wangjipods

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2006, MHB Colony, Borivali, Mumbai, India

The magazine slipped out of Uzair’s hands before he could decide whether to drop it.

It hit the floor with a soft, ugly slap, the pages bending against the tile, and somehow the sound seemed louder than it had any right to be. Uzair rose from the edge of Jaskirat’s bed too quickly, his knees knocking against the wooden frame as one hand flew out uselessly, as if he could undo the last ten seconds by moving fast enough.

“I didn’t—” he started, but his voice came out wrong, cracked and thin, nothing like himself. “I wasn’t—Jaskirat, I swear, I just—”

The fear on Jaskirat’s face changed, though it did not disappear; that would have been easier. It stayed there, white and sharp under his skin, but something darker moved over it, something furious enough to make Uzair stop breathing for half a second. Jaskirat lifted one hand and pressed a finger to his own lips in a warning so clear that Uzair’s mouth shut before he even thought to obey.

One second, he was stammering, panic spilling out of him in pieces, and the next he had gone silent so completely that the only sound left in the room was the ceiling fan clicking above them. Jaskirat’s eyes did not leave his face, his finger still pressed to his lips, and Uzair, stupidly and terribly, noticed the shape of his mouth behind it. He noticed the tension in his jaw, and then, with a fresh twist of dread, noticed that Jaskirat’s hand was not steady.

Jaskirat leaned back out into the hallway, and for one terrible second, Uzair thought he was going to call his mother. Instead, Jaskirat only looked toward the kitchen, then toward the hall, toward all the ordinary noise of his family moving around beyond the room. Prabhneet Aunty was still somewhere outside, probably putting something away, probably completely unaware that in her son’s bedroom, something had cracked open so violently that neither boy knew what to do with the pieces. The television murmured from the living room, a pressure cooker hissed, and somewhere in the building corridor, someone laughed as life, rudely and impossibly, continued.

Jaskirat stepped back into the room and closed the door behind him, not loudly, which somehow made it worse. The click of the latch sounded final, and only then did he lower his hand from his mouth.

“Jaskirat,” Uzair whispered, because whispering felt safer even though nothing about the room felt safe anymore. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

Jaskirat crossed the distance between them so quickly that Uzair barely registered him moving until his hands were already fisted in Uzair’s collar, shoving him back hard enough that his shoulder blades hit the wall beside the bed. The impact knocked the breath out of him, and Uzair’s hands flew up on instinct, hovering at Jaskirat’s wrists without fully pushing him away or grabbing him back. For one wild second, he thought Jaskirat might hit him, and then, with a sick twist in his stomach, realized that being hit might not even be the worst thing happening.

Jaskirat was close in a way Uzair had spent years imagining but had never once been prepared to survive. He was close enough that Uzair could smell more than soap or the faint detergent clinging to his shirt; he could smell the heat of him, the clean sweat at his throat, and something sharper beneath it that might have been fear. Jaskirat’s breath touched his face in uneven bursts, and from this distance Uzair could see the tiny flecks around the green of his eyes, the redness gathering at the rims, and the furious tremor he was trying and failing to hold back.

His hands were strong at Uzair’s collar, because of course they were. Arjun Uncle had carved that strength into him through morning runs, push-ups, weights, and discipline, through all the hard, quiet expectations of a military father who had survived injury and built an entire home around control. Jaskirat’s grip was not careless, but it was held so tightly in check that it had become violent anyway. His knuckles pressed into Uzair’s throat through the fabric, his forearms were tense, and his shoulders crowded Uzair back into the wall until there was nowhere to look but at him.

Uzair was terrified in the plain, sensible way any person would be terrified when someone stronger had him pinned to a wall and looked as if his whole life had just been placed in danger. But the terror did not arrive alone, because Uzair was still Uzair, unfortunately, and his body had never understood timing or shame or self-preservation. Even now, with his heart punching at his ribs and Jaskirat’s hands twisted in his collar, some traitorous part of him noticed the warmth of Jaskirat’s chest so near his own, the shadow of stubble along his jaw, and the fact that those usually distant green eyes were no longer distant at all. They were full of things Uzair had never expected to see there: rage, betrayal, panic, and beneath all of it, a desperate, pleading fear.

The kind that said, please don’t ruin me.

Jaskirat leaned closer, his voice dropping into a whisper that did not sound like a whisper at all.

“What the fuck were you doing?”

It came out low and rough, dragged through his teeth with enough force to scrape. Uzair opened his mouth, but nothing came out, and for one impossible moment, all he could hear was the sound of both of them breathing too hard in a room that suddenly felt sealed off from the rest of the world. Borivali seemed to go quiet around them—the colony, the aunties, the boys shouting downstairs, the scooters coughing through the lane, the pressure cooker in the kitchen, the trains somewhere beyond the buildings—until there was only this bedroom, this wall against Uzair’s back, Jaskirat’s fists twisted in his collar, and the magazine lying open on the floor like a wound.

“I—” Uzair began, trying to sound level, steady, anything other than guilty, but Jaskirat’s grip tightened before he could get another word out.

“Shut the fuck up, idiot.”

Uzair shut up.

Jaskirat’s eyes flicked once toward the door before returning to him, sharp and frantic in a way that made Uzair’s stomach drop. “You are going to listen,” he said, still in that deadly, controlled whisper. “You are going to act like you saw nothing. You are going to say nothing about what you think you saw. You are not going to make a face, you are not going to ask questions, and you are not going to tell Jasleen, your family, any of your friends, or any bastard in this colony who will open his mouth for two seconds and destroy everything. Do you understand?”

Uzair nodded too fast, and Jaskirat’s jaw tightened at once.

“No,” Jaskirat said. “Don’t nod like a child.”

Uzair swallowed, suddenly aware of how tight his own collar felt beneath Jaskirat’s hands.

Jaskirat’s fingers were shaking now, not enough that anyone else might have noticed, but Uzair was close enough to feel the tremor where they gripped the fabric of his shirt. He was speaking like a person in control, like each word had been cut into shape before leaving his mouth, but his eyes were unsteady and his breath kept catching in small, uneven pulls. Rage had given him something to stand behind, but it was fear holding him upright.

“You will go home,” Jaskirat continued, each word low and precise. “You will not come back to this room. I will tell my mother I don’t have time to tutor you anymore because college work is too much. Your family can find someone else. You will keep your mouth shut, I will keep mine, and this never happened.”

Something in Uzair’s chest twisted painfully, and it was not only because of the tutoring, though the thought of never sitting at this desk again, never hearing Jaskirat call his steps tragic, never watching his ears go slightly red over a good mark, landed with a horrible, dull ache. It was the way Jaskirat said that last part, this never happened, as if he could bury it quickly enough to make it true. As if Uzair had not seen the fear on his face. As if Uzair did not know the shape of that fear from the inside.

“Do you understand?” Jaskirat asked.

Uzair nodded again before he could stop himself, and Jaskirat let out a sharp, humorless breath.

“Of course,” he said. “You speak at every wrong time, and now suddenly you’re silent when you’re supposed to answer.”

Uzair looked at him, his throat tight beneath the pressure of Jaskirat’s hands, while Jaskirat stared back with eyes that were hard on the surface and breaking apart underneath.

“I asked,” Jaskirat said, harsher now. “Do you understand?”

Uzair forced his voice to work. “Yes.”

Jaskirat did not move, so Uzair swallowed and said it again, more clearly this time. “Yes, I understand.”

“And?”

“And I won’t tell anyone.” The words came faster now because this, at least, he knew. This, at least, was true enough to hold on to. “I promise. No one will find out from me.”

Jaskirat stared at him without blinking, without trusting him, and Uzair could feel him searching his face for a lie, for disgust, for that tiny flicker of power people got when they realized they had something over someone else. It was so intense that, in some fucked-up way, it felt intimate. Not soft, not romantic, not anything like the stupid versions of this moment Uzair might have once let himself imagine, but intimate in the way fear stripped people down. Jaskirat was holding him against the wall, breathing hard, trying to decide whether Uzair was dangerous, and Uzair had never felt more seen by someone who still knew almost nothing about him.

Then Jaskirat huffed out a laugh, small and almost silent, threaded through with disbelief and no humor at all. He let go of Uzair’s collar, but Uzair stayed against the wall for another second even after he was free, as if his body had forgotten it could move without permission. His shirt hung twisted at the neck, and when he reached up to smooth it down, his fingers felt clumsy and slow.

Before either of them could speak, Prabhneet Aunty’s voice came from beyond the door.

“Jassi? Everything okay? What was that noise?”

Uzair’s entire body went cold, but Jaskirat changed in front of him so cleanly it was terrifying to watch. One second he was standing there with panic still bright in his eyes and his hands shaking slightly at his sides, and the next his face smoothed out, his shoulders lowered, and his voice returned to the easy, faintly irritated tone of a son answering his mother.

“Nothing, Ma,” he called back, louder now. “Uzair just needed the door closed to focus. Too much noise outside.”

Uzair stared at him as a pause stretched on the other side of the door. Then Prabhneet Aunty said something about not studying too late, her footsteps moved away, and the performance ended as quickly as it had begun.

Jaskirat’s face did not fall apart exactly, but it loosened, and somehow that was worse. He stepped back from Uzair, closed his eyes, and pressed the heel of his palm hard into one of them before dragging his hand down his face and pushing his hair away from his forehead. For the first time since Uzair had known him, Jaskirat Singh Rangi looked young. He looked twenty. He looked scared. He looked like someone who had been carrying a glass bowl filled with his whole life and had just watched Uzair knock into it.

Guilt rose so sharply in Uzair that it almost made him sick.

Jaskirat bent to snatch the magazine off the floor, shoved it onto the bed, and then pushed it under the pillow, which was such a terrible hiding place that it only made clearer how badly he was not thinking. He started pacing after that, three steps one way and three steps back, the room too small to contain the motion.

“Fuck,” he muttered, his voice low and rough.

Uzair opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“Fuck,” Jaskirat said again, quieter this time, more to himself than to Uzair. “How am I supposed to know you won’t croak? How am I supposed to know you won’t say something stupid by mistake?”

“I won’t—”

Jaskirat turned on him at once. “You were under my bed.”

Uzair flinched.

The anger in Jaskirat’s face twisted into something rawer, something that looked less like fury and more like fear wearing its clothes. “You were looking under my fucking bed, Uzair.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” Jaskirat asked, his voice sharp enough to make the question feel like a slap. “Because from here, it looks like you don’t know anything.”

Uzair took the hit because he deserved it.

Jaskirat grabbed the steel water bottle from the desk and unscrewed the cap with too much force, spilling water over his hand as he drank. He swallowed once, twice, then lowered the bottle and stared at the floor like it had personally betrayed him, his breathing still too fast, too uneven, too caught in his chest. Uzair watched him helplessly, feeling the shape of the room tilt around the sound of it.

He did not know what to call what was happening. All he could think was that fear had gotten into Jaskirat’s body and was now moving it around from the inside, making him pace, making his hands shake, making his voice come out wrong. People had words for anger, for tension, for weakness, for drama. They had advice too: drink water, pray, sleep, study harder, stop being sensitive. None of those words fit this, and none of that advice would help.

So Uzair thought, simply and terribly, I did this.

He thought, I need to fix this.

But fixing it felt impossible because every sentence that came to mind was wrong. He could say he was sorry, but sorry had already proven too small for the room. He could say it was not a big deal, but that would be such an insulting lie that Jaskirat might actually hit him. He could say he did not care, but that was not true either, because he cared too much and in too many directions at once. He cared that Jaskirat was scared, that Jaskirat had been hiding, that this impossible private thing Uzair had carried alone for years might not be his alone after all. He cared so much it made him feel selfish and monstrous.

He could say he understood, but how would Jaskirat believe that?

How could he?

Uzair’s mind moved desperately through possibilities. He thought of Rehman, who solved most practical problems by becoming direct enough to make everyone else embarrassed, and of Ulfat, who would have softened her voice but not her spine, who would have told the truth and then become the human version of a warm blanket. None of that seemed useful here, not with Jaskirat pacing like the walls were closing in and not with the air between them still crowded by what Uzair had done.

The only thing Uzair knew, truly knew, was what might have brought him comfort if their positions were reversed. Not denial, not jokes, not promises floating loose in the air, but proof. A shared risk. A hand held out with the blade facing both ways.

He pushed himself away from the wall slowly, carefully.

Jaskirat noticed immediately, his eyes snapping up as Uzair moved toward him.

Uzair lifted both hands a little, palms open, careful not to come too close too quickly. “I’m not—just listen, okay?”

Jaskirat gave a laugh that had no humor in it. “You want me to listen?”

“Yes,” Uzair said, swallowing as he forced himself to keep walking until there were only a few feet between them. “I know that’s rich coming from me right now. I know I don’t deserve it, and I know I shouldn’t have looked. It was wrong. I was curious and stupid and—” He grimaced at himself, shame twisting hard in his stomach. “And perverted, probably. I don’t know. I don’t have a good explanation because there isn’t one. I just did it, and I’m sorry.”

Jaskirat said nothing, but his chest rose and fell too fast, his whole body held tight like he was waiting for something terrible to happen.

“But I won’t tell anyone,” Uzair said quietly. “I mean that.”

“How do you expect me to believe you?” Jaskirat snapped, his voice louder now, not quite a shout but sharp enough that Uzair glanced instinctively at the door.

Jaskirat noticed the look and lowered his voice, though it still shook. “How, Uzair? Tell me. How the fuck am I supposed to believe you?”

Uzair looked at him and felt the answer rise in his throat before he was ready for it. There was no careful way to say it, no clever line that would keep his pride intact, and no version of the truth that would not leave him standing there with his own skin peeled back. His fear came up old and familiar, not as sudden as Jaskirat’s but deeper, worn smooth from years of jokes his friends had made without knowing, warnings buried in adult conversations, pages closed too quickly before someone entered the room, and every time he had stood among boys talking about girls while feeling like a liar wearing his own face.

He drew in a breath. “I’d never tell anyone,” he said, his voice low, “because I’m like you too.”

Jaskirat went still, and the words seemed to settle into every corner of the room, no longer trapped safely behind Uzair’s teeth but out in the open, belonging now to the air, to Jaskirat’s ears, to this bedroom with its cricket posters, Preity Zinta, the whiteboard, and all the hidden things neither of them were supposed to have.

Jaskirat stared at him. “What?”

Uzair’s throat tightened, but he kept going because stopping now would be worse. “I’m like you too. Okay? We share the same secret, or close enough to it. Maybe it’s not exactly the same, and maybe I don’t know what words you use for yourself, but I know what it is to hide it. I know what it is to be scared someone will find out. I would never want anyone to find out about me, so I get it, and I won’t tell anyone about you.”

Jaskirat did not blink, and Uzair rushed on because the fear had turned into momentum now, dragging everything out before he could lose his nerve. “And I don’t want you to stop tutoring me. Not because—okay, not only because of maths, even though you are actually good at teaching, which is very annoying. But I like coming here. I like these sessions, even though you’re rude and maths is a disease. I like—” He caught himself just before the sentence could become too honest, but restraint had already abandoned him enough that he added, softer, “I just like them. And I’m sorry. Really. I know I shouldn’t have been snooping, and I know I crossed a line. I don’t have any excuse.”

Jaskirat made a small motion with one hand, not harshly, but enough to make Uzair stop.

The silence that followed was still heavy and awkward, full of things neither of them knew how to hold, but it no longer felt like the room was about to split open. Jaskirat’s breathing slowed by degrees, and his shoulders, which had been braced as if expecting impact, lowered just a little as he looked at Uzair for a long time.

Uzair let him look. There was nowhere else to go now.

After a moment, Jaskirat stepped closer, not rushing this time and not shoving, just closing the distance one careful step at a time until they were nearly face to face again. There were only inches between them, and Uzair’s body, traitorous as always, noticed the nearness before his mind could tell it not to.

Jaskirat’s eyes moved over his face, searching for something Uzair did not know how to prove except by standing there and letting himself be seen.

“You’re like me,” Jaskirat said finally, and it was not really a question.

Uzair nodded once. “Yes.”

Jaskirat’s mouth tightened. “And I’m supposed to believe that?”

“I don’t know,” Uzair said honestly. “But it’s true.”

Jaskirat’s eyes dropped briefly before coming back up, and for some reason, that tiny movement broke something in Uzair.

Maybe it was the fear still lingering between them, or the relief of having finally said it aloud. Maybe it was years of wanting piled so high inside him that one more second of Jaskirat standing this close was enough to tip all of it over. Or maybe it was just that Uzair was eighteen and stupid, and he had already ruined the evening so thoroughly that his brain decided one more reckless choice could not possibly make it worse.

He leaned in.

The kiss was barely a kiss, just a quick, chaste press of his mouth to Jaskirat’s. It was so soft it might have been nothing if Uzair’s whole body had not lit up with it, every nerve catching at once.

