***

There’s a school of thought that says frameworks kill creativity. That real storytelling can’t be stuffed into boxes.

I understand the concern. And honestly, some of the most brilliant storytellers I’ve encountered would never use a framework consciously. Instead, they use instinct born of years of experience to perform something akin to magic.

But study their work closely, and you’ll notice that they’re using patterns. They’ve just absorbed them so completely that they don’t recognize them as patterns anymore.

There’s a story about Johann Sebastian Bach that I think about often. In 1747, Bach visited the court of Frederick the Great in Prussia. He was sixty-two years old and somewhat out of fashion in that age of music. The king, who was a musician trained in the modern style, handed Bach a melody and asked him to improvise a fugue on the spot. The theme was long, intensely chromatic and rhythmically awkward. Some commentators have speculated that Frederick conspired with Bach’s own son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, who worked at the court, to design a melody that would be nearly impossible to work with. It was, by most accounts, a trap. But Bach improvised the fugue flawlessly.

Frederick then raised the stakes: create a sixvoice fugue on the same impossible theme. Even Bach couldn’t do that on the spot. He promised to send something later.

Two months later, Frederick received ‘The Musical Offering’. It contained the six-voice fugue he’d demanded. But also, a three-voice fugue, ten canons of increasing complexity and a full trio sonata, all built on the same ‘impossible’ theme Frederick had used to try to embarrass him.

The constraint revealed Bach’s art instead of limiting it.

That’s what I want for you from this book.

This book is a system of patterns that helps you find the story already inside the situation you’re facing. This is not a formula that makes all your stories sound the same, or a template that strips the life out of anything you want to say.

The Story Map: Soul, Body, Spirit

So, what did Pasteur have that Semmelweis didn’t?

It wasn’t intelligence. Semmelweis was brilliant. It wasn’t evidence. Semmelweis had more data than Pasteur did when he started. It wasn’t even courage. Semmelweis risked his entire career to tell the truth.

What Pasteur had was a complete story. And every complete story, I’ve come to believe, rests on three pillars. Miss any one, and the story fails.

I call these pillars Soul, Body and Spirit.

Soul is the meaning of your story. It’s what makes people care even before you’ve told them anything useful.

Soul answers three questions:

Who is this story about? That’s your Character. It might be you, your customer, your company, your team or somebody else. But someone has to be at the centre of the story, facing something.

What do they want? That’s your Goal. Every Character worth caring about wants something. To solve a problem, to achieve a milestone or perhaps to undergo transformation.

What’s standing in their way? That’s your Challenge. Without an obstacle, there’s no tension. Without tension, there’s no story—you just have a sequence of events.

Character. Goal. Challenge. These three levers move the Soul of every story worth telling.

Body is the structure of your story. It’s how you organize and deliver the meaning you’ve established.

Body also answers three questions:

What shape will this story take? That’s your Structure. There are nine master structures that cover most situations you’ll encounter, from the Hero’s Journey to the Inverted Pyramid to the simple Problem Solution. Each has a different purpose and a different effect on the listener.

How do you create tension? That’s where Tension Tactics come in. Starting in the middle of the action. Introducing a ticking clock. Setting up a David-versus Goliath dynamic. These are the moves that grab attention and hold it.

How do you build connection? That’s where Connection Tactics come in handy. A well-placed anecdote. A vulnerable confession. A visual metaphor that explains an abstract concept. These are the parts that build trust and make your audience feel like you understand them.

Soul gives your story meaning. Body gives it shape.

Spirit is what makes your story land with your audience, in a moment, in a particular context.

You can have a perfect Soul and Body and still fail, because you didn’t adapt to the room you were actually in.

Spirit answers three final questions:

Who are you talking to? That’s your Audience. A story that works for investors might bore your team. A story that energizes a conference crowd might feel over the top in a one-on-one conversation. You need to know who’s actually listening.

What should they feel? That’s the Emotion you’re designing for. Urgency. Trust. Pride. Belonging. Hope. Different emotions drive different actions. Pick the wrong one and your story might be admired but not acted upon.

