07-04-2026, 12:37 AM
Chapter One: The Last Night in Amritsar
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The cardboard boxes had swallowed the flat.
By seven in the evening there was nowhere left to sit that was not a surface in the process of being dismantled — every shelf stripped bare, every cupboard yawning open and empty, the bookshelves reduced to pale rectangles on the wall where the spines used to press. Six years of a family in one place, and it all came down to brown squares of cardboard and the tape gun Naina kept leaving on the floor for people to trip over.
Simran stood in the middle of what had been the living room and looked at the rectangle of lighter paint where the large mirror used to hang. They had taken it down that morning — her mother's decision, it was too heavy for the truck and the glass would not survive the road — and given it to the Mehtas next door. She had watched it go without regret. It was an ordinary mirror, gilt-framed, slightly spotted at the lower right corner. She had looked into it every day for six years and never thought anything particular about it.
She thought about it now, for some reason. The wall without it looked like a wall with a missing tooth.
From the kitchen came the smell of rajma and her mother's voice conducting a one-sided argument with the refrigerator, which had been difficult about being moved and was being difficult again. From the bedroom came the sound of her father's suitcase being dragged across the floor in stops and starts, the way he did everything — thorough but unhurried, a man who had never understood that speed was available as an option.
Simran pressed her back against the stripped wall and looked up at the ceiling and tried to locate the feeling she'd been carrying for the last two weeks. It sat just below the sternum. Not dread exactly. Not grief. Something older than both, something that did not have the decency to arrive with a name so she could look directly at it.
She was 19 years old and she was leaving Amritsar and she could not explain why that felt like more than it should.
"Simi."
Naina appeared in the hallway doorway with a clipboard — an actual clipboard, because Naina was a person who owned a clipboard and knew where it was at all times. She was 24, their father's eldest, built like someone who had never been uncertain of her right to take up space — medium height, broader in the shoulder than Simran, the comfortable solidity of a woman who walked fast and carried things and did not think twice about either. She had their mother's jaw — strong, slightly squared — and their father's deep-set eyes under prominent brows, and the warm brown complexion of their mother's family that the Amritsar sun had deepened further over the years. She wore her hair in a practical braid, as she always did, and had opinions about women who didn't. She had opinions about most things. She had their mother's jaw and their father's eyes and a quality of personal certainty that had annoyed Simran for the entirety of her conscious life and that she was, right now, deeply grateful for.
"Guest bathroom," Naina said, looking at the clipboard. "The rack behind the door is still there, I saw it twenty minutes ago and nobody has moved it."
"I'll get it."
"And the little shelf above the toilet. There's still a kajal on it."
"Probably Maa's."
"Then tell Maa." Naina made a note on the clipboard with a satisfaction that suggested the note-making itself was pleasurable. She looked up. Her eyes found Simran's and she did the thing she always did — the elder-sister scan, a quick read for what was actually going on underneath the surface of whatever face Simran was showing. "You're doing it again."
"I'm not doing anything."
"The wall thing. Standing against the wall looking at nothing."
"I'm looking at where the mirror was."
Naina glanced at the rectangle of lighter paint. "It was an ugly mirror," she said, which was true. "Come help with the kitchen boxes. Maa has been talking to the fridge for twenty minutes and it's making Papa nervous."
"Why is Papa nervous about Maa talking to the fridge?"
"Because he's afraid she'll win," Naina said, and ticked something off the clipboard and disappeared back into the corridor.
Simran stood a moment longer. She looked at the wall. She looked at the shape the mirror had left.
Then she went to help with the kitchen boxes.
