The Society Meets

A novel, told chapter by chapter. This is Chapter 2. If you have not read Chapter 1, begin there. It is a work of fiction; any resemblance to real people is coincidental.

---

The Last Local Society was founded at sunrise, on a wet stone wall, by three people who had known one another for seven hours. Nobody expected it to survive the week. It survived six months, and in those six months, without anyone quite noticing, it changed all three of them.

This is how that happened.

---

The First Sunday

Every society needs a rule, and the Last Local Society made its first one on the Monday after Marine Drive, on the back of a tea coaster, in Roy's handwriting.

RULE ONE: WE MEET EVERY SUNDAY. NO EXCUSES. (EXCEPT MOTHERS.)

It sounded easy. It was not. Shreya lived in Borivali with a mother who believed that the world outside the front door was a rumour, and it took three weeks of very careful lying, and one very unconvincing story about a "group study on structural loads," before she was permitted to leave the house before noon. Roy lived in a hostel where the warden, Pawar Sir, timed everybody's return like a man launching rockets. Riyansh had a part-time job, three roommates and one working alarm clock.

But on the first Sunday, at ten past nine, on a bench outside Dadar station, all three of them were there.

"You are late," said Shreya.

"I am on time," said Roy, "for a person who has to cross the entire city by local train, on a Sunday, with a guitar."

"Why did you bring the guitar?"

"Because the Entertainment Officer," said Roy, drawing himself up, "does not travel without his entertainment."

"He also," said Riyansh mildly, "left his wallet in the hostel."

"I did not leave it. I entrusted it. There is a difference."

"Who is paying for breakfast?"

There was a small silence.

"The Treasurer," said Roy, and Shreya, and in the same breath, with the same sweet, ruthless, perfectly rehearsed smile.

Riyansh looked at the sky. Then he sighed, and dug into his pocket, and produced two crumpled notes and a handful of coins, and the three of them walked off toward the flower market, arguing about whether a fifty-rupee breakfast could reasonably feed three.

It could. Barely. It was, all three of them agreed afterward, the best breakfast of their lives: three plates of poha at a stall run by a woman named Kamlabai, who had been frying onions at the same corner since before any of them was born, and who looked at the three of them, eating in a row with their knees touching, and said, to nobody:

"Achha jodi hai."

Good pairing.

"Which of us is she talking about?" whispered Roy.

"All of us, I think," said Riyansh.

Shreya said nothing. She was busy, very carefully, being fascinated by her poha. But a small shy colour had come up under her ears, and both boys saw it, and both boys, for very different reasons, looked away.

---

The Notebook

She kept it in her bag, under everything, wrapped in a handkerchief.

It was an ordinary notebook. Blue cover, spiral binding, the kind that costs twenty rupees at any stationery shop and comes with a picture of a cartoon squirrel. The front thirty pages were engineering notes: soil mechanics, beam deflection, the strange and beautiful mathematics of things that must not fall down. Neat, tidy, colour-coded, the notes of a girl who had never in her life been late with an assignment.

But the back of the notebook, if you turned it upside down and opened it from the wrong end, was another book entirely.

At the top of the first back page, in her small upright handwriting, it said:

THINGS TO DO BEFORE WE GRADUATE (strictly confidential) (if you are reading this, close it)

And underneath, a list.

1. Ride the ferry to Elephanta Island. (Take a photograph. Riyansh, obviously.) 2. Watch the flamingos at Sewri at dawn. 3. Eat at the oldest Irani café in the city. Order the mawa cake. Argue about the tea. 4. Walk across the Bandra-Worli Sea Link. (Illegal. Try anyway. Ask Roy.) 5. Sing something in public. (Roy sings. I stand nearby and pretend I do not know them.) 6. See a train arrive at Churchgate at exactly the last minute. And DO NOT catch it. 7. Build a small bridge. (Any bridge. A model bridge. Out of anything.) 8. ...

There was no number nine. There was only number eight, and after it, three little dots, and nothing at all.

She had written it on the night after Marine Drive, sitting on the floor of her room in Borivali with the door bolted and the fan rattling and her heart doing something quick and foolish that she had been putting off naming. She had written seven things, and then she had sat with the pen in her hand for a very long time, looking at the number eight.

There was something that she wanted to write. She knew exactly what it was.

She just did not know whether it was a thing to do, or a thing to be afraid of, or a name.

She closed the notebook. She wrapped it in the handkerchief. She put it under everything, in the bottom of the bag, where a person hides the only thing she is sure will be found.

---

The Ferry

On the third Sunday they took the ferry to Elephanta. It leaves from beneath the Gateway of India, and on a bright Sunday in the season before the monsoon it is a floating village: families with tiffin boxes, honeymooners with matching sunglasses, schoolboys shouting the names of cricketers into the wind, and a man selling raw mango with salt and chilli, calling his wares in a voice like a small, sour, extremely confident bird.

