Chapter 1
Karnal
The fan above Yami's desk had a wobble in it that had been there for three years, a faint arrhythmic tick every time the third blade came around, and he had long since stopped hearingit the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat. His mother heard it. She heard everythingwrong with everything, that was her particular genius, and twice a year she announced that this time she was really going to get Bhatia Electricals to come and fix it, and twice a year the summer ended before Bhatia Electricals did.It was ticking now, at eleven at night, while Yami sat cross-legged on his bed with his biology notes open to a diagram of the human kidney that he had been not-reading for the better part of forty minutes, one earphone in, the other looped over his collar because his mother had a habit of pushing open his door without knocking and he liked half a second of warning.The song ending in his ear was one he'd already heard four times that day. He didn't skip it. There was a particular satisfaction in a comeback title track in its first week, before he'd fully decided what he thought of it, when he was still auditioning his own opinion - track two off SEVENTEEN's new mini, and he was fairly sure by Thursday he would have an official ranking of it against the last three title tracks, a ranking he would defend to Priya with more conviction than he'd ever defended an actual exam answer. He picked up his pencil, turned to a blank page at the back of his notebook - not the front, the front was for kidneys - and started sketching the fifth line's jawline from the choreography teaser he'd watched that afternoon between two classes he did not remember the content of. He was not good, exactly. He would never have said he was good, out loud, to anyone but Priya, and even to her only when she'd already told him three times to shut up and show her. But his hand knew certain things without asking his brain - the angle a jaw made when someone's chin was tilted a certain way toward a camera, the particular economy of a good line - and there was a peace in the drawing that the kidney diagram simply did not offer him, no matter how the diagram's opinion of a promising future was probably more relevant to his life.
His phone lit up on the pillow beside him. Priya.priya: did you finish the practical file
Priya: Don't lie
Priya: I can feel you lying from here
He typed back with his thumb, pencil still trapped between two fingers of the same hand,an old skill.
Yami: I finished the important 60%
Yami: The readings. i did not finish the diagrams
Priya: The diagrams are the marks Yami
Yami: The diagrams are Malhotra's ego. he doesn't even look at them properly
Priya: He looked at MINE for ten minutes last time
Yami: because yours are beautiful and mine look like a crime scene
Priya: Ok that's true. come do it tomorrow before first period, I'll help
Yami: You are a genuinely good person and I don't deserve you
Priya: Correct. 8 am. don't be dead
He set the phone face-down, not because he didn't want to keep talking to her - he always wanted to keep talking to her, she was better company than most of what his own head produced late at night - but because the next message, if he let it come, would be about Chip, and he wasn't in a Chip-conversation mood tonight. He was in a jawline-sketching, half-a-song-repeating, mildly-behind-on-a-practical-file mood, which was its own complete and satisfying kind of Tuesday. He did check, of course. He always checked. Nine forty-two, Bangkok time meant - he did the math without thinking about it anymore, it had become as automatic as converting rupees to a rough dollar figure in a shop - nine forty-two meant it was past eleven there too, and Chip hadn't messaged since the afternoon, which wasn't unusual, Chip worked long shifts at whatever it was he actually did, something logistics-adjacent that Yami could never get a completely clean explanation of and had decided not to worry about because everyone's job sounded boring and complicated when you tried to explain it to someone in another country. His mother's job sounded boring and complicated too, and she just did accounts for a fertiliser distributor in the industrial area, nothing mysterious about it at all. He put the phone away for real this time, under his pillow, on silent, and went back to the drawing until his eyes started doing the sandy thing they did when it was time to actually sleep and not just pretend to be about to sleep.Karnal in October smelled like burning stubble if the wind came from the wrong direction,which it usually did, and Yami's mother had opinions about that too, delivered every morning at the same volume over the same breakfast, aimed at farmers she had never met and would never meet, as though volume alone might reach across two districts and change agriculturalpolicy.
"Every year," she said, setting down a plate of paranthe in front of him with the particular force of a woman who had made four hundred of these in her lifetime and stopped finding it interesting around parantha number sixty. "Every single year they burn it and every single year we breathe it and every single year the government says next year, next year." "Next year," Yami agreed, not looking up from his phone, where a fan cam of the exact five seconds he'd been drawing last night was doing respectable numbers in the comments.
"Are you listening to me?"
"I'm agreeing with you, that's better than listening."
