Prologue
Ten of us on that flight.
Nobody spoke. That’s the thing nobody warns you about - moments like this are always quieter than you expect. No ceremony. No speech. Just the hum of the aircraft and ten men staring at various points in the middle distance, each of us somewhere else entirely.
A man stood at the front of the cabin. He didn’t need to call attention to himself. He just stood there until the air in the cabin changed, until every head turned on its own.
‘Alright, boys.’
Two words. That was the whole thing.
I looked out the window. Somewhere below us, a city was doing what cities do - lights, noise, the beautiful indifferent chaos of a place that doesn’t know and doesn’t care that your life just turned a corner it cannot turn back from.
I had made a choice.
I had chosen this - whatever this was, whatever the next years would look like, whatever I was flying toward right now in a cabin full of quiet men who had all made the same choice.
It was the right choice. I knew it was the right choice.
I looked out the window for a long time.
And then, because my brain has always had genuinely terrible timing, a thought arrived that I had been holding at arm’s length and could no longer keep away.
Ira Sharma.
I almost laughed.
That’s what my brain wanted to do right now. Not think about what was ahead. Not think about my father, who would have been proud beyond words, or my mother, who was going to cry for a week when she found out. No. My brain, in this moment, wanted to think about a girl with glasses and a book in her hand and a pen turning between her fingers, who had looked at me in a bar in Bangalore like I was something she’d already read and found disappointing.
The pen, which was with me. In my pocket.
I placed my hand over the fabric of my shirt as I smiled.
The night after the 12th.
That’s where it started. With the most infuriating person I had ever met in my life, in a pub in Bangalore, on the night 12th standard ended.
I pressed my head back against the seat.
You idiot, I thought. Not unkindly.
The aircraft climbed.
