Dear Shreya

A novel, told chapter by chapter. This is Chapter 3. If you have not read the earlier chapters, begin at Chapter 1. It is a work of fiction; any resemblance to real people is coincidental.

---

The Longest Conversation

There is a particular kind of courage that nobody gives medals for, and it is the courage of listening politely to the one person you least want to hear.

Roy had it that night, in large quantities. He drew Shreya into the shelter of the stairwell, where a single yellow bulb swung in the draught and the rain drummed on the tin roof like a thousand impatient fingers, and he sat her down on an upturned crate, and he said, with the air of a doctor who is calm because he must be, "Start from the beginning."

"There is no beginning," said Shreya. "That is the problem."

"Everything has a beginning."

"This started so quietly that I cannot find it. It is like trying to remember the exact moment you fell asleep." She wrapped her wet dupatta round her fingers, unwound it, wrapped it again. "One day I noticed that when a certain person was not there, the room felt slightly wrong. As if a picture had been hung a little crooked. And I could not tell which picture."

"Which person?" said Roy, before he could stop himself.

"I am not going to tell you."

"Right. Yes. Of course. Quite right." He cleared his throat. "Go on."

She told him what she could. She told him that one of them made her feel warm, like standing in a doorway with the sun on her face, and that with the other she felt seen, right down to the bottom, in a way that made her want to run away and stay in the same second. She said it plainly, the way she said everything, like a woman reading out a set of measurements. And Roy sat there, dripping, with his heart lying on the concrete floor between them like a dropped plate, and nodded.

Because that was the cruel part. He could not tell.

He had thought, for six months, that he could read her like a map. He knew the exact twitch of her eyebrow when she disagreed with a professor, the way she pulled her sleeves over her hands when she was nervous, the particular laugh she saved for jokes that were slightly beneath her. But when she described the person who made her feel warm, he thought, That is me, and when she described the one who made her feel seen, he thought, That is him, and then, a second later, with an awful sinking, he thought the exact opposite.

Warm could be Riyansh, who was quiet, and steady, and kind. Seen could be Roy, who noticed everything and joked about it so nobody would know. It could be one or the other or neither, and the honest truth was that a girl in love does not describe a person. She describes a weather.

"What do I do?" said Shreya, at last, and her voice cracked a little on the last word.

Roy looked at her, wet and small and shining in the yellow light, and he understood that this was the moment his grandmother had warned him about in a different context, entirely. Not do not trust anyone who says the train is not crowded. The other one. The one she said in Bengali, with a finger raised: "When somebody you love is standing at a crossroads, do not point. Hold the lantern."

"Nothing," he said gently. "You do nothing. Not yet."

"That is terrible advice."

"It is the best advice there is. You do not choose between two people in a stairwell in the rain. You choose when it is quiet. You choose on a day when nobody is watching, when you are not trying to be fair to anybody, and you ask yourself only one question."

"Which one?"

"When something goes wrong," said Roy slowly. "Really wrong. The worst kind of night. Which of them do you want to be standing next to?"

She was silent for a long moment. Above them the rain rose, and fell, and rose again.

He saw her face change. It was small, just a softening around the eyes, as if somebody had opened a window in a room she had not known was stuffy. She opened her mouth. Then, very quickly, she closed it.

"You know," said Shreya, in a slightly different voice.

"I do not," said Roy. "I do not know anything. I am only the entertainment officer."

"You are much more than that."

"Do not say that," said Roy, and it came out sharper than he meant. He got up, quickly. "You will make me cry, and I have a reputation. Come on. We must get you out before Pawar Sir finds a sister who does not exist."

---

The First Draft

It was after two in the morning when the hostel finally went quiet.

Roy's roommate, a large, kind, deeply unconscious boy from Nagpur, slept on his back with his mouth open, like a man waiting to be fed. The fan turned in the dark. Outside, the rain had eased to a fine, persistent whisper, and the drains of Andheri, which never in their lives did anything quietly, were gurgling like a thousand angry old men.