The Society sat at the very front, on the upper deck, with their feet up on the rail.

"I have a confession," said Roy.

"You always do," said Shreya.

"I cannot swim."

Riyansh took the camera down from his eye.

"You are on a boat," he said. "In the middle of the harbour. Now you tell us?"

"It seemed like a bad moment before. There was a queue. There was pressure."

"What would you have done if it sank?"

"Sung," said Roy. "Very loudly. Very tragically. So that the fish would take pity."

"He is being brave," said Shreya, patting his arm, and Roy, who had been about to make another joke, forgot what it was.

It was a small, ordinary, entirely accidental touch, her hand on his sleeve for a moment, light as a leaf, and then gone. But it was the kind of moment that a boy in his position replays for weeks. He kept looking at the place on his sleeve where her hand had been, as if it might have left a stain.

Behind the lens, Riyansh watched them, and lifted the camera, and took a photograph of the harbour.

The harbour, he told himself. Only the harbour. Nothing else. Not the two people in the corner of the frame. Not the way the wind has taken her scarf and she is laughing at it and reaching for it and it is going, going, gone, a small red flag lifting over the sea.

He took four more of the harbour. In all four, if you looked closely, in the left-hand corner, a scarf was flying.

At Elephanta, the caves were dim and cool and full of the enormous, patient, three-faced god, carved out of a single hill by people who had never heard of photography. Shreya stood before him for a long time.

"They did not have cranes," she said, in a low, almost reverent voice. "They did not have cement. They had a hill, and a chisel, and a great deal of time."

"And faith," said Roy.

"And arithmetic," said Shreya. "Faith is what you have before the arithmetic is done."

"That is the most engineer thing I have ever heard."

"It is a compliment."

"I know it is," said Roy. "That is the terrible part."

---

The String

On the ninth Sunday, it snapped in the middle of a song.

They were on the steps by the Bandra Bandstand, in the late gold light, with a few strangers gathered at a polite distance to listen, because Roy had a way of playing that pulled people toward him against their will, like a tide. He was in the middle of the second verse. The verse that had, for six weeks now, ended with the word again.

"...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, and we will..."

Ping.

The top string flew up and struck him lightly on the chin.

There was a stunned silence. Somebody in the audience gasped. A small child, who had been dancing, stopped mid-step and stared at Roy with enormous, delighted horror.

"That," said Roy, very calmly, holding the useless curl of wire between two fingers, "was the string for the high notes. The ones that make people cry."

"You can buy another," said Shreya.

"A good one costs four hundred rupees."

"So?"

"So I have eleven," said Roy. "Until the fifteenth."

Nobody spoke. It was one of those small, real, embarrassing truths, the kind that a person tells by accident and would have died before telling on purpose. Shreya looked at the ground. Riyansh looked at his shoes.

Roy, who had never in his life been comfortable with silence, laughed.

"It is fine! Truly. I will play with five strings. It is a very modern technique. There is a whole school of it. In Kolkata they call it shaadha-shiddha."

"They do not call it that."

"They will."

And they moved on, and the audience drifted away, and the sun went down over the water in long red bars. But three days later, on a Wednesday, Roy came back to his hostel after a day of lectures and found a small paper packet sitting on his pillow.

Inside was a brand-new set of guitar strings, the good kind, and a folded slip of paper. In small, careful handwriting, it said:

For the Entertainment Officer. Do not argue. It is a Society expense. R.

He read it four times.

There was a Society. There was a Treasurer. And the Treasurer, who had two hundred rupees left for the whole month, had gone without lunch for a week to pay for it.

Roy sat on the edge of the narrow hostel bed with the packet in his hands. He was not sure, for a while, whether he was going to laugh or cry, and so, after a fair amount of thought, he did both, quietly, into a pillow, so that his roommate would not hear.

Then he restrung the guitar, tuned it, and played the second verse right the way to the end, for the first time, with the again landing exactly where it should.

He had never felt so grateful to anyone in his life.

He had never felt so guilty, either. Because he knew, now, what he had known on the promenade and had tried, with all his cleverness, to unknow: that the boy who bought the strings was the best person he had ever met.

And that Roy was in love with the girl that boy loved.

It is a terrible position, thought Roy. It is as if you are a man and your two best friends are drowning, and you are the only one holding the rope, and you cannot save one of them without letting go of your own hand.

He did not make a joke about it. It was the first time he had not been able to.

---

The Folder

Every night, at about a quarter to midnight, when the roommates were asleep and the fan was doing its slow, patient rotation in the dark, Riyansh Malhotra opened a laptop and made a folder.

It had a plain name. SUNDAYS.