"Don't be clever at seven in the morning." But she said it without heat, the way she said most things to him, and put a second parantha on his plate before he'd finished the first, the universal Punjabi-Haryanvi maternal assumption that anyone eating one thing must obviously want more of it immediately. His father was already at the table, three seats down, reading the Dainik Bhaskar in the particular hunched way he read everything, close to his face, because he refused to admit his eyes had changed in the last five years and refused even harder to get new glasses. Ravi Chaudhary was not a talker at breakfast. He had opinions, plenty of them, but he metered them out across the day like a man who suspected there was a lifetime allowance and didn't want to run out early.
"Exam?" he asked, without lowering the paper.
"Not till Thursday."
"Study today, then, not the night before."
"I do study the night before and today," Yami said. "That's called being thorough."
His father made a sound that in another family might have been a laugh and in this one was filed under acknowledgment. He did not look up. He rarely looked directly at Yami for long these days, not unkindly, more like a man carefully not looking at a bright light, and Yami had noticed this without ever quite deciding what to do with the noticing. It wasn't coldness. His father had taught him to ride a bicycle on this very street, had sat up with him the whole night before his board exam results even though the results came out at ten in themorning and there was nothing useful a father could do with a sleepless three a.m., had once driven forty minutes to another town because Yami mentioned offhand that a particular shop there stocked a specific brand of drawing pencils he liked. It wasn't coldness. It was something more like - carefulness. As though his father was navigating a room in the dark where he half-remembered the furniture had been rearranged and didn't want to bark his shin on something he wasn't ready for.Yami's little sister Meher, eleven years old and entirely without her older brother'sdiplomatic instincts, chose this exact moment to announce, "Yami was on a video call until midnight, I heard him laughing," in the specific tone of a younger sibling who has found leverage and intends to use it.
"It was Priya," Yami said. "We were doing the practical file."
"You weren't laughing about kidneys."
"You'd be surprised what's funny about kidneys."
"Meher, eat," their mother said, with the weary efficiency of someone who had long ago stopped adjudicating every skirmish at this table and now only intervened when the skirmish threatened the schedule. "Bus in fifteen minutes."It hadn't been Priya on the call, actually. It had been Chip, for eleven minutes, before Chip said he had an early morning and needed to sleep, and Yami had said okay, love you, sleep well, and lain there afterward turning the phrase over the way he turned over most of what Chip said to him, mining a very ordinary sentence for its exact weight, the way you'd hold a coin up to the light to make sure it was real, and being irritated with himself for doing it, and doing it anyway. He didn't correct Meher. There was no version of "I was talking to my boyfriend in Thailand" that could be said at this table with his father three feet away and the fan ticking overhead and the parantha going cold, not yet, maybe not for a long time, and he'd made his peace with that in the specific way you make peace with a decision by simply not examining it too often.
• • •
The bus to college was late, which meant everyone had already decided it wasn't coming and started walking, which meant it then arrived and everyone had to run for it, an entire choreography Yami had performed at least four hundred times in two years without it ever once occurring to the bus service that the ritual might be improved upon. Priya was already on it, in the third row, bag on the seat beside her that she moved the second she saw him, an automatic gesture, two years of habit worn smooth.
"You look like you slept four hours," she said, by way of greeting.
"I slept five, thank you, and I did the diagram of the nephron this morning, so I am both sleep-deprived and diligent, which is my final form."
"Show me."
He pulled out the notebook - not the K-pop page, he flipped past that fast enough that she didn't quite catch it, though from the small knowing look she gave him she absolutely caught it - and showed her the nephron, which was, if he did say so himself, a genuinely competent nephron.
"Okay this is actually good," she said, sounding faintly betrayed by this fact. "Why is your handwriting-diagram ratio so unfair. Your labels look like a doctor wrote them and your lines are the wrong thing to be neat about."
"Some of us have priorities."
"Some of us have a crush on our own pencil." She handed the notebook back. "Chip called?"
"Briefly."
"Define briefly."
"Eleven minutes."
"You timed it?"
"I didn't time it, I just - know," Yami said, which was a lie, he had absolutely glanced at the call duration after it ended, a small furtive check he did every time, the way you'd check a bank balance you were slightly afraid of. Priya didn't say anything for a second, which was, with Priya, always more significant than anything she did say. She had a face that gave things away slowly, in increments, like a pot coming to boil, and Yami had learned over two years of friendship to watch for the increments rather than wait for the boil, because by the time she actually said the thing, she'd usually been thinking it for days.
"What," he said.
"Nothing."