Where and how are you telling it? That’s your Context. A boardroom presentation is different from an email is different from a toast at a sangeet is different from a difficult conversation with a direct report. The medium shapes what’s possible.

Spirit is the final gate. It’s what separates a good story from the right story for this specific moment. This is where Semmelweis failed most completely. His Audience was physicians who valued professional status above almost everything else. The Emotion he triggered was shame and defensiveness—the exact opposite of what he needed. And his Context kept shifting from medical journals to public accusations to, eventually, screaming at colleagues that they were murderers.

Pasteur read the room. He gave doctors a story that made them heroes, not villains. He let them feel like they were defeating an enemy rather than admitting a mistake.

***

What begins as one young researcher’s determination to find a snow leopard becomes a decades-long journey through the Himalayas, wildlife research and conservation. The Ghost of the Mountains by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi takes readers into the wild, unpredictable world of one of the planet’s most elusive big cats—and the people working to protect it.

***

‘You will never see a snow leopard,’ said a professor when I sought advice on my master’s research project. ‘And you won’t get enough data to write your thesis.’

As a Wildlife Biology and Conservation student at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, the thesis I was due to present in 2008 was to be my gateway to a career in wildlife research. Modelled on American Ivy League universities, with acres of green lawns, air- conditioned research laboratories and cafeterias that serve cappuccino, the NCBS is one of India’s leading institutes in biological systems research, studying everything from molecules to entire ecosystems. I had found my way into this elite scientific institution through hard work and a talent for wandering the wilderness, but now I was struggling to journey through the door I wanted to open – the one labelled ‘snow leopard’.

‘Your idea of studying predator–prey relationships between snow leopards and blue sheep in the Himalaya is very good,’ said another faculty member, ‘but you should do this research with the tiger and the deer instead, and work here in South India. Besides, it will be 40 degrees below zero during the winter and you are from one of the hottest parts of India, so how will you handle the Himalayan winter?’

Some of this was true. Only a handful of researchers – mainly from Western countries – had ever studied snow leopards in the wild, and they often struggled to back up their research claims with adequate data from the field.

It was also true that I had grown up in the heat, in a village in the central Indian state of Maharashtra, near the famous UNESCO heritage site of the twenty- nine Buddhist caves cut into the cliffs at Ajanta between the second and fourth centuries BC. My village often gets to over 40º C, and the hot summers of my childhood were spent eating mangoes and swimming in wells. I had grown up listening to my grandmother tell the story of the Last Tiger of Ajanta. This tiger had killed a cow on the outskirts of my village, and my grandmother recounted in great detail how my grandfather stayed up in a cowshed near the carcass and shot the tiger on a full-moon night. My father was a little boy then and remembers sitting next to the dead tiger, measuring his height against the length of the ferocious animal. My grandmother would end the story on a sad note, saying that was the last time any­ one saw a tiger near our village. I grew up regretful of the outcome but tried to maintain a proud feeling that my grandfather had helped the village. The suggestion that I should study the tiger had resonance.

But I felt a calling to the Himalaya. I had been obsessively drawn to vertical surfaces since I was 15. Be they boulders, hillsides or buildings, I had to find a route to climb them. As a teenager I spent every waking moment thinking about how I could find my way to the Himalaya and be among the ‘real mountains’. Living in the mountains, hiking without a destination and climbing was the dream – not to set records but simply to be with myself exploring my great passion. Doing my master’s thesis in the Himalaya could locate me in the mountains for good. I knew I could handle the Himalayan winters. At 19, I had trained at one of the best mountaineering schools in Asia, and I could hold my own on icy slopes. During the NCBS’s summer break, after the second semester of my current course, I had also interned with an organization working on snow leopard research and conservation, and I was confident I would gather enough data to complete my thesis. What I lacked, given an upbringing which emphasized an unquestioning respect for my elders, was the courage to say this to my professors.