Jaskirat did not kiss him back, but he did not push him away either. He stayed perfectly still, mouth warm beneath Uzair’s for one suspended second, and then Uzair stepped back before he could be shoved, slapped, or destroyed by his own courage.

His heart was beating so fast he felt faint. “See?” he said, voice rough. “Same secret.”

Jaskirat stared at him, and for one terrifying moment, Uzair thought he had miscalculated so badly that even God would be embarrassed for him. Then Jaskirat closed his eyes, breathed in through his nose, slow and uneven, and pinched the bridge of it like Uzair had given him a headache.

“Okay,” he said.

Uzair blinked. “Okay?”

Jaskirat opened his eyes, looking exhausted now in a way that made him seem older and younger at once. “Go home for now, Uzair.”

The use of his name did something awful to Uzair’s chest. “I—”

“I need some time to myself.”

That was fair. More than fair, really, even if it still made Uzair feel like something inside him had dropped through the floor. He nodded and packed his books with hands that were not steady, shoving his notebook, textbook, and pencil box into his bag without looking too closely at anything. He did not look at the bed, or the pillow, or Jaskirat’s mouth, though some doomed part of him wanted to confirm that the kiss had actually happened and had not been invented by stress.

Jaskirat opened the door first and checked the hallway. When no one was there, Uzair slipped out without saying goodbye to Prabhneet Aunty, though she called something from the kitchen that might have been his name. He did not stop for Jasleen either, who was sprawled on the sofa and looked up only long enough to say, “Done already?”

He walked home with his bag knocking against his hip and cursed himself the entire way, each step dragging the same words through his head until they started to lose shape. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He had been curious like a dog sniffing under a gate, selfish enough to pull at something hidden just because he wanted to know. He had risked Jaskirat’s safety for what? A glimpse? A possibility? The answer to a question he had no right asking?

And then, because apparently one invasion of privacy was not enough, he kissed him.

He had kissed Jaskirat, and Jaskirat had not kissed him back.

That thought followed him up the stairs, into the flat, and all the way to the dinner table, where it sat with him while Ulfat asked why he was so quiet and Rehman squinted at him over his dal like silence was a mechanical fault he could repair if he found the right tool.

“Oh ho, Uzair was tuition tough?” Ulfat said, her mouth curving like she had already decided to be amused by him no matter what answer he gave.

Rehman looked up from his plate with quieter approval. “Heard you did well on your midterm. Good job.”

Uzair managed a weak smile, the kind that felt like it had to be dragged onto his face by force. “Thanks.”

Naieem, who had rice stuck to his cheek and no understanding of the tension sitting under Uzair’s skin, offered him a soggy piece of papad with great seriousness. Uzair took it because refusing a two-year-old felt cruel, even when said two-year-old had clearly been holding the papad in his fist for too long.

That night, he lay awake for hours, staring into the dark while the ceiling fan pushed warm air around the room. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Jaskirat in the doorway, then Jaskirat’s hands fisted in his collar, then Jaskirat’s face after Uzair had said, I’m like you too. After that came the kiss, replaying so many times that by morning it felt both enormous and pathetic, like something that had lasted forever and ended before it could become anything at all.

It had been nothing, and it had been everything.

The next week moved like wet cloth, slow and heavy and impossible to shake off. Uzair went to classes, took notes, answered when teachers called on him, and ate lunch with the guys while laughing in all the right places. He let one of them copy his accountancy homework and pretended not to hear when another made some stupid comment about a girl from the next class, because pretending was easier than reacting, and reacting required a version of himself he did not know how to be in public.

Jasleen cornered him in accounting on Thursday, sliding into the bench beside him with suspicion already written across her face. “You left without saying anything on Tuesday.”

Uzair kept his eyes on his notebook. “I wasn’t feeling well.”

“You looked fine when you came.”

“Then I became unwell.”

“Was it the maths?”

“Yes.”

“That’s believable,” she admitted, though her eyes narrowed a second later. “But Jassi bhaiya was also weird.”

Uzair’s pen stopped for only half a second before he forced it to move again. “Your brother is always weird.”

“True, but this was a different weird.”

“Maybe his engineering coursework finally poisoned his brain.”

“Maybe.” She leaned closer, lowering her voice as if she were about to uncover some grand conspiracy instead of ruining Uzair’s already fragile peace. “Did you guys argue?”

Uzair looked at her too sharply, and Jasleen’s eyebrows rose at once. He forced himself to roll his eyes, hoping the gesture looked casual instead of panicked. “Over what? Derivatives?”

“With both of you, yes, that’s possible.”

“No.”

She stared at him for another second, long enough for Uzair to feel his own heartbeat in his throat, before she seemed to decide either that he was telling the truth or that he was not worth interrogating before the teacher arrived. “You’re both annoying.”

“Family trait for you.”

She kicked his shoe under the desk.

By Friday, Ulfat noticed something was wrong because of course she did. Ulfat noticed everything. If Uzair breathed wrong, she wanted to know whether it was a cold, stress, poor diet, or some new form of teenage idiocy. That evening, she watched him move food around his plate and frowned at him across the table.

“Are you worried about the next test?”

“No.”

“Then why are you making that face?”

“What face?”

“The face you make when you are trying not to make a face.”

Rehman laughed into his glass of water, and Uzair turned his glare on him because it was easier than looking at Ulfat for too long. “Very helpful.”

“Woh meri jaan hai,” Rehman said, setting the glass down. “I cannot help you against her.”

“Correct,” Ulfat said. “No one can.”

Naieem banged a spoon against the table and shouted something that might have been agreement, which at least gave Uzair somewhere else to look. He tried to be normal for the rest of dinner, but normal had begun to feel like a shirt that no longer fit properly, tight in the shoulders and awkward at the throat.

By Sunday, Rehman had noticed too, though he handled it differently. He took Uzair to the shop for inventory, which was usually punishment disguised as bonding, and they spent the afternoon counting switches, wires, small boxes of screws, and tube lights stacked in cardboard sleeves. The shop smelled of dust, metal, plastic, and hot tea from the stall nearby, and for a while the work was repetitive enough to let Uzair pretend his mind was quiet.

After an hour, Rehman said, “Did someone say something to you?”

Uzair froze with a box of plug tops in his hand. “No.”

“Don’t answer too fast.”

He set the box down carefully, buying himself a second he did not know how to use. “No one said anything.”

Rehman looked at him for a moment, then nodded as if he were accepting the answer without believing it. “If it is studies, say studies. If it is friends, say friends. If it is something else, say something else.”

Uzair’s throat tightened around the words he could not say.

Something else.

There was no category for this. There was no clean name he could place in Rehman’s hands, no version of the truth that would not turn the air between them into something dangerous. He wanted, suddenly and painfully, to be ten again with a broken pencil box and no secrets worse than grief.

“No,” he said again, quieter this time. “I’m fine.”

Rehman sighed, but he did not push, and that was one of the things Uzair loved most about him, though he almost never said it. Rehman pushed when pushing was needed, but he also knew when to stand near the door and leave it open.

“Fine,” Rehman said. “Then count properly. You missed one row.”

Uzair looked down and realized he had.

By Tuesday, Uzair had convinced himself of at least twelve different outcomes, all of them bad. Jaskirat would refuse to tutor him and send a message through Jasleen. Jaskirat would act like nothing had happened, which might somehow be worse. He would tell Uzair never to come again, or he would tell him the kiss had been disgusting, or he would insist that Uzair had misunderstood everything: the magazine meant nothing, the panic meant nothing, the kiss meant nothing, and Uzair was sick for thinking otherwise.

Or maybe Jaskirat would say nothing at all, and Uzair would have to sit in that room with his own shame pressing down on him until maths became the least painful thing there.

By the time Uzair came home from classes, his stomach felt hollow and sour.

Ulfat was in the kitchen, still in her school sari, her hair loosened from its clip as she moved between the stove and the counter. Naieem sat on the floor with a steel bowl and two plastic cars, making engine noises into the bowl for reasons known only to him.

“You’re early,” Ulfat said.

“Teacher was absent last period.”

“Good. Eat something before tuition.”

Uzair stayed near the doorway with his bag still on his shoulder, and the word tuition hit him like a stone thrown straight into his chest. He did not know if he should go. Jaskirat had said he needed time, but he had not said how much. He had not sent word, had not called through Jasleen, had not appeared at the door with borrowed curd or kheer or some other normal excuse that would let them pretend nothing had happened. Maybe silence was the answer. Maybe Uzair showing up would be another violation, another stupid insistence on entering a room he had no right to enter again.

“I feel sick,” Uzair said.

Ulfat turned immediately. “What kind of sick?”

“Just headache. Stomach also.”

She studied him for a moment, and Uzair braced himself for suspicion because Ulfat could sniff out fake illness like a police dog. Instead, her expression softened. Maybe it was because, for weeks now, he had gone to tutoring without any real complaint. Well, with complaint, but he had still gone. He had studied, improved, and not missed a single day, not even when it rained so badly the street outside looked like a gutter trying to become a river.

“All right,” she said. “Lie down. I’ll tell your brother not to shout about it.”

“He wouldn’t shout.”

“He would make a face. Same thing.”

Uzair managed a faint smile before going to the room, changing out of his college clothes, and curling onto the bed with a book he had no intention of reading. It was some novel from the library, the kind he usually finished in two evenings, but the lines blurred in front of him. His eyes moved over the page while his mind stayed in Jaskirat’s room, caught on the door, the magazine, the hands at his collar, the kiss.

Same secret.

He pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead and whispered, “Idiot.”

He tried to read, failed, and then tried again only to fail worse. Somewhere outside, evening settled over the colony, the light changing first as it went gold and dusty through the window grille and caught on the edges of the buildings opposite. Children shouted downstairs, a pressure cooker whistled in someone else’s flat, and a vendor called out something stretched and musical. In the distance, the local train sounded faintly, metal on tracks, the city carrying on with its usual lack of concern for private disasters.

Then the doorbell rang.

Uzair ignored it, but Naieem shouted, “Bell!” from the hall.

“Yes, I heard,” Ulfat said, and a moment later, the front door opened.

Uzair turned a page without reading a word, only to freeze when he heard Jaskirat’s voice. It was not clear at first, just the low, familiar shape of it at the entrance as he spoke politely to Ulfat, but it was enough to make Uzair’s entire body go still, the book open and forgotten in his hands.

No way.

“Uzair!” Ulfat called. “Come here. Someone is here for you.”

His heart began doing something unreasonable as he sat up too quickly, the book sliding off his lap and landing beside him. For a second, he only stood there, staring at the door of the room as though he could prepare himself by looking at it hard enough. Then he ran a hand through his hair, realized that had probably made it worse, and walked out anyway.

Jaskirat was standing near the entrance, and the first thing Uzair noticed was that he looked calmer. Not fine, exactly, because Uzair was beginning to understand that fine on Jaskirat could mean many things, most of them fake, but calmer. His face was composed, his hair neatly pushed back, and his dark blue T-shirt sat well across his shoulders, paired with jeans slightly faded at the knees. He had one hand in his pocket and the other wrapped around his bike keys, his thumb moving restlessly over the metal ring.

He was attractive in all the usual, unfair ways, and Uzair hated that, even after everything, his first full thought was still, Oh.

Jaskirat looked at him, his expression giving nothing away. “You want to go for a walk?”

Ulfat glanced between them with interest.

Uzair’s mouth went dry. “Walk?”

“Only if you’re not feeling too sick,” Jaskirat said, and there was something in his voice that was not teasing and not quite gentle, but an opening.

Uzair nodded before he could overthink it. “I can walk.”

Ulfat crossed her arms. “You can walk, but not study?”

Uzair winced, and Jaskirat, traitor that he was, looked mildly amused.

“I’ll make him study later, bhabi,” he said. “Fresh air first.”

Like every adult in the colony, Ulfat trusted Jaskirat Singh Rangi more than he deserved, so her expression softened after only a second.

“Fine,” she said. “Not too late.”

Uzair grabbed his sandals, and they went downstairs without speaking.

The silence should have been horrible, but somehow, it was not. Not immediately. It was thick, yes, and Uzair’s stomach was twisting itself into knots so complicated even Jaskirat could not have solved them, but walking made it bearable. Their shoulders did not touch, and they kept enough distance between them to look normal: two boys from the same colony walking together in the evening, with nothing strange or dangerous about it.

The colony was alive around them. A group of boys played cricket near the gate with a plastic bat taped at the handle, while two aunties stood near the parked scooters, discussing someone’s daughter-in-law with the seriousness of a national inquiry. A scooter started, coughed, died, then started again. Somewhere above them, a pressure cooker released steam from an open kitchen window, and a little girl in two plaits ran past carrying a packet of Parle-G like treasure.

Uzair kicked a small stone along the path, watching it skitter over the uneven concrete before it hit the side of a drain cover and bounced away. He wished Jaskirat would speak, and at the same time, he wished Jaskirat would never speak, because both options felt equally capable of ruining him. The stone rolled ahead again, and when Uzair kicked it too hard, it disappeared under a parked motorcycle.

Great. Even the stone had left him.

They walked past the building where the ground-floor uncle kept too many potted plants and complained if children so much as looked at them wrong, then past the back lane where damp moss grew along the walls during monsoon. They passed the spot where younger kids sometimes played seven tiles until someone’s mother called them home for dinner, and only then did Jaskirat finally let out a breath.

“Going through my stuff was not okay, Uzair.”

Uzair’s head whipped up. Jaskirat was looking ahead, but there was a small smile at the corner of his mouth, not a happy one exactly, and not fully forgiving either, but present enough to soften the words and let Uzair breathe properly for the first time in a week.

“I know,” Uzair said at once, relief and sincerity tripping over each other in his voice. “I know. I’m so sorry.”

Jaskirat glanced at him, and Uzair hurried on before he could lose his nerve.

“I mean it,” he said. “It was horrible, and I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me.”

“You were being a pervert.”

Uzair winced. “Yes.”

“And an idiot.”

“Yes.”

“And your curiosity is going to get you murdered one day.”

“Probably by you.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

Uzair almost laughed, though the sound came out shaky. Jaskirat’s smile faded after that, but not cruelly; it only settled back into something quieter, something more careful.

“Look,” Jaskirat said. “Whatever happened, happened. It’s fine.”

Uzair did not know if fine was the right word, but he was not stupid enough to argue with it.

“And yes,” Jaskirat added, “I’ll still tutor you.”

The relief hit so hard that Uzair nearly stopped walking, though he forced himself to keep moving and tried to arrange his face into something calm. Judging by the way Jaskirat looked at him, he probably failed.

“Okay,” Uzair said.

Jaskirat raised an eyebrow. “Just okay?”

“What do you want, a dance?”

“No. I’ve seen you dance at weddings. No one wants that.”

Uzair gasped. “I was twelve.”

“Your elbows everywhere.”

“I grew into them.”

“Barely.”

Uzair shoved his hands into his pockets so Jaskirat would not see them curling with stupid happiness. The pit in his stomach had not disappeared completely, and the kiss still sat between them, unmentioned and hot, but something had eased. Something had finally unclenched.

They kept walking as the colony road curved behind the third building, where the noise thinned and the shadows stretched longer between parked scooters and uneven patches of grass. For a few minutes, conversation came in small, cautious pieces. Jaskirat asked about Uzair’s homework, Uzair accused him of being unable to go ten minutes without discussing maths, and Jaskirat, entirely unbothered, said maths had saved Uzair from academic death. Uzair told him math was still the villain in this story, which made Jaskirat’s mouth twitch like he was trying not to smile.

For a moment, it almost felt normal.

Then Jaskirat said, “You know I’m not gay, right?”

Uzair stopped walking so abruptly that Jaskirat took two more steps before noticing. When he turned back, his expression was far too calm for someone who had just thrown the most ridiculous sentence possible into the evening.

“What?” Uzair asked, because apparently that was the only word his brain had decided to keep.

“I’m not gay,” Jaskirat said again.

Uzair stared at him as the last week of his life flashed before his eyes in a deeply unhelpful montage: the magazine, Jaskirat’s panic, his hands fisted in Uzair’s collar, Uzair saying, I’m like you too, Uzair kissing him, and Jaskirat very notably not moving away.

“What?” he repeated, this time with more accusation than confusion.

Jaskirat’s mouth twitched again before he looked away and laughed softly, almost to himself. “I’m not gay,” he said. “I’m bisexual.”

Uzair blinked at him.

“That means liking girls and guys,” Jaskirat added, because apparently he had decided to be helpful in the most annoying way possible.

“I know what bisexual means,” Uzair said, offended on instinct.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Your face didn’t.”

“My face was reacting to you saying something insane after everything that happened.”

“It’s not insane if it’s true.”

Uzair opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again, unable to decide which part of that sentence to attack first. “So you actually like women?”

“Yes.”

“And men?”

Jaskirat gave him a dry look. “That is what I just said.”

Uzair stared at him for another moment before starting to walk again, mostly because standing still made him feel too exposed. Jaskirat fell into step beside him, quiet enough that Uzair could hear the faint scrape of their sandals against the pavement.