Roy sat at the tiny desk under the window, with a lamp turned low and a sheet of paper in front of him.

Dear Shreya, he wrote.

It looked strange. It looked like the beginning of a much bigger thing than he was ready for. He looked at it for a long time, and crossed it out, and wrote it again, more carefully.

Dear Shreya,

I do not know how to begin this, so I will begin the way you do, from the last page. The last page is: I am in love with you. I think I have been since a train that smelled of wet newspaper and a phone that was not a maracas.

He stopped. He read it. It was true, and it was awful, and he tore it out of the pad and crumpled it and threw it into the bin.

Dear Shreya,

You asked me tonight what to do, and I gave you advice that I think was quite wise. What I did not tell you is that every word of it cost me something. It is very hard to stand in a stairwell and be wise at someone who is the reason you are not.

He tore that one out too.

There is a special humiliation in trying to write a love letter when you are supposed to be funny. Roy's whole nature rebelled against it. Every sentence he put down wanted to wear a costume, to have a joke tucked in its pocket like a handkerchief, and when he took the jokes away the sentences stood there naked and trembling and looked exactly like what they were.

By four, there were nine attempts in the bin. By five, there were seventeen.

And somewhere between the seventeenth and the eighteenth, he stopped writing to her, and began, without meaning to, writing to himself.

What are you doing? he thought. Say she chose you. Say tomorrow she walks up and says it is you, Roy. Then what? Riyansh, who bought the strings with his lunch money. Riyansh, who has never once in six months said an unkind word about anybody. You will sit on the sea wall with her, and he will sit on the other side, and none of you will ever be able to look at a photograph again.

And say she chooses him. Then you will have to stand there, and clap, and be the best man. You would do it. That is the worst part. You would do it beautifully.

He put down the pen.

Outside, the first grey light was creeping up the wall of the next building. A crow landed on the water tank and began to complain. Somewhere in the corridor a bucket clanged, and somebody began, in a very cracked and hopeful voice, to sing a film song from the nineteen-eighties.

Roy looked at the eighteenth draft.

He did not throw this one away. He folded it into four, with great care, and slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket, where it would stay for a very long time.

Not yet, he told it. But I will not forget you.

---

The Suitable Boy

It arrived, as these things always do in Shreya's house, disguised as an ordinary Tuesday.

Her mother called at seven, which was itself unusual — her mother called at nine, always at nine, with the same three questions in the same order, food, studies, sleep — and when Shreya picked up she could hear, underneath the ordinary words, a particular brightness in her mother's voice that she had learned, over twenty-one years, to be afraid of.

"Sujata Aunty's sister's son," said her mother, without any preamble at all. "You remember Sujata Aunty. From the building. He is in Bangalore. Software. Very good company, foreign clients only. He is coming to Mumbai next weekend, for his cousin's wedding, and his mother would like — just tea, Shreya. Just to meet. Nobody is asking you to marry a stranger on a Sunday."

"I have a submission next weekend, Mama."

"There is no submission that cannot wait one hour for tea."

"It is not one hour, Mama. It is never one hour. It is one hour, and then a phone call every evening asking if I have thought about it, and then Sujata Aunty telling the whole building that we met and it went nowhere, and everyone deciding there is something wrong with me."

There was a silence on the line, the particular silence of a mother gathering herself. "Shreya. You are twenty-one. You are in your final year. I am not saying tomorrow. I am saying — a mother likes to know that there is someone, somewhere, that her daughter will not simply vanish into a hostel of boys and a bridge she wants to build in some village nobody has heard of, with nobody beside her at the end of the day." Her voice cracked, very slightly, in a way that undid Shreya far more effectively than any argument could have. "I am not getting any younger either, beta. I would like to see it settled. That is all. That is the whole crime I am guilty of."