The final decision would be made at the proposal defence seminar, a gruelling annual ritual at the end of the third semester at which students presented their research plans to an audience composed of professors and practising conservationists. If a student’s idea was accepted, they would get the funding and permission to research at the proposed field site for six months. I had decided to propose researching the snow leopard’s prey species, rather than the cat itself, in the hope that this would sound more achievable. I included a photograph of myself climbing an icy Himalayan peak to convince them that I could handle the winter cold. When I walked up to the lectern and the lights in the seminar hall dimmed, with faculty members and students leaning back in their seats to listen to my proposal, the voice ringing in my ears was that of a friend. She had told me that some people in the audience would support my plan simply for its audaciousness.

***

Parenting often asks us to correct what we can see, but what if the real answer lies beneath the behaviour? Connection Before Correction by Schweta Merchant Gandhi explores how understanding a child’s developing brain can help parents respond to tantrums, big emotions and difficult moments with greater empathy, connection and calm.

***

That night, the house was silent.

Agastya had finally fallen asleep, his breath soft, his face impossibly peaceful, as if the hurricane at Hamleys had never happened.

I sat beside his bed in the dark. Watching him breathe. My own chest was still tight. My hands were still trembling slightly. The guilt was a physical thing, heavy, pressing against my ribs, making it hard to take a full breath.

I kept replaying the scene.

The wailing. His small body crumpled on the floor of that store. The eyes of strangers. My own voice, that voice I didn’t recognize, ricocheting off the walls of our home.

His face when I screamed. The way his whole body crumpled. The sob that came from somewhere so deep it shook us both.

How did we get here?

How could a loving, educated mother lose herself just as fast? How could logic, love and all my training evaporate the moment emotions rose?

I had read the parenting books. I studied child psychology. Built a career around understanding little minds. Worked with thousands of kids and millions of parents.

And yet, here I was. Broken on the floor of my own home. Watching my son wonder if it was safe to feel happy again.

In the silence, something whispered, a truth I’d been avoiding: There has to be a reason.

Not an excuse.

A reason.

The Realization

For the first time, I saw it clearly: I had spent years looking at my child. His tantrums. His reactions. His ‘difficult’ moments. His behaviours that needed ‘fixing’.

But I had never truly looked into him. Into the invisible universe firing beneath his skull. Into the why behind every meltdown, every explosion, every moment that left us both in tears.

Beneath every word he spoke and every tear he shed, something far more powerful was shaping him, a ‘universe of tiny circuits’ firing faster than thought, deciding in a split second whether to connect or protect.

That night, I made a promise: Before I teach, correct or guide, I will first understand the brain behind the behaviour. Because that’s where the real story of parenting begins. Not in what our children do, but in what’s happening inside them while they do it.

Inside that small but mighty organ that holds our children’s feelings, fears and future.

Let’s open the door and walk inside your child’s brain, a little two-storey house where storms rise, calm returns and connection is built brick by brick.

The Two-Storey House

When you imagine a child’s brain, don’t picture a dull diagram or a medical sketch.

Picture a home, warm, buzzing, alive.

Where some rooms are loud and impulsive, while others are wise and calm.

Where some spaces are fully furnished and others are still being built.

Dr Daniel Siegel, one of the world’s leading child psychiatrists, explains it beautifully using a ‘two-storey house’ model:

1. Downstairs Brain (Survival + Emotion)

2. Upstairs Brain (Thinking + Reflection)

3. The Staircase that connects both the brains

***

Sometimes, you travel to escape your life, only to find yourself sitting in a strange city, confronting everything you were trying to leave behind. Manav Kaul’s A Mountain, A Lake and a Song captures this beautiful contradiction of travel—the way new places, fleeting encounters and unfamiliar rhythms can bring us face to face with ourselves.

 

***

The next day the weather in London changed suddenly. Golden sunlight covered everything. I was sitting outside Paul Cafe at Gloucester Road, trying to put the darkness of the past into words. To sit in this beautiful sunlight and write about the darkness of the last few days was making the sunlight that much more beautiful. But after I had written it all down and read it in the sunlight, it all rang hollow. Again and again, I’d type, read and delete the same sentences. My life lay in front of me like a tangled mess of wet thread and I was trying to find one of the ends—then there’d at least be an opportunity to untangle it all.