Inside it, arranged by date, were about nine hundred photographs. They were, for the most part, extraordinary. A single crow on a rusted railing at Sewri, caught in the second before it took off. A street-sweeper at dawn in the flower market, sitting on an overturned bucket, her face hidden by marigolds. Roy, laughing on the ferry with his head thrown back like a boy who has never once been afraid. The bell of the Bandstand, the surface of the sea, the light on the steel side of a train.

He showed these to the others. Every week. They were, in a sense, his gift.

But there was a second folder, inside the first, that was named DO NOT OPEN. It was not a joke. It had a password, and the password was nothing at all that a person would guess, and inside it were forty-one photographs of one person.

Shreya, from behind, bending over a railing. Shreya, reading, her forehead crumpled in the effort of understanding a hard page. Shreya, asleep on the first train home, one hand curled around her phone. Shreya, in the rain, on the first night, walking backward, laughing, the first photograph.

He did not look at them often. That was the strange thing. He simply knew they were there, in the same way that a person knows there is a candle in a drawer in a house in the dark. It was a comfort. It was also, in the small hours, a kind of quiet punishment, because he was a decent person and he knew that a decent person would not have taken them.

He knew what he should do. He should tell her. He should walk up to her on a Sunday morning and say Shreya, I think that I am in love with you, and I am very sorry, and I have forty-one photographs.

But there was Roy.

Roy, who had made a joke on the very first night about marrying a genius, and had then looked for an hour at his own hands. Roy, who sang at her, unknowingly, in every song. Roy, who had looked at her on the ferry, when she reached for her scarf, in the specific way that a person only looks at something they would give anything to keep.

He loves her, thought Riyansh. He has not said it. But he does. I have seen it. And he is my friend. He is the first friend I made in this city that I did not have to pretend to be a different person for.

And I would rather lose the girl than lose the friend.

It was a brave thought. It was also, though he did not know it yet, one of the great tragic misunderstandings in the history of the world: that two boys, each of them convinced that he was standing in the other's way, would spend six months quietly making sure that neither of them ever stood in it.

He closed the laptop.

He went to sleep.

In the dark, the little green light on the camera went on blinking, patient as a heart.

---

The Fever

It began, as these things always do, as nothing at all.

Roy missed a Thursday message. That was all. No joke, no voice note, no forwarded meme with three exclamation marks — nothing, for a whole day, which for Anirban Roy was roughly equivalent to a total eclipse of the sun. Riyansh noticed at lunch, frowned at his phone, and thought, he is probably busy, and went back to his lab file.

He missed Friday too.

By Friday evening, Riyansh's frown had become a low, persistent hum of worry that he could not quite justify to himself. He called. It rang eight times and went to voicemail — Roy's own cheerful recorded voice, absurdly healthy-sounding, saying he would call back soon. Riyansh told himself this proved nothing. People's phones died. People slept early sometimes, even people who had never once in recorded history slept early.

He called again at nine. Voicemail.

At half past nine, worried in a way he could no longer talk himself out of, he took the train to Andheri.

The hostel corridor was quiet, dimly lit, smelling of someone's dinner two doors down. He knocked. Nothing. He knocked again, harder, and this time a voice answered from inside — not Roy's voice, but a large, groggy, unmistakably Nagpur-accented voice that belonged to Sameer, Roy's roommate.

"Who is it?"

"It is Riyansh. Roy's friend. Is he there?"

The door opened on a boy in a vest, blinking, hair standing up in six directions. "He is there," said Sameer, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, in the tone of a man reporting a mild inconvenience. "Making noise since morning. Talking to the ceiling fan. I told him to go to the medical room but he said he is fine, he said it is only tiredness." He lowered his voice, suddenly a little uneasy himself. "He does not look fine, yaar. I am telling you honestly."

Riyansh pushed past him.

Roy was lying on his narrow bed with the sheet twisted around his legs, his old grey T-shirt dark with sweat, his face flushed a deep, alarming red under the single bare bulb. His eyes were half open and did not focus on anything in the room. His lips were moving.

"Ira," he was saying, to no one. "Ira, the science fair. Tell them. Tell them about the — the volcano. It is not finished."

"Roy." Riyansh crouched beside the bed and put the back of his hand to Roy's forehead, and pulled it away almost at once, the way you pull your hand off a stove. He was burning. Not warm — burning, the kind of heat that felt less like a fever and more like a small, private furnace someone had lit behind his friend's eyes and forgotten to put out.

"Roy. Can you hear me?"

"...five strings," Roy mumbled. "It is a very modern technique."

Riyansh had never in his life been more frightened by a joke.

He turned to Sameer, who had followed him in and was now hovering by the door with the particular helplessness of a large, kind young man who has no idea what to do with his hands. "How long has he been like this?"

"Since morning I am seeing. He said it is nothing. You know how he is."

