So. Tuesday, again. Ajay had tried hard to wake up at five, thinking (how optimistic was this?) that he’d go for a run. But when the phone alarm, an annoying tinny version of Für Elise, went off, he’d hit the snooze button. Now, at exactly ten to six, the phone rang again. His right knee tightened just a bit. The neighbors, whom he could hear outside his window, were already arguing in Telugu.

Don’t you idiots ever sleep? Gagan was screaming from the next room. The neighbors were silenced for a few minutes. Then the slow, angry murmurs began, their volume rising with every passing second. They were back to shouting in another ten minutes.

You jabbering fools! Gagan was throwing something out on the balcony.

“Shut up, you ass.” The neighbors, a family dominated by burly dark men, hurled something back. Ajay heard it crash against the bars of Gagan’s window.

Ajay, lying on his bed, was aware now of every noise being added to the waking day. He knew Gagan – a short, wiry, spectacled, throbbing knot of anger – would be sitting on his bed, wishing the sun wasn’t rising just then, that the night and dark would last just a few hours more, that the neighbors and the howling dogs would be struck dumb. It’s what he wished for every day. What they all wished for. They didn’t want to see the light that told them they had to wash, dress up, and go deal with irate Americans in Wisconsin. They’d spend the day dragging vowels, softening consonants, mimicking twangs and fill in spreadsheet after spreadsheet of issues resolved, issues pending, turnaround times, exceeded estimates and project showstoppers. This was the vocabulary of the tedious times they lived in where every outsourced bump and banana skin had to be named, shamed and obliterated.

The family of four on the floor above were up and about, their annoying toddler Karthik hitting the floor with a plastic rattle. The thin walls and floors of the building allowed noises to shudder across space. The rattle Karthik dropped bounced on the ceiling that Ajay stared at and he wondered if one day the ceiling, tired of being abused, would simply fall, bringing the fan down. He imagines himself shredded by the blades, his flesh hurled onto and sloppily sliding down the walls. He remembered the way the fan had fallen down one summer in his parents’ house in Kerala. It crashed as they were eating lunch at the table, right behind his mother and sister. His mother had become rigid, sitting on her chair with her muscles frozen stiff. His father had to massage her shoulders and back, melt her down part by part before she was able to move. She spoke of how she felt the whoosh of the fan as it fell, like a feather brushing her spine. Now when she sat in rooms, she made sure she stayed in the corners.

The phone alarm rang again. This time he took it and stuffed it under the mattress. He could hear it even then, echoing in his brain.

The other inhabitants of the house, the six boys who were sleeping in various parts of the house were waking up. Karthik the toddler was dragging something around and Ajay could hear the mother, the curvaceous and mouthy Sharada, shushing him. The day the hung-over estate agent had shown them the flat with its yellow stained tiles (the previous tenant’s toddler wandered around without a diaper, the agent explained), Sharada had poked her head over the banisters to stare at him and Gagan.

“Bachelors?” She was cold and unfriendly. Her housecoat gaped a little at the neck to show a deep cleavage.

“Fucking cow,” Gagan had said as they went away from the building, “What’s she acting superior for? Her husband’s my colleague. He’s an asshole.”

“A manager?”

“Senior project manager for some telecom account.”

“So he is superior.”

“Bullshit. He’s not a VP − she needn’t lord it over us like that. Besides, he ogles all the pretty girls in the office.”

If Gagan had been a Malayali, Ajay often thought, he would have been the leader of the student union, menacingly twirling bicycle chains on the playing field during college elections. He saw everything in black and white and the world was a messy, crowded, never-ending struggle between the exploited and the slave drivers. He’d often, in drunken harangues, castigate his American paymasters and curse the stars and stripes. He’d talk, eyes misting over with nostalgia, about the fields back home in Madhya Pradesh, which were not enough to support the family because his father wouldn’t adopt modern farming techniques. So Gagan was sent out of the family home to get a proper paying job. He spent four years in an engineering college in Mumbai and he was still paying off the educational loan. Which, he told Ajay the first time they met at a pub in Koramangala, had handcuffed him to a job he hated.

“My father can’t understand why I’d want to walk away from a job that pays thirty thousand rupees. If I tell him about the late nights, he talks about his early mornings on the farm. If I talk about the difficulties I have with my seniors, he bitches about the moneylenders. If I complain about the clients and their impossible demands, he curses the government. And then he tells me that what I earn is keeping my mother and sister alive.”