My coffee had gone cold. I was just thinking about ordering another when the waitress came by to take the cup away. I asked her for another. She acknowledged the request and was picking up the cold cup when she saw the laptop screen. ‘What the hell is this?’ she blurted out. I couldn’t help but laugh at her surprise. I told her that it’s Hindi, and that I’m a Hindi writer. She sat down next to me, staring at the words on the screen. She then asked me to type something. I asked her name. Katherine, I typed it out.

कैैथरिन

She looked at it and laughed. She pulled out her phone, took a photo of my screen and said, ‘Your next coffee’s on me.’ I thanked her and she went back inside. I kept staring at her name for a long time, कैैथरिन, her laughter now embedded in it.

I started writing a story. I once knew a girl called Katherine . . . The minute I typed it, I was ashamed of my own superficiality. For a long time now I’ve been struggling with the question as to which parts of my life are real and which are the stories I make up? I mean, there has to be a difference between my real life and the stories I create; else I’ll never be able to experience anything real. The minute anything beautiful happens around me, I start looking at it as a potential story. But how do I remain in the present? Like, where am I right now? What am I doing here in London? Why do I want to run from my lonely life towards more loneliness? I hate my writing when such questions surround me. I instantly deleted the name and closed my laptop.

Katherine was back with my coffee. She put the cup down and asked, ‘Are you okay?’ An anxious person looks the same in all the languages of the world. I just smiled, which meant both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. I’m not in my country, or I would’ve instantly said, I’m alright. You have to hide everything there. You have to constantly toil to hide the weakness that comes with not being okay. But here, here I felt I should live my reality how it was. Katherine was gone. Soon I was irritated at myself for smiling. I should’ve just said I’m fine.

It had been a long time since I had quit smoking. But the last two days had been so stark that I had bought a packet. I know I’m weak. After just two sips of coffee, my hands were on the packet. I pulled one out and put it on the table. I had to scramble a bit in my bag before I could find the lighter. I sniffed the cigarette for a bit before putting it between my lips. I kept waiting for something to stop me, a thought, a call or a message but nothing did. After some time, I lit the cigarette. With the first drag, the tension in my body started to loosen up. But soon I felt dizzy and couldn’t smoke the entire cigarette.

Katherine brought a chocolate cake and put it on my table. ‘This is from my boyfriend. He asked me to give it to you,’ she said and smiled. I thanked her but refused to accept the cake, to which she replied that her boyfriend will feel bad. After some back and forth, I accepted the cake. I was hungry. The only thing I had consumed since morning was coffee. Soon, I had demolished the entire thing. I thought Katherine had gone back in, but she was just standing there at the door, watching me eat. She had golden hair, like the sun’s sheen on London’s buildings. She was tall and well-built like an athlete. Her genial smile seemed like an anomaly. I had to leave. I pulled some money out of my wallet and gestured at her to accept it. But she kept looking at me, she didn’t accept the money or deny it, she just smiled at me. I was getting uncomfortable. She was still smiling when she went back inside but there was something different to this smile. It felt as though she was saying, ‘I see you, I know you.’

I left the money for the two coffees and the cake on the table and got out of there like a thief.

***

***

‘There is a Hindu–Muslim couple here today for court marriage. The girl is Hindu,’ a lawyer informed Balraj Dungar over the phone. Even though it was still early in the day, Dungar’s deep-seated worries were stirred by this call. The Bajrang Dal Uttar Pradesh convenor-turned-BJP state worker rushed to his car and sped to a local court in Meerut.

Shortly after, the couple’s marriage was stopped by a group of zealous workers of the Bajrang Dal. The lawyer had done his part, and Dungar had done his.

