One week had crawled past since the classroom incident—seven nights of teeth-grinding and mornings that tasted like cotton. Rahul submerged himself in past papers and physics problems until the numbers blurred. Exams were coming up. Distraction was a luxury he could not afford.
The municipal library on Hoshangabad Road had become his refuge. Between the high, dust-streaked windows and the rows of yellowing catalogues, there was a merciless silence that let him pretend the world had an edge he could grip. Outside, the city of Bhopal hummed: distant horns, the occasional rattle of an auto, and the low, warm scent of chai from a stall near DB City Mall. From somewhere across the skyline, the minarets of Taj-ul-Masajid kept time with the azaan—an ordinary sound that kept the city honest.
He left late. The librarian—a small woman who had seen too many students with too little sleep—gave him a sympathetic nod. The streetlights along Hoshangabad Road threw an orange pool over puddles; the night air smelled faintly of frying samosas and wet dust.
Rahul walked with his hands in his pockets, bag slung on one shoulder. He tried to force his thoughts into neat boxes: equations, chapters, exam strategies. But the questions refused to be disciplined.
Why did she do it? What did I lack? Was I not enough?
He shook his head. Focus. Exams. Forget her.
He cut through a familiar alley behind a closed photostat shop—an old shortcut. The lamps here sputtered; shadows gathered like reluctant guests. Then he heard them: purposeful footsteps that belonged to people whose hands were practiced in making other men small.
"Oi, Rahul!"
The voice had the oily edge of someone used to being obeyed. Rahul turned, and the alley answered with silhouettes. Four men stepped from the dark: three with wooden bats, faces hard with a mirror of malice, and one at the front with his arms folded and a grin that never touched his eyes.
Niraj.
Rahul's grip tightened on his bag strap. "What do you want, Niraj?"
Niraj's laugh was a blade disguised as silk. "What do I want? You really don't get it, do you? You humiliated me in front of everyone. Made me look like a fool."
"That was a fair fight," Rahul said, trying to keep his voice level. "You started it."
"Fair?" Niraj's face creased. "You think fairness exists for people like me? You—" he spat the word as if it burned—"a nobody from a rented chawl, made me look weak. Do you know who my family is? Do you even know what I can do?" He stepped closer and let the threat hang, polished and obvious.
Rahul looked past him. No help, only the occasional silhouette of a shuttered shop. His chest tightened. "I don't want trouble," he said.
"Too late for that." Niraj nodded like a judge giving sentence.
The first bat cracked into Rahul's shoulder. Pain exploded, white and hot. He staggered, the bag slipping from his hand. A second blow landed between his ribs; lungs burned. He dropped to his knees, fingers scraping the gritty ground.
"Stop!" he tried. It sounded tiny. It sounded ridiculous.
A boot found his side; air left his body in a soundless whoosh. Hands and wood and boot came down in a rhythm meant to erase a person. Rahul curled, instinctively guarding his face. His vision watered. Blood kissed the dust.
"This is what you get," Niraj said, standing over him. "This is what happens when you cross someone like me."
Rahul's world narrowed to a dull roar. Then a voice cut through—lighter, measured.
"Is he still conscious?"
That voice. Her voice.
He forced his eyes open. At the mouth of the alley she stood—Ananya—dupatta clinging to her shoulder, hair tucked like she had somewhere important to be. Her face was the same he'd memorized, but the light in her eyes was gone. She watched him as if he were an insect at a museum.
"Ananya…" The name slipped out like an apology.
Niraj's grin widened. He motioned, and his men halted, folding the chaos into a tableau so everyone could admire the spectacle. "Come here, babe," he said, like a man offering sweets to a guest.
She walked up to him slowly and took his hand. Her fingers rested in his as if it were ordinary to hold the hand of the boy who had just been beaten into the dirt.
Rahul shoved himself up, legs trembling, a clean line of blood down his temple. He looked at her—really looked—and the thing that answered in his chest wasn't love anymore. It was something cold and raw: a single bright thing that wanted retribution.
"Why?" He tried to make it simple. "Just tell me why."
She cocked her head, as though deciding whether the mosquito deserved the trouble. Then she looked at him the way someone looks at an old debt.
"You want to know why?" she said, voice flat. "Because you have nothing, Rahul. No money. No status. No future." She glanced at Niraj, who watched like a man who'd come to collect. "I thought I loved you. I thought I… But I was stupid. I wasted my time on someone who could never give me what I deserve."
Rahul felt the words split him open. "Niraj can give me everything you never could," she continued with terrible calm. "Comfort. Respect. Power. You? You're just a poor, pathetic boy who thought love was enough."