Shreya sat on the edge of her hostel bed for a long time after the call ended, with the phone warm in her hand, and found that she could not, for once, summon the three rehearsed sentences. Busy. Not ready. There is time. They did not come. Somewhere in the last six months, without her noticing, they had quietly stopped being true.

She told Roy about it the next evening, on the phone, in the small, careful voice she used for things that frightened her.

"His name is Karthik," she said. "I have not even met him and I already do not want to like him, which is unfair, and I know it is unfair, and I am telling you so that you can tell me it is unfair and I will feel slightly better."

"It is unfair," said Roy, obediently, and then, in a voice that tried very hard to stay light and did not entirely manage it, "Are you going to go? To the tea?"

"I do not know." A pause, longer than the question needed. "I do not know what I am waiting for, Roy. I do not know what I am supposed to say to my own mother, who has never once in her life asked me for anything, when the one thing she has finally asked for is this."

Roy sat with the phone against his ear, in the dark of his room, and felt something in his chest that he did not have a clean word for — not quite jealousy, because he had never once been given the right to feel jealous of a stranger from Bangalore; not quite fear, though it was closest to that; something more like the cold, specific dread of a man watching a train pull slowly out of a station he has not yet managed to reach the platform for.

"Go," he heard himself say. "Have the tea. It is only tea."

"Is it?"

"I do not know," said Roy, honestly, for once, with no joke anywhere near the sentence. "But I know that if you do not go, some part of you will always wonder, and I would rather you found out for certain than spent your whole life not knowing. That is not advice. That is only what I would want, if it were me."

She went.

She did not tell him what happened afterward for three days, and when she finally did, it was in four short sentences over a bad phone line, and Roy, listening, found that he had been holding his breath for the whole of the silence between them without noticing.

"He was perfectly nice," said Shreya. "He talked about his flat in Bangalore for forty minutes. He has a dog. He does not read." A pause. "I told my mother I needed more time."

"And?"

"And she cried a little, and then she made aloo paratha, which is what she does instead of forgiving me, and I ate four of them to make up for it." Another pause, softer this time. "Roy. I am not ready to explain to you why I said no. I am not entirely sure I could explain it to myself. But I wanted you to know that I said it."

Roy did not trust his own voice for a moment. When he found it again, all he managed was, "Thank you for telling me," which was, he thought afterward, the smallest and truest thing he had ever said to her, and somehow also the largest.

He did not write about it in the letter. There was no room left in eighteen drafts for a boy called Karthik with a dog and a flat in Bangalore. But that night, for the first time, he allowed himself to hope in a way he had been too careful to hope before, and hope, he was discovering, was a great deal more frightening than dread had ever been.

---

What Riyansh Said On The Train

On the following Sunday, which was the twenty-second, there was no Society meeting.

Shreya had a mid-term. Roy had a lab that ran late, so late that it ended, according to his own account, "in a different geological era." That left only Riyansh, who arrived at Dadar station at the usual hour, alone, and stood on the platform for a full ten minutes with a paper cup of tea going cold in his hand, watching the crowd flow round him like water round a rock.

He was about to go home when the entertainment officer came sprinting through the barrier with a guitar case in one hand and his hair standing up like a startled cockatoo.

"Am I late?"

"There is nobody to be late for," said Riyansh. "She is not coming. It is only me."

"Then it is a Society meeting of two." Roy dropped onto the bench beside him, panting. "Quorum is two. It is in the constitution."

"We do not have a constitution."

"We do now. I have just written it in my head. Article One: whoever shows up is the meeting."

They sat there together on the station bench, and for a while neither of them said anything. It was a comfortable silence, the kind that only exists between people who have been through a great deal of ordinary weather together. Trains came and went. A vendor went past with a tray of steaming vada pav, singing the price.

Then Riyansh said, without looking up, "Can I tell you something?"

"Always."

"You will think I am foolish."

"I have known you for six months. I already think you are foolish. I also think you are the best man I know. Both things can be true."

Riyansh almost smiled. He turned the paper cup slowly in his hands. Then he said, very quietly, in the voice of a person stepping off a ledge:

"I think that I am in love with someone in the Society."