That made sense, he supposed. It made sense of the Preity Zinta poster, maybe, and the magazine, and the fact that Jaskirat could like girls and still have looked so terrified when Uzair found what he found. It made sense in a simple way that Uzair should have been able to accept immediately, but instead it opened a different kind of mess inside him.

Because Uzair did not think he was bisexual.

He had tried, in quiet and desperate ways, to see if he could be. He had looked at girls the way his friends did, or at least the way they claimed to. He had listened when boys talked about actresses, schoolgirls, and cousins’ friends at weddings. He could tell when a girl was pretty; he was not blind. But the feeling never went where it was supposed to go. It never caught fire or made him stupid.

Boys did.

Jaskirat did.

For some reason, standing beside Jaskirat while he calmly explained that his own wanting was wider, less singular, and more possible in one acceptable direction at least, made Uzair feel both understood and strangely alone. He hated that too.

“So,” Jaskirat said carefully, “you’re…”

“Gay,” Uzair said, quieter than he meant to. He kept his eyes on the pavement as the word settled between them. “I think. I mean, yes. I know.”

Jaskirat did not respond immediately, and although the silence was not cruel, Uzair still hated it. Then Jaskirat said, “Okay.”

Uzair looked at him. “Okay?”

Jaskirat shrugged, almost awkwardly. “What else should I say?”

Uzair did not know. Maybe nothing. Maybe, for once, okay was enough.

They walked until they reached the small shaded area behind two of the colony buildings, the kind of place people rarely came to unless they were looking for a shortcut or somewhere to smoke. A few trees grew there, their roots pushing up through the cracked pavement, and the wall of one building rose beside them without balconies or windows, only blank concrete stained darker from years of rain. It made the space feel hidden, not private exactly, because nothing in the colony was ever truly private, but private enough.

Jaskirat stopped near the wall, and Uzair leaned back against it, trying to look casual even though he probably looked like someone waiting to be interrogated. For a moment, Jaskirat only watched him, his expression unreadable in a way that made Uzair’s skin feel too tight.

Then he asked, “Was that your first time kissing a guy?”

Uzair’s entire body went hot. He had prepared himself for plenty of possible questions, but not that one, not something so direct and humiliatingly specific. He could have lied, and maybe he should have. He could have said something casual, something that made him sound experienced and mysterious instead of like an eighteen-year-old who had spent most of his romantic life staring out windows and being mentally ill about Jasleen’s older brother.

But Jaskirat was watching him too closely for that.

Uzair nodded with as much composure as he could gather. “Yeah.”

Something shifted in Jaskirat’s expression, though it was not mockery. It was quieter than that, like he was taking the answer in and deciding what to do with it.

Uzair, because he apparently enjoyed pain, asked, “Was it the first time a guy has kissed you?”

Jaskirat shook his head, and Uzair’s stomach sank before he could stop it.

“There was a senior at my college,” Jaskirat said after a moment. “That’s how I found out. Or more like confirmed it, maybe.”

He did not offer more than that. There was no name, no details, nothing about whether he had liked him, whether they still spoke, whether the senior was the boy from the magazine’s shadow in Uzair’s imagination, whether Jaskirat had kissed him back or touched him or wanted him. Uzair hated himself for wanting to know any of it.

He nodded like a normal person, or at least like someone attempting a convincing impression of one. “Oh.”

Jaskirat leaned one shoulder against the opposite wall and crossed his arms. “Oh?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

Uzair looked at him, irritation rising mostly because it was easier than letting anything else show. “Congratulations on your senior?”

Jaskirat gave him a look, and Uzair looked away first, pretending to be deeply interested in a crack running through the pavement near his shoe.

God, this whole thing felt like a humiliation ritual, some secret society of shame where the entrance exam was kissing your crush badly and then finding out he had already had a college senior. Uzair had spent four years turning Jaskirat into this impossible figure in his head, only to realize that Jaskirat had been out in the world having experiences while Uzair was at home staring over books and trying not to think about his own hands.

He leaned harder against the building, trying to look cool and unaffected, though he was fairly sure he only looked constipated.

Jaskirat stayed quiet for a while, long enough that Uzair started to think the conversation had finally died a merciful death. Then he said, “When did you know?”

Uzair frowned. “Know what?”

“That you liked me.”

Uzair’s head snapped up. “Who said I liked you?”

Jaskirat stared at him, and Uzair stared back with as much dignity as a person could manage after everything that had happened between them. It lasted all of three seconds before Jaskirat’s eyebrows rose, and Uzair, defeated by the sheer obviousness of his own face, looked away.

“Shut up,” he muttered.

“So?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“You already kissed me.”

“As a demonstration.”

“A demonstration.”

“Yes,” Uzair said, lifting his chin slightly. “Of our same secret.”

Jaskirat’s mouth twitched. “Very academic.”

“I’m good in theory subjects.”

“Then explain.”

Uzair groaned and tipped his head back against the wall, staring up at the building like the concrete itself might take pity on him. “Why are you like this?”

“Curious.”

“That word has caused enough damage between us.”

“True,” Jaskirat said, and for one terrible second Uzair thought he might let it go. Then he added, “Still.”

Uzair wanted to refuse. He should have refused, if only to preserve whatever scraps of pride he had left after the kissing, the panicking, and the general collapse of his personality. But Jaskirat was standing there with that almost-smile on his face, no longer terrified, no longer furious, and still close enough that the evening seemed to arrange itself around him. Uzair did not have the mental strength to fight him on anything right now.

He exhaled, slow and reluctant. “Do you remember that time you were playing cricket in the gully and the ball came through our window?”

Jaskirat blinked, and Uzair watched him search his memory with the immediate, sinking certainty that this had been a sacred foundational event for exactly one of them.

“It was raining,” Uzair added. “You came upstairs to get it, but by the time you reached, it had started pouring properly. Bhabi made you stay for a bit because she said you’d get sick if you left.”

Jaskirat frowned in concentration.

“You were drenched,” Uzair said, then regretted it the moment the words left his mouth. “I mean, because of the rain. Obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“And she gave you a towel,” Uzair continued, looking away before his face could betray him any more than it already had. “And papaya.”

Jaskirat’s expression shifted as recognition arrived slowly, then all at once. “Oh,” he said. “That day.”

Uzair looked down at the ground. “Yeah. That day.”

“You were sitting with a book.”

His chest tightened. “You remember that?”

“Now I do.”

Uzair swallowed, unsure what to do with the fact that Jaskirat remembered even that much. The silence that followed was worse than all the others, not because there was fear in it, but because there wasn’t. It was only memory now, humiliatingly bare and impossible to take back.

Jaskirat’s voice was softer when he spoke again. “Since back then?”

Uzair nodded. “Yes.”

“All the way back then?”

A bitter little laugh escaped him before he could stop it. “Yes, Jaskirat. All the way back then. Congratulations. You have been ruining my life since approximately 2002.”

Jaskirat did not laugh as much as Uzair expected. He only looked at him, surprised and almost careful, which somehow made the whole thing worse.

Uzair’s face burned.

There it was. Too much. He had said too much, and now Jaskirat was going to make fun of him. Not cruelly, maybe, not after everything, but still. He would tuck it away somewhere, this ridiculous fact that Uzair had been nursing a crush since a rainy afternoon with papaya and a cricket ball. He would think it was childish, pathetic, funny.

Uzair pushed himself off the wall, forcing his shoulders loose even though everything inside him had gone tight and bruised.

“You know what, I’m going to head back,” he said, aiming for casual and landing somewhere much closer to injured. “I’ll see you next Tuesday.”

He had only taken one step when Jaskirat caught his wrist.

Uzair stopped so abruptly that his breath caught too. Jaskirat’s fingers closed around him firmly, not rough like before, but warm and certain in a way that made Uzair’s thoughts scatter before he could gather them into anything useful.

“So soon?” Jaskirat asked.

Uzair looked back at him, wary despite the stupid, helpless leap his heart made at being touched again.

Jaskirat tugged once, not hard enough to force him, only enough to turn him back around. “Without asking me when I started liking you?”

For a second, Uzair did not understand the sentence at all. It entered his head, rearranged everything inside it, and still refused to make sense.

“When you…” he started, but the rest of the words failed him.

Jaskirat stood there with one eyebrow raised and the beginning of a smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth, looking far too pleased for someone who had just said something impossible. Then, all at once, Uzair understood.

His heart kicked so hard it was almost painful.

“What?”

Jaskirat’s smirk grew, and Uzair stared at him while every careful attempt at nonchalance slipped through the cracks of his face. He could feel it happening: the stupid hope, the disbelief, the bright and reckless excitement rising in him before he had given it permission.

“Are you serious?” he asked.

Jaskirat rolled his eyes, but his ears had gone a little red. “Yes, idiot. I thought you were supposed to be good at all this feelings shit as an Arts kid.”

“I ended up in Commerce,” Uzair corrected automatically, because apparently even now, when the boy he had wanted for years was admitting to wanting him back, his mouth still had academic grievances to settle.

“You wanted to be in Arts.”

“That is not the point.”

“It is a little bit the point.”

Uzair stepped closer without meaning to, drawn in by the warmth of Jaskirat’s hand and the unbearable smugness on his face. “Tell me.”

Jaskirat looked far too pleased with himself. “Tell you what?”

“When.”

“When what?”

“Jaskirat.”

Jaskirat laughed under his breath, and Uzair hated how badly he wanted to keep that sound somewhere safe, folded away with every other small, stupid thing he had collected over the years. Jaskirat pulled lightly on his wrist again, bringing him closer until they were almost standing toe to toe beneath the trees, hidden behind two ordinary buildings in the middle of their ordinary colony, saying things that should have been impossible.

“Do you remember two years ago,” Jaskirat said, “during Ramzan?”

Uzair blinked. “That is a whole month.”

“Very smart. Let me finish.”

“Fine.”

“You were fasting,” Jaskirat said. “It was right around iftar. My mom sent me to your flat with kheer.”

Uzair frowned, trying to pull the memory into focus. Ramzan blurred together in his mind as a month of heat, hunger, late evenings, and Ulfat’s voice calling from the kitchen while Rehman checked the time like he could make the sun set faster by glaring at the clock. There were dates set out in a small plate, the smell of pakoras frying in oil, Rooh Afza turning milk pink, and the whole flat feeling softer in those few minutes before iftar, as if even the walls were holding their breath.

Jaskirat watched him with visible amusement, clearly enjoying the fact that Uzair had not immediately remembered a moment that had apparently ruined his life.

“You opened the door,” he continued, “and you looked like you were going to bite someone if food didn’t appear in the next ten seconds.”

“That sounds like me.”

“You already had a date in your hand. I think your bhabi shouted from inside that it was time, and you just took one bite of the date before grabbing the bowl from me and drinking the kheer straight.”

The memory returned in pieces then, each one small and ordinary until Jaskirat’s voice made it enormous. The doorway. The humid evening pressing against the corridor. The smell of fried onions and cardamom from the kitchen. Ulfat calling his name from inside, telling him the azaan had started, telling him to stop hovering and eat properly. Naieem had not been born yet, so the flat had been quieter, just Rehman moving plates around and Ulfat pretending she did not need help while clearly needing help.

And Jaskirat had been at the door with a covered steel bowl in his hands.

Kheer.

Prabhneet Aunty’s kheer, thick and sweet and fragrant with cardamom, the kind she sent every year because she was like that, because their colony survived on borrowed sugar, returned dabbas, and neighbors remembering each other’s festivals even when they pretended not to be sentimental about it.

Uzair groaned as the rest of it came back. “Oh my god.”

Jaskirat’s smile widened.

“I must have looked like a fool.”

“Maybe a little.”

“Great.”

“But,” Jaskirat said, and his voice changed just enough that Uzair stopped cringing and looked at him properly, “I was mostly distracted.”

Uzair’s mouth went dry. “By what?”

Jaskirat’s thumb moved once against the inside of Uzair’s wrist, so small a touch it should not have meant anything, and yet Uzair felt it everywhere.

“You,” Jaskirat said simply. “Your stupid lanky limbs. Your hair all messed up. The way you grabbed the kheer from me like I had personally been starving you.”

“I was hungry.”

“I could tell.”

“Shut up.”

“And your hands,” Jaskirat added.

Uzair stopped breathing properly.

Jaskirat looked down at their wrists, then back at him. “Our hands didn’t touch. I remember that very clearly. You took the bowl, and our hands didn’t touch, but I spent all night thinking about how I wanted them to.”

The echo of it moved through Uzair slowly.

Four years ago, there had been a cricket ball and a sudden sheet of monsoon rain. Jaskirat stood in his doorway with wet hair and a towel over his shoulders while Uzair pretended to read from behind a book, feeling doomed every time those green eyes flicked toward him. Their fingers had not touched then either, not when Uzair handed the ball back, and Uzair had remembered the absence of it like a wound.

Two years ago, there was a bowl of kheer at iftar. Their hands had not touched then, either. Uzair had been hungry and impatient, probably graceless, probably sharp with everyone in that way, fasting made him before the first bite softened him back into a human being. He had not known Jaskirat was standing in the doorway quietly ruining himself over the same almost-touch Uzair had been mourning for years.

Then Uzair remembered something else, something so small that it had never meant anything until that moment.

After that year, Prabhneet Aunty had sent kheer every Ramzan. Every year, without fail, a steel bowl arrived at their door before or after iftar, covered with a plate and wrapped in a cloth so it would stay warm. Sometimes Jaskirat brought it. Sometimes Jasleen came with it, complaining about the stairs. Sometimes a passing neighbor carried it over because the colony had its own postal system made entirely of aunties and children with instructions. Uzair had always thought of it as kindness, as the easy generosity of people who had lived too close to each other for too long not to become tangled.

But that first time was Jaskirat.

Jaskirat had remembered it too.

Uzair stared at him, the realization settling low and warm in his chest. “You’re so stupid,” he said, though his voice came out faint.

Jaskirat laughed. “Me?”

“Yes, you. All this time?”

“You’re the one who liked me since the papaya incident.”

Uzair’s face heated immediately. “Do not call it that.”

“What should I call it? The great monsoon awakening?”

“I will actually leave.”

“You won’t.”

The worst part was that Jaskirat was right. Uzair had no intention of leaving, not when Jaskirat was looking at him like that, eyes bright and mouth curved, his fingers still wrapped around Uzair’s wrist like he had finally decided not to let the moment slip away from them. For a while, they only looked at each other, both of them standing too close and smiling like fools as the absurdity of it settled over them in warm, disbelieving waves.

Years of glances. Years of not touching. Years of thinking themselves alone in it.

Uzair had been watching Jaskirat through windows, over books, across the colony courtyard, from behind the safe cover of jokes and insults and other people’s expectations. Jaskirat had been remembering bowls of kheer, missed touches, and the shape of Uzair’s hands around steel. They had both been so careful, so terrified, so certain that the wanting was one-sided that neither of them had noticed the other doing the same thing back.

Uzair huffed out a laugh, shaking his head. “We’re idiots.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“You hid a dirty magazine under your bed while keeping Oscar Wilde on your shelf.”

Jaskirat’s eyes widened. “You noticed the book?”

“I notice many things.”

“Clearly. Even the undersides of beds don’t escape your notice.”

Uzair winced. “Deserved.”

Jaskirat smiled, but the teasing softened into something quieter as his gaze dropped briefly to Uzair’s mouth. The movement was quick, barely more than a flicker, but Uzair saw it because of course he saw it. He had spent years noticing things he was not supposed to notice.

His own gaze fell too, helpless and obvious, to Jaskirat’s lips.

This time, there was no panic sitting between them. No desperate proof, no magazine heavy with accusation, no bedroom walls closing in around a secret neither of them had known how to hold. There was only the evening air, warm and damp against Uzair’s skin, the hidden strip of wall behind the buildings, Jaskirat’s hand sliding from his wrist to his fingers, and the terrifying, impossible knowledge that wanting him had never been a punishment meant only for Uzair to carry.

Jaskirat’s smile faded into something softer.

Uzair leaned in first, or maybe Jaskirat did; even later, when he tried to remember it properly, the moment would refuse to separate itself into who moved and who followed. It felt more like both of them finally giving in to the same pull, closing the small distance they had spent years pretending not to measure.

The kiss was careful at first.

Not because Uzair did not want him. God, that was not the problem. He wanted him so badly his whole body felt lit from the inside, but wanting and doing were different things, and some frightened, obedient part of him still expected the world to punish them for even this much. His mouth touched Jaskirat’s lightly, uncertain with the newness of it, and for one suspended second, neither of them seemed to know what to do with the fact that the impossible had become warm and real between them.

Then Jaskirat kissed him back.

Tentative at first, almost questioning, and then with a little more certainty, his fingers tightening around Uzair’s as if he was finally correcting the mistake of every moment they had not touched before. Uzair felt the breath Jaskirat let out against his mouth more than he heard it, and the sound, small as it was, undid him completely. He stepped closer, not enough to be reckless, not enough for anyone passing by to immediately understand, but enough that their shoulders nearly brushed and the world narrowed to Jaskirat’s mouth, Jaskirat’s hand, Jaskirat’s warmth in the fading evening.