"Do you have a thermometer? Paracetamol? Anything?"

Sameer did not. Nobody in that room, or that corridor, or possibly that entire wing of the hostel, owned a thermometer. Riyansh felt, for one long, useless second, exactly as lost as he had felt on the sea wall on the very first night, except that this time there was no rain to hide in, and no song to fill the silence, only a boy who had once dragged himself across a kitchen floor for love, now lying still and burning and talking to a ceiling fan about volcanoes.

He took out his phone. His thumb found her name before his mind had finished deciding.

Shreya. It is Roy. He is very sick. High fever, talking strange things. I am with him now in the hostel but I do not know what to do. Can you come. I am sorry it is so late.

The reply came back in under a minute.

Coming. Do not leave him.

---

She told her mother it was a group study.

It came out of her mouth so fast, and so smoothly, that she surprised even herself; six years of never lying, and now, twice in one lifetime, the same lie in the same rehearsed cadence, as though her mouth had built a small private department just for emergencies involving these two boys. "There is a structures submission Monday, Mama, I am going to Priyanka's, we will be up all night, do not wait for me."

"At this hour?"

"It is due Monday, Mama."

Her mother, half asleep already, made the small suspicious noise that meant she did not entirely believe it and was too tired to fight about it, and Shreya was out of the door before the noise could turn into a question.

She did not remember the train. She remembered standing on the platform with her heart going much too fast for a girl who was, she kept telling herself, only going to see a friend who had a fever — people had fevers, fevers were not emergencies, fevers went away with rest and water and a little paracetamol — and she remembered that none of that helped in the slightest, because underneath the sensible engineering-student voice in her head there was another voice, much older and much less reasonable, saying only hurry, hurry, hurry, all the way to Andheri.

---

The hostel gate was shut for the night. A sleepy watchman looked at her with mild, professional suspicion.

"Visiting hours are over, baby."

"It is an emergency. My —" The old lie rose up automatically, and this time, for the first time, it cost her something to say it; it no longer felt like a clever trick, it felt like a small, necessary betrayal of a truth she did not yet have a better name for. "My brother is very sick. Fourth floor. Please."

Something in her face must have been more convincing than the words, because the watchman, grumbling, let her through.

By the time she reached the door, Riyansh had it open before she knocked, and one look at his face told her everything the message had not.

Roy was worse.

---

Word travels fast in a hostel, and by the time Shreya had been in the room twenty minutes, three more boys from the floor had drifted in and out of the doorway — not to help, particularly, but with the frank and shameless curiosity of young men who have just discovered that a girl is present on their floor at eleven at night. Sameer, to his credit, herded most of them away with a look. But one of them, a thin, bright-eyed second-year named Deepak who fancied himself the block's great romantic authority, lingered in the doorway with his arms crossed, watching Shreya wring out a cloth in a steel bowl with the brisk, unthinking competence of someone who has watched her own mother do this a hundred times.

"Roy bhai's sister," he said to Sameer, in a stage whisper that was not remotely a whisper, "is very dedicated."

"Go to sleep, Deepak."

"I am only saying. Last time also she came at midnight. Very close family."

"She is his—" Sameer stopped, looked at Shreya's back, looked at the tenderness with which she was laying the cool cloth across Roy's forehead, and appeared to reconsider whatever he had been about to say. "Go to sleep," he said again, more gently, and shut the door most of the way, leaving it open only the width of a hand, which was, in the unspoken constitution of that hostel floor, as good as a chaperone.

By midnight, without anyone quite deciding it, the whole corridor had settled into a new understanding. Whoever this girl was — sister, cousin, whatever the story happened to be that week — she was clearly Roy's, in the particular, sacred, do-not-question-it way that certain visitors become fixtures. Nobody objected. Nobody even really wondered any more. She had simply, somewhere between the sea wall and tonight, become one of the permanent facts of that floor, the way the leaking tap outside the bathroom was a permanent fact, and the questionable wiring in room 402 was a permanent fact.

Riyansh watched all of this happen with a strange, complicated ache in his chest that he did not examine too closely.

---

The night went on in small, exhausting increments.

Shreya sat on the plastic chair pulled up beside the bed, changing the cloth every fifteen minutes, coaxing sips of water between his cracked lips, checking his forehead with the back of her hand the way, she realised somewhere around one in the morning, her own mother used to check hers, on the handful of childhood nights she could still remember being sick. She had never done this for anyone. She found, to her own quiet astonishment, that she was good at it — steady-handed, unhurried, entirely unafraid, in the specific way that fear disappears the moment there is a job to do.