"Priya.". "It's nothing, I just -" She looked out the window at the field going by, mustard not yet in flower, still that flat green-brown of early season. "You said last month he was going to visit his parents for Diwali and then he didn't, and the reason changed twice. First it was work, then it was his mother being sick. I'm not saying anything about it. I'm just saying I noticed, because I notice things, that's my whole personality, ask anyone."
"His mother probably actually was sick and then also had work stress from it, that's not actually contradictory -"
"I said I'm not saying anything." She held both hands up, mock-surrender, and the moment passed the way these moments always passed between them, without either of them fully letting go of it, both of them simply agreeing to set it down for now, like a heavy bag you put down on the platform without checking it in. The bus jolted over the pothole everyone called The Pothole, capital letters, a local landmark by now, and the conversation moved on to Malhotra sir's practical marks and whether Simran had actually failed the viva or was just being dramatic about it (dramatic, it turned out later that day; she'd gotten a six out of ten and was treating it like a diagnosis of terminal illness), and by the time they reached the college gate Chip had receded to his usual place, which was not absent, never absent, but folded down small enough to fit alongside biology and bus potholes and Simran's viva and all the rest of an ordinary Tuesday.
• • •
The Life Science block was the ugliest building on campus, poured concrete the color of old teeth, and everyone complained about it and nobody wanted to be transferred to the newer commerce building because the newer commerce building had worse professors and no ceiling fans that worked, so the trade-off was generally considered not worth it. Malhotra sir's practical was a study in mutual disappointment. He walked the rows of the lab with his hands behind his back, in the manner of a man who had once, decades ago, seen a foreign professor do this in some documentary and had never let go of it, peering down at diagrams through his glasses with an expression that suggested personal betrayal at the quality of Haryana's next generation of biologists.
"Chaudhary." He stopped at Yami's bench. "This is a kidney or a mango?"
"It's meant to be a kidney, sir."
"It looks like it's had an argument with a mango and lost." But he moved on without deducting anything, which by Malhotra sir's standards constituted a rave review, and Priya, one bench over, had to bite down on her pen to keep from laughing out loud, which made itworse, because Yami could see her shoulders shaking and had to look very hard at his own diagram to keep a straight face for the remaining forty minutes of practical.
At lunch they sat under the neem tree behind the canteen with Rohan and Simran, on the same strip of packed dirt they'd been sitting on since first year, worn smooth and slightly dished from two years of the same four people dropping onto it every single day at the same time.
"I'm telling you," Rohan was saying, unwrapping a paratha his mother had packed with the kind of excessive quantity of pickle that suggested she was fighting a war against blandness on principle, "SEVENTEEN's new title track is not even in their top ten. I don't understand the hype."
"You don't understand music," Yami said, with the flat, absolute confidence of a man discussing scripture. "You listen to three-year-old Bollywood remixes and you have opinions about choreography, that's like me having opinions about cricket."
"You do have opinions about cricket, you told Simran India was going to lose the last match and then acted personally vindicated when they did."
"That's different, that's basic math, their middle order was -"
"Oh my god," Simran said, to no one, to the sky, to the neem tree. "Can we go one lunch without the K-pop argument."
"It's not an argument, it's an education," Yami said, already pulling out his phone, already three taps deep into finding the exact clip he wanted to show them, the one where the choreography broke formation into something genuinely clever, a small structural surprise in the second chorus that he'd noticed on his third watch and had been waiting all week for an excuse to point out to someone. He held the phone out. Rohan watched it with the studied blankness of a man determined not to be impressed. Priya, who had by now seen this exact clip four times because Yami had shown it to her separately the night before over video call, watched it anyway, because that was simply what you did for Yami, you watched the clip again.
"Okay," Rohan admitted, grudging, "that part is a little clever."
"Thank you."
"I still think the song itself is average."
"You have the ears of a buffalo, Rohan, I mean this with love."
Simran had brought a carrom board - her cousin's, borrowed for a college event two weeks ago and somehow never returned, a small ongoing scandal in her family that she foundmore amusing than guilty about - and after lunch, with twenty minutes left before the next lecture, they set it up on a flatter patch of ground and Rohan and Priya played while Yami attempted, once again, to demonstrate that he had absolutely no natural aptitude for a game that every other person in Haryana appeared to have absorbed through the water supply.
"How," Priya said, watching his striker skid entirely off the board and under a parked bicycle, "do you miss the board. Not the piece. The board. The entire board."
"It's a physics problem, I'm bad at applied physics, my strengths are elsewhere."