It lasted only a few seconds.

Long enough.

Too short.

When they pulled apart, both of them were smiling with a stunned, private happiness of two boys who had found something impossible behind the backs of everyone who would never understand it. The colony carried on around them as if nothing had happened. Somewhere, a pressure cooker whistled. A scooter started near the gate. Someone’s mother shouted from a balcony for a child to come upstairs. The ordinary sounds wrapped around them, almost protective in their indifference.

Jaskirat looked at him, eyes bright with something that made Uzair’s chest ache.

“Tuesday, then?” he asked.

Uzair laughed softly. “For tutoring?”

“For tutoring,” Jaskirat said, and then, with that annoying little smirk returning, “You still need help.”

Uzair rolled his eyes, but he did not move his hand away.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling despite himself. “I know.”

---

Part 1

---

2006, MHB Colony, Borivali, Mumbai, India

The first thing Uzair noticed about Jaskirat Singh Rangi’s bedroom was that it looked exactly the way he had feared it would: not ugly, not strange, not revealing in any obvious way, but normal. Painfully, disgustingly, unfairly normal.

It had the faint smell of old paper, hair oil, detergent, and that closed-room heat that never fully left Mumbai flats, even in the evening, when the ceiling fan was working so hard it made a small creaking noise. A study table was pushed against the wall, its corners chipped white beneath the fake wood laminate. Above it, a black-and-red Hero Honda calendar hung crookedly, even though the month was wrong. Beside it was a badly laminated periodic table, curling at one corner, with some elements circled in blue marker. A whiteboard leaned on two nails nearby, covered in ghost-smudges from equations that had been erased but not forgotten.

On the wall opposite the bed, there were cricket posters. Sachin, obviously. Dravid too. A slightly torn poster of Dhoni had probably been put up more recently, because half the colony boys had started acting like growing their hair would give them the same fan following as India’s current favorite wicketkeeper-batsman. There was a football poster as well, Brazil’s team in yellow, because Jaskirat had always played football as if cricket was only something to do when the monsoon had ruined the football ground.

Then, next to the cupboard, there was a poster of Preity Zinta.

Uzair knew it was Preity Zinta because every boy with a pulse was expected to have an opinion on her. The dimples, the bright smile, the hair falling around her face, that particular coy film-poster expression that made actresses look like they existed only to lean against walls and ruin sensible men’s lives—all of it was familiar enough that Uzair barely needed to look for more than half a second.

Of course Jaskirat had a poster of Preity Zinta. Uzair hated that the sight of it gave him disappointment.

He sat at Jaskirat’s study table with his mathematics papers spread in front of him like crime scene evidence, which, frankly, they were. There were red marks everywhere: crosses, half-ticks that had clearly been given out of charity, and question marks in the margin that felt less like academic correction and more like personal insult. His school maths teacher had written, revise basics, in very sharp handwriting on one page, as if Uzair had not been trying to revise basics since the beginning of time.

Jaskirat stood beside him, holding the last test paper between two fingers, and the fact that he had not even bothered to sit down yet felt like its own insult. Uzair, who had spent the entire walk from his own building to the Rangi flat trying to convince his stomach not to behave like an idiot, had imagined many things about this tutoring arrangement. Unfortunately, because he was apparently a shameless fool with no self-preservation, most of those imagined things had involved Jaskirat leaning close over his shoulder, speaking softly, maybe smiling once in a way that meant nothing to Jaskirat and everything to Uzair.

He had not imagined Jaskirat looking at his failed maths paper like someone had handed him a dead rat.

Jaskirat turned one page, then another, taking his time in a way that made Uzair want to crawl out of his own skin. Then, very calmly, he said, “Okay. Wow.”

Uzair’s ears went hot. “That’s not teaching.”

Jaskirat glanced at him, and Uzair was immediately annoyed by the fact that his eyes were still green up close. They had always been green, obviously. Uzair had known that for years. It was one of those facts his brain had stored with the dedication of a government clerk maintaining useless records: Jaskirat Singh Rangi, green eyes, sharp nose, broad shoulders, quiet voice, annoying habit of carrying things for aunties without looking embarrassed, played football barefoot when he was younger.

Still, it was rude how green they remained from this distance.

“Who said I started teaching?” Jaskirat asked, looking back down at the paper. “I’m assessing the damage.”

“Damage?”

“This is damage.”

“It’s a maths test.”

“It’s a disaster, that’s what it is.”

Uzair snatched the paper out of his hand before he could stop himself. “I know it’s bad. That is the whole reason I’m here.”

Jaskirat’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, which was irritating too. “So you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“And you still did this badly?”

Uzair stared at him. “Are you always this rude?”

“Only with people who know they’re bad at something and still don’t make an effort.”

“I swear to God—”

“Don’t swear to God in front of your test paper,” Jaskirat said, finally pulling out the chair beside him and sitting down. “It has already suffered enough.”

Uzair hated him for three whole seconds, truly and sincerely, with the full force of every insulted nerve in his body. Then Jaskirat reached across him to take one of the papers, and Uzair caught the faint scent of his soap, clean and plain beneath the warmer smell of his skin. Just like that, the hatred became useless.

That was the problem. That had always been the problem. Uzair had liked Jaskirat better when he was someone observed from a distance: from a window, from across the colony compound, from behind a book, from the safe and humiliating privacy of his own head. Jaskirat up close, with opinions and sarcasm and the ability to see Uzair’s marks, was much worse.

Jaskirat uncapped a pen with his teeth, which was also annoying because Uzair noticed his mouth and then immediately wanted to hit himself with the whiteboard.

“Your basics are weak,” Jaskirat said.

“My basics have been insulted many times before, thank you.”

“I’m not insulting them. I’m saying they’re missing.”

Uzair gave him a flat look. “That feels worse.”

“It is worse.” Jaskirat tapped the paper with the pen. “Look here. This step. Why did you do this?”

Uzair leaned forward and looked at the question, but the longer he stared at his own work, the less sense it made. He had no idea why he had done it. Maybe because numbers were bastards, or because maths was a language invented specifically to make him feel like a donkey. He could read a political essay once and remember every argument, every example, every unnecessary flourish of English, but the moment someone put x and y in the same line, his brain packed its bags and left for Pune.

“I thought it was right,” Uzair muttered.

Jaskirat looked at him. “Did you?”

Uzair opened his mouth, then shut it again when no defense arrived. Jaskirat only raised his eyebrows, waiting, until Uzair sank lower in the chair and admitted, “No.”

“Good. Honesty is important.”

“Are you going to teach, or are you going to give me a moral lecture?”

“I can do both.”

“What if we cut out the unnecessary judgment? I’m paying you.”

“Your bhaiya and bhabi are paying me.”

That made Uzair grimace because it was true. The whole thing had started because Ulfat bhabi had gone to Prabhneet Aunty’s flat to return a steel dabba and had come back with a plan. At the time, Uzair had been sitting at the dining table pretending to do accounts homework while actually trying to convince Naieem not to stuff a crayon into his mouth.

“Good news,” Ulfat had announced, which in their house usually meant Uzair was about to suffer.

Rehman looked up from his tea. “For who?”

“For all of us,” Ulfat said, though she pointed directly at Uzair. “Mostly him.”

Uzair knew immediately that he was finished.

Apparently, Prabhneet Aunty had mentioned that Jaskirat had been helping Jasleen with maths. Jasleen, like Uzair, had been forced into Commerce because Humanities was considered the academic equivalent of lying down in the street and waiting for failure to run you over. Jasleen wanted to do something with literature or psychology or maybe journalism, depending on the week, but her family had decided Commerce was “safer.” Uzair’s family had decided the same thing, though Rehman had at least had the decency to look apologetic when he said it.

“Arts is fine for other people,” Rehman had told him once, scratching his chin and avoiding Uzair’s eyes. “But you need options. Commerce gives options.”

Uzair had not said, Options for who? because Rehman had done enough for him already. More than enough.

Rehman had been twenty when Uzair’s parents died, newly married and living in a one-bedroom flat with a wife who had barely learned where the rice tin was kept in her new kitchen. He had not been rich. He had not even been comfortable. He had only been a young man with too many responsibilities, standing in front of relatives who had suddenly started speaking about Uzair as if he were an expense instead of a child.

No one had said, We don’t want him, not directly. They had said things like, School fees are so much these days, and He’ll need proper looking after, and I already have two of my own, all of them circling the same ugly truth without wanting to be the first person to say it plainly.

And Rehman, who had been all of twenty, had simply said, “He’ll come with me.”

That was it. There had been no big speech, no dramatic tears, no promise made with a hand over his heart. Rehman had said it once, and Uzair had come with him.

He had been ten years old then, clutching a bag with two shirts and one broken pencil box, when he moved into Rehman and Ulfat’s home. Ulfat, barely older than a girl herself, had looked terrified for exactly one evening before she started scolding him like he had been hers from birth.

Now Rehman had two electrical shops, one near the market and one close to the station road, with men who worked under him for house wiring, building repairs, wedding lights, fan installations, and whatever else people needed. He had built all of that by working until his hands cracked and his temper shortened. Ulfat taught sixth standard biology at the local public school and came home smelling of chalk, coconut oil, and a simmering irritation.

They worked hard, and they had always worked hard, so Uzair could go to good private schools. So he could sit in clean classrooms, wear polished shoes, and complain about maths like a spoiled idiot.

Which meant that when Rehman finally got tired of seeing red marks on Uzair’s tests, he did not shout first. That was worse. Instead, he sat Uzair down after dinner while Ulfat washed dishes in the kitchen and Naieem slept sideways on the cot.

“You’re not stupid,” Rehman had said.

Uzair stared at the table.

“But you are behaving stupidly.”

There it was.

“You think because you are good in other subjects, maths will become shy and leave you alone?”

Uzair said nothing.

Rehman sighed. “We gave you time to fix it yourself.”

“I tried.”

“I know,” Rehman said, his voice not unkind, which somehow made it sting more. “But trying is clearly not enough.”

That had hurt because it was true in the way only Rehman knew how to make things true.

Then Ulfat found out about Jaskirat tutoring Jasleen, and now Uzair was here, in Jaskirat’s bedroom, having his academic corpse examined by the same boy he had been quietly, shamefully, stupidly wanting for four years.

“Why are you staring at the wall?” Jaskirat asked.

Uzair snapped back. “I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I was thinking.”

“About maths?”

“No.”

“Then stop.”

Uzair looked at him, offended. “You know, for someone everyone calls quiet, you have a lot of mouth.”

Jaskirat paused, and for one second, something in his face shifted before he looked away first, which was unexpected enough that Uzair immediately wished he had not said it. Not because it was wrong, exactly, but because it was too familiar. Too easy. It sounded like something he would say to a boy he had always spoken to this way, not someone he had spent years orbiting from a careful distance with only the occasional word passing between them.

Jaskirat was not a stranger, but then again, no one in their colony was really a stranger. That was the problem with middle-class buildings in their surroundings; everyone knew everyone in the most inconvenient way possible. Aunties knew which child had failed which subject before the child’s own father did, uncles knew who came home late, and children knew which households fought loudly and which ones fought quietly. Someone was always borrowing curd, sugar, a screwdriver, a pressure cooker whistle, or a plastic chair for guests, and the borrowed thing always came with some new piece of information to be carried back home.

Jaskirat had come to Uzair’s house plenty of times over the years, usually because Prabhneet Aunty was sending curd or Ulfat was sending back biryani, or because Rehman had borrowed Arjun Uncle’s drill and returned it late enough for Arjun Uncle to appear at the door himself, leaning slightly on his injured leg with his serious retired-army face. Jaskirat was often the one sent for these errands because he was the only son, the second child and only boy, useful in that way families made boys useful while still acting as if they were precious.

His older sister Harleen had just gotten married after finishing her B.Com, an event the aunties had discussed with the intensity of people who had personally negotiated the match, while Jasleen was in Uzair’s year, equally doomed by mathematics and parental expectations. Their father, Naib Subedar Arjun Singh, despite a leg injury and retirement, carried himself with the same poise and discipline as he probably did when he was on the field. He worked as an accountant now, though Uzair could never really imagine him sitting quietly with ledgers. Prabhneet Kaur, Jaskirat’s mother, was kind in a way that still allowed her to know everyone’s business within twelve minutes.

As for Jaskirat, he had always been around, just never close enough to become ordinary. He existed in glimpses: coming down the stairs two at a time, standing near the gate with a schoolbag over one shoulder, playing football in the gully with boys older than him, or helping another man carry a gas cylinder with his jaw clenched and his arms tight.

Once, when Uzair was fourteen, Jaskirat had become less a person and more a problem.

It had been raining that day, though not at first. At first, there had only been the heavy, swollen air and dark clouds gathering over Borivali like they had a grudge. Uzair had been in the living room because the electricity had gone off in his room, and Ulfat had said there was better light near the window. He was reading some library book he barely remembered now, probably something he had borrowed because the cover looked mature.

Outside, the older boys were playing cricket in the gully, which they absolutely should not have been doing. Everyone knew it would rain. The clouds were practically announcing it. But boys were idiots, and Uzair, being a boy himself, understood this as a community flaw rather than an individual one.

There was shouting from below, followed by the sharp crack of a bat, and then the ball came flying through the open window grille and landed near the leg of the sofa.

Uzair looked at it, and the ball looked back at him, smug.

Downstairs, someone yelled, “Arrey! Ball gaya!”

Then a voice Uzair knew but did not really know said, “Main laata hoon!”

He went to the window and looked down just as Jaskirat came toward their building entrance, hair falling into his face and shirt sticking slightly at the chest from sweat. He was almost sixteen then, taller than most boys his age, not fully built yet but getting there in a way that seemed to happen overnight and very rudely. Uzair had seen him before, obviously. He had known Jaskirat was good-looking in the same vague way everyone knew certain people were good-looking, but that day, the knowledge sharpened its teeth.

By the time Jaskirat reached their door, the rain had started properly. It was not polite rain or warning rain, not the kind that gave anyone time to gather clothes from the balcony or run to the shop before getting caught. It was rain that came down in sheets so thick that when Ulfat opened the door, Jaskirat stood there soaked, blinking water from his eyelashes with one hand raised as if he had been about to knock again.

“Ball,” he said.

Uzair had already picked it up, so he handed it over.

Their fingers did not touch, and Uzair remembered that because he thought about it later like an idiot.

Jaskirat took the ball and said, “Thanks,” already turning to leave, but Ulfat made a scandalized sound from behind Uzair.

“In this rain? Are you mad? Sit for ten minutes.”

“It’s okay—”

“Sit.”

So Jaskirat sat, because everyone sat when Ulfat used that voice.

She gave him a towel first, then fruit, then questions. Which class now? Twelfth already? How are studies? Science track, haan? Your mother said you’re doing very well. What about football? Your father still makes you run in the morning? Poor thing. Eat more papaya.

Uzair should have gone upstairs, but he did not. He stayed on the other side of the room with his book open in his lap, pretending to read while looking over the top of it every few seconds. Jaskirat’s hair dripped onto the towel around his shoulders, and his shirt clung to him in patches as he answered Ulfat politely, quietly, with the faint awkwardness of a teenage boy trapped in some random neighborhood aunty’s affections. Every now and then, while speaking, his green eyes would flick toward Uzair.

It was never long enough to mean anything. It was not meaningful at all, probably. It was only a glance, the kind people gave when they knew someone else was in the room, but every time it happened, Uzair felt a chill move down his spine. It was a strange, impossible feeling, as if his body had understood something before his brain had permission to say it.

He had liked boys before then, in some half-formed, frightened way. He was not stupid. He knew the difference between admiring a cricketer’s skill and staring too long at the line of his throat. He knew that when his friends whispered about actresses and girls from school, his own interest was mostly performance. He knew that whatever other boys seemed to feel toward girls, he felt toward boys.

But knowing something inside yourself and living with it in India were not the same thing. Knowing did not make it easy, and it certainly did not make it clean. He was Balochi. Jaskirat was Sikh. Their families were middle-class Indian families in a colony where people acted scandalized if a girl stood too close to a boy near the lift. Every normal love story was already treated like a possible disaster unless it involved parents, reputations, salaries, and somebody’s aunty approving the tea.

And this was not even normal. Uzair was a boy, and Jaskirat was a boy, which made the whole thing unspeakable. Not difficult or complicated, but unspeakable.

So Uzair did not speak. He became good at not speaking.

He became good at laughing when his friends talked about girls, good at liking cricket and football loudly enough that no one looked too closely, good at being just another boy in the group, tall and sharp-tongued and decent at everything except mathematics. He was not outwardly anything. There was nothing for people to point at, no softness he could not hide, no obvious difference he could not bury. He blended in well enough.