Ajay and Gagan talked that whole evening and the following day. They decided to move out of the crowded living rooms where they had been staying since coming to Bangalore. Rooms where underwear went missing, cellphones were stolen, wallets emptied and spectacles crushed under the feet of clumsy roommates.

Finding a place and moving in wasn’t easy. It was only after an extended war of words with the building’s tenant association that the rental agreement had been signed. Sharada and her husband had been vociferous about their displeasure at having bachelors living below their house. They feared drunkenness, lewdness and infectious immorality. Gagan had sighed, rolled his eyes and thrown his hands around during the final meeting with the association in the basement parking garage. The other tenants and their landlord, a software engineer based in Chennai and desperate to leave fast so that he could catch the last train that day, had shouted down Sharada and her husband. The next day Ajay and Gagan had signed the agreement.

“So Ajay − let’s show our appreciation to Sharada. How about stealing those gigantic underpants of hers? We can use the mop to take it off the clothesline.”

They hadn’t done it of course. But they didn’t become model tenants either. After reassuring their landlord that they wouldn’t bring more people into the flat, they had got two more boys to stay. The ten thousand rupee rent was split four ways, making it easy on everyone’s pockets. The boys moved in and out − Gagan and Ajay were the only constant and thus had unencumbered possession of the two bedrooms. The tenant association disapproved but let the constantly drifting crowd in. The number of boys increased − from two to four and now, six. The overzealous watchman, however, harassed them and they paid back in kind. One temperamental game designer from Kolkata had slapped the watchman during an argument about a scooter parked in the parking bay belonging to another flat. The association forced Gagan and Ajay to throw him out. The game designer left the apartment dragging the giant wok which he refused to part with.

“Good,” said Gagan, “More space in the kitchen.” Which they never used.

When Ajay finally got up from his warm bed (he must change the sheets tonight) it was eight thirty. He brushed his teeth, shaved, stared at his round, dark face in the mirror, showered and went into the kitchen. A cockroach was scuttling round the rarely used stove and the water dispenser was almost empty. He took a grimy spatula and slapped the cockroach. It lay flattened for a few moments before springing up again and dashing for safety out into the balcony. The other boys − Ajay rarely bothered to learn their names since they moved out after a few weeks and new ones replaced them − were roaming around, brushing teeth, taking turns in the bathroom and talking on their phones. Gagan came out of his room and into the kitchen.

“What are you doing with that thing in your hand? Cooking?”

“Trying to kill a cockroach.”

“Just use the Baygon. If you are presented with a convenient poison, use that for murder. Bludgeoning is not a very effective method.”

“It’s gone − went into the balcony.”

“Maybe Sharada aunty has Baygon.”

Ajay and Gagan stood, dressed and ready for the long day ahead, staring at the dusty counter top.

“Time we cleaned this,” Gagan ran a finger on the counter and held it close to his face. The fingertip was practically black.

“I haven’t seen that maid in weeks.”

“I fired her.”

“Why?”

“She stole a watch from that Pune guy and he was about to accuse her of it when the Shiney Ahuja shit happened. He got scared out of his wits and left the next day but told me about the watch. I gave her a thousand bucks and told her to go. She went.”

“Yeah? And who is supposed to clean the place now?”

Gagan turned to the rest of the boys sitting in the living room.

“Hey − who knows how to clean?”

They shrugged and shook their heads. One of them, tapping away on his phone, chuckled.

“Bunch of useless −”

There was a shriek from the floor above and they could hear Sharada shouting. A resounding thud. Then silence.

“Nice to see the damsel in distress has been rescued.” Gagan was laughing.

Ajay wondered if she and her husband would now make love to celebrate. Probably. He strained his ears to listen for any creaks. Silence. Then a faint tinny sound. His phone. He should take it out from under the mattress and leave for work.

In a more logically laid out and better functioning universe, the ride to work should have taken Ajay just fifteen minutes. Instead, it was a journey that was a series of starts and stops, taking him the better part of an hour. His bike, two years old and showing signs of hard slogging on Bangalore roads, has been trustworthy. He’d finished paying off the loan for it three months ago and yet his bank account was not robust. Everything was expensive in this city – food, clothes, fuel. Besides, he had to pay off his father’s debts as well, the result of a series of diseased and still-born business ventures back in Kerala – real estate developments that never came to be, an appliances shop that shut down because of puny sales, loans taken to pay the dowry for Ajay’s younger sister. His father lost hair and gained plaque-ridden arteries and mind-bending hypertension. His mother had receded into silence and shabbiness. This was what he’d left behind in Kerala – a home in which his broken parents rattled around, waiting hopefully for the money he’d send them, month after month. Money he earned after traversing the choking air, the daily gridlock on Old Airport Road, the angry buses and the angrier cars, the auto rickshaw drivers with the foul moods and the bunched up fists.

