Chapter 1: Pehli Mulaqaat

The night I met Manav Kapoor, I was wearing a green kurta that I had bought on impulse from a sale rack at Westside, and I was three glasses of cheap wine into a party I had not wanted to attend.

Maitreyi had dragged me. That was what Maitreyi did — she dragged. She was the kind of friend who believed that the solution to every problem was the presence of other human beings, that loneliness was a disease and socialising was the cure, and that if you were sitting alone in your flat on a Saturday night eating Maggi from the pan and watching crime documentaries, you were not relaxing, you were dying slowly. She had arrived at my door at eight, already dressed — red lipstick, gold jhumkas, the particular confidence of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted from the evening and who intended to get it — and she had looked at me in my pajamas and said, with the particular tone that Maitreyi reserved for situations she considered emergencies: "Anu, get dressed. We're going to Rohan's."

Rohan was Maitreyi's colleague at the architecture firm. I had met him once — a harmless, loud man who collected people the way some people collected stamps, indiscriminately and with great enthusiasm, and who threw parties in his three-BHK in Koregaon Park with the regularity and intensity of a man who believed that silence was a personal failure. His flat was always full. The music was always too loud. The drinks were always cheap. And the crowd was always the particular Pune crowd — software engineers and architects and startup founders and MBAs and the occasional artist who had been invited for cultural credibility and who stood in a corner looking uncomfortable and drinking more than everyone else.

I did not want to go. I had been working sixty-hour weeks at the agency — we had three properties closing simultaneously and Nikhil, my colleague, was useless in the way that only confident men could be useless: he created the impression of productivity without producing anything, he scheduled meetings about meetings, he said things like "let's circle back on that" and "I'll loop you in" and the net result of his existence in the office was that I did his work as well as mine and he received half the credit. I was tired. Not the romantic tiredness of overwork — the actual, bone-deep tiredness of a twenty-seven-year-old woman who was carrying the professional weight of two people and who wanted, more than anything, to eat Maggi from the pan and watch a documentary about serial killers and not talk to anyone.

But Maitreyi dragged. And so I went.

Rohan's flat was exactly as I remembered it — too many people, too little furniture, the music turned up to the volume at which conversation became a competitive sport, the air thick with cigarette smoke and the particular optimism of young professionals who still believed that networking at parties led to opportunities. The kitchen counter was lined with bottles — Old Monk, Breezer, a bottle of Sula that someone had brought as a housewarming gift three parties ago and that no one had opened because everyone preferred rum. There was a bowl of mixture — the spicy kind, from the namkeen shop on MG Road — and a plate of paneer tikka that was already cold and that had the particular look of food that had been prepared with ambition and served with indifference.

I poured myself wine — the Sula, because no one else was drinking it and because I wanted something that didn't taste like it had been manufactured in a bathtub — and I stood near the balcony, looking out at Koregaon Park's tree-lined street, the amber glow of streetlights through neem leaves, the distant sound of an auto-rickshaw's horn, the particular Pune night that was cool enough to stand outside without sweating and warm enough to not need a jacket. March. The city between seasons — winter gone, summer not yet arrived, the brief window when Pune was perfect and everyone knew it and no one said it because saying it would acknowledge that it was temporary.

"You look like you're at a funeral."

The voice came from my left. I turned.

He was leaning against the balcony railing — tall, lean, the particular build of a man who did not go to the gym but who moved through the world with the physical confidence of someone who had always been comfortable in his body. Dark hair, slightly longer than corporate-acceptable, pushed back from his forehead in a way that was either deliberately stylish or accidentally perfect. A light blue shirt, top two buttons undone, sleeves rolled to the elbows. And eyes — dark, sharp, the kind of eyes that looked at you and made you feel like they were seeing something that other people missed, something beneath the surface, something that you yourself might not know was there.

He was smiling. Not the broad, performative smile of a man who wanted you to know he was friendly, but the small, private smile of a man who had noticed something amusing and who was deciding whether to share it.

"I might be," I said. "This wine tastes like it died three years ago."

He laughed. A real laugh — not the polite, social laugh that parties demanded, but the sudden, surprised laugh of a person who had heard something genuinely funny. The laugh changed his face. The sharpness in his eyes softened, the angles of his jaw relaxed, and for a moment he looked younger, more open, like a door that had been closed and that a gust of wind had blown ajar.

"That's the Sula that's been sitting on the counter since October," he said. "Rohan keeps it as a test. Anyone who drinks it is either desperate or interesting. Which are you?"

"Both," I said. "Desperate because I'm at a party I didn't want to attend, and interesting because I'm the only person here who's honest about it."

The smile widened. He extended his hand. "Manav."

"Ananya. Anu."

His hand was warm. The handshake lasted exactly one beat longer than it needed to — not long enough to be inappropriate, but long enough for me to notice, for the extra beat to register as a signal, a frequency that my body tuned into before my brain had time to analyse it.

"So, Anu who didn't want to come to the party — why are you here?"

"Maitreyi," I said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the living room, where Maitreyi was almost certainly holding court, telling a story with her hands, making everyone around her feel like they were the most important people in the room.

"Ah," he said, nodding. "The force of nature in the red lipstick. She works with Rohan, right?"

"She works with everyone. Maitreyi doesn't have colleagues, she has an audience."

Another laugh. I felt something shift — the particular shift that happened when a conversation stopped being small talk and became something else, when the words stopped being placeholders and became connectors, when you stopped performing the social version of yourself and started being the actual version.