Inside, though, privately and shamefully, he built a whole religion around glances.

Jaskirat at sixteen, wet from the rain and eating papaya in Uzair’s living room. Jaskirat at seventeen, running in the morning because Arjun Uncle made him. Jaskirat at eighteen, carrying Harleen’s wedding shopping bags with an expression like death would be preferable. Jaskirat at nineteen, home from his first year at university, taller and broader and quieter, studying Computer Engineering like he had been born knowing how to make his parents proud. Jaskirat at twenty, looking at Uzair’s maths test and saying, “We have a lot of work to do.”

Uzair came back to the room with the miserable awareness that the boy of his dreams was, unfortunately, a bit of a bastard.

Jaskirat drew a line under one question and pushed the paper slightly toward him. “Start from here,” he said. “Show me how you solved it.”

Uzair looked at the question, then at Jaskirat, then back down at the question again, as if staring long enough might force the numbers to arrange themselves into something less humiliating. “I don’t know.”

“That is not showing.”

“Because I don’t know.”

“Try.”

“I tried on the test.”

“And created this mess,” Jaskirat said, tapping the paper with the end of his pen.

Uzair leaned back in his chair, irritation rising fast enough to outrun his common sense. “You know what? I liked you more when you didn’t speak.”

The silence after that was sharp enough to cut skin, and Uzair realized what he had said only after it was already sitting between them. His stomach dropped as Jaskirat looked at him, not amused this time, not arrogant either, just looking in a way that made Uzair’s mouth go dry.

“I mean,” Uzair said quickly, trying to drag the words back into safer territory, “all this nonsense you’re spewing just really ruins the image you have going on.”

For another second, Jaskirat said nothing. Then he looked back at the paper, his expression closing off as he said, “Solve the question.”

His voice was flatter now, and Uzair felt heat crawl up his neck.

Great. Brilliant. First tutoring session, and he had already managed to flirt, insult, and academically embarrass himself in one sitting. Maybe Rehman should have let him fail after all; it would have been more dignified.

By the end of the hour, Uzair’s head hurt. Jaskirat had made him redo two problems from the very beginning and then explain each step aloud, which was a form of torture not listed in any constitution but absolutely should have been. Still, annoyingly, some of it made sense when Jaskirat explained it, and that was the worst part.

Jaskirat was rude, but he was not bad at teaching. He did not rush the way his maths teacher did, writing half the solution on the board and expecting the class to automatically understand the rest. He stopped when Uzair’s face went blank, asked where he had lost the step, made him go back, and explained the same thing twice, then a third time with a different example, his irritation always present but controlled. It was not kind exactly, but it worked.

When Uzair left that day, Jaskirat walked him to the door. Prabhneet Aunty was in the kitchen, calling something about tea next time, while Jasleen was sprawled on the sofa with her Commerce textbook open and her soul visibly absent from her body.

“So?” she asked as Uzair put on his sandals.

Uzair glanced back at Jaskirat, who was watching him with unreadable eyes, then looked at Jasleen and said, “Your brother is evil.”

Jasleen snorted.

From behind him, Jaskirat said, “Your friend is mathematically illiterate.”

“See?” Uzair said. “Evil.”

Jasleen laughed into her book, and Uzair left the Rangi flat feeling strange in a way he could not properly name. He was not happy, exactly, but he was not disappointed either. It was something more uncomfortable than both, because for years, wanting Jaskirat had been easy in the way impossible things were easy. Uzair could want him precisely because nothing would ever happen. He could put him on a pedestal because pedestals were far away, and from that distance, Jaskirat had been quiet, handsome, disciplined, and decent. He was the older boy from the colony, local football star, Naib Subedar Arjun Singh’s son, intermediate topper, Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute scholar, the sort of boy aunties praised and younger boys watched.

But now Jaskirat had spoken. He had been arrogant and mean, had made Uzair feel stupid, and then, somehow worse, had made him understand maths in some weird way.

Maybe, Uzair thought that night, lying on his back while Naieem snored faintly in the other room and Rehman locked the front door, this was not going to be the beautiful punishment he had imagined. Maybe this was not all he had wished for. Maybe it was going to be worse, and maybe the most irritating part was that it was already better too.

—

Tutoring continued twice a week at the Rangi flat, usually in the evenings, and the first five minutes always followed some variation of the same routine: Prabhneet Aunty asked if Uzair wanted tea, Uzair said no, she gave him tea anyway, and Jasleen appeared long enough to complain about accountancy, mathematics, or the general cruelty of being born into a family that cared about marks.

“Commerce is fake,” Jasleen declared one Tuesday, leaning against Jaskirat’s bedroom door with a half-eaten guava in her hand. “They told us the maths was easier than Science track, clearly a lie if this is what I’m dealing with.”

Uzair was taking out his notebook. “Adults lie for sport.”

“They should have let me take Arts,” Jasleen muttered, biting into the guava with real bitterness.

“They should have let us take Arts,” Uzair corrected, because if Jasleen was going to make a tragic speech, he deserved to be included in it.

From inside the room, Jaskirat said, “Both of you should have studied harder.”

Jasleen and Uzair turned to him with identical disgust.

“See?” Jasleen said, pointing vaguely toward him with the guava. “This is why no one likes you”

“Everyone likes me,” Jaskirat said without looking up from the textbook.

“Only if they’re into nerds.”

“Well, at least he’ll earn money,” Uzair conceded, which was a very practical thing to say and, unfortunately, a betrayal of everything he stood for.

Jasleen pointed the guava at him more sharply. “Traitor.”

Uzair put a hand over his chest, entirely unrepentant, while Jasleen laughed and disappeared before Jaskirat could assign her some problem out of pure spite.

That became the rhythm of those evenings: Jaskirat insulting Uzair’s fundamentals, Uzair insulting Jaskirat’s teaching style, the fan turning overhead, the whiteboard slowly filling with numbers, and the Preity Zinta poster looking on from the wall, useless and suspicious. None of the benefits Uzair had privately imagined ever occurred. There was no soft, cinematic tutoring, no accidental hand brushing that lasted too long, no lingering eye contact over textbooks, no secret smile from Jaskirat when he was impressed by Uzair’s effort, no whispered encouragement, and definitely no moment where Jaskirat leaned close and Uzair suddenly understood both mathematics and love.

Mostly, Uzair stared at practice problems until his eyes burned.

Jaskirat gave homework with no mercy. If Uzair made careless mistakes, Jaskirat circled them so aggressively the paper nearly tore, and if he did well, Jaskirat said things like “fine” or “better” or, once, “decent,” which made Uzair want to throw the compass box at his head. The worst part was that, despite all of this, Uzair was learning. He was actually learning.

Functions stopped looking like curses after a while, and differentiation, though still offensive, became manageable in a way Uzair had not thought possible. He began recognizing patterns before Jaskirat pointed them out, his steps got cleaner, and his maths teacher looked faintly surprised one day while handing back a practice paper, which Uzair enjoyed more than he should have.

Still, the crush did not go away. If anything, it became more irritating because now it had details. Before, Uzair had liked an idea: Jaskirat Singh Rangi as a distant, quiet, handsome older boy from the colony, someone he could observe safely from afar and build into whatever shape his own longing needed. Now, unfortunately, he liked specific things. He liked the way Jaskirat tapped the end of his pen against his lower lip while checking a solution, the way his hair fell forward when he bent over the notebook, and the impatient motion with which he pushed it back. He liked the faint crease between Jaskirat’s eyebrows when Uzair did something particularly stupid, and he liked the old faded T-shirts Jaskirat wore at home, stretched slightly at the shoulders from years of washing and from the fact that Jaskirat’s discipline seemed like something he inherited rather than learned.

Uzair knew why, because everyone knew why. Arjun Uncle made Jaskirat run in the mornings and had done so since they were boys. Even now, with Jaskirat in engineering college, his father still expected discipline: running, push-ups, weights, posture, no laziness. Some boys rebelled by smoking near the station or failing classes, but Jaskirat had apparently rebelled by becoming hotter in silence and making it Uzair’s problem.

Not that Uzair was bad himself, because he was not, and he knew that too. At eighteen, his body had finally stopped looking like it had been assembled in a hurry. He had grown tall first, then spent two years walking around like his limbs belonged to someone else, but now his shoulders had widened and his arms had filled out enough that Rehman had started making him help move boxes at the shop before laughing whenever Uzair complained. He played cricket, played football sometimes, walked everywhere, and carried Naieem whenever the child demanded it with the authority of a small king. He was not some weak little thing staring helplessly at a hero.

But Jaskirat had a solidity to him, a steadiness that made Uzair feel ridiculous for noticing and even more ridiculous for wanting to be close to it.

Once, only once, Jaskirat had leaned over from behind him to correct something in his notebook, and Uzair had thought about it an embarrassing number of times afterward.

He had been stuck on a problem, bent over the desk and muttering curses at the page, when Jaskirat apparently got tired of explaining from the side. He stood, moved behind Uzair’s chair, and reached over him with the easy impatience of someone who did not understand that his body being that close could become a full crisis for another person.

“Here,” Jaskirat said, pointing to the page. “You’re skipping this step.”

His chest came close to Uzair’s back, not touching, but near enough that Uzair could feel the heat of him through the thin cotton of his shirt. Jaskirat’s arm passed beside his shoulder, his forearm firm, his wrist marked faintly with a blue vein, and Uzair forgot how to breathe like a normal person. Jaskirat was saying something about limits, or derivatives, or maybe the TV serial in the living room; Uzair had no idea, because every word entered his ear and dissolved immediately.

A chill went down his spine, the same chill from the rainy day years ago, the same impossible, humiliating spark that made him feel both caught and completely alone. He stared at the notebook and understood absolutely nothing until Jaskirat moved away, leaving the space behind him suddenly cooler.

It had not happened again, and Uzair hated how badly he wished it would. He knew it was stupid. He knew it was shameful. He knew Jaskirat was only teaching him maths and not secretly acting out some fantasy Uzair had invented because his brain was diseased and eighteen. Still, the wanting sat there anyway, stubborn and low in his stomach, and no amount of scolding himself made it disappear.

The only good thing was that his marks improved, slowly at first and then all at once. First, he passed a class test, barely, but a pass was still a pass. Ulfat stuck the paper on the fridge as if he had won a national award, which was embarrassing because it was only a fifty-two, but Naieem clapped when everyone else clapped, so Uzair allowed it.

Then came the midterm, and for once, Uzair studied properly for it. Not the fake studying he usually did, where he opened the textbook, stared into space, and then rewarded himself for suffering, but actual studying, the kind that made his eyes hurt and his hand cramp. Jaskirat made him solve old papers until the steps started appearing in his head before he could panic. Ulfat made tea and left it beside him without too much fuss, and Rehman checked on him from the doorway now and then, never saying much but always noticing. Once, very late, Rehman put a plate of cut mango beside his notebook and ruffled his hair like Uzair was still ten.

“You’ll do fine,” he said.

Uzair did not look up. “Don’t jinx it.”

Rehman laughed softly. “Idiot.”

When the midterm result came, Uzair stared at the number for so long that the ink might as well have changed in front of him.

Seventy-one.

It was not brilliant, and it was definitely not topper material, but it was seventy-one. It was above average, respectable, and, most importantly, not shameful. He carried the paper to tutoring that evening folded inside his notebook, pretending he did not care even though he cared so much it sat hot and restless under his ribs.

Jasleen met him near the stairs with her schoolbag hanging off one shoulder and an expression so tragic that Uzair knew, even before she opened her mouth, that marks were out.

“How much?” she demanded.

Uzair tried to keep his face neutral as he leaned against the railing. “Hello to you also.”

“How much?” she repeated, stepping closer like she could physically intimidate the number out of him.

“What makes you think I got it back?”

“Because I saw three of our classmates crying near the canteen, which means marks are out and lives have been ruined.”

“Maybe they were crying because of life in general,” Uzair said, but Jasleen only stared at him until he gave up and unfolded the paper just enough for her to see.

She immediately grabbed his wrist and pulled it closer. “Seventy-one?”

“Don’t shout.”

“Seventy-one?” she repeated, now whisper-shouting with so much force that it was somehow worse. “Saala ghada, you beat me.”

Uzair tried not to grin and failed. “By how much?”

“Don’t ask all those questions.”

“How much, Jasleen?”

She glared at him for a second before muttering, “Sixty-six.”

“That’s not bad.”

“I don’t want pity from you right now.”

“Fine, no pity,” Uzair said, folding the paper back before she could snatch it from him. “Your brother is evil, but effective.”

“He is,” she said bitterly. “He made me cry over limits last week, and the worst part is that I understood them afterward.”

Uzair winced because he knew exactly what she meant. “Commerce was a mistake.”

“Life was a mistake.”

“Dramebaaz.”

She hit his arm with her notebook, though there was no real force behind it, then jerked her chin toward the flat. “Go. Show him. He’ll act like it’s nothing, but if he’s proud, his ears will become red.”

Uzair paused, because that information was immediately too much. He did not need to know what Jaskirat looked like when he was proud, and he especially did not need to know where to look for it.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“I’m his sister,” Jasleen replied, looking deeply pleased with herself. “I know these things.”

“Sure, okay.”

She smiled with all her teeth. “Also, if he says ‘not bad,’ that means he’s very happy.”

“That is stupid.”

“He is stupid,” she said, with the absolute confidence of someone who had spent her entire life gathering evidence.

From inside the flat, Prabhneet Aunty called Jasleen’s name, and Jasleen rolled her eyes before going in first, leaving the door open behind her for Uzair to follow.

The Rangi flat was louder than usual, filled with the whistle of the pressure cooker from the kitchen and the low murmur of the television in the hall. Prabhneet Aunty was speaking to someone on the phone in Punjabi, her voice bright and quick as it carried through the rooms, while a family photo from Harleen’s wedding photo sat on the showcase with all of Jaskirat’s academic certificates and awards. Arjun Uncle was nowhere in sight, which immediately made the air feel less formal, like Uzair could breathe without having to sit up straighter.

Jaskirat was in his room, sitting at the desk in a grey T-shirt and track pants, his hair damp like he had washed his face recently. He looked up when Uzair entered, glanced briefly at the clock, and said, “You’re late.”

“By three minutes,” Uzair said.

“Late is late.”

“You should join the army also.”

Jaskirat gave him a look, unimpressed enough that it almost counted as a full lecture. “Paper?”

Uzair hated that his heart kicked at the question, as if Jaskirat had asked for something more personal than a maths midterm. He pulled the folded paper from his notebook and handed it over with as much casual boredom as he could manufacture, even though his fingers felt too aware of themselves.

Jaskirat took the paper, and Uzair immediately looked away, pretending to be deeply interested in the Dhoni poster on the wall. Behind him, there was only the rustle of paper, followed by a silence that stretched just long enough to become unbearable.

“Seventy-one,” Jaskirat said eventually.

Uzair shrugged, still not looking at him. “Apparently.”

There was another pause, shorter this time, before Jaskirat said, “Not bad.”

It was nothing, really. Two words, delivered in that flat voice of his, without a smile or any obvious warmth. But Uzair, remembering Jasleen’s cursed sibling knowledge, glanced at Jaskirat’s ears and found them slightly red.

Oh, fuck him.

Uzair’s heart did something stupid and acrobatic in his chest, while his stomach dropped low and warm in that terrible way he could never fully avoid around Jaskirat, no matter how many times he reminded himself that shame existed for a reason. He snatched the paper back before his face could give him away.

“Whatever,” he said.

Jaskirat looked at him, eyebrows drawing together. “Whatever?”

“It’s just one test.”

“You were failing one month ago.”

“So? I’m humble now.”

“You are many things,” Jaskirat said, leaning back in his chair. “Humble is not one of them.”

Uzair sat down, feeling far too pleased and trying violently not to show it. “Are we doing maths, or character assassination?”

“Both, as usual.”

Before Uzair could respond, Prabhneet Aunty called from the kitchen, “Jassi!”

Jaskirat closed his eyes briefly, and Uzair immediately stored that away too. Jassi. He knew people called him that—his family mostly, along with some aunties and older neighbors—but he had never heard it from this close, inside Jaskirat’s room, where everything already felt too personal.

“Jassi!” she called again. “Come here one minute!”

Jaskirat stood, pushing his chair back with a scrape against the floor. “Open your homework and start the first exercise. I’ll be back.”

“You trust me alone with maths?”

“No,” Jaskirat said, already walking to the door. “I trust maths to defeat you before I get back. Compile any questions on things you get stuck on.”

“Rude,” Uzair said, but Jaskirat was already gone.

Uzair opened his homework because he was not a child, wrote the date at the top of the page, underlined it, and read the first question with the expectation that it would immediately ruin his evening.

It did not.

That was new.

He began solving it slowly, carefully, writing out each step the way Jaskirat had bullied into him over the past few weeks. Outside the room, Prabhneet Aunty was saying something about a container on the top shelf, and Jaskirat responded too quietly for Uzair to catch. The pressure cooker gave another whistle from the kitchen, sharp and familiar, while somewhere in the building corridor, someone shouted for a child to come inside.

