

He set the camera down on the stone beside him, very carefully, the way a person sets down something that might otherwise be mistaken for a shield.

"You are right," he said quietly. "About all of it. We are two boys. It is past midnight. You are half wet, and you are —" he stopped himself, and started again, more carefully, "— and this sea wall is quiet enough that if you shouted right now, I do not think five people in this whole city would hear you." He did not look away from her. His voice did not rise, and it did not shake. "We could. I will not pretend otherwise, because pretending otherwise would only be another kind of lie, and you have had enough of those tonight. We could."

Shreya's eyes came up to his, wide and unblinking.

"But we did not," said Riyansh. "And we are not going to. Do you know why, Shreya?"

She did not answer. She could not.

"Because somewhere between Churchgate and this sea wall," he said, "in a night that has lasted about three and a half hours, we stopped being two boys and a girl who happened to share a train. We became something else. I do not have a tidy word for it yet. But I know it is real, because I have never in my life told a stranger the things I told you an hour ago, and Roy has never once, since I have known him — which is also three and a half hours, I am aware how that sounds — Roy has never once, tonight, made a joke at your expense when he very easily could have." He paused. "We are your friends, Shreya. We have been your friends for longer than we have known each other's surnames. That is a strange kind of arithmetic, but it is true, and it is the only answer I have for you."

For a moment nobody on the sea wall moved. The rain went on falling, fine and silver, indifferent to all of it.

Roy, still frozen, still silent, felt something enormous and wordless rise in his chest and had, for the first time that night, nothing whatsoever to say about it. He simply sat there, guitar forgotten across his knees, and stared straight ahead, perplexed in the particular way a person is perplexed when the ground has just proven far steadier than they expected it to be.

And then Shreya moved.

She did not decide to. It happened the way the raindrop had happened, before thought could catch up with it: she was on her feet, and then she had crossed the wet stone between them, and then her arms were around Roy's neck and her face was pressed into his shoulder, and she was holding on to him the way a very small child holds on to a parent in a crowd — not romantically, not carefully, not with any thought at all for how it looked, but with the whole, uncomplicated, desperate relief of a person who has just discovered she is, after all, safe.

Roy sat absolutely still, his arms hovering an inch from her back, unsure, for the first time in his entire performing life, of what the correct next line was.

She was not crying, quite. But her shoulders were doing something close to it, small and quick, and he could feel, through the wet cotton of her kurta, how fast her heart was going.

The truth, which she would not have said aloud to either of them for all the money in Mumbai, was smaller and sadder than the speech she had just made. She did not, in fact, have a friend. Not a real one — not the kind who came at midnight, not the kind you told your secret list to, not the kind whose hand you would take on a wet stone wall without a second thought. Between the coaching classes, the structures drawing hall, and a mother who tracked her like a satellite, there had never been room to make one. Tonight, walking beside two strangers along a flooded railway line, she had known exactly one true thing: that there was almost no one else in this enormous city she could have called if something had gone wrong, and that the two people she happened to be with were, against every warning her mother had ever given her, the safest she had felt in longer than she could remember.

That was the part that frightened her most of all. Not the dark, not the empty sea wall, not even the two strangers.

It was how much, already, she did not want the night to end.

After a while — nobody could have said exactly how long, and none of them thought to count — she loosened her arms and sat back, wiping her face once, quickly, with the heel of her hand, and gave a small, unsteady laugh at her own dramatics. Riyansh picked the camera back up, mostly so that his hands would have something to do. And Roy, very softly, so softly that at first it seemed less like a decision than a kind of breathing, began to play again, finding his way back into the song from wherever it had left him, until the last verse came round once more, whole this time, and did not stop until it was finished.

When the last chord died away, the sea took it, and there was only the sound of the waves.

"That was beautiful," said Shreya, in a very small voice.

"It is not finished," said Roy, embarrassed. "The second verse is... it has a hole in it. I never found the last line."

"What is the hole?"

