What the hell was that, Gehna thought. I’m turning into a porn star. And he looks like someone whacked him on the back of the head with a brick.

Gehna believed there was a cosmic balance in all things: good and evil, black and white, male and female, simple carbs and complex carbs. She carved her life into indulgences and abstinences, totalling them up in a never-ending battle against asymmetry. Too much of one and not enough of the other made her feel unlike herself. Balancing things out grounded her. If she spread butter on her toast in the morning, she would avoid drizzling her lunchtime lettuce with honey mustard mayo. If she yelled, say, at Nina, she would be sweetness and light to everyone else around for a week to make up for losing her temper.

This very night she had told Eram she loved him. She had licked chocolate off his finger. It made her feel vulnerable, especially since on both occasions he had just sat there like a poleaxed bull instead of immediately wrapping her in his arms. To make up for these excesses, Gehna withdrew almost completely for the rest of the journey. She let Eram drive from Pune to Satara to Kolhapur to Belgaum, a distance of some three hundred kilometres, without speaking more than a handful of times, that too mostly to discuss the route and the directions. The rest of the time she sat in the passenger seat with her legs curled under her, staring out of the window. Occasionally, the lights of a small town or toll booth would appear to break the monotony of National Highway 4, but for the most part the world outside Gehna’s window was an endless charcoal grey.

‘What you looking at?’ Eram would ask every fifty kilometres or so.

‘Nothing.’

‘Did I say something to piss you off?’

‘No, no, you’re all right.’

As her friend, Eram was familiar with Gehna’s moods. He knew that worrying at her wouldn’t help, that given enough time and space it (whatever ‘it’ was) would blow over on its own like rain clouds drifting by in the wind. As Gehna’s friend he knew this. But as her—what was he to her? Lover? Boyfriend? Partner? Bae? It all felt wrong to him, either too corny or too premature—as someone who loved her, Eram couldn’t bear her sullenness for even a minute. He felt a driving need to fix it, to make the silence between them go away. But how do you fix something when you don’t know what is broken? He wanted to reach into her head, locate the source of the trouble and fix the damn thing.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked again. ‘What’re you thinking of?’

‘Nothing.’

Neither of them noticed that Gehna’s phone was blowing up with messages and missed calls.

At Belgaum, the toll highway ended and they turned on to the potholed road that lay along the coastal ghats. It wound up, and down, and then steeply around a hill with no apparent topographical logic. At times the road became so narrow that Eram had to wait on the shoulder to allow cars approaching from the opposite direction to pass. The air had become fresher the further they got from Mumbai and, now, Gehna could almost taste salt on her lips. It brought her back to the moment.