This was in 2017, when the BJP’s Yogi Adityanath became UP’s chief minister for the first time on the back of a historic win in the assembly elections. Adityanath, believed Dungar, would finally stop love jihad in the state and show Muslims their place.

When I first interviewed Balraj Dungar in 2020, he described this incident as one of his ‘success stories’—the high point of a life dedicated to protecting Hindus. A middle-aged, round man with a giant teeka across his forehead, he saw himself as a ‘protector’ of his religion.

‘Hindus are under threat,’ Dungar declared at the very start of our conversation.

‘From whom?’ I ventured to ask.

‘From Muslims, who else?’ He shot back, stunned that the question even had to be asked. ‘If a Hindu woman marries into a Hindu home, she will give birth to two children. But if she marries into a Muslim home, she would be forced to give birth to at least ten children.’

With more than 20 crore people, roughly the entire population of Brazil, Muslims are India’s largest minority. One of the many allegations against them is that they produce too many children, which contributes to the country’s population growth and upsets the demographic balance. Right-wing Hindu politician Sakshi Maharaj from Unnao even claimed in 2015 that Hindus needed to outnumber Muslims by having at least four children.

According to the United Nations, India overtook China as the world’s most populous country in 2023. Several calls for population control policies have come from right-wing quarters who see this in a Hindu–Muslim binary and say that India’s Muslim population will eventually, if unchecked, outnumber the Hindu population.

S.Y. Quraishi, a former chief election commissioner of India, refuted this claim in his book The Population Myth: Islam, Family Planning and Politics in India published in 2021, claiming that Muslims would never be able to surpass Hindus in population.

In an interview I conducted with Quraishi in 2021, he told me, ‘While Muslims have the lowest levels of family planning as well as the highest fertility rate due to poverty and other factors, Hindus are not far behind. They have the second-highest fertility rate. The truth is, both communities are backward according to indicators of family planning.’

While Muslims have the highest fertility rate in India, it has seen the sharpest decline over the past few decades. According to data from the National Family Health Survey, the total fertility rate has declined dramatically among Muslims, falling from 4.4 children per woman in 1992 to 2.6 children in 2015 to 2.3 in 2021.7 In fact, as a result of greater access to family planning facilities and education, birth rates have been falling for all communities in India in recent decades.

Dungar doesn’t buy it. ‘In the end, the country’s Muslim population will rise and Hindus will be reduced to a minority.’

Since the anti-conversion law was enacted in Uttar Pradesh in 2021, Dungar and his vigilante network have the police’s full backing in their efforts to sabotage interfaith unions.

The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 was introduced by the Uttar Pradesh government in November 2020 and enacted in March 2021. By end-2021, a slew of BJP-ruled including Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka, had enacted similar laws. Haryana followed in 2022, Rajasthan in 2025 and Maharashtra in 2026—the thirteenth Indian state to regulate religious conversions—giving state sanction to what had long been considered a fringe theory.

However, the epicentre of this non-existent threat remains UP—home to 3.85 crore Indian Muslims (Census 2011 data)10 and frequently the site11 of communal conflict. The BJP’s loaded rhetoric since coming to power in 2017 has made divisions deeper in an already troubled society. The love jihad laws may thus seem to be a direct consequence of the current dispensation’s prejudices but, in reality, they were the result of years of labour put in by the soldiers of Hindutva.

Organizations like the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other RSS affiliates have worked tirelessly for decades to popularize the idea that Muslim men ‘lure’ Hindu women into marriage with the ultimate aim of increasing the Muslim population in the country. And now with legal backing, there is nothing holding them back.

In Cashless Nation, Santanu Paul and B. Sambamurthy revisit the dramatic night of 8 November 2016, when India’s currency landscape changed overnight—and trace how that disruption helped set the stage for the digital payments revolution that followed.

***

It was 8 November 2016, and the day had felt like any other. Barely ten days had passed since Diwali, and India was beginning to emerge from its after-effects. Diwali motivates and excites Indians like no other festival. From lighting oil lamps to setting off colourful fireworks, from buying shiny gifts to wearing new clothes, from scrubbing homes to gorging on sweets, Diwali is an opportunity to indulge in jubilant and boisterous excess. The celebrations of 2016 had been no exception.

