They repacked Eram’s bag and carefully counted one final time the money he would need for the tournament buy-in. Dinner with Faizl and Elango was pleasant and, for Eram, hugely reassuring because his dad seemed all there for a change. He even hugged Eram at the end and, because he didn’t believe in wishing anybody good luck, told him to do his best and be safe instead.

Gehna and Eram were in his car by 9 p.m. and, soon after that, fuelling up at the last gas station within the city limits.

Eram exhaled noisily through his mouth.

‘Hey, you good?’ Gehna asked.

‘Yeah. I should’ve got the car a tune-up at least.’

‘It’s a ten-hour drive,’ Gehna smiled at him. ‘What could go wrong?’

Eram started the car and they pulled out on to the road.

12

‘It says here on this blog,’ Gehna said, scrolling down on her phone, ‘that there’s two routes to Goa. The first one, through the Mumbai–Pune Expressway, is safer and faster but has more toll booths. The second is through the Western Ghats—wow, whoever wrote this needs a grammar lesson—the second is through the Western Ghats and takes longer, but is “stunningly scenic”. I vote for that one.’

‘We’re taking the expressway,’ Eram said, jabbing at the buttons on the stereo system while trying to watch the road. He had never driven out of the city at night and was pretending a confidence he didn’t really feel.

‘What, why? What about the toll booths?’

‘What about them? Listen, if you could do a little less navigating and a little more DJ’ing, that would be awesome.’

‘Okay, sure, but it says right here this other route is stunningly—’

‘Scenic, I know,’ Eram finished for her. ‘It could be the Eighth Wonder of the World and I still wouldn’t take it. It’s dark, it’s the monsoons, that road zigzags up and down, and if you think I’m ever going to risk anything bad happening to you, well, then, think again.’

‘Aww.’ She reached over and ran her fingers through the hair on the nape of Eram’s neck.

Privately, Gehna believed that if something bad was meant to happen, it would happen no matter how much you guarded against it or how good a person you were. The Yam used to mock her fatalism as if she had said that she believed in elves or something. Gehna didn’t care. Bad things happened to good people all the time, and it was laughable to think that anybody had any real control over it. If you never smoked a cigarette in your life and drank green tea all day and prayed sincerely every night, you could still randomly win the cancer lottery as easily as the next guy.

She thought that Eram, with his grasp over probabilities and quantum physics, might get this better than the Yam had, but you never knew. People were emotional; they liked to believe they had a say in what was about to happen to them or to those they cared for.