Two minutes passed, then three. Uzair finished the first problem, checked it once, then checked it again because trusting himself in mathematics still felt like trusting a goat with important documents. It seemed right. Probably.

He looked toward the door, but Jaskirat was still not back.

The room felt different without him in it, less charged but more dangerous. It was as if the second Jaskirat stopped watching him, the room itself invited Uzair to become stupid. He leaned back in the chair and let his eyes wander, telling himself it was harmless. For weeks, he had sat in this room with Jaskirat beside him, too busy being tortured by calculus to really look around. Now, without Jaskirat hounding him to show his work, everything seemed to come into focus.

There were the obvious things first: textbooks stacked by subject, loose notes shoved between their pages, engineering drawing sheets rolled near the cupboard, and a geometry box that was, of course, better than Uzair’s. A steel water bottle sat near the edge of the desk beside a cracked plastic alarm clock and a comb with two missing teeth. Near the bed, half-hidden in shadow, was a dumbbell, which made Uzair look away and then look back almost immediately because he had no dignity.

His gaze moved to the bookshelf next. Most of it was exactly what he expected from Jaskirat Singh Rangi: science textbooks, coaching material, old CBSE guides, engineering entrance books thick enough to kill someone, computer manuals, and a few notebooks labeled in Jaskirat’s neat, controlled handwriting.

Between all those heavy books, though, were novels.

Uzair paused, tilting his head to read the titles better. There was Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which he knew mostly by reputation and by the kind of boys in college who carried Russian novels and looked tortured. Beside it was Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury, the copy old enough that the spine had cracked and faded, probably bought secondhand from one of those pavement stalls where half the books smelled like dust and sun.

Then his eyes moved to the next one.

The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Oscar Wilde.

Uzair stared at it longer than he meant to.

That one he knew. Not fully, because he had never read it cover to cover, but he had once read about Wilde in some article late at night, with the door closed and his pulse making him feel stupid. A man ruined for the thing Uzair had no words for in daylight. A name that lived in whispers, English essays, and the kind of knowledge Uzair collected privately because it made him feel less like the only person in the world and more like part of some cursed, hidden history.

And there it was, Oscar Wilde sitting quietly on Jaskirat Singh Rangi’s bookshelf between engineering guides.

Uzair’s mouth went dry for no good reason.

No, he told himself almost immediately. There were many reasons to own a book. People read classics. Toppers especially read classics, probably to become even more unbearable. Maybe Jaskirat had bought it because it was famous, or because some professor had recommended it, or because he had no idea about Wilde beyond the fact that the book was considered important. Maybe Uzair was just a desperate idiot building palaces out of paperbacks.

His eyes moved on quickly, almost angrily, and landed on a small glass jar on the next shelf.

It was filled with tiny paper cranes in different colors: blue, yellow, pink, newspaper grey, and the shiny silver of old sweet wrappers. Some were folded neatly, others unevenly, all of them crowded together like trapped birds. That did not fit either, not with the textbooks and the dumbbell and the rude mouth Jaskirat carried around like a family inheritance.

Uzair frowned.

Who had made those? Jasleen? Harleen? Jaskirat himself?

The idea of Jaskirat, all broad shoulders and sharp comments, sitting alone and folding tiny paper cranes in secret was so unexpected that Uzair almost smiled.

Then his gaze dropped lower, to the space beneath the bed, where something was sticking out just enough to catch his attention.

It was only a corner, barely visible from where he sat, but it did not look like a textbook or a notebook. The paper seemed too floppy for that, glossy maybe, thin and old, with one bent edge peeking out from the shadow under Jaskirat’s bed. Uzair knew what it looked like before he let himself admit it.

A magazine.

His heart gave one hard thud.

No. Absolutely not.

He looked toward the door, but it was still empty. From the kitchen, Prabhneet Aunty laughed at something, and Jaskirat answered her from somewhere beyond the room, close enough that Uzair could hear the low shape of his voice but not close enough to be coming back.

Uzair turned back to his homework and picked up his pen. He wrote the number two beneath the first problem, stopped before writing anything else, and found his eyes drifting back to the bed again.

No. No, no, no.

This was deranged. Looking around the room was one thing. Everyone looked around. It was not a crime to notice books or paper cranes or the dumbbell half-hidden near the wall. But going under someone’s bed and pulling out something hidden there was different. That was perverted behavior. That was cheap. That was exactly the kind of thing he would judge someone else for doing while secretly, shamefully wanting to know what they had found.

He tapped his pen against the notebook and tried to convince himself it was probably nothing. It could have been an old film magazine, or a cricket magazine, or loose engineering notes shoved somewhere stupid because even toppers were allowed to be untidy. It could have been anything.

But his brain, because it was a traitor and also belonged to an eighteen-year-old boy, supplied a more likely answer.

Porn.

Uzair swallowed.

Every boy had seen things, or tried to, or lied about seeing them. There were magazines passed around school with the seriousness of illegal weapons, cheap CDs sold near stations with covers that made boys laugh too loudly, and internet cafés where everyone pretended not to know why the back computers were always taken. Uzair had avoided most of it, not because he was pure, but because watching boys perform interest in women made him feel like he was standing outside his own body.

This was different, though.

This was Jaskirat’s, and that made it terrible in a way Uzair could not talk himself out of. It also made it tempting.

A hot, ugly curiosity uncurled low in his stomach. What kind of women did Jaskirat like?

It was a stupid question. He knew that. He should not care. Jaskirat liking women was the safest, most obvious thing in the world. Jaskirat had a poster of Preity Zinta on his wall. Jaskirat would one day marry some nice Sikh girl his parents liked, probably someone educated, pretty, fair, and soft-spoken at all the right times. They would have children with green eyes if God wanted to be especially cruel.

Uzair knew all of this, but knowing did not stop him.

He stood up, then immediately sat back down.

“What the hell,” he muttered under his breath.

He looked toward the door again. Jaskirat still had not returned, and the empty room seemed to hold its breath around him.

This time, when Uzair stood, he did it more quietly. His pulse beat in his throat as he moved from the desk to the side of the bed. He had never been this close to Jaskirat’s bed before, which was such an obscene thought that he nearly turned around from the shame of having it. It was just a bed, nothing more than a narrow wooden frame with a faded bedsheet tucked badly at one corner, one pillow near the wall, and a thin blanket folded at the foot. Nothing holy. Nothing dramatic.

Still, Uzair’s body behaved like he had crossed some invisible border.

He crouched beside it.

“You are a disgusting person,” he whispered to himself.

Then, because self-awareness had never stopped any boy from doing anything stupid in the history of mankind, he reached under the bed and pulled the magazine out.

It was old, with creased covers, softened corners, and dust clinging to one side. The woman on the front was blonde and pale, wearing very little and smiling with her mouth open in a way that made Uzair want to laugh from sheer nerves.

He exhaled.

Of course it was a white woman.

“Really?” he whispered.

The relief that hit him was so odd and stupid that he almost did laugh. Jaskirat Singh Rangi, disciplined son of a retired army man, engineering student, colony pride, secret owner of a dirty magazine featuring some blonde foreign woman with impossible hair. It made him seem less untouchable somehow, less like the quiet, perfect boy Uzair had built in his head and more like an actual boy.

A horny, tasteless boy, but a boy.

Still crouched beside the bed, Uzair flipped the cover open. He knew he should stop, and then, with the full useless knowledge that he was doing something awful, he did not stop.

The first few pages were exactly what he expected. Women, posed bodies, glossy paper, too much skin. Uzair looked with the detached curiosity of someone examining a subject he understood in theory but not in practice. This was what other boys lost their minds over? This was what made them whisper and shove each other and talk big in bathrooms?

He turned another page, then another, and despite himself, he almost smiled.

“I didn’t know you liked white women like that, Jassi,” he murmured under his breath, so quietly even he barely heard it. The second the name left his mouth, shame crawled hot up the back of his neck. He had no right to use Jaskirat’s family nickname like that, not even alone, not even as a joke to himself while crouched beside his bed like a pervert with no front lobe development and even less dignity.

He flipped further into the magazine, expecting more of the same: glossy pages, foreign women, impossible hair, that bored-open-mouth expression men apparently lost their minds over. Instead, something thinner slid loose from the middle and dropped against his knee.

Uzair froze.

It was not part of the magazine.

For a second, he only stared at it, not quite understanding what he was seeing. It was a separate booklet, smaller and older, its cover worn soft at the corners from being handled too many times and hidden too quickly. There was no woman on the front. No blonde hair, no coy smile, no pretending this was the kind of thing every normal boy would laugh about and shove under his mattress.

There were men.

Only men.

Uzair’s fingers tightened around the edges before he could make himself let go. His heartbeat changed, no longer quick with mischief, but sharp with fear, recognition, and a wild impossible hope so sudden it felt almost like panic. He opened the booklet carefully, as if it might burn him, and the first page made his throat close.

It was not accidental. It was not some mixed foreign magazine where men happened to appear beside women in the middle pages. This was separate, deliberate, meant for men who wanted to look at men. Meant for the kind of wanting Uzair had spent years hiding so deeply inside himself that even thinking about it too clearly made him feel dirty and relieved at the same time.

There was no way.

He turned another page with clumsy hands, barely letting himself look and somehow seeing too much anyway: bare shoulders, hard lines, bodies arranged for a gaze that was not pretending to be anything else. This was not proof in the way a confession would be proof. A booklet could belong to someone else. One of Jaskirat’s friends could have shoved it here. Some older cousin could have left it behind. Maybe Jaskirat had found it and panicked and hidden it without knowing what to do.

But who kept something like this tucked inside a straight magazine under his own bed by accident? Who kept The Picture of Dorian Gray on his shelf, quiet between engineering guides? Who put a Preity Zinta poster on the wall where everyone could see it, as if the right kind of woman on paper could answer questions before anyone asked them?

And who looked at Uzair sometimes like—

No.

Uzair’s thoughts tangled together so quickly he could not catch any single one. He crouched there with Jaskirat’s secret open in his hands, feeling the whole room tilt around him. It meant nothing, and it meant everything. It was not enough to know, and somehow he already knew.

His mouth moved before he could stop it.

“No way,” he whispered, voice rough and disbelieving. “There’s no fucking way.”

A floorboard creaked behind him, and Uzair looked up so quickly his neck almost hurt.

Jaskirat was standing in the doorway, one hand still resting against the frame, his body caught halfway between entering the room and turning back out of it. For a second, neither of them moved. The expression on Jaskirat’s face had gone completely still, but it was not anger Uzair saw there, not yet. It was worse than anger. It was fear, raw and immediate, the kind that emptied a person out before they could decide what face to wear over it.

His eyes dropped to the magazine in Uzair’s hands, and whatever little color had been left in his face seemed to drain at once. When he looked back up, Uzair felt the full weight of what he had done settle into the room between them. This was not some stupid thing he could laugh off, not some dirty magazine Jaskirat could snatch away and curse him over. Uzair had not just found something embarrassing. He had found something dangerous.

The room seemed to shrink around them, all those ordinary things suddenly looking like props in a badly made lie: the cricket posters, the Preity Zinta poster, the textbooks stacked neatly on the shelf, the whiteboard full of half-erased equations, the tiny colored paper cranes sitting quietly in their jar. Jaskirat’s lips parted like he meant to say something, but no sound came out, and that scared Uzair more than shouting would have.

Uzair stood frozen beside the bed, the magazine heavy in his hands, his heart hammering so hard he could feel it in his throat. Jaskirat did not know what lived inside Uzair’s chest; he did not know about the years of looking, wanting, hiding, and hating himself for it. All he knew was that Uzair had seen something he was never supposed to see.

And from the look on Jaskirat’s face, that was enough to ruin him.

---

Part 2

Monday, 28th May, 2024

Uzair Baloch’s flat in West London looked like the kind of place a man kept only because he needed somewhere to put his passport.

It was not unlived-in exactly. There were signs of him everywhere if someone knew how to look for them: the slim black raincoat hooked by the door, the battered leather wallet dropped into the same blue ceramic bowl every time he came in, three different accreditation lanyards placed in the drawer of his entry table. There were two mugs in the sink, both rinsed but not washed, and a single spoon beside them. The sofa cushions had not sunk into anyone’s shape. The glass coffee table was wiped clean enough to reflect the ceiling light. The kitchen counters were bare except for a French press, a tin of tea bags his bhabi had sent from Karachi, and a fruit bowl that held no fruit, only a roll of gaffer tape, spare batteries, and a pair of cufflinks he had been looking for last month.

It was too clean in the way hotel rooms were clean, not cared for, but reset.

The flat had pale walls, pale floors, and windows that looked down onto a quiet street lined with narrow brick houses and trees that had survived London weather and looked tired year-round. There were no shoes scattered by the door, no blanket abandoned on the arm of the sofa, no half-read newspaper folded open to the sports section. During tournament season, Uzair came home in intervals, never properly. He slept here, showered here, unpacked enough to repack. Sometimes he returned from a week in Sydney or Colombo or Johannesburg and found the flat exactly as he had left it, as if it had been holding its breath in his absence.

The only thing in the room that argued for a soul was the bookshelf.

It took up nearly an entire wall, dark wood against all that sterile white, and it was the one place where Uzair’s life refused to arrange itself neatly. Books leaned into each other in multiple languages, cracked spines pressed against glossy hardbacks, Urdu poetry tucked beside cricket memoirs, dog-eared essays on politics and migration stacked horizontally because he had run out of space. Faiz and Manto sat next to Arundhati Roy, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, and Joan Didion. There were biographies of fast bowlers with their pages marked in pencil, books on the history of Test cricket, a battered copy of Beyond a Boundary, and a notebook from his university days still stuffed between two journalism textbooks, its edges feathered from use.

That shelf was the only part of the flat that confessed anything true about him, that before he had learned to ask questions into a microphone, he had been a boy who loved sentences. That the work had not started with cameras or studios or the clean shine of ESPN graphics over his shoulder, but with him reading match reports in Karachi until the ink blurred, trying to understand how a man could make a game sound like war, heartbreak, and prayer.

Now, a huge black suitcase sat open near the door, half-packed with precision. Uzair moved between the bedroom and living room with his phone propped up against a water bottle on the kitchen counter, FaceTime filling the flat with noise from a home thousands of miles away.

“Chachu,” Naieem said, his face too close to the camera, one eye enormous and the other disappearing off screen, “are you excited to go to America?”

Uzair folded a white linen shirt and placed it into the left side of the suitcase. “A little bit.”

“A little bit?” Naieem repeated, scandalized. “It’s America.”

“It is America, yes.”

“Will you see the White House?”

Uzair glanced at the screen. Naieem had backed up enough for Uzair to see the living room behind him, loud, warm, and busy in a way Uzair’s flat never managed to be. The ceiling fan spun lazily overhead. A pile of freshly folded clothes sat on the charpai behind him, growing taller under Ulfat bhabi’s careful hands. Somewhere out of frame, a pressure cooker hissed. The wall behind Naieem held framed calligraphy, a school calendar, and a crooked photo of him in a cricket jersey two sizes too big.

“No, jaan,” Uzair said, reaching for a stack of undershirts. “I don’t think I’ll be near the White House.”

“But you’re going to America.”

“America is very big.”

Naieem frowned, as if Uzair had personally made the country so large.

Uzair tucked the undershirts into a packing cube. “But if I have time in New York, maybe I’ll see the Statue of Liberty.”

Naieem’s eyes widened. “Take a picture with her for me!"

“I’ll ask her if she can schedule me in.”

Naieem giggled, delighted with him, and Uzair felt something in his chest go soft.

Ulfat bhabi appeared then, leaning into frame from a few steps away with a folded kurta in her hands. Her dupatta was pinned loosely over her hair, and her expression had that familiar mixture of affection and accusation.

“Acha, suno,” she said. “Pack sweaters.”

Uzair paused with one hand inside the suitcase. “Sweaters?”

“Yes. I know it’s summer, but I heard America is getting lots of rain and cold at random times. They say it on the news.”

“Bhabi,” Uzair said, already smiling.

“No, listen to me. Weather is not normal anymore. One day hot, one day cold, one day storm. You’ll be running around stadiums, taking three wrong turns because you can’t follow directions to save your life, and then you’ll get sick.”

“Bhabi, my sense of direction has nothing to do with sweaters.”

“Everything has to do with sweaters when you’re the one traveling, and I’m the one worried.”

“Bhabi, there’s no need for more than two sweaters. Most of the matches are in the West Indies anyway, and the weather is good when we’re in America.”

“No, listen, Uzair—”

“Bhabi,” he whined, dragging the word out like he was fifteen again and not a thirty-year-old man who interviewed captains and coaches and retired legends.

Ulfat narrowed her eyes at him through the phone. “Fine. Do whatever you want.”