The world did not end. The tannoy announced a train to Virar. A pigeon landed on the platform and looked at them, with interest, with its head on one side.

Roy said, "I see."

"I am not going to say who. I am not going to do anything about it. I only wanted to say it, once, out loud, to somebody. I have been carrying it for so long that I thought my ribs would crack." He gave a small, crooked laugh. "There. That is all. It is said."

And Roy, who had a hundred jokes for every occasion, who had never in his life been at a loss for a word, sat there and found that every single one of them had gone out of the room.

He does not know, he thought. He thinks that I do not know. He is sitting here, telling me the one thing that would make me the happiest man in the world if it were about anyone else, and he has no idea that it is the same thing that I am holding in my own jacket, in eighteen drafts.

And she does not know which of us.

And neither of us can say it, because neither of us can bear to take it from the other.

"Riyansh," said Roy, and stopped, because there was no sentence that came after the name. He looked at his friend's tired, honest, open face, at the circles under the eyes, at the camera bag that never left his shoulder, and something in him, which had been standing at attention for six months, quietly sat down.

"Thank you for telling me," he said, at last. "I will not say a word. Not to anyone."

"I know," said Riyansh. "That is why I told you."

He said it so simply, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to say, and for a moment Roy thought that he might not be able to stand up. He stared at the tracks. He counted the sleepers, one, two, three, four, all the way to the vanishing point. He counted the pigeons.

Then, brightly, as if turning a page: "Right! Society meeting of two. Item one on the agenda. Is there any possibility of breakfast? Because I have eleven rupees and a great deal of hope."

Riyansh laughed. And they went off together in search of poha, arm in arm, a little clumsy, like two people carrying a piano up a staircase, each one thinking, with a fierce and secret tenderness, I will not be the one who hurts him.

---

The Bridge That Held

Item seven on the list at the back of Shreya's notebook was build a small bridge, and on the last Sunday of the month, they built it.

It took place in the structures laboratory of Shreya's college, a long, high, cold room that smelled of machine oil and old chalk, and had, on its walls, photographs of famous collapses with captions like DO NOT LET THIS BE YOU. It was empty on a Sunday except for a sleepy attendant named Ghosh Kaka, who had been told that three students had permission to work on a project and who was not inclined to ask what kind.

They had a bag of ice-cream sticks, four bottles of white glue, a pair of scissors, some string, and a great deal of confidence.

"Rules," said Shreya, tying her hair back. "One. Span of sixty centimetres. Two. Weight of five kilograms at midpoint. Three. Nobody touches the glue unless I say."

"That is not a rule," said Roy. "That is a dictatorship."

"It is a bridge. It is the same thing."

For three hours they worked. Riyansh, who had a mathematician's patience and a photographer's eye, sketched out the trusses, with the small precise lines of a man who had never quite learned to draw carelessly. Roy cut sticks, with a great deal of noise, singing the second verse of the song, and Shreya moved between them like a general, correcting a joint here, pressing a glued corner there, her whole face concentrated into a single fierce point.

At one point, reaching for the scissors, Riyansh's hand and Shreya's closed on them at exactly the same moment.

It lasted less than a second. Nobody said anything. She pulled her hand away and murmured, "Sorry," and he said, "No, no, take it," and they both looked, with enormous interest, at the ceiling.

Roy, on the other side of the table, put down his stick. He watched them not looking at each other. Then, with an air of rather too much cheerfulness, he announced, "I am going to see if Ghosh Kaka has any chai. Nobody build anything without me."

He walked the length of the lab, past the photographs of collapsed bridges and the rusting machines, and stood at the far window, with his forehead against the glass, and let out a very long breath.

It is fine, he told himself. You said you would hold the lantern. You did not say the lantern would not be heavy.

When he came back with three plastic cups, the bridge was finished.