Riyansh went out twice, into the sleeping city, and came back once with a strip of paracetamol from an all-night chemist eleven minutes' walk away, and once with a thermometer, procured from a bewildered but sympathetic night nurse at a clinic three streets over, to whom he had explained the situation so earnestly that she had simply given it to him and refused payment. "Bring it back," she had said, "when he is well." He did not tell Shreya how frightened he had been, walking back through the empty streets both times, that he would return to find things worse.

"A hundred and two," Shreya read, at half past one, squinting at the thermometer under the bare bulb. "It was a hundred and three an hour ago. It is coming down. Slowly."

"Is that good?"

"It is good," she said, and did not say the rest of it, which was that an hour ago, watching the little red line, she had been more frightened than she had let herself admit even to herself.

Somewhere near two, Roy's mumbling grew clearer, though no more sensible. He said his mother's name. He said, once, with great and sudden clarity, "The masala tin was empty," and then laughed weakly at his own joke, which nobody in the room understood, and Shreya, wringing out the cloth for the hundredth time, found that she was laughing too, from sheer exhausted relief, because a boy delirious enough to make jokes was a boy who was, in some essential way, still entirely himself.

At three, Riyansh, who had not slept in nineteen hours, finally lost the fight with his own eyelids and fell asleep sitting upright against the wardrobe, his camera bag still on his shoulder, like a soldier who had refused to lie down even in retreat.

Shreya did not wake him. She sat alone in the small circle of lamplight, with one hand resting, very lightly, on Roy's burning wrist, and watched his chest rise and fall, and thought, with a clarity that frightened her more than the fever had, I would do this every night, for the rest of my life, and never once complain of it.

She did not let herself finish the thought. She was too tired, and it was too large, and there would be time, she told herself, to be frightened of it properly in the morning.

---

Pawar Sir did his rounds at twenty to four.

Nobody, in the ordinary run of things, expected Pawar Sir at twenty to four. But a pipe had burst two floors down an hour before, and the warden, roused from sleep and thoroughly bad-tempered about it, had decided, in the manner of tired men everywhere, that the most productive use of his fury was an unscheduled inspection of every room on his way back to bed, "to see what other disasters this generation has arranged for me tonight."

His footsteps, heavy and unmistakable, reached the fourth-floor corridor at nineteen minutes to four.

Sameer, who had been dozing on the floor with his back against his own bed, came awake with the particular speed of a boy who has heard that tread before and knows exactly what it means. "Pawar Sir," he hissed. "Pawar Sir is doing checking. He is two doors away."

For one full second, nobody in that room moved at all.

Then everybody moved at once.

"He cannot see me here," Shreya whispered, in a voice gone suddenly high and thin. "He cannot — if he sees a girl in a boys' room at four in the morning, Roy will be thrown out, I will be — my mother will —" She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to. The whole weight of a great many futures, all of them disastrous, stood suddenly and completely in the room with them.

"The bathroom," said Sameer, pointing.

"He checks the bathroom. He checked it last month when Deepak was hiding a — never mind, he checks the bathroom."

"Under the bed—"

"He looks under the bed. It is the first thing he looks."

Riyansh, awake now and moving fast, grabbed the first thing his hand found on the chair — Roy's spare kurta-pyjama, hanging there since some forgotten Sunday — and thrust it at her. "Put this on. Quickly. And this." A towel, tossed from the rail. "Wrap it round your head. If he asks, you are — you are a cousin, visiting, taking a bath, you have not — just do not let him see your face clearly, that is all, do not let him see your face."

There is no dignified way to describe what happened in the next ninety seconds, and Shreya, telling the story much later, to people who by then loved her enough to be allowed to laugh at it, never once tried to make it sound dignified.

She got into a dead boy's — no, not dead, she corrected herself wildly even as she was doing it, a very much alive and currently unconscious boy's — spare kurta over her own clothes, the shoulders drowning her, the hem falling to her knees like a nightdress. She wound the towel round her head and half her face in the manner, she hoped, of a boy fresh from a very early oil bath, with only her eyes and the bridge of her nose showing. Riyansh, in an act of desperate improvisation that he would also, later, never quite live down, took a stub of the coal-black kajal pencil from her own dropped bag — she used it, absurdly, for exam-stress dark circles, a fact she would be mortified to have revealed — and drew, with the shaking hand of a boy who had never in his life applied cosmetics to anyone, two thick, uneven, entirely unconvincing eyebrows and the beginnings of a moustache on her upper lip.

"What are you doing," Shreya said, muffled, through the towel.

"I do not know!" said Riyansh, in an anguished whisper. "I have never done this before! Stand like a boy. Slouch. Boys slouch."

"I do not know how to slouch like a—"

"There is no time, just — sit. On the floor. With the others. Pretend you are asleep."

She sat, cross-legged, hunched, towel-headed, lopsided-eyebrowed, exactly as the door opened and Pawar Sir's flashlight swept the room.