Anger, impatience and irritation coursed through this city’s veins. You saw it not only on the faces of the people and the revving of the bikes that leapt onto pavements in traffic jams, but also in the broken, greying buildings. The day after he moved to Bangalore, he saw a man hacked to death at a traffic signal near his office. He and his colleagues stood, ties loosened in happiness at the end of the working day, waiting for their bus and recoiled as a car was stopped and the driver dragged out by three men who had arrived on a bike. One of them held up a machete and brought it down, and Ajay heard the flesh give, the bones break and the blood burst out. A woman screamed, another cried out. The three men rode off, leaving behind the mangled head, the pooling blood.

He expected to dream of it, but he didn’t. He’d later tell Gagan that it was almost as if he’d imagined it all. The next day the papers carried a cursory report about the murder – the victim was a Dalit activist, the motive was political. And then there was nothing more. His colleagues never mentioned it and he suppressed it. But it would come to him, unbidden, on these long pauses on his way to work. Or when he saw the taxi drivers push other vehicles off the road and evade pedestrians by a few inches as they raced to get their fares to the gleaming IT vortices of the city.

Ajay worked in one of these vortices, for a twelve year old IT firm in Whitefield. The architecture of IT parks had certain essential elements in common − antiseptic walls, smooth facades, reflective metal veneers, boring hedges and interlocking pavement bricks. They were all born from the identikit imaginations of developers across the city, cut using the same cookie cutter. Gagan’s office was nearby, a clone of the building in which Ajay worked.

Entering the office, Ajay passed by the cubicle of his manager, Muzaffar who was on the phone talking to Katherine, the American project liaison. Katherine hadn’t been happy with the work Ajay and his teammates were doing. She’d been calling every day for the past month. There were veiled threats of closing down the project, court cases, lawsuits. Muzaffar had aged at least twenty years in four weeks.

Ajay’s own cubicle, which he shared with two other project teammates, was in a corner surrounded by floor to ceiling tinted glass. From here, he could see across Whitefield main road and clusters of apartment complexes as well as the smaller lanes with semi-pukka buildings that signaled sudden economic acceleration. In between, small pockets of trees had remained, resilient survivors of a holocaust.

As Ajay waited for his machine to start up, his phone rang. It was Sitara, a friend of Gagan’s, whom he had met at a boozy Saturday night party a few months before.

“Good morning.” She sounded so cheery.

“Sitara, tell me something.”

“What?”

“Do you eat fiber in the morning?”

There was a click, and then the monotone.

It took him a few seconds to realize she was no longer on the line.

Then a text message arrived with the usual loud ping.

“You needn’t be so nasty, jerk. I just wanted to know if you liked the book.”

The book. She had given him a copy of Conrad’s The Secret Agent a fortnight ago. He’d told her when he first met her and learned that she was an English Honors graduate that he’d love to start reading Conrad. She sent him the book through Gagan. He called her up to thank her and she had been calling every morning since. How was the book, was he enjoying it, wasn’t Conrad’s prose rich and all encompassing?

Ajay had made a sincere effort to read the book. He had also read synopses of the story online to try and figure out if he’d like it. The dense prose took time to wade through and the plot was difficult to anticipate.

He replied now. “I am sorry but that was a sincere question. I like it so far.”

She didn’t respond. He remembered Gagan telling him, “She’s a bit too idealistic − at thirty-three! The woman is headed for perpetual disappointment. And her last boyfriend was a trainee pilot from Prague. He dumped her and moved to Australia − flies Qantas jets now.”

Ajay’s stomach growled. His last proper meal had been a greasy plate of mushroom-spinach-baby corn noodles drowning in MSG the previous afternoon. He called Gagan and they agreed to meet for breakfast at Paradise Garden.