"A rhyme. For rain."

"Again," said Riyansh.

They both looked at him.

"Again," he said, shrugging, red to the ears. "And nothing will be the same, and we will meet again. It is only... it seems right. If they are going to meet."

There was a pause.

"They meet again," said Roy slowly. "That is... yes. That is exactly it. How did you..." He stared at the strings. Then he began, softly, to hum the line, testing it, and his whole face changed. "It fits. It just fits. Riyansh, you are a genius."

"I am a computer engineer."

"Same thing. Shreya, did you hear this? He is a genius. He is going to marry a genius."

The word fell out of his mouth, light and stupid and ordinary, the way a word does when a boy is happy. But something happened in the air after it. It hung there, for one long, terrible, glittering second.

Shreya blushed.

Riyansh went white, then red, then, with enormous concentration, became fascinated by the sea.

And Roy, who had made a joke, saw the blush, and the sea-watching, and understood, with a sudden cold precision that had nothing to do with the rain, that he had just accidentally said something true.

He looked at his hands.

Three hours, he thought. I have known these people for three hours.

But something had already been decided, somewhere, behind the reach of any of them. It had happened so quietly, in the rain, on the wet stone, between the last note of a song and the first sigh of the waves, that none of them had even noticed the moment it began.

---

Four A.M.

They talked until the sky went grey.

Not about anything. About everything. About the collapse of a professor's temper when someone mispronounced thermodynamics. About the best vada pav in the city, which was, Roy argued, at a nameless stall behind Dadar station, and which, Shreya insisted, was at a shop in Borivali that had a photograph of the owner shaking hands with a minister. About their homes, and their mothers, and the ridiculous things that their mothers said. About the terrible, secret ambitions that people only tell to strangers in the dark.

"I want to build a bridge," said Shreya, into the quiet.

She was lying flat on her back along the sea wall, with her arms behind her head and her eyes on the low, glowing, pearly clouds. The others were sitting either side of her, close enough to hear her breathing.

"Not a big one," she said. "Not, like, Bandra-Worli. A small one. Over a river in a village somewhere, where there is no bridge, and the children have to swim to school. I want to be the person who goes there and draws it and stands there when it opens, and a child walks across it. Dry."

"Dry," said Roy softly.

"Dry. That is the whole dream." She laughed a little. "It is a stupid dream."

"It is not stupid," said Riyansh.

He had not meant to say it so fast. It came out low and firm, like a stone put down.

"It is not stupid at all," he said. "It is... I think it is the best thing that I have ever heard anyone want."

She turned her head on the cold stone and looked at him.

And in the grey light that was already beginning, over the sea, to break at the edges like a pearl, something passed between them. It was small. It was tender. It was the kind of look that can change the whole of a life without either person noticing it has happened.

Roy saw it.

He was sitting on the far side with the guitar across his knees, and he saw it happen, in the small, precise, unbearable way that you see the exact moment a glass leaves the edge of a table. And in the same second, he felt, in the center of his own chest, the thing that had begun as a twinge on the pavement and had grown, over three hours, into something warm and enormous and completely impossible to hold.

She looked at him like that, he thought. Not at me. At him.

He looked down at the guitar.

Fine, thought Roy, with enormous, hurtful, mature good humour. It is fine. I have known her for three hours. That is nothing. That is not a thing.

It was, of course, the whole thing.

---

Dawn

The first light came up over the city like a slow, shy question.

It began as a paleness at the edge of the sky, above the dark line of the Malabar Hill. Then it spread, gold on grey, across the sea, turning the black water to pewter and the pewter to silver, until the whole bay was glowing softly, like the inside of a shell. The streetlamps flickered off one by one along the Necklace. The first crows began to argue. Somewhere far behind them, in the waking city, a train blew a long, low, hopeful whistle.

They stood on the sea wall, the three of them, shoulder to shoulder, watching.

Nobody said anything. There was nothing to say.

At last, Shreya let out a long breath.