He was a large man with a moustache that had, over many years of night duty, developed a kind of independent, suspicious sentience of its own, and he stood in the doorway sweeping his torch across four sleeping-or-pretending-to-sleep boys, a boy burning with fever and muttering about volcanoes, and a fifth, extremely short, extremely lumpy figure wrapped in a towel who appeared to be attempting, with limited success, to snore.

The beam paused on her.

Shreya's whole life, in that half second, narrowed to the single question of whether a badly drawn moustache could survive close inspection under a police-grade hostel torch.

"Who is this," said Pawar Sir.

"Cousin, sir," said Sameer, with the swift, unblinking confidence of a young man who had clearly decided, somewhere in the last ninety seconds, that loyalty to Roy outranked any personal risk. "From native place. Visiting. Had an oil bath, sir, that is why the towel."

"At four in the morning?"

"Overnight train, sir. Reached late."

Pawar Sir's torch lingered. The moustache, drawn in a shaking hand by an amateur under conditions of extreme duress, was not, on close inspection, a good moustache. It sat slightly askew. One eyebrow was noticeably thicker than the other, giving the whole face an expression of permanent, lopsided surprise.

"Why is he sitting like that," said Pawar Sir.

"Back pain, sir," said Deepak, inspired. "From the train."

"Hnh," said Pawar Sir, which was, in the extensive private lexicon that generations of students had built around that single syllable, a sound that could mean anything from I am satisfied to I strongly suspect all of you and will remember this, and was, maddeningly, impossible to tell apart in the moment.

The torch swung, at last, to Roy, sweating and murmuring on the bed.

"And this one?"

"Fever, sir. Very high. We are looking after him."

Something in Pawar Sir's flashlit face changed, very slightly — the particular softening of a strict man who has, underneath four decades of rule enforcement, a genuine and rarely admitted fondness for the boys under his care. "You should have called the warden's office. There is a doctor on call for exactly this."

"We tried, sir. Could not get through." (This was, Riyansh reflected privately, the first fully true sentence anyone had said in the last two minutes.)

Pawar Sir grunted, stepped fully into the room, and — to five held breaths and one entirely motionless towel-headed figure — did the one thing nobody had accounted for: he crossed to the bed, laid the back of his own hand briefly against Roy's forehead exactly the way Riyansh had done six hours before, and frowned.

"This is not a small fever," he said. "If it is not better by morning, take him to the hospital. Do not wait for permission from me, just go, and inform me after. Understood?"

"Yes, sir."

He straightened, cast one last, long, deeply unconvinced look at the small hunched towel-headed cousin from native place, who had by now achieved a state of such total physical stillness that she appeared to have stopped breathing entirely, and said, at last, "Cousin should sleep properly. Not sitting up like that. Will get a crick in the neck."

And then, mercifully, impossibly, he left.

The door had not fully closed behind him before the entire room exhaled at once, in a single ragged breath, and Deepak, clapping a hand over his own mouth, began to shake with silent, helpless laughter, and Sameer sank slowly down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, and Riyansh put his head in his hands and laughed too, the exhausted, disbelieving laugh of a man who has just watched a disaster fail to happen.

Shreya pulled the towel off her head, revealing a face with one thick eyebrow, one thin one, and half a moustache smeared sideways across her upper lip where she had, at some point in the last two minutes, pressed her face into her own knees, and she looked so purely, helplessly ridiculous that even she began to laugh, sitting there in a boy's kurta three sizes too large, laughing until there were tears in her eyes that had nothing at all to do with fear any more.

"Cousin," she managed, "should sleep properly."

That set Deepak off again entirely.

---

By the time the laughter had worn itself out, it was past four, and the fever, when Shreya checked it next, had dropped to ninety-nine and a half — not gone, but breaking, the way a fever breaks when a body has finally decided to stop fighting and rest. She did not change out of Roy's kurta. It was, she told herself, only sensible; her own clothes were still slightly damp from the water bowl, and it was very late, and nobody left in that room was in any state to think it strange.

She sat back down in the plastic chair, in a dead boy's — no, she corrected herself again, smiling now, faintly, to herself, in a very much alive boy's oversized kurta, with half a smudged moustache still on her lip, and let her eyes close, just for a moment, just to rest them.

She did not mean to fall asleep. She fell asleep anyway, her head tipping slowly sideways until it came to rest against the edge of the bed, close to his hand.

---

Roy woke a little after seven, into a world that was blurry, and much too bright, and smelled faintly of Dettol and cold tea.

His head ached in a slow, muffled way, as though it had been wrapped in cotton wool sometime in the night and someone had forgotten to unwrap it. His mouth was dry. His whole body felt as though it had been run, at some point, through a very old washing machine. But the furnace behind his eyes, the one that had turned Thursday and Friday and most of a Saturday into a single unbroken smear of heat and half-dreams, was gone. He was, for the first time in three days, simply tired, rather than burning, and being simply tired felt, in that moment, like the single greatest luxury he had ever been offered.

