The six-foot home aquarium was a sophisticated affair—automatic filtration system, temperature controls and lots of vegetation the baby mollies could dart into whenever their parents tried to eat them. Varun rooted for the parents.

‘Go get ’em,’ he would yell. ‘Get that little bastard. He’s behind the seaweed.’

And Gehna, as if on cue, would be outraged. ‘How could you! The poor thing can’t even defend itself. Is this why you keep them? So you can watch them, what, cannibalize each other?’

‘Natural selection, baby,’ Varun would say, tapping the plate glass of the tank to show the adult Black Molly where its dinner was hiding. ‘The weak are doomed. Try not to let your heart bleed all over my carpet.’

That evening was the first time Eram visited Varun’s 2-BHK apartment in the Bandra suburb. The main thing that made this apartment different from the trillions of other apartments in Mumbai was that its door was open. Not just unlocked, but left ajar.

Who does that in a big city? Eram wondered. Nobody who’s still breathing, that’s who. In the movies, gumshoes always have these tough-as-shit names like Spade or Hammer or Shaft. I could be PI Steele, hot on the scene of a mystery so raw that it bled. The door opened with a loud creak. Steele waited for something to happen, a matchstick stuck in his mouth like it was a pin holding the rest of him together. He needn’t have bothered—in this crummy neighbourhood, even a shotgun blast wouldn’t have stirred the residents. Inside, the apartment was bright and cold as a morgue. Steele hoped that the resemblance ended there. He hoped that the worst thing he would find in here was milk gone bad. But deep in his bones he knew it wasn’t to be. Death had been a guest here tonight. Pity, thought Steele, slipping the matchstick into the pocket of his trench coat. He’d have to scratch that dinner date he had with a dame so hot you could fry bacon on her.

The goddamn movies, Eram thought. You watch too many of them, they set up shop in your brain.

The big aquarium sat on a counter dividing the kitchen alcove from the hall. When he bent down to get a closer look, Eram saw a girl in a pink camisole curled into an armchair on the other side of the tank.

‘Look at that. A pretty pink fish.’

The girl lowered the book she was reading. Through the clear water of the aquarium—past the mollies, goldfish, tetras, platies and pairs of kissing gourami that fought with their mouths pressed tight together—Eram looked into her eyes. He may have looked a moment too long. She smiled at him with half of her mouth. How could he have known, at seventeen, the peril in girls with sad eyes and crooked smiles? Eram’s pulse jerked like a koi fish fresh to the net. It suddenly became imperative that the aquarium not be between the pink girl and himself, so he stepped around it.