It was not beautiful. It was slightly crooked. One end sat a little higher than the other, and a dark stain of glue ran along the north side like a scar. But it stood, an arch of pale sticks across sixty centimetres of empty table, quite still and quite sure of itself.

They put it on the testing frame, and Shreya, very slowly, lowered a five-kilogram weight onto its midpoint.

It creaked. Something in the middle gave a small alarming pop.

Nobody breathed.

And then, like a tired man deciding to keep going, it settled, and held.

"It held," whispered Shreya. "It held. Roy. Riyansh. It held."

She was laughing and crying at the same time, and she threw one arm round each of them, all three in a knot, foreheads together, in the cold bright empty laboratory, with Ghosh Kaka watching from the door and shaking his head, wonderingly, at a world in which three grown children could be so happy about ice-cream sticks.

"Item seven," said Shreya, into the middle of them, quite muffled. "Done."

"Item seven," said Roy.

"Item seven," said Riyansh.

And for that one long moment, with her arms round them both and their foreheads touching, it felt to all three as if nothing was ever going to change. It felt as though the crooked little bridge might carry them, all three, safely over.

That is what bridges are for. They do not tell you what lies on the other side.

---

The Visitor from Kolkata

Naresh Roy arrived in Mumbai on a Thursday, unannounced, the way he did everything, with a single steel trunk, a tin of sweets from the shop two doors from home, and the particular grim satisfaction of a father who has decided, after eighteen months of "I am fine, Baba, do not worry," to come and see for himself.

Roy found out he was in the city forty minutes after he had already arrived at the hostel gate.

"There is a man downstairs," Sameer reported, putting his head round the door with the expression of someone delivering news he did not fully understand the weight of. "He says he is your father. He is talking to Pawar Sir. They are getting along extremely well."

Roy went down the stairs two at a time and arrived, breathless, to find his father and the warden seated on white plastic chairs in the courtyard like two old generals reviewing a battlefield, a pot of tea between them, deep in a conversation that appeared, impossibly, to be about cricket.

"Baba."

"Anirban." His father rose, looked him up and down with the swift, silent, comprehensive audit that fathers perform without ever admitting to it — thinner, tired, but the eyes are the eyes — and said only, "You did not tell me your warden was such good company."

"I did not know he was," said Roy, with feeling, and shot Pawar Sir a look that Pawar Sir returned with the placid, immovable satisfaction of a man who now had a great deal of very useful new information about a certain student's habits, timings, and — he had gathered, over tea, with mild and growing interest — a certain young lady who visited rather more often than most sisters generally did.

Naresh Roy had come, ostensibly, to see his son's flat, check on his health, and attend a cousin's engagement in Thane. He had not come, he insisted several times over the next two days, to interfere. He was only looking. A father was allowed to look.

He looked at the flat and said nothing about the two chipped cups, though his eyes rested on them for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. He looked at the guitar, propped in its usual corner, and ran one thumb along the strings, producing a soft, discordant hum, and said only, "Still playing."

"Sometimes, Baba."

"For money? Or for yourself?"

Roy considered lying. He found, standing in front of his father in the small clean flat he had grown up believing was the finish line of somebody else's life, that he did not have it in him. "Both," he said. "Mostly for myself, now."

His father made a small sound that was not quite approval and was not quite its opposite, and moved on to the next thing to examine, which turned out to be, with the timing of a man who had clearly been building up to it all along, a folded piece of paper visible at the corner of a half-open drawer.

"What is this?"

"Nothing, Baba."

"It is not nothing. You do not keep nothing folded into four and carried in your jacket pocket for months. Your mother found the same jacket wet through and would not stop asking me about it."

There was a silence in which Roy considered, briefly and with real horror, every possible outcome of this conversation, and his father, watching his son's face do several things at once, did something Roy had not expected: he put the paper down, unread, exactly where he had found it, and sat down heavily on the narrow bed.