He turned his head on the pillow.

And found himself looking directly into the sleeping face of Shreya Menon, her head resting against his mattress inches from his hand, wearing — he blinked, certain for a moment that this was one more fever dream, stranger than the volcano, stranger than the masala tin — wearing his own spare kurta, several sizes too big for her, with one smudged black eyebrow considerably thicker than the other and what appeared to be, unmistakably, the ruined remains of a hand-drawn moustache on her upper lip.

Roy lay very still, and looked at her for a long moment, in the pale grey light of a Sunday morning that had not been a Sunday when any of this began.

"...Shreya?" he said, his voice a dry, cracked whisper.

She woke instantly, the way people wake who have spent a night listening for exactly this, and her eyes found his, and for one unguarded second — before the reflexes of six years of careful family life could arrange themselves back into place — he saw on her face something entirely unrehearsed: not embarrassment, not the flustered scramble of a girl caught out, but a pure, undefended relief so complete that it was almost frightening to look at, as though she had been holding her breath since Thursday and had only just, this second, let it go.

"You are awake," she said, and her voice cracked slightly in the middle of the sentence.

"Why," said Roy slowly, working through the sheer number of impossible details in front of him, "are you wearing my kurta." A pause. "Why do you have a moustache."

"It is a very long story."

"Why does it look like you got into a fight with a pen."

"Roy." She was laughing now, and there were tears standing in her eyes at the same time, an expression he had never once seen on her before and would, from that morning onward, never entirely stop thinking about. "You have been unconscious for a day and a half. You do not get to ask questions first. First you have to drink some water. Then eat something. Then I will tell you about Pawar Sir and the moustache, and you are going to owe Riyansh a great many favours, and Sameer, and, I regret to say, a boy called Deepak, whom you will simply have to accept into your life now, because he has seen everything and will never, ever let any of us forget it."

Roy looked past her, taking in for the first time the rest of the room — Riyansh asleep sitting upright against the wardrobe with his camera bag still on his shoulder, Sameer snoring gently on the floor, a steel bowl of water gone cold on the table, a strip of paracetamol, a thermometer he did not recognise, the grey unfamiliar light of a morning he had entirely lost — and something in his chest, already weak and hollowed out by three days of fever, went a great deal weaker, and a great deal warmer, all at once.

"You stayed," he said. "All night."

"Of course I stayed." She said it so simply, so entirely without drama, that it took him a moment to understand it was the answer to a much larger question than the one he had asked. She reached for the glass of water on the table and held it to his lips herself, the way she had been doing, without either of them quite noticing when it had become automatic, since sometime after midnight. "Drink," she said. "And then sleep a little more. I am not going anywhere."

He drank. He did not argue. Somewhere in the last three days, without either of them ever deciding it out loud, an argument had quietly stopped being necessary.

Outside the window, the city was waking, ordinary and unaware, and in the doorway Sameer stirred, and Riyansh's eyes opened slowly against the wardrobe, taking in, in the space of one blink, the whole small, exhausted, radiant tableau in front of him — and smiled, even though something behind the smile ached in a way he had long since stopped trying to name, because whatever else this fever had cost the Last Local Society, it had also, unmistakably, given something back.

---

What Shreya Did Not Say

By the twenty-first Sunday there was a rule, and it was Shreya's, and she had made it herself: In the Society, nobody is allowed to be sad without telling.

It had seemed such a simple rule in the spring. It had seemed like the kind of rule that only a happy person could invent.

But now, on the twenty-first Sunday, on a bench in Powai by the great grey lake, where the herons stood on one leg in the shallows like small, patient question marks, she found herself sitting with a rule she was breaking.

She was sad.

She did not know quite why. Nothing was wrong. The Society was, in every visible way, thriving: four of the seven items on the list had been ticked off, and she had added three more. Her marks were high. Her mother had stopped calling the police. She was as happy, as clearly and plainly happy, as she had ever been in her life.

And yet there was a thing.

It was at the back of everything, like a small dark room at the back of a bright house, and it was called number eight.

I am in love, she thought, with a kind of stunned, astonished clarity, sitting there in the sun with a paper cup of tea going cold in her hands.

I have been in love for months. I have known it for weeks.

And I do not know which of them it is.

She thought, without meaning to, of a corner of the promenade at Marine Drive, six months and one lifetime ago, and a sentence she had turned over so many times since that it had gone smooth, like a stone in a pocket. I am starting to know you, Shreya. Since when, I could not tell you. Why, I do not know either. She had told no one she still had it. She was not sure, most days, whether it was a memory or something she was still, quietly, waiting to hear the rest of.

