She stopped pacing and jiggled the balcony door. It was open. She stepped onto the marble mosaic in her bare feet. The balcony made her feel like Rapunzel. She needed her hair to be long enough to make its way across the Arabian Sea, Western Asia, and Europe. Because across all that was Omar, entirely unaware of how much she needed him.

At home, every Sunday she made a trip to the long-distance calling booth across town in a neighborhood her father and his elitist posse of spies wouldn’t be caught dead in for fear of muddying their fancy shoes. It was an hour-long trip one way, but for five minutes of hearing Omar’s voice, Shoban would have done it a hundred times over.

The man who ran the booth was creepier than anyone Shoban had ever encountered. The entire time that Shoban talked to Omar, the man sat behind his rickety desk in his gauzy polyester kurta and undressed her with his eyes, his bony jaw rhythmically juicing the tobacco lumped in his cheek.

Shoban always took care to wear a loose-fitting salwar kameez that buttoned close around her neck, and wrapped her dupatta scarf all the way around herself. She tried to turn away when she spoke into the heavy black handpiece of the phone as she soaked up the gently melodic tones of Omar’s voice. But turning her back on the telephone man’s lecherous gaze only made the violation worse.

More than anything, she wanted to yell at him to stop, but that was the only place in town where she could go to make that call without letting her father find out. If the man threw her out, she wouldn’t get to hear Omar’s voice at all.

Another sniffle escaped her. Swiping her face with her sleeve, she went back into her sandalwood-scented jail. What she wouldn’t give to be in that creepy phone booth right now.

Omar knew she was visiting Sripore, so he would not be sitting by the phone in his landlady’s house waiting for her call this Sunday.

It is dark without your voice, jaan. But I’ve gathered the sparks of your laughter in my heart for centuries, and like constellations in the night they will be my light.

He had whispered the words into the hollow behind her ear, into the dip between her breasts, into the wetness of her lips. She missed his gentleness. It had always eased the cynicism from her heart, kept her from choking on her own anger.

“Oh, Omar,” she whispered into the empty room. “They want to steal our light. They want to use it to burn us away.”

Daddy’s lackey, Ramesh, was standing sentry outside the room. If Shoban found a way to escape, or to go the Rajes, she had no idea what her father would do. Without a doubt he was fully prepared to destroy Omar’s family to get his way.