He laughed under his breath and opened the top drawer of his dresser, taking out rolled socks, a few belts, and the small pouch where he kept collar stays, tie clips, and extra cufflinks. “That means you’re saving your scolding for when I call you with a sore throat.”

“Of course. Because then I’ll be right and it’ll be easier to rub it in your face.”

“You always are.”

“Say it louder. Naieem, did you hear? Your chachu said I’m always right.”

Naieem, who had become distracted by something on the floor, popped back into view. “Chachu, will you interview all the big teams?”

Uzair placed the belt along the side of the suitcase. “Yes, for sure. That’s the job.”

“All of them?”

“All types of matches, all types of teams. Pre-match, post-match, maybe some training days also.” He picked up three neatly pressed dress shirts from the back of his sofa and laid them across the suitcase. “Why? Do you want an autograph from Babar Azam or something?”

Naieem made a face.

Uzair stopped. “What is this face?”

“Sure,” Naieem said, with the whatever diplomatic politeness a seven-year-old could muster, “but can you actually get one from Rangi?”

Uzair blinked once, then laughed.

From the Karachi living room, Ulfat burst out laughing too, covering her mouth with the kurta. “Arrey wah.”

Naieem straightened, defensive. “What? Babar Azam doesn’t play well sometimes. But everyone thinks Rangi plays well at school.”

“Everyone at school,” Uzair repeated, nodding gravely. “Very serious cricket analysts.”

“Yes.”

“Jaskirat Singh Rangi, haan?”

Naieem nodded so hard the phone blurred. “Rangi. Bohot lambe lambe chhakkay marta hai woh.”

“He does,” Uzair said, slipping a navy blazer from its hanger and checking it for lint. “Beta, if I interview him, I’ll get you one.”

Naieem threw both arms in the air. “Yes!”

Uzair laughed, folding the blazer carefully into the garment sleeve. “Only if I get the chance, okay? No promises until I’m actually standing in front of him.”

“I know, I know,” Naieem said, already distracted by his own excitement.

Then his face changed, lighting with remembered urgency.

“Chachu, wait!” he suddenly shouted. “I have to show you something.”

Before Uzair could answer, the boy vanished from frame, leaving the phone tilted toward the ceiling fan and half of Ulfat’s shoulder. His footsteps slapped away across the floor.

“Where is he going?” Uzair asked.

“To bring his trophy,” Ulfat said, resuming her folding. “Sports day wali. He has been waiting since yesterday to show you.”

“Trophy?”

“Hundred-meter dash. First place.” There was pride in her voice, bright and unguarded.

Uzair smiled, looking down into his suitcase so she would not see too much of his face. “Mashallah.”

For a few seconds, only the ordinary sounds of the Karachi house moved between them. Cloth snapping as Ulfat folded. A distant clatter from the kitchen. A child yelling somewhere outside. It filled his flat strangely, like borrowed sunlight.

Then Ulfat said, softer, “Why do you look so thin?”

Uzair closed his eyes. “Bhabi.”

“No, don’t bhabi me. Turn your face properly.”

“I’m packing.”

“Turn.”

He looked at the phone.

Ulfat leaned closer to the camera, inspecting him with the seriousness of a doctor. “Haan. Thin. Your cheeks are gone.”

“My cheeks are still here.”

“Is any of that Angrezi khanna actually working for your body?”

He laughed, despite himself. “Relax, bhabi. I’ve been living here for seven years. I’m okay. Stop worrying.”

“Stop worrying,” she repeated, but the humor thinned around the edges. “How can I stop worrying about you? Me and your bhaiya sent you so far—”

She stopped.

The flat went quiet around him.

Uzair’s hand stilled over the open suitcase, fingers resting on a stack of pressed trousers. On the screen, Ulfat looked away first. She smoothed the kurta in her lap, once, twice, though it was already folded.

There were some silences that were like an old family home. You learned to walk around them. You learned which words made the floorboards creak.

Rehman bhai.

He had been twenty-one when Uzair came to him. Twenty-one, newly married, barely old enough to know how to be someone’s husband, never mind someone’s guardian. Uzair had been thirteen then, all skin and bones, grief making a stranger out of his own body. His parents had died, and the world had become suddenly practical in a way that had no space for him. Who had money? Who had the patience to raise a boy who woke up some nights unable to breathe? People had lowered their voices around him and discussed him like an expense.

Rehman had not lowered his voice. He had taken Uzair home.

He had fed him, clothed him, argued with school administrators, paid fees late for exams. He had worked extra lighting jobs at weddings and shops and half-built houses while still running his electrical store, coming home with dust in his hair and his hands smelling of wire and metal. He had made sure Uzair studied. He had made sure he applied to the best journalism programs in Pakistan. Later, when Uzair got the chance to go to the United Kingdom for his masters, Rehman had acted as if the entire family had been waiting for that letter, as if there had never been any question that Uzair would go.

He had done it all so Uzair could grow into an educated Balochi boy. A respectable man. An upstanding citizen who carried the family name properly because men like Rehman broke their backs to give him the chance.

Too bad Uzair had disappointed him in that department.

For two years now, Uzair and Rehman had not said a single word to each other.

Not on Eid. Not on birthdays. Not when Uzair’s contract with ESPN became permanent and Ulfat cried happy tears over the phone. Not when Naieem lost his first tooth and insisted Chachu had to see the gap. Not when Pakistan played badly enough that a long time ago Rehman would have called just to shout about it with him.

Two years of Ulfat passing messages without knowing what she was carrying. Two years of Naieem saying Abbu is busy, Abbu is at the shop, Abbu just stepped out. Two years of Uzair ending calls before Rehman’s voice could enter the room.

“I wish you two would just make up,” Ulfat said quietly.

Uzair pressed his thumb into the edge of the suitcase. “Bhabi—”

“Or that either of you felt like you could share with me what happened.”

He looked at her then. Her face on the small screen was open in a way that hurt him. Ulfat had always been warmth first, questions later. She had been twenty when he entered her marriage like a storm nobody had planned for, and she had made space for him anyway. She had learned what he liked for breakfast. She had scolded him into clean clothes. She had sat beside him during exam results and cried at all his graduations harder than he had.

She did not know.

Uzair was not sure she would still want them to make up if she did.

He opened his mouth, already reaching for some vague answer that would move them both safely away from the truth.

Then Naieem came running back into frame.

“Chachu!” he shouted, breathless, holding up a small gold plastic trophy with a runner on top. “Look!”

Uzair’s answer died before it had to become a lie.

Naieem climbed onto the sofa, shoving the trophy close enough to the camera that Uzair could see his own distorted reflection in its shiny base. Ulfat made a small sound and shifted back, letting her son take over the screen.

“First place?” Uzair asked, forcing brightness into his voice.

“First!” Naieem said. “Hundred meters. I ran so fast. Even Daniyal was behind me, and he always says he is fastest because his shoes are from Dubai.”

“Daniyal sounds like tough compeition.”

“He is,” Naieem said seriously. “And then Sir gave me this, and Ammi said we will put it near the TV, but Abbu said not near the TV because I will knock down something when I try to take it off the shelf, but I won’t.”

Uzair watched his nephew talk, the words spilling over each other, the trophy flashing in the warm Karachi light.

But for a moment, the sound faded.

He thought of Naieem struggling in maths and pretending not to care. Naieem filling the margins of his notebooks with little stories and football scores. Naieem asking for books above his reading level because Chachu had said stories made your head bigger in a good way. Naieem loving English, loving running, loving cricket and football and every sport that let him turn his restlessness into usefulness.

Just like his chachu.

And if Ulfat knew, really knew, would she still let her son press his face close to the phone and say Uzair chachu like it was a blessing? Would she still laugh when Naieem repeated his jokes? Would she still send tea bags and scold him about sweaters and worry his cheeks were too thin? Or would she spit in his face, gather her child close, and decide Rehman had been right to make a silence out of him?

Uzair was happy, he told himself.

He was.

He was happy his brother had let him keep this much. Happy he still had Ulfat’s worry, Naieem’s trophies, the noise of that house over FaceTime. Happy Rehman had distanced himself but had not taken a knife to every thread between them. Happy that the family Rehman had so selflessly given him when Uzair thought he had lost everything had not vanished all at once.

“Chachu,” Naieem whined. “Are you even listening?”

Uzair blinked.

Ulfat was looking at him, her eyes had sharpened with the old, frightening familiarity of someone who had known him as a grieving child and still recognized when his thoughts went somewhere dark.

Uzair ignored it.

“Of course I’m listening,” he said, leaning closer to the phone. “You beat Dubai-shoes Daniyal in the hundred-meter dash, won a trophy, and now you’re going to become the fastest boy in Karachi.”

Naieem grinned, pleased. “Not all of Karachi.”

“Fine. South Karachi first. Then we expand.”

“Then Pakistan.”

“Then the world.”

Naieem nodded, accepting this career plan. “And then I will run in the Olympics and you will interview me.”

“Done. But I’ll ask very tough questions.”

“I will answer very well.”

“Then I’ll just have to make the questions harder.”

Naieem laughed again, and Uzair let himself memorize it. The high, bright sound of it. The gap in his front teeth.

Then, from somewhere beyond the frame, a door opened. A man’s voice entered the house. “Naieem?”

Uzair’s whole body reacted before his mind did. Rehman’s voice was deeper than memory and exactly the same. Naieem twisted around. “Abbu! I’m on the phone—"

“I should go,” Uzair said.

Ulfat’s head snapped back toward the phone. “Arrey, Uzair—”

“Chachu, please,” Naieem said, turning back with immediate panic.

Uzair smiled. It felt small on his face. “No, jaan. Say hi to your Abbu.”

“But—”

“I’m proud of you. Very proud.” He swallowed. “Bye, bhabi.”

“Uzair,” Ulfat said, softer now.

He ended the call before Rehman could come into frame.

The flat returned all at once. No ceiling fan. No pressure cooker. No Karachi evening humming through a phone speaker. Just the white walls, the clean counters, the half-packed suitcase by the door.

Uzair stood there for a while with the phone still in his hand.

Then he set it facedown on the counter.

The suitcase waited for him. Three weeks of shirts. Two sweaters, because he was not completely suicidal. A navy blazer. A charcoal one. Trousers rolled and folded. Workout clothes he might not use. Loafers in dust bags. Chargers and adapters separated by type and country. A pouch for skincare. A smaller pouch for broadcast makeup. A folder with printed itineraries, accreditation details, hotel confirmations, and flight information for New York, Dallas, Florida, Barbados, Antigua, St. Lucia. The 2024 T20 World Cup, reduced to zippers and compartments.

He closed his eyes and dragged both hands over his face.

When he opened them, his gaze went to the narrow console table by the bookshelf.

There were only two framed photographs in the flat.

In the first, Uzair was ten years old and sitting between his parents on a beach near Gwadar, his hair blown messily across his forehead, his mother’s hand curved around his shoulder, his father squinting at the camera with the sun in his eyes. Uzair barely remembered the day itself anymore. He remembered the photo more than the moment. His mother’s bangles. His father’s beige kurta. His own grin, unguarded and full of teeth.

In the second, he was in his graduation gown, standing outside the University of Punjab with Rehman’s arm thrown across his shoulders. Rehman was beaming with the kind of pride that embarrassed everyone around him. Ulfat stood on Uzair’s other side with tears shining in her eyes, one hand pressed to her mouth, like she was trying not to sob in public and failing. Uzair held baby Naieem in his arms, no older than a few months, a warm sleeping weight against his chest.

He remembered that day clearly, thinking that Allah had given him a second chance. Not at replacing what he had lost. Nothing did that. But at being loved and belonging somewhere. At having people who looked at him and saw not a burden, but their own.

Uzair looked down at his suitcase again.

Then he reached into the pocket of his jeans and found his cigarette case.

The balcony door slid open with a tired scrape. London air met him cool and slightly damp, carrying the smell of rain even though the pavement below was dry. His balcony was narrow, just wide enough for two chairs he never used and a small metal table with an ashtray hidden behind a dead basil plant he kept forgetting to throw away.

Below, the street was quieter than usual. Most evenings, a gaggle of school-aged boys played football between the parked cars. Today, there was only one boy. Maybe eleven or twelve. Skinny legs, oversized red shirt, hair flopping into his eyes. He dribbled from one corner of the pavement to the other with fierce concentration, tapping the ball gently around an invisible defender, then turning sharply and doing it again.

Uzair watched him for a moment, cigarette unlit between his fingers.

There was a familiarity in that focus. The private seriousness of a child practicing for an audience that did not exist yet. He would see that same look over the next month on training grounds and in stadium tunnels. On batters marking guard, bowlers at the top of their run-up, men who had learned to turn pressure into results.

On Jaskirat Singh Rangi, probably.

Uzair smiled to himself despite everything.

Then he flicked the lighter open, cupped his hand against the wind, and lit his cigarette.

—

Friday, 31th May, 2024

Dallas did not feel like a place that should have been holding a World Cup.

That was the first thing Uzair had noticed when he stepped out of the airport three days ago, suitcase dragging behind him and Texas heat pressing down on the back of his neck. Everything was too wide. The roads, the sky, the parking lots stretching in flat gray oceans around malls and hotels and stadium-adjacent shopping plazas, all of it built with the confidence of a country that had never once worried about running out of space.

In London, everything leaned into everything else. Terraced houses sat shoulder to shoulder, corner shops tucked beneath flats, buses grumbling through streets too narrow for their own ambition. Even when the city annoyed him, even when the Tube was packed and someone’s elbow was in his ribs and rainwater dripped from every umbrella onto his shoes, there was a closeness to it. A sense that life had been stacked carefully because there was no other choice.

Karachi was closer still. Louder, hotter, more impatient. Streets spilled over with motorbikes and fruit carts and rickshaws, shopfronts glowed under old signs, boys played cricket in lanes that had no business allowing cricket. Everything there touched everything else: family, neighbors, strangers, arguments, prayers, traffic, grief. You could not be anonymous in a city like Karachi unless the city allowed it, and even then, only for a little while.

Dallas, by comparison, felt like it had been built by someone who believed every human being required four lanes of personal space.

For exactly six hours, Uzair had found this mildly depressing. Then work descended.

There were warm-up matches to cover, team arrivals to track, practice sessions to chase, clips to record, questions to send back and forth with London and Bengaluru, sponsors to acknowledge without sounding like he had been replaced by a machine. There were producers asking for thirty-second stand-ups in front of newly printed signage and editors requesting context pieces on cricket’s American expansion, as if anyone could summarize fifty years of administrative neglect and recent investment in a neat broadcast package before lunch.

By the morning before the tournament began, Dallas had stopped being strange and had become simply another place where Uzair was tired.

The Group A press room had the strange temporary polish all international tournaments carried: black carpet that still smelled faintly new, a long table at the front dressed in dark cloth, microphones lined in even intervals, small placards placed with ceremonial importance. Behind it, the tournament backdrop repeated itself in bright blocks of sponsor logos and official branding, so cheerful and clean it made the whole room feel slightly less real.

India. Pakistan. Ireland. USA. Canada. Two placards for each country: captain and coach.

Uzair sat three rows back, his notebook open on his lap and a pen tucked between two fingers. Around him, reporters settled into their seats with the restless exhaustion of people who had all pretended they were not checking their phones under the table. A few had already opened laptops. Someone behind him was whispering into a voice memo, while someone else argued quietly but intensely about whether the media availability would run long enough to make their next segment impossible.

Then Meera dropped into the empty seat beside him like she had arrived specifically to punish the air.

“They’ve changed the schedule,” she said.

Uzair looked over. “Good morning to you too.”

Meera gave him a deadpan look that had once been intended to intimidate. Now, he just smiled politely into his coffee.

She ignored that. “The delay with the room setup pushed everything by twenty minutes, which means they’re cutting down the mixed media portion. We’re not getting the USA and Canada captains separately anymore. We’ll get their coaches outside after this, maybe five minutes each if the media manager is feeling generous, which, based on the last email, she is not.”

Uzair nodded, because nodding was safer than interrupting Meera when she had entered operational command mode.

“That means the segment needs to shift,” she continued. “Less captain-focused, more tournament infrastructure, associate team prep, home advantage, North American growth angle. You can still use the USA question if you reframe it, but don’t make it sound like we’re annoyed about access even though we are annoyed about access.”

“I never sound annoyed.”

“You sounded annoyed when hotel toast was cold this morning.”

“Hotel toast is a serious matter.”

“Uzair.”

He pressed his lips together.

Meera’s eyes narrowed. “Also, India and Ireland are leaving immediately after the main press conference. No mixed media, hallway grab, or informal follow-up unless someone wanders into our shot like a blessing. And don’t go running off afterwards, please. Once the mixed media chaos is done, I want you, Cal, and photographer intern in the press lounge for a regroup.”

“Photographer intern has a name.”

“Lovely. He can tell it to me in the press lounge.”

His gaze shifted to the front of the room, where India’s placards sat at center left.

Jaskirat Singh Rangi.

Kailash Nath.

The names were printed in plain black lettering, harmless as office supplies. Uzair looked at them anyway.