That was the terrible, ridiculous, undeniable truth. She had tried to put it away, and it kept coming back like a coin in a fountain. She had tried to work it out, like a problem in mechanics, with a free-body diagram and a list of forces. There was Roy, with his wild, gold, generous, infuriating heart, who could not stop making jokes because he was scared that silence would make him honest. And there was Riyansh, who watched the world so quietly and so carefully that you sometimes forgot how much of it he had already understood.

When Roy sang, she felt warm all over, like standing in a sunlit doorway.

When Riyansh looked at her, she felt seen, completely, all the way to the bottom, in a way that made her want to run and stay in the same second.

You cannot love two people, she told herself, sternly, as she would have told a first-year student who had drawn a beam with two supports and one load. It is not statically determinable.

But she did.

She sat there, in the bright sun, next to the two of them, laughing at something Roy had said, and holding her secret against her chest like a hot stone, and she thought:

I will not choose. I cannot. If I choose, one of them loses. And then there is no Society. And I would rather have both of them as friends for a lifetime than have one of them as everything for a year.

It was a noble thought. It was also, as all noble thoughts are, quietly unsustainable.

She smiled, brightly, at nothing.

"Sad?" said Riyansh, next to her, so low that only she could hear it.

"What?"

"You made a face. The rule."

"I am not sad," said Shreya.

He looked at her for one more second, and did not say anything. He simply nodded, once, as if she had spoken the truth, and went back to watching the herons.

And this, oddly, was worse.

---

The Rain Comes Back

The night that changed everything began, as the great Mumbai rains always do, with the sky turning the colour of a bruise.

By six o'clock the light had gone strange and yellow. By seven, the wind had started to run through the streets with a hard, wet, thrilling smell, of dust and iron and a thousand roofs waiting. And by eight, the first great drops came down like coins thrown on tin, and then all at once the whole sky opened and the city disappeared behind a wall of falling water.

Roy was on the rooftop of the hostel in Andheri, because it was the only place in the world where he could be alone in the rain, and he was, at that moment, extremely happy.

He was soaked to the skin. He had lost one sandal. His hair had plastered itself to his forehead, and his guitar was safely indoors in a plastic bag, and he was standing in the middle of the open terrace with his arms wide, turning in slow circles, singing at the top of his voice a song that had no words at all.

"You will catch a cold," said a voice behind him.

He spun round.

Shreya was standing in the doorway of the stairwell, holding a large black umbrella, which was doing, in that wind, no good whatsoever. She was drenched. Her plait had come undone, and her yellow kurta was clinging to her, and she was laughing.

"How did you get in?" said Roy. "It is a boys' hostel. Pawar Sir will..."

"I said I was your sister."

"I do not have a sister."

"He does not know that."

"He has my file."

"He has many files," said Shreya. "I am told that you are not the one he reads."

Roy stared at her. The rain rushed between them, silver and roaring.

"Why are you here?" he said.

"I do not know," said Shreya. "I was sitting in my room. It was raining. I thought about Marine Drive, and about how it rained that night too, and I thought I would go mad if I did not see somebody. And you are the only one I could think of who would be standing in the rain with one sandal."

"That is a very specific reason."

"I am a very specific person."

He laughed. It came out unsteady. She came forward across the wet concrete, and folded the useless umbrella, and dropped it, and stood in front of him in the great, warm, roaring downpour.

They were very close. Roy could see the rain on her lashes.

"Roy," she said. "I need to tell you something."

The world seemed to get very quiet, even though it was not. Somewhere behind his ribs, a small, foolish, trapped bird began to beat against the bars.

Do not, he told it. Do not hope. It is only rain. She has come to tell you about a bridge. She has come to tell you the exam results. Do not.

"Promise me first," said Shreya, "that you will not tell Riyansh."

The bird stopped.

"...Promise."

"And that you will not laugh."

"I cannot promise that. I am a comic by temperament."

"Roy."

"I promise," said Roy, quietly. "I will not laugh."

She took a deep breath. She looked at the sky, at the black roaring dark of it, at the thousand lit windows of the city blurring in the rain. She looked at him, with the same eyes that he had seen on the first night, the deep, watchful, faintly indignant eyes of a person who reads the last page of the novel first.

"I think," said Shreya, "that I am falling in love."

Roy did not move.

"With one of you," she said. "And I do not know which."

The rain came down. Somewhere, a very long way off, a train blew a long, low whistle. And on the rooftop in Andheri, in the middle of the monsoon, a boy with one sandal and a letter in his jacket that he had begun and torn up eleven times stood absolutely still, and did, with enormous, heroic, terrible effort, the hardest thing that he had ever done.

He smiled.

"Well," said Roy, brightly, in a voice that did not sound like his own. "That is a very interesting problem. Let us think about it. Sit down. Tell me everything."