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Gurpreet Singh arrived home at seven-thirty carrying a small barfi box from the sweet shop on Katra Jaimal Singh because he had passed it on the way back from the office and it had seemed, he said, like a last-night-in-Amritsar occasion. He was five foot ten, the kind of man who had been unremarkably tall his entire life and was entirely at peace with this. Medium build gone soft at the middle after twenty years of desk work, the belly gentle rather than imposing, the kind of softness that belonged to a man who ate his wife's cooking without complaint and sat behind a desk and did not exercise and considered this a reasonable arrangement. His hair was silver at the temples and thinning at the crown, his face clean-shaved and mild, his eyes — the deep-set ones he had given both his daughters — warm and slightly slow and entirely good-natured. He was the sort of man strangers trusted immediately and were never disappointed by, which was, Simran had come to understand, a rarer quality than it seemed.
Nobody told him they had already packed the plates.
Reena found four disposable cups from the back of the topmost kitchen shelf. She was five foot seven — the same height Simran would eventually reach — and built entirely differently from her husband: full and round and warm in the way of the women from her family in Gurdaspur, a figure that had been generous in its proportions since she was twenty and had settled into something rich and comfortable over the years since. Her waist had thickened with age and with the comfortable indifference of a woman who had raised two daughters and had no particular interest in being thin, but the shape of her — the full bust, the wide hips, the deep curve between — was the shape that both her daughters had inherited in different proportions, and it was the shape that had turned heads on the Gurdaspur streets when she was young and which she wore now with the complete unselfconsciousness of someone who had stopped thinking about it. She was the source of Simran's cheekbones, Naina's hips, both their hair — dark and thick, hers now shot through with grey she hadn't bothered to cover in three years because she had, as she said, better things to think about. She had the rounded face of her family, warm-complexioned, expressive, a face that had never learned to be quiet about what it was feeling and had never been asked to. They ate barfi standing at the kitchen counter because there was nowhere else to stand. Gurpreet ate with the slightly dazed happiness of a man who had set a large thing in motion and was only now beginning to feel the weight of it moving.
"Nayagarh is a good town," he said. Not for the first time. Perhaps the fifteenth. He said it the way some people say a prayer — repetition as reassurance.
"We know, Papa," Naina said.
"The haveli is only three hours from Jodhpur. We can go on weekends. I've read that the—"
"We know about the Mehrangarh Fort," Simran said. "You've mentioned it."
Gurpreet looked at her with the gentle concern he brought to everything. "You'll love it once we're there," he said. "You always take time to warm up to things."
"She's already warmed up to Amritsar," Naina said. "That's the problem."
"Amritsar is home," Simran said.
"Amritsar will still be Amritsar after we leave," her mother said, in the tone that closed arguments. "It's not going anywhere. We're going somewhere. These are different things." She ate the last piece of barfi and put the empty box on top of the nearest sealed crate. "Now someone wake up and remember where I've packed the razai because it's going on top of everything and I'm not digging through four boxes tonight."
Naina consulted the clipboard.
Later, after the razai had been located and the remaining cups washed and the lights turned off room by room, Simran sat on the floor in what had been the living room and listened to the flat become quiet. Her mother had found the one remaining mattress and fallen asleep on it with the speed of a woman who had been practical all day and had earned the right. Her father had gone to lie down on his side of it and was almost certainly asleep within four minutes, as he always was. From the small room at the end of the hall — Naina's room, the one with the window that got morning light — she could hear her sister moving around, doing her final checks, ticking things off the invisible list in her head even after the clipboard had been put away.
The flat was half-lit by the orange spill of the street lamp outside. The boxes made black shapes in the dark. The walls, stripped of pictures and shelves, were strangers.
Simran thought about the friends she hadn't said proper goodbyes to. She thought about the chai shop at the end of their lane where she had gone every morning for three years and where the uncle who ran it had been quietly pleased every time she came in, in the uncomplicated way of someone who simply enjoyed their regulars. She thought about Neha, who had come to sit with her yesterday and had cried a little and had not apologised for crying, which was the kind of person Neha was. She thought about the Harmandir Sahib visible on clear days from the roof of this building, the gold just catching the late afternoon light.
She was 19. People moved cities. It happened all the time.
She looked at the wall where the mirror had been.