"I am going to be in so much trouble," she said, with a shaky, incredulous, radiant smile.

"Worth it?" said Roy.

She thought about it. She looked at the light, and at the sea, and at the two boys on either side of her, drenched, unshaven, exhausted, and, for reasons that she could not possibly have explained, absolutely, unreasonably happy.

"Yes," said Shreya. "Yes. Definitely, completely worth it."

"Then it was a good mistake," said Roy.

"The best." She turned. "Will we... I mean, we will not just... You two will not just disappear?"

The boys looked at each other. It was a look, quick and private and slightly astonished, of two people who have realised that they are thinking the same thing.

"We could form a group," said Riyansh, carefully. "A friendship. A... a system. For, um, emergencies. Missed trains."

"A society," said Roy, with dignity, "for the prevention of last locals."

"The Last Local Society," said Shreya, and burst out laughing. "Yes. Oh, yes. All right. I am the president."

"Why are you the president?"

"Because I have the plan for the bridge."

"That is not a qualification."

"It is the only qualification," said Shreya. "Riyansh, you are the treasurer."

"I do not have any money."

"Roy is the entertainment officer."

"I accept," said Roy gravely, "with humility."

She put out her hand, palm down, in the middle of them, the way children do. Roy laid his on top of hers, his hand warm and slightly calloused from the strings. And after a moment, hesitating, as though he were touching something that might vanish, Riyansh laid his on top of them both.

Three hands, in the first light, on a wet stone wall above the sea.

"To the Last Local Society," said Shreya. "May it never miss another train."

"May it always miss the last one," said Roy. "So we have to walk."

They laughed. And beyond them, huge and gold and slow, the sun lifted over the rim of the world, and lit the whole bay like a promise.

They gathered their things and started walking, unhurried, toward Marine Lines and the first train, the promenade behind them slowly filling with the city's earliest risers — a man doing stiff, serious stretches against the sea wall, two women walking fast with their dupattas tied like belts, a boy on a bicycle far too big for him, ringing its bell at nothing in particular.

Shreya had gone quiet.

She walked a little apart from the two of them for a while, her sandals in one hand, her eyes on the ground, and then, at the corner where the promenade curved away from the water, she stopped.

"Wait," she said. "Before we get there. I need to say something properly, not the way I said things last night."

Roy and Riyansh stopped too.

She turned first to Riyansh, and her voice, when it came, was quieter than either of them had heard it all night.

"Thank you," she said. "For what you said. I do not think anyone has ever told me something so plainly, and meant it, the way you meant it. I will not forget it." She held his eyes for a second longer than the sentence needed, and Riyansh, who did not know what to do with being thanked like that, simply nodded, once, and looked at his shoes.

Then she turned to Roy, and something in her face changed.

"And you," she said. "I am sorry."

"For what?" said Roy, though he already half knew.

"For running at you like that. For — for holding on to you the way I did, without asking, in front of Riyansh, when it was both of you who—" She stopped, started again, her hands moving now, trying to build the sentence out of the air in front of her. "It is only that you were the one closest to me, and I did not think, I only—"

"Shreya."

She stopped.

"You do not have to explain that," said Roy, gently, and for once there was nothing funny in his voice at all. "Friendship does not need an explanation. What you did was the truth of the moment — that is what you felt, right then, and there is nothing to be sorry for in a thing you felt." He glanced, just for a second, at Riyansh, and then back at her. "What Riyansh told you was his view of the three of us. I did not mind it. I do not mind any of it." He stopped, and for the first time all night, Anirban Roy, who always had a next line ready, did not have one. "I am starting to know you, Shreya. Since when, I could not tell you. Why, I do not know either."

Nobody said anything for a moment that stretched a little too long to be comfortable.

Somewhere behind them, on the tracks toward Marine Lines, a train sounded its horn, once, low and unhurried, the way a train sounds when it still has a few minutes to spare.

"We should go," said Riyansh, quietly, breaking it. "Or we will have earned all of this for nothing."