Of all Indian festivals, Diwali enjoys a special relationship with money, or more specifically, currency notes. This year too, clean and crisp currency notes flowed like a river through families, businesses and society. The clamour for freshly minted notes had reached a frenzy, and the affluent class did not mind paying a tidy premium to get their hands on them. Elders gave them as gifts to young members of their families. Devotees offered them to Goddess Lakshmi as they prayed for their own financial prosperity. Workers in India’s massive informal economy invariably look forward to cash bonuses during Diwali. Their employers had not disappointed them this year.

Diwali is also a harbinger of new business cycles. As in other years, small businesses organized chopda pujan ceremonies to close the accounts of previous years and open new ledger books decorated with auspicious symbols. Despite it being a national holiday, stock markets opened briefly for muhurat trading so investors could make token trades for good luck. As the Diwali fever reached its zenith, consumers emptied their wallets, merchants offered cut-rate discounts and lenders teased borrowers with attractive schemes. Cash from new buyers rained down on sellers of bicycles and BMWs alike. The demand for currency notes was so great that even the Reserve Bank of India, or RBI, the country’s central bank, advised commercial banks to generously overstock their currency chests. By early November, with the madness behind them, everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

Yet, as day turned to dusk, there was a sudden buzz in the air that Prime Minister Narendra Modi might address the nation later that evening. Elected a little over two years earlier, Modi already had a burgeoning reputation for bold pronouncements and muscular action. Curiosity and speculation immediately ricocheted throughout the country. Mercifully, the wait was short. At 8 p.m., the prime minister appeared on national television and cleared his throat. Over the next twenty-five minutes, as tens of millions of Indians hung on to his words with a combination of incomprehension and anxiety, Modi laid out the case for why a whopping 86 per cent of India’s currency notes needed to be rendered null and void within the next four hours. Suddenly, the country was on the brink of the unknown.

‘There comes a time in the history of a country’s development when a need is felt for a strong and decisive step. For years, this country has felt that corruption, black money and terrorism are festering sores . . . To break the grip of corruption and black money, we have decided that the ₹500 and ₹1000 currency notes presently in use will no longer be legal tender from midnight tonight’, said the prime minister. And with that, Modi effectively banned ₹15.4 trillion of the nearly ₹18 trillion cash in circulation. It was a breathtaking act. From billionaires to beggars, from ministers to minions, from entrepreneurs to employees, no one would be spared the oncoming pain.

The sun rose on 9 November to not one but two black swan events. In India, the vast majority of currency notes had been demonetized overnight. In the United States, Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton but inflicted an unexpected defeat on her in the electoral college. Proving most political pundits completely wrong, Trump was on his way to the White House as the next US President.

Overnight, the world’s two largest democracies had managed to jolt not just themselves but the entire planet. Would anything ever be the same again?

In I Died Too Early, bestselling author Sumitra Manda gives voice to the heartbreak, childhood wounds and quiet struggles we carry long after the pain has passed, offering a tender reminder that healing begins when we slowly find our way back to ourselves.

***

I grew up watching films

where lovers became enemies,

where rage shattered cities

and revenge split worlds.

But even the cruellest villain

could only wound the body,

bruise the will,

shake the ground beneath a life.

The heart, though,

has its own laws.

It has never been broken

by outsiders or adversaries,

only by the ones

who were invited in,

the ones who spoke softly

while holding the place

meant to keep me alive.

They say the heart is whole,

but mine beats in halves,

one still reaching for you,

the other learning to let go.

I walk around with symmetry broken,

lungs full of leftover prayers.

People call it heartbreak.

I call it surviving

without instructions.

—Half a heart

In The Second Orbit, Shubhanshu Shukla takes readers beyond the launchpads and headlines, into the deeply personal journey of becoming an astronaut—where years of discipline, uncertainty and belief culminate in one life-changing phone call.