She could not explain it. She had been trying to explain it to herself for two weeks and she kept arriving at the same empty place: a sourceless conviction that something was wrong, not about the move, not about Rajasthan, but about something that had no location she could put her finger on. Like a wrongness in the frequency of things. Like a sound just below hearing.
She had been having the same dream for two weeks. Dark water. Her own face looking up at her from below the surface — her face but wrong, the expression not hers, the eyes not meeting hers at the right angle. Something behind it, deeper in the dark, watching.
She hadn't told anyone about the dream.
From Naina's room the sounds of movement ceased. Silence settled through the flat with the particular weight of a last night — a silence that knew it was a last night. Simran sat in it for a while.
Then there were footsteps in the corridor — Naina's footsteps, recognisable after twenty years by their pace, unhurried and certain the way Naina was unhurried and certain about everything — and then Naina appeared in the doorway of the living room in her sleeping clothes.
She was wearing the old cotton kurta she slept in — the pale yellow one, faded from too many washes, fraying at the hem, owned since college and refused to be thrown away on principle. She had undone her braid. Her hair was down around her shoulders, thick and very dark, falling to the middle of her back, and without the practical braid she looked unexpectedly different. Softer. Less like a person with a clipboard. She was five foot seven, a couple of inches taller than Simran, and built entirely unlike her — where Simran was slim and fine-boned, Naina had the figure of the women on their mother's side: full, round, and settled into herself with the ease of someone who had been this way since nineteen and had never thought twice about it. Her chest was heavy under the loose kurta — the cotton pulled across it slightly when she moved, the kind of thing you notice and then feel rude for noticing — 36 at least, probably more, Simran had never asked but the tailors who did both their clothes had made it plain. Her waist was a 28, her hips wide and round at maybe 37 or 38, the full deep curve of them visible even through the loose sleeping kurta. She was barefooted, her braid-cord around her wrist, and in the orange half-dark of the stripped living room she looked, for once, like someone who had run out of things to organise and was simply herself — which was, Simran thought, a version of her sister she did not see often enough and would miss more than she'd admitted.
She had the clipboard in one hand. Of course she did.
"I thought you'd gone to bed," Simran said.
"I did. Then I remembered the rack behind the bathroom door." She came into the room and sat down on the floor beside Simran, which was a Naina thing to do — not on a box, not standing in the doorway, on the floor, because Simran was on the floor. She set the clipboard aside. She did not look at it. "We got it, by the way. It's in the hallway stack."
"I know. I got it at eight."
"I know you got it. I ticked it off." A pause. Outside the street was doing its quiet things. Naina stretched her legs out and leaned her head back against the bare wall. Her shoulder was against Simran's — warm, familiar, the specific weight of her older sister, which Simran had known her whole life and which felt, right now, like something she had not properly appreciated until this exact moment.
"We're really going," Simran said.
"We are really going," Naina said.
"You're not bothered at all."
"I'm bothered." Naina considered. "I'm bothered in the abstract. In the specific I've been too busy with the logistics to have feelings about it."
"That's very you."
"Yes." A beat. Then, because Naina always knew when there was a real thing underneath a surface thing: "What are you bothered about specifically. Not the general. The specific."
Simran thought about it. The feeling below the sternum. The sourceless wrongness that had no name. "I don't know," she said, which was true. "That's the problem. I can't locate it."
Naina was quiet for a moment. Then she put her arm around Simran's shoulders and pulled her sideways in the brief fierce way she had done since they were children, the elder-sister grip that communicated everything it needed to without words and had never needed words. She held it for three seconds. Released.
"Nayagarh," she said. "New city. New mirrors to hang things off of." She picked up the clipboard. "I'm going to sleep. You should too." She stood up, looked at the stripped walls, made the expression of someone filing a conclusion, and went back down the corridor.
Simran listened to her footsteps. Heard the light click off in Naina's room. The flat went fully dark.