He laughed then—low and ugly, a sound that didn't belong to him. "You fucking bitch!" he spat, the words tearing out of him raw and animal. "You think money makes you better?! You think you're something special because you sold yourself to this bastard? You're nothing but a cheap whore who—"
A bat smashed into his stomach and cut the sentence into pain. He doubled, retching on blood, and a kick sent him sprawling back.
"Watch your mouth," Niraj said coldly. His friends obliged; the beating resumed, this time with a cruelty that had nothing to prove to anyone.
Rahul's mind was a rush of images—her hand in his hand, late-night conversations under street lamps, a promise that had been a paper boat. Now it was burning. Rage hot and immediate filled him, and a voice inside—darker than guilt—coiled.
Kill her. Kill them. End it. Make them feel the clean, silent thing you feel now. The thought arrived not as an accusation but as a tool, familiar and terrifying. He'd learned to name it; to hide it. The master's words—teach yourself calm, teach yourself patience—hovered at the edge of his mind, an instruction manual for someone who intended to last longer than a night.
He didn't strike back. He couldn't. His body was collapsing into itself. Still, that voice—the teacher, the dark edge—whispered a steady thing: Remember. Wait. Turn it into a blade that doesn't tremble.
He spat at Ananya. "If I see you again, I will—" his words came out in Hindi, ragged: "Main tumhe maar dunga" (I will kill you). The sentence landed in the alley like a stone.
Ananya's face didn't change. Perhaps she heard the threat, perhaps she didn't. Either way, what passed for feeling in her eyes was a brittle, contemptuous pity.
"You're dramatic," she said, with a faint shrug. "Good for theatrics, poor for life."
The last blow came hard enough to dim the world. Rahul curled and accepted it, because acceptance hurt less than the betrayal did.
They left him there. Their boots and laughter faded down the alley until even the echo ran out of air.
Rahul lay on the cold concrete, his breaths shallow, the taste of metal heavy on his tongue. Somewhere, a distant azaan lifted and fell. The air felt too large for his body.
Is this how it ends? the thought whispered, ridiculous and small.
A shadow bent over him. A voice, different from the others—soft, steady, real—said, "Good Lord… what have they done to you?"
Hands cradled his head like careful language. They were warm. They had calluses not of violence but of work.
"Stay with me, son," the man said. "Stay awake."
Rahul blinked up through the blur. The face above him was middle-aged, with kind, tired eyes and a grey stubble. His kurta was plain; his hands smelled faintly of antiseptic. In his voice was a steadiness that refused drama.
"Antony… sir?" Rahul croaked.
Antony, who ran the small medical stall across from the tea stall and always kept a stock of bandages, adjusted him gently. "Shh. Don't speak. You'll waste your breath." He slid his arms under Rahul with surprising strength. "You're going to be alright. I'll get you out of here."
Rahul tried to form the rest of the question—why, who—but his tongue was lead. Pain stitched his thoughts into fragments. He tried to remember the sound of Ananya's laugh, then blocked it because the memory felt like a wound reopening.
"Why does… everyone…" he managed, voice so small it might have been a whisper in another life.
Antony's mouth tightened. For a moment his face was not kind, just human and real. "The world is cruel," he said, "but not everyone in it is."
Rahul wanted to believe it. The dark voice inside him was louder now—humming with the energy of a thing that had been fed anger and humiliation. It showed him a vision so simple he hated it: a clean act, precise and final. He pushed the thought away because even imagining it felt like a fracture.
Antony lifted him, slung Rahul's arm over his shoulder, and started walking toward the main road. The night air hit Rahul like a slap. There was a smell of wet earth and frying oil and the hush of people who stayed inside to avoid trouble.
As they moved into the open light, someone at a tea stall shouted and three people ran over. One wrapped a shawl around Rahul's shoulders. Someone else called a number. The city around them kept going—today's dramas folding into tomorrow's trivialities.
Rahul's eyelids grew heavy. The alley, the bats, Ananya's flatness—everything slid into a blur of half-thoughts.
Antony's voice came close, steady and small like a hand at the back of the neck. "Don't close your eyes, beta. Help is coming."
Somewhere in him, between hatred and something that might still have been a hollow love, something harsher set itself like a seed in dark soil. The lesson the master had whispered across many sleepless nights—temper your pain, keep your hands steady, build a life that can take and return the world's cruelty—clicked into place with the cold comfort of inevitability.
Rahul wanted to say he wasn't afraid. He wanted to say he didn't want to become the thing that thought the clean act. He wanted to believe Antony.
But the darkness has a memory, and one week was enough to teach him that the city kept receipts.
He closed his eyes. The world tightened once more, then loosened. Silence took him.
Not yet, the inner voice promised—not a vow, only a fact. Not yet.
And the darkness took him.