Paradise Garden was an upgraded dhaba, like most family restaurants that sit on Bangalore’s outskirts, close to the temples of the modern Indian economy. The tables were of cheap plastic and the chairs rickety. The food was greasy and rich in additives. All patrons leave bloated, sweaty and sleepy − deadened to all feeling and taste, Ajay had often thought. Aboobacker from Kumble in Kasargod (“Anil’s ancestral house is not far from ours,” he would tell all regular customers) had been running Paradise Garden for the past fifteen years. Gagan was already at a table in the corner, chatting with a waiter who moved away when Ajay slumped down in a chair.

“That’s Shaji. Just in from Manjeri.”

“They get here fast don’t they?”

“Aboobacker is very resourceful.”

They ordered and ate two masala dosas, filled with yellow potatoes that spilled out onto the plate. The coffee was really just sweetened milk and Gagan, hungry even after that, ate two vadas.

They emerged from Paradise Garden, stuffed and heavy, after half an hour.

“How does the day look?” Gagan asked, staring at the cars and buses speeding past.

“Muzaffar is on the verge of a breakdown. That cow is giving him trouble as usual.”

“Why doesn’t he just quit?”

“He’s got a wife and two kids. This city is expensive. What is he supposed to do about money?”

“Get a job in another company.”

“Really, Gagan? Is yours any better?”

Gagan was now looking down at his bike, kicking the tires. “Need to get that mudguard cleaned. And no, it’s not better, and I am handcuffed to it, right?”

Back in the office, the cubicles were almost full, speakerphones were on and groups were rushing in and out of conference rooms. Ajay pushed past the gaggle of chattering accountants standing near the water cooler and reached his cubicle. Devdutt, his colleague, was already at his computer, running through lines of code. He nodded as Ajay sat on his chair. Ajay looked up and saw that the window cleaners were descending along the sides of the building already. The men, wearing helmets and heavily harnessed, lowered themselves and their little buckets and window wipers. Did they have to pass an exam to get that job?

A sudden shout from Muzaffar’s cubicle silenced the low chatter around the office. The shouting increased and the words became clearer.

“I said no. How many bloody times − Listen, Katherine! No, listen…”

There was a crash. For a moment the only sound in the wide expanse of the office was someone talking in one of the conference rooms. Ajay got up from his chair and looked towards Muzaffar’s cubicle. All around him, heads were popping up slowly, like prairie dogs peeking out of their burrows. Devdutt called out to Muzaffar. There was no reply.

“Muzaffar?” It was Katherine, on the speakerphone.

“Muzaffar?” That nasal whine.

Ajay sprinted to the cubicle. Muzaffar lay on the floor, his hand clawing feebly at his tie, eyes closed and face gradually purpling. He didn’t seem to be breathing.

“Call an ambulance, quick!”

Shekhar Mohan, the office manager was running towards the cubicle. Someone called out that the ambulance was on its way. All Ajay could think and see now was Muzaffar’s hand clawing at his neck where his nails had raked the skin and blood was slowly oozing. Katherine was still on the phone. Shekhar politely bid her goodbye, assuring her that someone would get back to her. Muzaffar’s cubicle was filled with people now and Ajay fought to get out. He went back to his cubicle and opened the New York Times website. Suicide bombers had attacked markets in Iraq. Another bank was in trouble and being bailed out. A badly reviewed action movie was topping the box office. Ajay looked up and stared at the window cleaner wiping the tinted window, oblivious to the drama happening inside the office.

The ambulance took Muzaffar away. Devdutt, young and impressionable, was looking more vulnerable than usual.

“Do you think he’ll be alright, Ajay?”

“Let’s hope so.”

“Ajay,” Shekhar was in the cubicle. “Call Katherine and get whatever information you need to proceed with the project.” He walked out, tapping furiously on his Blackberry.

It was well after one o’ clock when Ajay ended the call with Katherine. He stretched his arms behind his back and massaged his neck. Devdutt was eating lunch out of a plastic box.

“What’s that?” Ajay stood next to him and peered into the box.

“Tamarind rice and beans. Want some?”

Ajay munched a spoonful of the rice and looked out the window onto the road. He could see Gagan’s office some distance away.

“Think Muzaffar is fine?”

“They would have told us if something had happened.”

“What did Katherine say?”

“Well. After the usual constructive criticism she dictated a list of things to be done by Friday.”

Devdutt munched thoughtfully. “Guess her requests are undoable as usual?”

“Of course.”

Ajay laughed. “She wanted to know if Muzaffar’s files could be shared.”

“Customer is king, right?”

“That’s what the marketing team wrote on our website.”

“He’s got two kids.”