She sat in it for a while longer. Then she got up and went to the bathroom.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The cardboard boxes had swallowed the flat.
By seven in the evening there was nowhere left to sit that was not a surface in the process of being dismantled — every shelf stripped bare, every cupboard yawning open and empty, the bookshelves reduced to pale rectangles on the wall where the spines used to press. Six years of a family in one place, and it all came down to brown squares of cardboard and the tape gun Naina kept leaving on the floor for people to trip over.
Simran stood in the middle of what had been the living room and looked at the rectangle of lighter paint where the large mirror used to hang. They had taken it down that morning — her mother's decision, it was too heavy for the truck and the glass would not survive the road — and given it to the Mehtas next door. She had watched it go without regret. It was an ordinary mirror, gilt-framed, slightly spotted at the lower right corner. She had looked into it every day for six years and never thought anything particular about it.
She thought about it now, for some reason. The wall without it looked like a wall with a missing tooth.
From the kitchen came the smell of rajma and her mother's voice conducting a one-sided argument with the refrigerator, which had been difficult about being moved and was being difficult again. From the bedroom came the sound of her father's suitcase being dragged across the floor in stops and starts, the way he did everything — thorough but unhurried, a man who had never understood that speed was available as an option.
Simran pressed her back against the stripped wall and looked up at the ceiling and tried to locate the feeling she'd been carrying for the last two weeks. It sat just below the sternum. Not dread exactly. Not grief. Something older than both, something that did not have the decency to arrive with a name so she could look directly at it.
She was 19 years old and she was leaving Amritsar and she could not explain why that felt like more than it should.
"Simi."
Naina appeared in the hallway doorway with a clipboard — an actual clipboard, because Naina was a person who owned a clipboard and knew where it was at all times. She was 24, their father's eldest, built like someone who had never been uncertain of her right to take up space — medium height, broader in the shoulder than Simran, the comfortable solidity of a woman who walked fast and carried things and did not think twice about either. She had their mother's jaw — strong, slightly squared — and their father's deep-set eyes under prominent brows, and the warm brown complexion of their mother's family that the Amritsar sun had deepened further over the years. She wore her hair in a practical braid, as she always did, and had opinions about women who didn't. She had opinions about most things. She had their mother's jaw and their father's eyes and a quality of personal certainty that had annoyed Simran for the entirety of her conscious life and that she was, right now, deeply grateful for.
"Guest bathroom," Naina said, looking at the clipboard. "The rack behind the door is still there, I saw it twenty minutes ago and nobody has moved it."
"I'll get it."
"And the little shelf above the toilet. There's still a kajal on it."
"Probably Maa's."
"Then tell Maa." Naina made a note on the clipboard with a satisfaction that suggested the note-making itself was pleasurable. She looked up. Her eyes found Simran's and she did the thing she always did — the elder-sister scan, a quick read for what was actually going on underneath the surface of whatever face Simran was showing. "You're doing it again."
"I'm not doing anything."
"The wall thing. Standing against the wall looking at nothing."
"I'm looking at where the mirror was."
Naina glanced at the rectangle of lighter paint. "It was an ugly mirror," she said, which was true. "Come help with the kitchen boxes. Maa has been talking to the fridge for twenty minutes and it's making Papa nervous."
"Why is Papa nervous about Maa talking to the fridge?"
"Because he's afraid she'll win," Naina said, and ticked something off the clipboard and disappeared back into the corridor.
Simran stood a moment longer. She looked at the wall. She looked at the shape the mirror had left.