"Your strengths are drawing boy bands and knowing lyrics in a language you don't speak."
"That's a skill."
"It's a very specific skill."
Rohan retrieved the striker from under the bicycle with the weary patience of someone who had done this exact retrieval at least a dozen times over two years, and by unspoken agreement nobody suggested Yami try again, and he didn't argue, because he had long since made peace with being constitutionally unable to play a game that eight-year-olds in his own neighborhood beat him at, and there was something almost restful about having one thing you were simply, permanently, unembarrassedly bad at.
• • •
He got home a little after four, the house quiet in the particular way it was quiet only in that window before his mother came back from the office and Meher came back from tuition, and he made himself tea the way he liked it, strong, too much sugar, and took it up to his room and put on the new mini album front to back while he opened his sketchbook to a fresh page, not the fifth line's jaw this time but something he'd been wanting to try for two days - Priya's face, actually, from memory, the specific way she looked when she was about to say something cutting and was holding it in her mouth like a sweet she didn't want to finish too fast. He got the eyes wrong twice and started over. He was better at strangers' faces, he'd noticed, faces from videos and photographs where he could stare as long as he wanted without anyone asking what he was doing - faces he knew were harder to draw, because you had memorized them too well to lie to yourself about a bad line. Priya's face he'd drawn perhaps thirty times over two years and still hadn't gotten exactly right, and there was something he liked about that too, about a problem that didn't resolve, that stayed interesting because it stayed slightly out of reach . His phone buzzed. Chip. Finally awake, presumably, on the other side of the day.
Chip: Morning (well, evening for you)
Chip: Did you survive the exam prep ?
Yami: Exam is thursday, today was just suffering in advance
Yami: Malhotra sir called my kidney diagram a mango
Chip: lmao. send me the mango
Yami: absolutely not, you'll laugh at me
Chip: I'm already laughing at you, you might as well commit
Yami smiled at the phone in the specific unguarded way he only smiled at it alone in his room, and typed back something teasing, and the conversation went on for a while in the loose unimportant register of two people who liked each other enough that the content of what they said mattered less than the fact that they kept saying it - Chip asking about the tea he was drinking, Yami asking whether Chip's mother's cough had gotten better (it had, mostly), Chip sending a single photo of a plate of something orange and unidentifiable that he claimed to have cooked himself and that Yami was fairly sure had come from somewhere else, given that Chip's last three attempts at self-described cooking had each looked suspiciously like takeaway in a different bowl.
"You didn't cook that," Yami typed.
"I absolutely cooked that."
"Chip."
"Fine. I heated it. Heating is a form of cooking."
"It is not."
"It is in Thailand."
He was laughing, actually laughing, alone in his room with the fan ticking and Priya's half-finished eyes staring up at him from the sketchbook, and it did not feel, in that specific ordinary moment, like the beginning of anything at all - not a warning, not a countdown, not the first domino in a line neither of them could yet see the end of. It felt like a Tuesday. It felt like a boy in Karnal texting a boy in Bangkok about a plate of reheated curry, both of them slightly showing off for each other in the harmless, low-stakes way people show off when they like being liked. Downstairs the front door banged, his mother's keys hitting the little brass dish by the entrance with the particular clatter that meant she'd had a long day and wanted everyone to know it without having to say so directly, and a minute later Meher's voice rose up through thefloor complaining about tuition homework, and the ordinary machinery of the evening started up around him the way it did every evening, dinner and homework and his father's newspaper and the fan and his mother's opinions about stubble-burning farmers who by now had presumably finished burning for the season and moved on to being blamed for something else - and Yami sat in the middle of all of it with his tea gone lukewarm and his phone warm in his hand, twenty years old, second year, no job, no fixed answer yet to what came after the degree, though not for lack of things he was interested in - a degree, then what, then presumably a job somewhere, then presumably a wedding somewhere, his mother had already started dropping names of girls from good families with the studied casualness of a woman laying mines in a field she thought no one had noticed her walking through - and underneath the ordinary noise of the house there was a small, specific, private thought he didn't examine too closely, the same one he'd been carrying for months now, small and warm as a coal held in a closed fist. Maybe it doesn't have to go the way everyone thinks it goes.He didn't say it out loud. He didn't even fully finish the thought in his own head. He just closed the sketchbook, left Priya's eyes unfinished for another day, and went down to see what was for dinner, because his mother had already called him twice and the third call, everyone in the house knew, came with consequences.