"I am not going to read it," he said. "Whatever it is. I raised a son, not a suspect." A pause. "But I am an old man, Anirban, and I have eyes, and I have been sitting with your warden for two days listening to him tell me, in great detail, about a young woman who apparently visits this hostel with a regularity that no sister in the history of India has ever managed."

Roy opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it.

"I am not angry," said his father, and something in his voice, gruff and unpractised, made it clear that this cost him something to say. "I came here to see if my son had become a stranger to me. Instead I find a boy who sings on trains, apparently, according to your warden, quite beautifully, and who has been carrying a letter in his pocket for months because he is too honourable to send it to a girl who has not yet chosen between him and his own best friend." He shook his head slowly. "This is not the son I expected to find. It is, I think, rather a better one."

"Baba—"

"I wanted you to have what I did not have," said Naresh Roy, more quietly now, looking not at his son but at the guitar in the corner. "A number on a payslip. A flat with your name on the deed. I thought that was the whole of it — that if I gave you safety, I would have given you everything. I did not think, until I was sitting in a plastic chair with a warden two days ago, listening to a stranger describe my own son's life back to me as though it were a film, that I had perhaps only given you the safety, and left you to find the rest of it entirely on your own." He looked up. "Send the letter, or do not send it. That is your business, and I find, to my own great surprise, that I no longer have an opinion about which. But do not fold it into four again and put it away for another six months on my account. I did not come to Mumbai to keep my son's heart in a drawer."

Roy sat down on the floor, because his legs did not seem entirely willing to hold him, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all.

"There is a girl," he said at last, to the floor, because it was easier than saying it to his father's face. "And a friend. Both of them, at once. It is a very long story."

"I have four days," said his father, "before my train, and your warden already knows the whole of it in more detail than I do. You may as well tell me yourself."

And so, for the first time in his life, Anirban Roy told his father everything — the last local, the rain, the song with a hole in it, a boy called Riyansh who deserved better than a friend who loved the same girl, a Society founded at dawn on a wet stone wall — and his father listened, all the way through, without once interrupting, with the particular stillness of a man discovering that his son had, somewhere in eighteen months of "I am fine, Baba," built an entire second life he had known nothing about, and had built it, as far as his father could tell, with more courage than safety had ever taught him to have.

When Naresh Roy left, on the fourth day, at Churchgate, with the steel trunk and the empty sweet tin, he held his son by both shoulders for a moment on the platform, in a gesture so unfamiliar to both of them that neither quite knew what to do with it.

"Whichever way it goes," he said, "with the girl. You will still have a father in Kolkata who is, against all his own better judgement, rather proud of you."

It was not, Roy thought, watching the train pull out, the kind of thing his father said. But he found, walking back out into the roaring afternoon light of the station, that he believed it completely, and that it had changed something in him that eighteen drafts of a letter had not quite managed to.

---

Fairy Lights

Riyansh's twenty-first birthday fell in the week before the rains withdrew, and it was Shreya who decided, with the ruthless efficiency of a woman who had planned an entire structures project, that there would be a party.

"You have not had a birthday in this city," she said. "Not a real one. Roy told me. You spent the last one in a lab, with a sandwich."

"It was a good sandwich," said Riyansh.

"It is not a birthday if it is only a sandwich."

The rooftop was Roy's idea. It belonged, technically, to the hostel, which meant that it belonged to Pawar Sir, who had strong opinions about anything that took place above the third floor. But Pawar Sir, as it turned out, had a weakness that no one had ever suspected: a passion for old Kishore Kumar songs, and a daughter who had just got engaged. Roy, with the diplomacy of a natural entertainer, had spent a full evening in the warden's office discussing the songs and admiring the engagement photographs, and had come out of it with a signed permission slip and a warm, faintly puzzled expression.

"How?" said Shreya.

"I do not know," said Roy. "I think I am somehow his favourite now. It is terrifying."