***

There’s a peculiar physics to the days before significant travel. Time doesn’t flow normally. It compresses and dilates simultaneously, hours vanishing like water through cupped hands while individual moments stretch into strange elasticity. The universe, it seems, has little patience for leisurely goodbyes.

My final three days before departure operated under this distorted chronology. Seventy-two hours to compress an entire life into luggage allowances and administrative boxes. Pack belongings for a year’s absence, not just clothes and necessities but the careful curation of what parts of yourself you’ll carry into this new existence. Put the house in order, which is a euphemism for ensuring that life continues smoothly in your absence, that the machinery of daily existence won’t grind to a halt simply because you’ve stepped away from it. Complete endless administrative formalities, paperwork that governments and institutions demand as tribute before releasing you to pursue your dreams. And perhaps most challenging: mentally prepare yourself to leave, to say goodbye not just to people but to a version of yourself that will cease to exist the moment you board that flight. Three days for all of this.

Three days that have dissolved in memory into a single undifferentiated blur, like watching a film on fast-forward, where you catch impressions rather than details. Faces appear and vanish. Conversations happen but their specific words evaporate. Tasks get completed though you can’t quite remember the sequence. It’s all there in memory, somewhere, but merged into one continuous stream of motion and momentum.

And yet, and here’s the mysterious grace that governs these transitions—everything fell into place. It always does, somehow. The chaos resolves. The impossible checklist gets checked. The bags get packed, the forms get filled, the goodbyes get said. Not because you’re particularly organized or efficient but because departure creates its own gravity, pulling everything into alignment through sheer inevitability.

My flight was scheduled for 3 a.m., that particular hour that belongs to neither the night nor morning—when the world exists in suspension between yesterday and tomorrow. An ungodly time, really, chosen not by human preference but by the algorithmic optimization of airline scheduling systems that care nothing for sentiment or convenience.

I had made up my mind. There would be no airport farewells, no bleary-eyed goodbyes under fluorescent lights, no forced smiles hiding the weight of what was left unsaid. I wanted our parting to happen the way all sacred things should—at home, in the warmth of familiar walls, where every corner holds a memory and every room breathes with the life we have built together.

And, if I am being honest with myself, I was also protecting something deeply selfish and deeply necessary—the image of my family I wanted to carry across the miles. Not their tired faces at the departure gate, waving behind a rope of strangers. I wanted to carry them, the way my wife laughs with her whole face, the way my son sleeps with his arms flung wide like he owns the world. I wanted the last picture in my heart to be of home as it truly is, not home performing its goodbye.

So I rose early. And I found her already awake.

She hadn’t slept. Of course she hadn’t.

She sat in that quiet, not dramatically, not demanding comfort, just present. Carrying everything and saying nothing. I sat beside her holding my coffee.

And then I began to speak because silence frightened me more than the journey ahead.

I talked about the electricity bill, the school fees, the dates she needed to remember, the neighbour who would check in, the bank account, the passwords. I was reciting logistics like a man trying to prove he had thought of everything, as if planning could be a substitute for staying.

She let me go on for a while. Then, gently, the way she always reins me in, she said: ‘Stop with the logistics. It will all get done.’

And just like that, the words dried up.

We sat together in the hush of that early hour, no television, no phones, just the sound of the house settling into its own stillness. And in that silence, somehow, everything that needed to be said was said. More passed between us in those wordless minutes than in all my frantic planning. She knew. I knew. Some goodbyes don’t need sentences.

When the time came, I stood at the door of my son’s room. He was asleep, arms sprawled, lost in some dream only children are lucky enough to have. I leaned over and kissed his forehead softly, so softly, the way you touch something you are terrified of waking, terrified of losing.

He didn’t stir.

I picked up my bag. My wife walked me to the door. She straightened my collar, as if sending you off well-pressed is how she holds you together when she can’t hold you at all.

I stepped outside.

In The Fourth Girl by Arefa Tehsin, a long-buried disappearance brings three former friends face-to-face with the secrets they thought they had left behind and a question that refuses to stay buried: what really happened to the fourth girl?