We talked. We stood on that balcony and talked while the party happened around us, the music and the voices and the laughter becoming background noise, becoming the soundtrack to a conversation that felt — and I know how this sounds, I know how every woman who has ever fallen for a man describes the first conversation, I know the clichés, I have read the novels, I have watched the films, and I am telling you that knowing the clichés did not protect me from living them — that felt different.

He told me he worked in finance. Mumbai — an investment firm in Lower Parel. He was in Pune for the weekend, visiting a friend. He was from Indore originally — the city of poha and sev, he said, and I laughed because every person from Indore said that and they all said it with the same pride, as if poha was a cultural achievement rather than a breakfast item. He told me he had moved to Mumbai three years ago, that he lived in a small flat in Bandra that he overpaid for because Bandra was Bandra and you paid the tax of aspiration whether you could afford it or not.

I told him about the real estate agency. About Nikhil. About the three properties closing simultaneously and the sixty-hour weeks and the particular exhaustion of being good at a job that did not notice your goodness, that took your competence as its baseline and that only noticed when you fell below it. He listened. Not the performative listening of a man who was waiting for his turn to speak — the actual listening of a person who was interested, who was processing what you said, who responded to the thing you meant rather than the thing you said.

At some point Maitreyi appeared. She looked at me, looked at Manav, looked at the space between us — a space that had been shrinking steadily for the past hour — and she smiled. Not at me. At the situation. The particular smile of a matchmaker who had not intended to matchmake but who was taking credit for the outcome anyway.

"I see you've met someone," she said, and the way she said "someone" carried the weight of an entire romantic comedy, the word stretched and loaded and aimed at me like a dart.

"This is Manav," I said. "He's from Indore."

"The city of poha," Maitreyi said automatically, because everyone said it, and Manav laughed, and I laughed, and for a moment the three of us were connected by the shared understanding that some things in India were as predictable as sunrise and that this predictability was not boring but comforting, the cultural constants that held us together.

Maitreyi left. She left with a look — the particular look that Indian women gave each other across rooms, the look that said: I see what's happening, I approve, we will discuss this in detail later, do not leave this party without getting his number. I received the look. I acknowledged the look. And then I turned back to Manav.

"Your friend is subtle," he said.

"Maitreyi has never been subtle about anything in her life. Subtlety is a concept she has heard of and rejected on principle."

The party was thinning. People were leaving — the couples first, then the groups, then the individuals who had stayed too long and who now faced the particular Pune dilemma of getting home after midnight: Ola that would take twenty minutes, auto-rickshaw that would charge double, or the walk that was pleasant in theory and inadvisable in practice. The music had been turned down. Rohan was in the kitchen, washing glasses with the satisfied air of a host who considered the evening a success.

"I should go," I said. Not because I wanted to — I did not want to, I wanted this conversation to continue indefinitely, I wanted to stand on this balcony and talk to this man until the sun came up and the neem trees cast their morning shadows and the auto-rickshaws began their first routes — but because I had learned, over the years, that the best conversations were the ones that ended while you still wanted more. The ones that left a space, a hunger, a reason to come back.

"Can I have your number?" he asked. Simple. Direct. No elaborate justification, no manufactured excuse about connecting on LinkedIn, no pretence that the request was anything other than what it was: a man who wanted to talk to a woman again.

I gave him my number. He typed it into his phone. He looked up.

"I'll call you," he said. "Not text — call. Texting is for people who don't have anything to say."

"That's either the most romantic or the most pretentious thing anyone has ever said to me."

"Both," he said, echoing my answer from earlier. "Romantic because I mean it, and pretentious because I know how it sounds."

I walked home. Maitreyi was already in the auto — she had left fifteen minutes earlier with Jhanvi, who had spent the party in a corner arguing with her boyfriend on the phone and who had emerged, red-eyed and furious, to announce that men were garbage. The auto had left. I walked. Fifteen minutes through Koregaon Park's quiet streets, the neem trees overhead, the streetlights casting amber circles on the pavement, the night air carrying the faint smell of jasmine from someone's garden, the distant bass thud of another party in another flat, the city alive in its late-night way, the particular aliveness of a city that was going to sleep but that was not asleep yet.

My phone buzzed. A message.

The Sula was 2021. I checked the bottle after you left. You drank a wine that should have been buried with full honours. — M

I smiled. I stopped walking and I smiled, standing under a streetlight on North Main Road, the amber light on my face, the jasmine in the air, the night warm and cool at the same time, and I felt something — the particular something that you felt when the world shifted, when the ground beneath your feet tilted by a single degree, barely perceptible but absolutely real, the tilt that meant that everything that came after would be different from everything that came before.

I did not know, standing under that streetlight, smiling at a message from a man I had known for three hours, that the tilt was the beginning of the end. That the ground was not shifting toward something beautiful but toward something that would break me. That the man who made me laugh about dead wine would, within a year, be dead himself. And that I would be sitting in a courtroom, accused of his death, wondering how the girl under the streetlight became the woman in the accused's box.

But I did not know any of that. All I knew was that my phone had buzzed and a man named Manav had made me smile and the jasmine smelled extraordinary and the night was perfect and I was, for the first time in months, not tired.

I texted back: Some things improve with age. Some things just get more desperate. The wine was the latter. The party was the former. — A

His reply came in thirty seconds: Calling you tomorrow. 10 AM. Have chai ready.

I walked the rest of the way home with my phone in my hand and his words on my screen and the particular, dangerous warmth of possibility spreading through my chest.

Maitreyi was right. Getting dressed was not dying slowly.

Getting dressed was sometimes the first step toward something enormous.

I just didn't know, yet, how enormous. Or how fatal.