In these moments, before the rains came to Mumbai, with the wind of earth and sea and sky filling her lungs, Gehna felt alive to the possibility of everything. She stretched her arms out and tilted her head as she waited for the first drops.

‘Yo. Gene Kelly. Mind getting a move on? I don’t want to drown while you’re a-singin’ in the rain.’

Gehna scowled at the Yam. ‘You really know how to kill my chill, you know that?’

‘Whatever. Race you home?’

They covered the two blocks from (Not Just) Jazz to the apartment building where the Yam lived in a remarkably short time, but the rain caught them anyway. While the Yam went to her room to change, Gehna lingered in the hallway of the enormous apartment that had been around for as long as south Mumbai had. At this time of the night, with the family asleep and the silence emphasized by the ticking of a grandfather clock, the place felt spooky to Gehna. Its twenty-foot-high ceilings and the bulbous fans hanging from them reminded her of the stock haveli Indian moviemakers always used as set locations for their horror films. The films were uniformly bad, almost farcical, but once you’d seen a couple, you could never again walk around these old houses without being a tiny bit convinced that demonic butchery lay in wait just behind the next door.

She took out her phone and called her brother to let him know that she wouldn’t be coming home that night. Varun didn’t answer. Even though she knew from experience that he would only delete his messages without listening to them, she left him a voicemail because if she were Varun she would have liked to know that her sister was safe and not lying kidnapped somewhere. Then, since the phone was there anyway, she batted around in her head the idea of calling Eram. She knew she wouldn’t, in the end, but it was tantalizing to think that she could.

Gehna found the Yam, with a towel twisted-up in her hair, sitting at the study table in her room, rolling a joint. She had already crushed some tobacco on top of a commentary on the Constitution of India and was heating a dark piece of charas with a lighter.

‘You look pretty when you’re committing a felony,’ said Gehna.

‘Or, in this case, two felonies. Possession of narcotic drugs and disrespecting the Constitution. Though it’s only a commentary and not the Constitution itself, so I don’t think that counts.’

‘Geek.’

‘Ho.’

Gehna watched her friend lick the edge of a sheet of Rizla+ rolling paper and wished she was more like her. The Yam always seemed so sorted. She was consistently cheerful, had a vocal and supportive family, knew (and had known since the age of eleven) the career she wanted, and had no trouble getting boys to date her. She had also never, not once since Gehna had known her, given any indication that her sixteen-plus dress size caused her any insecurities at all. Gehna herself had plenty of days when she felt like a sausage stuffed too tightly into its skin, and when her thighs seemed to jiggle with each step. How does shit like this happen? I don’t think I’ve looked at a fashion mag more than twice in my whole life.