“Everyone has a sad story in this city.”

Ajay sat back on his chair. Two years ago he’d suffered chronic back pain and the doctor had diagnosed a compressed disc in his spine. Muzaffar had allowed him to take almost a month off. He went back home to Cochin. He met up with old college mates who were now either in Dubai or in Kerala, acting the breadwinners, weighed down by wives, children and loans. Others, like him, were in Bangalore. He met them once in a while when walking in Cubbon Park or at a multiplex while eating stale popcorn and watching a boring movie.

He checked the New York Times website again. The bombers in Iraq had blown up a pet market. Blood. Fur. Feathers. Skin. Flesh. What’s human and what’s a golden retriever now? It was all carbon. He’d seen a bad road accident once. The driver pulverized, so that you could not make out which part of his body was protruding from the windshield. The smell that floated around that section of the national highway stayed with him for years. It was, he told his father that night at home, as though the man’s blood had taken the place of oxygen there. Just for those ten meters − vaporized blood entered the lungs of all those who passed by. Ajay had almost tasted it, metallic and salty, on his tongue. At home he had taken a bottle of mouthwash and rinsed his mouth till his gums, tongue and inner cheeks burned.

His phone beeped. Sitara had sent a text, their argument in the morning forgotten.

“Read the news of those bombers? Apparently mentally disabled. Like Stevie.”

He didn’t reply. He’d think of something interesting to say tomorrow and call her.

As Ajay made his way out of the office at six o’ clock (he never stayed an extra minute if he could help it and definitely not today), his phone rang.

Gagan was asking if he’d like to go have a drink.

They headed out to a pub off MG Road.

“It’s been a tough day,” Gagan was simmering. Ajay shook the beer pitcher.

“Muzaffar had a heart attack.”

“Shit.”

They nursed their glasses of cold beer and ate salted cashews. Around them the young affluent workers of Bangalore drank, laughed, and bopped their heads to the top forty hits playing on the radio.

Ajay seemed to remember a time when he would have been happy just drinking cheap Indian beer that didn’t get you drunk enough, and eating jackfruit chips sitting on an old mattress. The day he got his first salary he realized he didn’t want to do that anymore. He’d like to sit in a proper chair and drink imported beer.

“Sharada’s husband is screwing up my life,” Gagan said.

“What’s he done now?”

“He’s put me on a fourth project. I can’t handle the one that I am doing − forget a second or a third. I’ve hardly slept these past few weeks. Today’s the first time I got off early and only because I pretended I had a fever. The man’s a bloody sadist. I am sure the lovely Sharada’s hiding some ugly bruises under those housecoats of hers.”

At the next table a couple were kissing each other passionately, stopping only long enough to gulp down beer from slippery glasses.

“Well, at least someone’s having fun.” Gagan’s owlish face grew darker.

“I don’t think I can stand that fourth project, Ajay. I have to get out of that shit place.”

Who wanted to stay here really? Except for managers like Shekhar and scared young graduates like Devdutt. And Sitara in her paid activist position with an NGO. The rest of them, (of us, Ajay corrected himself) merely bided time and then scampered off the moment they saw something better. More fulfilling. To most, this was a sparkling MBA from a sparkling IIM, which would lead to a cushier job with more stress in the same companies they were all trying to get in, avoid or jump out of right now. Confusion was the only thing that stayed the same, as they slid from day to day, lurching from crisis to crisis.

“I hate that cow, Katherine.”

“When she gives you a heart attack…”

Gagan stopped, hand cupping his chin. He was a depressed owl now.

Someone was surfing channels on the television and briefly stopped on CNN. They showed the carnage in the pet market in Baghdad.

“Heard about that bombing?”

“Yes. They used mentally retarded girls. Sick people.” Gagan was frowning.

Ajay thought of what he could text back to Sitara. “Life imitating art in a sickening way.” Yes, he should text that. A full blown cliché that she could hack to pieces. He hoped he could see her this weekend and maybe kiss her. The couple at the next table were now giggling and whispering.

Ajay and Gagan drank a whole bottle of vodka between them and stumbled out of the bar a little after ten.

The air outside was cool. They gulped it in and tried to sober up.

Ajay, apprehensive, said, “I don’t know if I can ride straight.”

Gagan ran around in little circles with his arms flapping. “Let’s go,” he shouted.

“Where?”

“Nandi Hills.”

“Let’s just go home.”

“Let’s go to Nandi Hills and see the sunrise.”