Then she went to help with the kitchen boxes.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Gurpreet Singh arrived home at seven-thirty carrying a small barfi box from the sweet shop on Katra Jaimal Singh because he had passed it on the way back from the office and it had seemed, he said, like a last-night-in-Amritsar occasion. He was five foot ten, the kind of man who had been unremarkably tall his entire life and was entirely at peace with this. Medium build gone soft at the middle after twenty years of desk work, the belly gentle rather than imposing, the kind of softness that belonged to a man who ate his wife's cooking without complaint and sat behind a desk and did not exercise and considered this a reasonable arrangement. His hair was silver at the temples and thinning at the crown, his face clean-shaved and mild, his eyes — the deep-set ones he had given both his daughters — warm and slightly slow and entirely good-natured. He was the sort of man strangers trusted immediately and were never disappointed by, which was, Simran had come to understand, a rarer quality than it seemed.
Nobody told him they had already packed the plates.
Reena found four disposable cups from the back of the topmost kitchen shelf. She was five foot seven — the same height Simran would eventually reach — and built entirely differently from her husband: full and round and warm in the way of the women from her family in Gurdaspur, a figure that had been generous in its proportions since she was twenty and had settled into something rich and comfortable over the years since. Her waist had thickened with age and with the comfortable indifference of a woman who had raised two daughters and had no particular interest in being thin, but the shape of her — the full bust, the wide hips, the deep curve between — was the shape that both her daughters had inherited in different proportions, and it was the shape that had turned heads on the Gurdaspur streets when she was young and which she wore now with the complete unselfconsciousness of someone who had stopped thinking about it. She was the source of Simran's cheekbones, Naina's hips, both their hair — dark and thick, hers now shot through with grey she hadn't bothered to cover in three years because she had, as she said, better things to think about. She had the rounded face of her family, warm-complexioned, expressive, a face that had never learned to be quiet about what it was feeling and had never been asked to. They ate barfi standing at the kitchen counter because there was nowhere else to stand. Gurpreet ate with the slightly dazed happiness of a man who had set a large thing in motion and was only now beginning to feel the weight of it moving.
"Nayagarh is a good town," he said. Not for the first time. Perhaps the fifteenth. He said it the way some people say a prayer — repetition as reassurance.
"We know, Papa," Naina said.
"The haveli is only three hours from Jodhpur. We can go on weekends. I've read that the—"
"We know about the Mehrangarh Fort," Simran said. "You've mentioned it."
Gurpreet looked at her with the gentle concern he brought to everything. "You'll love it once we're there," he said. "You always take time to warm up to things."
"She's already warmed up to Amritsar," Naina said. "That's the problem."
"Amritsar is home," Simran said.
"Amritsar will still be Amritsar after we leave," her mother said, in the tone that closed arguments. "It's not going anywhere. We're going somewhere. These are different things." She ate the last piece of barfi and put the empty box on top of the nearest sealed crate. "Now someone wake up and remember where I've packed the razai because it's going on top of everything and I'm not digging through four boxes tonight."
Naina consulted the clipboard.
Later, after the razai had been located and the remaining cups washed and the lights turned off room by room, Simran sat on the floor in what had been the living room and listened to the flat become quiet. Her mother had found the one remaining mattress and fallen asleep on it with the speed of a woman who had been practical all day and had earned the right. Her father had gone to lie down on his side of it and was almost certainly asleep within four minutes, as he always was. From the small room at the end of the hall — Naina's room, the one with the window that got morning light — she could hear her sister moving around, doing her final checks, ticking things off the invisible list in her head even after the clipboard had been put away.
The flat was half-lit by the orange spill of the street lamp outside. The boxes made black shapes in the dark. The walls, stripped of pictures and shelves, were strangers.
Simran thought about the friends she hadn't said proper goodbyes to. She thought about the chai shop at the end of their lane where she had gone every morning for three years and where the uncle who ran it had been quietly pleased every time she came in, in the uncomplicated way of someone who simply enjoyed their regulars. She thought about Neha, who had come to sit with her yesterday and had cried a little and had not apologised for crying, which was the kind of person Neha was. She thought about the Harmandir Sahib visible on clear days from the roof of this building, the gold just catching the late afternoon light.
She was 19. People moved cities. It happened all the time.
She looked at the wall where the mirror had been.