***

The Swimming Club

Colombo

4 March 2019

The air was peppered with sea salt and coconut. Egrets flew in formation comparing notes of the summery evening. The sun was a bindi on the forehead of the horizon, shifting shyly towards the ocean with matrimonial intent. A few ships stood still on the waves, buoyant as corks. The raucous shrieks of kids playing in the club’s saltwater swimming pool were drowned out by a rattling train. The tracks ran parallel to the club. The train thundered past on its seaside tracks against a perfectly immobile sky.

‘You know what is disarming about Sri Lanka? Even the ocean here seems to be swirling her skirts to the tune of baila.’ Qailah took a long drag off her cigar. ‘In Bombay, it slams on the Bandra rocks as if it were the police, whacking the asses of honest people.’

‘You mean Mumbai?’ Siddhesh felt duty bound to correct his countrymen (and women), even when he felt intimidated by them. Pride in one’s origins was not to be taken lightly.

Qailah let out a low chuckle. ‘Is that your next question?’ Her red lips matched the bloodthirsty dusk sky. And her eyes the biscuit brown of the butter cookies on the table. She rolled a lock of hair around her finger. The dampness of the sea breeze had made her curls frizzy.

Beauty scared Siddhesh even more than the constant fear of chewing his nails in public. He fumbled as he flipped his notebook for the questions. There was such dignity in being orthodox. Taking notes on your phone or tablet was the most vulgar thing to do.

‘I know you generally don’t do interviews, Qailah ji. Such a successful Indian author based in Sri Lanka—the largest selling romance author of the Indian subcontinent with three major Bollywood films made on her books. It’s an honour for me.’

‘It is for my own benefit, Siddhesh ji. I was alarmingly bored socializing with the usual suspects.’ She studied him with her kohl-lined eyes, tapping her painted nails on the table to a distant music. ‘I know you came from India to cover the funeral of Kehan Karunaratne, KK, who passed away early morning today. The internationally acclaimed editor-in-chief of The Punchline. You’re doing this interview as a side story.’

He felt a surge of uneasiness and let out an embarrassed cackle. ‘In-In Jaipur Literature Festival last year, you recited a poem on the increasing incidents of mob justice and lynching. And I quote . . .’

‘Yes, I spoke about that noble band who want the others to do exactly what they like. But must we continue in this depressing vein?’ A spicy cloud from her cigar twirled before eloping with the sea breeze.

‘Uh-huh . . . No, Qailah ji, not if you don’t like. Um . . . let me see. What is your favourite character in literature?’

‘You really mean to ask this question?’ She raised a perfectly arched brow.

‘No, actually . . . the favourite character you have written?’

‘Have you read my books? What is your favourite character from my novels, Siddhesh ji?’

Siddhesh almost took his gnawed nails to his teeth and stopped midair, horrified, directing his hand to scratch his chin instead. Tickle it, more likely, with the nailless fingers.

‘I have not had the honour . . . um . . . of reading . . .’

‘Gawd, the impoliteness of being polite all the time! That’s okay, you don’t look the reading type to me. Just the writing type.’ Qailah gestured at a crisp waiter with her cigar. ‘Malinga, can you be a saviour and see they don’t put more than two olives in my dry martini?’

‘Sure, Ma’am.’

‘What will be your poison tonight?’ she asked Siddhesh.

‘Er . . . just a cup of coffee. Cappuccino please. Extra milk.’ The waiter gave an efficient nod before striding away purposefully.

The bar was beyond the archways and a black and white chequered passage. The twentieth-century club with its white-washed walls stood right opposite Temple Trees, the prime minister’s official residence. Shouldering the American Embassy on one side and an ugly high rise under construction on the other, the club opened its arms to the Indian Ocean.

The scattered tables around the terrace and lawns had started filling up. The sun had sunk and the kids, wrapped in purple pool towels by their attending maids, were being marched to the changing rooms. They looked like walking banana flowers.