“No.”

Gagan had stopped running. They stood alone in the lane next to their bikes.

“Ajay. What are we going home for? To listen to Sharada’s bed creak? Do you know how many times a week they fuck? They are right above my bedroom − they drive me insane. Those creaks. And that kid.”

“Yes. I hear him. He’s above my room.”

“That fucking rattle of his.”

Ajay remembered the rattle above the ceiling fan. He laughed and said, “You know, I thought the fan would fall on me today.”

Gagan was bent over, with his hands on his knees and eyes staring straight ahead at where the lane joined MG Road.

“Let’s go see the sun,” he said and got on his bike.

Ajay followed him out onto MG Road with its series of hulking columns that were to support the elevated metro rail. Earth movers, diggers, cranes and scaffolding stood about. Workers huddled together, laughing and talking.

The streetlights painted the road a painful, bright orange. Ajay and Gagan, helmetless, streaked up the road, swerving round construction equipment. At the Brigade Road junction the traffic police tried to stop them but they powered through.

Near Cubbon Park, Ajay shouted, “How do we go to Nandi Hills?”

Gagan didn’t reply and suddenly turned onto another road and Ajay’s sense of direction deserted him. Trees, brooding and still, surrounded them. Posh apartment buildings with stately balconies and elaborate stone facing zipped by. When they stormed onto a two lane road, they were surprised by a traffic cop on a bike. He blocked their path and they were forced to stop. The cop, young and thin and tired, asked for their licenses.

Gagan was furious but gave his. The cop began writing the challan.

“How much do you want?” Gagan asked in Hindi.

“You’re lucky I am not arresting you bastards,” the cop replied.

“You’re a bloody dog,” Gagan spat it out. The cop stopped writing and came forward, glowering.

“What did you say?”

It was a playground now, taunts flying. Gagan shouted out finely crafted and enunciated insults in Hindi. The cop was threatening him in Kannada. To Ajay’s addled mind and blurred vision, they were two screaming blobs destined to join. He rubbed his eyes and leaned against his bike for support. His helmet, tied to the back of the bike, came loose and crashed down. When he picked it and straightened up, he saw that Gagan and the cop were on the ground, clawing each other’s faces, wrestling and rolling amid the construction material littering the roadside. Ajay wondered why everything was just orange and black. What had happened to all the other colors in the world?

Gagan was standing now and beating the cop with a lead pipe. Ajay heard a bone crack.

Gagan leaped onto his bike and screamed at Ajay to jump on. “We have to get to Nandi Hills.”

“I can hardly feel my legs,” Ajay said but they had taken off.

“What about my bike?” Blood again. The smell. It was in the air.

“Katherine − she needs me to call her tomorrow at seven.”

“Shut up!” Gagan had finally found his voice and they were rushing through streets and roads that grew more orange.

“I hate orange. I hate it.” Ajay buried his face on Gagan’s wet, slippery back. Blood. That accident just outside Kalamassery. How old was he? Ten? He must have been ten. The flesh. And fur. A dead golden retriever. Or was that in Baghdad? He could see feathers. Feathers − his grandfather once killed a hen right before him. Bloodless. Its neck was twisted and broken and some feathers fell to the ground. He picked it up only for his mother to beat it out of his hand.

They were on dark roads. Trucks and buses passed them. Maybe he should tell Sitara those two girls in Baghdad didn’t get too emotionally involved with cabmen and their horses. That they actually killed, so were successful in a sense. While Stevie − well Stevie just blew himself up prematurely, didn’t he?

“Gagan,” Ajay shouted to make himself heard over the wind and the rush of trucks. “That cop. His blood’s on your shirt. And I think, in your hair.”

“We have to get to fucking Nandi Hills.” Gagan’s voice was hoarse. It was the last thing he said when the biked swerved and skidded over a pothole. Ajay flew and landed in a field − a squelchy field. Mud entered his nostrils. There was a shout somewhere and horns blaring. Frogs were croaking. And crickets. The noise they made. It grew louder and louder, drowning out the rest of the world.

The orangeness had dimmed and the world was dark again. He thought of Aboobacker right then, in his Paradise Garden restaurant. Aboobacker who bought used cooking oil from the five star hotels in Bangalore to cook the food he served his customers. Aboobacker had told Ajay and Gagan this. It saved him money. Yes, it probably would give his customers colon cancer in the long run. But then you have to die one way or the other right?

Right.