She could not explain it. She had been trying to explain it to herself for two weeks and she kept arriving at the same empty place: a sourceless conviction that something was wrong, not about the move, not about Rajasthan, but about something that had no location she could put her finger on. Like a wrongness in the frequency of things. Like a sound just below hearing.
She had been having the same dream for two weeks. Dark water. Her own face looking up at her from below the surface — her face but wrong, the expression not hers, the eyes not meeting hers at the right angle. Something behind it, deeper in the dark, watching.
She hadn't told anyone about the dream.
From Naina's room the sounds of movement ceased. Silence settled through the flat with the particular weight of a last night — a silence that knew it was a last night. Simran sat in it for a while.
Then there were footsteps in the corridor — Naina's footsteps, recognisable after twenty years by their pace, unhurried and certain the way Naina was unhurried and certain about everything — and then Naina appeared in the doorway of the living room in her sleeping clothes.
She was wearing the old cotton kurta she slept in — the pale yellow one, faded from too many washes, fraying at the hem, owned since college and refused to be thrown away on principle. She had undone her braid. Her hair was down around her shoulders, thick and very dark, falling to the middle of her back, and without the practical braid she looked unexpectedly different. Softer. Less like a person with a clipboard. She was five foot seven, a couple of inches taller than Simran, and built entirely unlike her — where Simran was slim and fine-boned, Naina had the figure of the women on their mother's side: full, round, and settled into herself with the ease of someone who had been this way since nineteen and had never thought twice about it. Her chest was heavy under the loose kurta — the cotton pulled across it slightly when she moved, the kind of thing you notice and then feel rude for noticing — 36 at least, probably more, Simran had never asked but the tailors who did both their clothes had made it plain. Her waist was a 28, her hips wide and round at maybe 37 or 38, the full deep curve of them visible even through the loose sleeping kurta. She was barefooted, her braid-cord around her wrist, and in the orange half-dark of the stripped living room she looked, for once, like someone who had run out of things to organise and was simply herself — which was, Simran thought, a version of her sister she did not see often enough and would miss more than she'd admitted.
She had the clipboard in one hand. Of course she did.
"I thought you'd gone to bed," Simran said.
"I did. Then I remembered the rack behind the bathroom door." She came into the room and sat down on the floor beside Simran, which was a Naina thing to do — not on a box, not standing in the doorway, on the floor, because Simran was on the floor. She set the clipboard aside. She did not look at it. "We got it, by the way. It's in the hallway stack."
"I know. I got it at eight."
"I know you got it. I ticked it off." A pause. Outside the street was doing its quiet things. Naina stretched her legs out and leaned her head back against the bare wall. Her shoulder was against Simran's — warm, familiar, the specific weight of her older sister, which Simran had known her whole life and which felt, right now, like something she had not properly appreciated until this exact moment.
"We're really going," Simran said.
"We are really going," Naina said.
"You're not bothered at all."
"I'm bothered." Naina considered. "I'm bothered in the abstract. In the specific I've been too busy with the logistics to have feelings about it."
"That's very you."
"Yes." A beat. Then, because Naina always knew when there was a real thing underneath a surface thing: "What are you bothered about specifically. Not the general. The specific."
Simran thought about it. The feeling below the sternum. The sourceless wrongness that had no name. "I don't know," she said, which was true. "That's the problem. I can't locate it."
Naina was quiet for a moment. Then she put her arm around Simran's shoulders and pulled her sideways in the brief fierce way she had done since they were children, the elder-sister grip that communicated everything it needed to without words and had never needed words. She held it for three seconds. Released.
"Nayagarh," she said. "New city. New mirrors to hang things off of." She picked up the clipboard. "I'm going to sleep. You should too." She stood up, looked at the stripped walls, made the expression of someone filing a conclusion, and went back down the corridor.
Simran listened to her footsteps. Heard the light click off in Naina's room. The flat went fully dark.
She sat in it for a while longer. Then she got up and went to the bathroom.
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