Shreya blinked, as if surfacing from somewhere. "Yes," she said. "Yes, of course." And she turned and started walking again, quickly now, and did not look back at either of them, though her ears, Roy noticed, had gone very slightly pink.

None of them said anything more about it. But something had shifted, small and sudden, like a single stone knocked loose on a hillside — nothing that could be seen falling yet, only felt, in the new and careful quiet between two of them, the whole rest of the walk to the station.

None of them knew, then, what was coming.

None of them knew that in six months, on a rooftop, under a string of fairy lights, one of them would be holding a letter that he could not give. That one would be carrying a photograph that he could not show. That the third would be standing between the other two with a smile she did not quite believe. Three hands, on a wall, in the morning. Three hearts, each with a secret, each one certain that it was the only one.

They were nineteen and twenty, and it was the last morning of the last simple day.

---

The Photograph

At a quarter past seven, the first train north was almost empty. Shreya slept against the window, her face soft and unguarded, and her mouth slightly open, one hand curled around her phone like a small animal.

Roy had gone to get tea. Riyansh sat opposite her, alone, with the camera in his lap.

He should not, he knew. It was not fair. She was asleep.

But the light was coming through the window in long gold ribbons, and it lay across her sleeping face like a benediction, and the plait had finally come loose, and a single strand of hair lay across her cheek, moving very slightly with her breath.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he lifted the camera, and very gently, with the softest press of a finger that he had ever managed, took the second photograph of Shreya Menon that he would never show to anyone.

I will not, he thought. I will keep it. That is all. I will only keep it.

He did not know that he was making a promise. But that is how promises are made: quietly, in trains, with the light coming through.

At the far end of the platform, with two cups of tea and a guitar strapped across his back, Roy stood watching through the window.

He had seen it. Of course he had seen it.

He stood there for a long, long time. Then he looked at the tea, and smiled with his whole face, the way he always smiled when he needed to hide, and stepped up into the compartment, calling, cheerfully:

"Chai! Who wants chai? Society meeting is in session!"

Shreya woke, blinking and delighted. Riyansh turned the camera off and slid it into its bag, his ears very red.

She took the tea from Roy with both hands, still half asleep, and drank a little, and seemed to wake up properly somewhere in the middle of the second sip. Then she looked from one of them to the other, and a slow, mischievous smile came up over the rim of the cup.

"I have a question for the Society," she said. "An official one. President's privilege."

"Granted," said Roy warily. "Depending on the question."

"Promise me something. Both of you." She set the cup down on her knee and looked from one to the other, suddenly serious in the way that only someone who has just been very silly can manage. "Promise that whatever happens to any of us — exams, jobs, other people, anything — this does not end when the sun comes up. That the Society is not just a thing that happened on one strange night, and by next month none of us remembers the other two's phone numbers."

"That is an easy promise," said Roy. "I have shockingly few friends to spare."

"I am not joking, Roy."

"I know you are not." And, for a moment, neither was he. "I promise."

They both looked at Riyansh.

He was quiet for a second longer than either of them expected, turning the empty camera bag over once in his hands, as if the words needed weighing before they could be trusted to hold anything.

"I promise," he said, finally. "Whatever happens. Even if it is complicated."

It was such an odd word to choose — complicated — that Shreya almost asked him what he meant by it. But the train chose that moment to lurch and gather speed, and the tea nearly went over, and by the time everyone had rescued their cups the question had slipped away, the way small, important things do on trains, and was never quite asked.

It was an easy promise to make, on a train full of morning light, by three people who had known each other for eight hours and already could not imagine the rest of their lives without one another.

It would turn out to be the only promise, in the whole short history of the Last Local Society, that not one of them would manage to keep in the way they meant it that morning.

The train ran on toward the city, and the three of them sat together in the gold, laughing, with the whole of their lives still spread out ahead like a long, bright, unlit road — and not one of them yet able to see how soon it would fork.