Chapter 2: Mandai

Five in the morning is a stupid time to be alive, but Kiran had been doing it six days a week for two years, so stupidity had become routine.

Neeta Aunty's van — a Maruti Eeco that smelled permanently of cardboard and old perfume — was idling outside the Sadashiv Peth godown when Kiran arrived. Neil was loading boxes. Neil was always loading boxes. He was the kind of man who, if the world ended, would still be loading boxes, because that was the job and Neil did the job and existential crises could wait until the van was full.

"Late," he said, without looking up.

"Two minutes."

"Three."

"Two and a half. Don't be a dick about it."

Neil grunted. This was their morning ritual — the argument about minutes that neither of them cared about, performed daily like a prayer neither believed in. He was twenty-eight, built like a wardrobe, and had the particular gentleness of very large men who know their size frightens people and have spent their lives compensating with softness. He loaded the last box — handbags, this batch, the kind that looked like branded goods from a distance and like optimism from up close — and slammed the van doors.

Neeta Aunty was in the passenger seat, applying lipstick with the rear-view mirror angled toward her face. Neeta Deshpande — fifty-three years old, five foot nothing, the kind of Pune woman who could sell sand to a beach and then convince the beach it was getting a bargain. She ran the stall at Mandai Market the way a general runs a campaign: with strategy, discipline, and an absolute refusal to acknowledge the possibility of defeat.

"Kiran. Good morning. You look terrible."

"Thanks, Aunty."

"Did you eat?"

"I had chai."

"Chai is not food. Chai is what you drink while deciding what food to eat. Neil, stop at the tapri near Shaniwar Wada. This girl needs a poha."

"I don't need a poha."

"You need a poha. Look at you. Your arms are like sticks. If a customer grabs a bag and runs, you couldn't chase them past the first stall."

"That's never happened."

"Because they see me and they know better. But I won't always be here, and then what? You need strength. Poha gives strength. It's the foundation of Marathi civilization."

Kiran got in the back of the van, wedged between boxes of handbags and a crate of costume jewellery that clinked with every pothole like a tiny, angry orchestra. Neil drove. Neeta Aunty directed, because Neeta Aunty directed everything, including traffic, weather, and the moral direction of the nation.

They stopped at the tapri. The poha came in a paper plate — turmeric-yellow, studded with peanuts, topped with fresh coriander and a squeeze of lime that made the whole thing sing. Kiran ate it standing by the van, watching Shaniwar Wada's ruined walls turn pink in the early light. The fort looked different at this hour — less tourist attraction, more ghost. The kind of place that had seen enough history to be tired of it.

The poha was good. The poha was always good. This particular tapri had been serving poha since 1987, which Kiran knew because the owner, a man named Dinesh who had the face of someone who'd seen everything and been impressed by none of it, had a framed newspaper clipping on his cart that said "Dinesh's Poha: 35 Years of Morning Excellence" — the kind of self-awarded title that, in Pune, passed for marketing.

"Better?" Neeta Aunty asked when Kiran got back in the van.

"Better."

"See? Poha. Never fails."

Mandai Market at 6 AM was controlled chaos. Stalls being assembled, tarps being unfurled, vendors arguing about territory with the particular intensity of people whose livelihood depends on six feet of pavement. The flower sellers were already set up — their section of the market a riot of marigold and jasmine and rose, the smell hitting you from twenty feet away like a floral ambush. The vegetable vendors were arranging their displays with the care of gallery curators, each tomato placed just so, each bhindi angled for maximum appeal.

Neeta's stall was in the middle section — the fashion zone, which was a generous term for the area where bags, scarves, jewellery, and clothing items of variable provenance were sold to customers of variable gullibility. Kiran loved it. She'd never admit it — admitting you love your job when your job is selling knockoff bags at a market stall felt like admitting you love your prison cell — but she did. The rhythm of it. The performance. The moment when a customer picked up a bag and turned it over and Kiran could see the calculation happening in real time: is this worth it? And Kiran's job — her gift, really — was to tip that calculation toward yes.

"This one," Kiran said to a woman who was hovering over a brown sling bag with brass hardware, "is the same design they had at Westside last season. Same look, same feel. But half the price, because you're buying direct, not paying for air conditioning and a security guard."

The woman laughed. Bought the bag. Neeta Aunty nodded from behind the stall — the nod that meant: good sell.

That was the thing about Kiran that people didn't expect. She hadn't finished school — dropped out at sixteen, family circumstances, the usual Indian euphemism for "everything fell apart and education was the first casualty." She couldn't do algebra. She'd never read Shakespeare. She thought the periodic table was something you put in a chemistry lab and ignored, like a fire extinguisher. But she could read people. She could look at a woman standing at a market stall and know — from the way she held the bag, from the angle of her head, from whether she checked the price first or the quality first — exactly what that woman needed to hear to make the purchase.

Neeta Aunty called it "the instinct." Kiran called it "paying attention." Either way, it worked.

By noon, they'd had a decent morning — eight thousand in sales, which was good for a Thursday and excellent for a Thursday in December when Pune's shopping money was being hoarded for Diwali bills and New Year plans. Neil packed the unsold stock. Kiran counted the cash — actual cash, notes and coins, because Mandai ran on physical currency the way Mumbai ran on dreams and Delhi ran on ego.

"Kiran." Neeta Aunty was on her phone, scrolling. "You free Saturday evening?"

"Define free."

"Not working. Not sitting in your room eating Maggi and feeling sorry for yourself."

"I don't feel sorry for myself. I feel sorry for the Maggi. It deserves a better cook."

"Saturday evening. My house. Seven o'clock. I'm starting a reading group."

Kiran looked at her. "A reading group."

"A book club. My friend Gauri is organising it. Women only. We read a book, we discuss it, we eat snacks. It's civilised."

"Aunty, I don't read books."

"Then it's time you started." Neeta's voice had shifted — from market-stall general to something softer, more deliberate. The voice she used when she was about to say something she'd been planning. "You're smart, Kiran. Too smart for this stall. Too smart for Mandai. And you know it, even if you pretend you don't. But smart without books is like a car without petrol — it'll look good in the driveway but it won't take you anywhere."

"That's a terrible metaphor."

"It's an excellent metaphor. Saturday. Seven. Bring snacks."

Kiran wanted to argue. But Neeta Aunty had the particular quality of certain Indian women of a certain age — the quality of being absolutely, immovably, cosmically right, even when you disagreed with them, even when every fibre of your being wanted to say no, because the rightness emanated from them like heat from a stove and resistance was simply a matter of how long you were willing to stand close before you gave in.

"Fine," Kiran said. "But if anyone makes me read poetry, I'm leaving."

"No one will make you read poetry."

"Promise?"

"Promise." Neeta Aunty smiled. The smile of a woman who had just won a negotiation so smoothly that the other party thought they'd had a choice. "We're starting with Jane Austen."

Kiran had never heard of Jane Austen. This, in retrospect, was the most important ignorance of her life.