They hung the fairy lights themselves, late in the afternoon, with an extension cord and a great deal of shouting. Roy stood on the water tank and passed the strings down. Shreya, on a ladder, fastened them to the railing. Riyansh, who did not trust anybody else with a knot, checked every one. When the sun went down over Andheri in a long orange ribbon and the first bulb blinked on, then the second, then the whole tangled length of them lit up at once against the dark, like a handful of stars that had come down to see what the fuss was about, they all stopped and looked.

"It is beautiful," said Shreya, quite softly.

"It is a fire hazard," said Roy.

"It is both."

The party was small. It was the three of them and a handful of friends from the hostel, a cake from a bakery in Lokhandwala that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY RIYANSH in green icing with the Y slightly squashed, a speaker playing songs at a volume that Pawar Sir had graciously overlooked, and a great deal of nervous laughter. Someone made a speech. Someone else spilled cola on the cake. Roy, after a long argument, was permitted to sing.

He sang the song from Marine Drive, the one with the hole in the second verse, and this time the hole was gone. And we will meet again. When he came to the line, he looked at Riyansh, and Riyansh, blushing, raised his paper cup, and all the strangers on that little rooftop cheered, because a song can make a family out of anyone.

The evening wore on. The guests thinned out, one by one, down the stairwell, in twos and threes. The wedding band on the far side of the road began to murder something by Bappi Lahiri, with tremendous feeling. The last train hummed over the distant bridge, all its windows lit.

By a quarter to midnight, only the three of them were left.

And that is how it came about that Anirban Roy was sitting on a rooftop in Andheri, at eight minutes to twelve, with his back against a water tank and a folded paper in his hand, when the terrace door banged open and two voices came through it, one bright and one careful.

He knew the moment well. He had, in a way, been living it in advance for six months.

"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.

---

The Light Goes Out

They sat together in the last of the party, in a small row along the low wall, with the fairy lights blinking over their heads and the city glittering below like something spilled.

Riyansh handed out the tea. Roy tucked the letter, once again, into the deepest pocket of his jacket, and put on his best smile, the one that could be switched on at will and had never once let him down.

"To the birthday boy," said Shreya, raising her cup.

"To the treasurer," said Roy.

"To the Society," said Riyansh, and they touched their paper cups together, and the tea slopped over Roy's wrist, and nobody cared.

For a while nobody spoke. The night was warm and full of the smell of cooking from a hundred windows. A pair of kites, left over from some festival, hung from a wire on the next building, twitching in the breeze. It was the kind of quiet that follows a good evening, the kind you would like to keep, if only there were a jar.

Then Shreya put down her cup.

"I want to say something," she said.

Roy's hand went very still on his knee.

"I have been thinking about it for a long time. Longer than I should have. And I have not said it, because I was frightened that whatever I said would change us. That it would break the Society." She looked at the two of them, one on either side, the way she had looked at them on the sea wall, in the grey light, in the very first hour. "But I have realised something. Something that a person told me, once, on a night like this. If you wait for the perfect moment to be honest, you will wait until it is too late."

Riyansh had stopped breathing. Roy did not dare to look at him.

"I have decided," said Shreya.

The fairy lights blinked, gold and white and gold, along the railing.

"I have decided which one of you it is."

Nobody moved. Down in the street, a horn sounded, very far off. The two boys sat on either side of her, in their separate silences, each with a secret in his pocket and a heartbeat he could hear in his ears.

She drew a breath.

And the lights went out.

All of them, at once, the fairy lights and the street lamps and the lit windows of the building opposite and the far-off blinking cranes on the skyline. Every light in Andheri, for as far as the eye could see, went out in a single soft click, like the shutter of an enormous camera. A moment of perfect, ringing darkness fell over the rooftop, with only the stars overhead, and three people sitting side by side on a wall, none of whom, for a long moment, could see the others' faces.

"Power cut," said Roy, into the dark, and his voice sounded strange, even to himself.

"Shreya?" said Riyansh, very low.

"I am here," said Shreya.

But she did not say anything else. And in the great black quiet of the city, three hearts went on beating, side by side, waiting for the light to come back and tell them what they had already begun to fear.