He had acted as if this was not a big deal. It was an assignment. A good assignment, yes, an important one, the kind of tournament that made retired players and administrators suddenly available, but still an assignment. He was prepared for it. He had covered bigger rooms, louder personalities, angrier coaches, worse collapses, uglier questions. In some ways, he had spent most of his life preparing for cricket journalism without realizing it, reading scorecards and match reports like literature, learning which silences mattered after a captain lost by six runs.

He had told Naieem he was only a little excited, and at the time, America had helped him believe it. There had been no romance in it or immediate tournament fever, crowds of kids outside a stadium holding bats and asking for autographs, taxi drivers offering an unsolicited opinion on selection strategy before asking where he was from.

But now, looking at the rows of cameras and folded tripods, at the reporters gathering themselves into professional alertness, at the placards waiting for men who carried entire countries into press rooms with them, Uzair felt it.

The excitement arrived warm and embarrassing, like youth returning without permission.

His eyes dropped to his notebook: small points, clean phrasing, follow-ups marked in the margin. A few questions for each team, most of them practical, some boring in the necessary way tournament questions had to be boring. Near the bottom of the page, under India, Meera had circled one question and written in all caps: DO NOT PULL THIS UNLESS YOU WANT HIM TO HATE YOU.

It was not even a cruel question, that was what annoyed him. It was unavoidable if anyone wanted to discuss India as more than a traveling parade of brand deals and batting averages. Eleven years without an ICC trophy sat over them no matter how carefully the BCCI arranged the lights, because two days ago a polite little message had gone around to the reputable outlets asking, in the smooth language of people who never threatened when suggestion would do, that everyone avoid “repetitive legacy narratives” if they wanted a cooperative working relationship throughout the tournament.

“Uzair.”

He blinked and turned toward Meera.

She was looking at him expectantly. “What did I just say?”

He leaned back in his chair. “Meeru, I need you to calm down.”

Her eyebrows rose.

“You’ve vetted my questions three times,” he said. “We need the Indian or Irish team to give us something in the room because they’re not stopping by for mix media after. The US and Canada captains are probably gone from our segment unless God or a deeply confused media officer intervenes. We’re pivoting to coaches. And I won’t run away, I promise.”

Meera stared at him.

He smiled.

“You listened,” she said.

“I always listen.”

“You absolutely do not.”

“I listen to the important parts.”

“One day,” she said, pointing the tablet at him, “I’m going to catch you not knowing what I was saying.”

Uzair laughed, too bright for the quiet room. Two reporters in the row ahead turned to look at him, one of them an older man from Lahore who had once tried to corner him into a forty-minute argument about strike rates at The Oval and now narrowed his eyes with an utter displeasure Uzair hoped would never grace his own face.

Meera closed her eyes. “Every day I ask God for patience,” she muttered, standing up. “Every day He sends me you instead.”

“Aw, Meeru, I love you too.”

“I’m going to check on Cal before I say something HR can use against me.”

Uzair watched her go, tablet tucked under one arm, press badge swinging against her blazer as she moved down the aisle toward the camera setup at the side of the room. Cal was crouched near one of the tripods, checking a cable with the calm focus of a man who could probably rewire the entire room using a shoelace and mild encouragement. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with his glasses pushed up on his head, his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, and the easy looseness of someone who had learned long ago that panic wasted time.

They had only been working together for a few days, but Uzair already trusted him in the way you learned to trust certain crew members because things stopped going wrong when they arrived. That morning in the car, while Meera answered emails in the front, Cal had shown Uzair photos from his daughter’s NYU graduation in May. His whole face had changed while he talked about it, softening as he described the ceremony, the hotel, the restaurant afterward, and the way his daughter had rolled her eyes when he cried.

Cal glanced up then and caught him looking. He lifted both thumbs with confidence, and Uzair raised a hand in a small wave.

Meera said something beside him that made Cal’s grin widen. The young photographer they had borrowed from American ESPN stood near them with a camera around his neck and the slightly haunted expression of someone who had already been given six contradictory instructions before breakfast.

Uzair turned back toward the front as a World Cup official stepped up near the long table holding a clipboard. “Good morning, everyone,” he said into the standing microphone. “Thank you for being here on time. We’ll begin shortly with the Group A pre-tournament press conference. As a reminder, each captain and head coach will take questions from the floor. Please identify yourself and your organization before asking your question. We’ll begin with general tournament questions, then move country by country as directed.”

A few reporters continued typing. Someone coughed. A chair scraped softly against the carpet.

“Because of the revised schedule, we’ll be keeping this session tight,” the official continued. “Please keep questions concise, and please avoid multi-part questions unless directed otherwise. We’ll have limited time for follow-ups. Mixed media access after the session will also be limited and handled by team media managers. Please do not approach players or coaches outside the designated areas.”

Uzair heard Meera’s voice in his head: Do not make that face when they say limited. You have a very obvious face.

He made his face less obvious.

“Photography will be allowed for the first few minutes as the captains and coaches take their seats,” the official said. “After that, we ask photographers to move to the side positions and keep the center aisle clear. Broadcast crews, please remain in your marked areas unless cleared by event staff.”

From the corner of Uzair’s eye, the young photographer looked like he was trying very hard to become part of the wall.

“We’ll bring them in now,” the official finished.

Uzair looked down at his notebook one more time, skimming the first question, checking the order he had marked, and dragging his thumb lightly over the corner of the page. He glanced at his phone, then put it facedown beside his thigh. His pen clicked once under his fingers.

The doors at the side opened.

The first few men entered in a loose file, media managers guiding them toward the table with practiced little gestures. Uzair recognized some of them immediately: a coach from Ireland he had interviewed in Dublin two years ago, Canada’s captain looking half-awake but pleasant, the USA coach already smiling with an easy charm. Pakistan’s captain came in with his head slightly bowed, speaking quietly to the man beside him, and Uzair felt the familiar pull of home.

Then Jaskirat Singh Rangi walked in.

Uzair meant to glance up and look back down to his notes. That was all. Instead, his eyes stopped.

Jaskirat was not the tallest man in the room. His listed height was five foot ten, which in cricket terms had somehow produced years of fan debates about whether he looked taller on television or whether everyone around him simply had poor posture. But that was not what Uzair meant. Jaskirat seemed tall in the way certain people did because the room adjusted around them.

He entered without rushing, without searching for attention, and received it anyway. His shoulders were relaxed beneath a navy India training jacket, the tournament badge bright against his chest. His hair was neatly cropped, his beard shaved clean enough to sharpen the line of his jaw. He looked rested, which Uzair knew was probably false, and composed, which was likely only partly true.

Uzair had known Jaskirat Singh Rangi was handsome. Of course he had. The man had hordes of female fans waging daily war online over which actress, singer, heiress, or entirely imaginary person he would eventually marry. There were fan pages dedicated to his smile, his cover drive, the way he adjusted his gloves, the way he stared down bowlers after being hit. There had been shampoo commercials, watch campaigns, and a cologne ad so hot Meera had once turned off the TV in the office kitchen and said, “Fuck all this pretense, just have him sell sex instead.”

Still, knowing a thing and understanding it were not the same.

In person, it was not only the sharpness of his features, or the clean line of his nose, the controlled mouth, or the easy athlete’s body under official fabric. It was the eyes. Pale green. Piercing. Startling against the warmth of his skin. They moved across the room as he approached the table with the quick assessment of someone used to being watched and determined to watch back.

Uzair forced himself to look away. He looked, with great discipline, at the shorter man walking behind him.

Kailash Nath. Bareilly’s very own. Former India captain in Test and ODI, head coach now, and the man who had led India to the 2002 Champions Trophy before finishing a career that had made even rival households fall reluctantly quiet when he came to the crease.

Rehman bhai had loved watching him, which was the truth. There had been many nights in Karachi when Rehman came home late from the shop, tired and dusty, only to sit in front of the television and talk about Kailash Nath like the man had been sent by Shaytan specifically to make Pakistan’s batsmen miserable. He said it with irritation, but admiration always sat underneath it.

Jaskirat took his seat at center left, and Nath settled beside him. Placards were adjusted. Microphones were nudged closer. Photographers moved in a brief, clicking wave before being directed back. Jaskirat leaned slightly toward Nath, listening as the older man said something under his breath, and whatever it was made the corner of Jaskirat’s mouth shift.

Uzair looked down at his notebook, the question Meera had warned him about sat quietly at the bottom of the page, waiting to ruin his life.

At the side of the room, the media official returned to the microphone. “Thank you, everyone,” he said. “We’ll begin with opening remarks, then take questions from the floor.”

Uzair uncapped his pen.

Across the room, Jaskirat Singh Rangi lifted his eyes toward the press.

The first few minutes passed the way these things always did. The moderator thanked everyone, remembered the sponsors with visible effort, and let the captains and coaches offer their opening remarks. Around Uzair, keyboards tapped, cameras clicked, and reporters raised hands before the previous answer had fully ended. The USA coach answered a question about playing at home, Ireland’s preparation became a tidy statement about adaptability, and Pakistan’s captain spoke about balancing youth and experience with the practiced patience of a man who had explained a rotating squad too many times already.

Uzair listened with half his attention, his eyes drifting back to his notebook. There was the usual question about fearless cricket and what that phrase meant when every T20 side claimed to play some version of it. There was the USA question, which he would save now that Meera had managed five private minutes with their coach. There were easy questions about Pakistan, but nothing that had not already been reported, clipped, and debated into exhaustion. His pen hovered over the page before returning, as if pulled by a magnet, to the question under India. The one everyone in the room had been very politely told to leave alone.

Uzair stood before he could talk himself out of it.

“Uzair Baloch, ESPN,” he said, his voice calmer than he felt. A few faces turned toward him. Near the camera setup, Meera went very still. “My question is for Mr. Rangi. India won the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007, but since the 2013 Champions Trophy, there’s been a long gap in ICC titles despite consistently entering tournaments as one of the strongest sides. As a first-time T20 World Cup captain, how do you approach that history? Is it pressure you try to keep away from the dressing room, or something this team has to confront directly?”

Jaskirat had been leaning back slightly, one hand resting near the microphone, his face set in the neutral attentiveness players wore when a camera could find them at any second. For a moment, nothing changed. Then his mouth flattened, his fingers stilled, and his pale green eyes sharpened before it disappeared again.

The typing ceased for half a second.

That was how Uzair knew they had all heard the same warning he had. Every reputable outlet in the room had received some version of it: avoid the repetitive legacy narrative, keep the focus forward. Yet there Uzair was, standing three rows back, treating the BCCI’s polite little warning like a suggestion.

Kailash Nath turned his head a fraction toward Jaskirat. One of the Indian media managers near the wall shifted her weight. The moderator leaned toward his microphone, already preparing to smooth the moment over, and for a breath it looked as if Jaskirat might let him.

Then Jaskirat reached for the microphone.

“No, I’ll answer,” he said.

Jaskirat adjusted the mic closer. When he spoke, his voice had settled into evenness. “I think it would be dishonest to say that history does not exist. Everyone in this team knows what Indian cricket means to people. We know what has been won before us, and what has not been won for some time. But pressure is only useful if you understand what to do with it.”

Keyboards and pens started moving again, fast now.

“We are not here to replay 2007,” Jaskirat continued. “That team had its own journey, its own courage. And we are not here to answer for every knockout match since 2013, because many of those teams played excellent cricket and lost fine margins. That is tournament sport. What we can do is be honest about the expectation, respect it, and bring our attention back to the next ball, the next session, the next game. In T20, if you spend too much time staring at the weight of history, the match has already moved on without you.”

He paused, just long enough to make the answer feel unrehearsed.

“So yes, we confront it,” he said. “But not as a burden we drag into the dressing room. We confront it by preparing properly, playing brave cricket, and accepting that this shirt comes with noise.”

Uzair felt, with a strange professional clarity, that every broadcast editor in the room had just found their clip.

“Thank you,” he said.

Jaskirat gave the smallest nod.

Uzair sat back down, aware of Meera’s eyes on him before she even leaned in.

“I think,” she murmured, barely moving her mouth, “we have our clip and your headline.”

Uzair should have smiled. He did not.

He had seen captains answer questions like that all over the world, and most of them revealed themselves in the first few seconds after impact. Arrogance made an answer brittle. Too much humility made it collapse under its own weight. Polished media training could carry a man for a sentence or two before the emptiness showed. Jaskirat had come dangerously close to giving himself away when the question landed, close enough that Uzair had seen the fracture, but then he gathered the pieces so cleanly it was almost more impressive than if he had never faltered at all.

Across the room, Jaskirat was already listening to the next question, face calm, posture easy, every inch the captain again.

The rest of the press conference moved on as if Uzair had not briefly turned the room into a held breath.

Another reporter asked Ireland about their middle order. Someone from a Canadian outlet asked about preparation facilities. Pakistan’s coach gave a careful answer about combinations, which meant nothing and would still become three headlines by evening. Jaskirat answered one more question about conditions with the calm of a man who had never once been caught off guard in his life, and Uzair did not look at him too long after that.

By the time they were released into mixed media, the room had broken into its usual controlled scramble. Reporters shifted toward players before handlers could redirect them. Camera operators adjusted positions with the quiet urgency and team media managers smiled with all teeth and no mercy.

Uzair did well.

That was the thing. For all Meera’s threats about patience and HR violations, the schedule changes and BCCI warnings and America’s confused relationship with cricket logistics, he did well. He got five clean minutes with the USA coach about playing a home World Cup without quite having a home cricket culture. He got Canada’s coach to speak warmly and usefully about associate teams needing opportunity instead of novelty treatment. He even managed to catch Pakistan’s captain in the mixed media zone for a quick this-or-that reel, which was mostly harmless except for the part where the man chose biryani over nihari and immediately looked like he knew he had made the wrong decision.

All things considered, Uzair felt like he had made full use of the morning.

Meera did not even look furious when he last saw her, which, given that her resting professional state hovered somewhere near slightly pissed off at him, felt like praise.

Then he lost her. One second she had been beside Cal, giving instructions to the photographer, whose actual name Uzair had still not learned, which still felt a little too rude, even for him. The next, a wave of staffers and media people had moved between them, and Meera had vanished without a trace.

His phone buzzed a minute later.

Press lounge. Same room from before conference. Regroup in ten.

He looked around the corridor he had ended up in, then toward the doorway at the end, then back at his phone as if the screen might develop compassion and show him a map. The convention area had too many identical walls, too many temporary signs taped at angles that suggested even the building had given up. He found a young event staffer wearing a tournament lanyard and asked for the press lounge.

The staffer pointed left. “Down there, then right after the sponsor wall. Not the first right. Second right. Then through the double doors.”

Uzair nodded with confidence he did not possess. “Perfect. Thank you.”

It was not perfect. He took the first right. Realized that was wrong. Turned back.

Took what he believed was the second right, only to find himself in a quieter corridor where the noise of the mixed media zone fell behind him in layers. The carpet changed from black to a dull beige. The sponsor signs disappeared. Someone had left a crate of water bottles against the wall and half-opened a door to what looked like a storage room.

He stopped. “Wonderful,” he muttered.

His phone was in his hand, ready to surrender to Meera’s inevitable abuse, when he heard a voice around the corner.

“Ma, please. Bas. Not now.”

Uzair slowed.

He should have turned around immediately. That was the professional thing and what he would absolutely tell someone else to do if they stumbled onto a player’s private call in a back corridor after a press event.

Instead, his feet carried him one more step before his brain caught up.

Jaskirat stood halfway down the adjoining hall, near a narrow alcove between two service doors. He had one shoulder against the wall, phone pressed to his ear, head tipped back. Without the table in front of him, without the cameras demanding stillness, the cutting edge from the press conference was gone. He was still broad-shouldered, still unmistakably himself, but softer somehow. Younger. His training jacket was unzipped at the throat, one hand pushed into the pocket of his trousers, the other dragging through his neatly cropped hair until it no longer looked quite so neat.

“Ma,” he said again, and there it was, unmistakable now. A whine. Not childish exactly, but close enough that Uzair had to press his lips together.

Jaskirat Singh Rangi, captain of India, national icon, destroyer of bowling attacks, was apparently capable of sounding like a boy trying to get out of trouble.

“No, I’m not being dramatic,” Jaskirat said, pacing two steps and turning back. “You’re being dramatic. I said we will talk after the World Cup, and now you’re saying after the World Cup means immediately after our last match. Main eh nahi keha.”

Uzair should have moved. He knew that.

Instead, some terrible combination of curiosity, shock, and his own lifelong inability to make a normal exit kept him frozen half behind the corner.

Jaskirat listened, eyes closing briefly. “Simran is very nice,” he said, in the tone of a man who had said this many times and survived none of them. “I’m sure she is. I’m not saying anything bad about her. I’m saying I’m not going to marry Simran after the World Cup.”

A pause.

Then, more strained, “I’m not going to marry anyone after the World Cup.”

Uzair’s amusement thinned.

Jaskirat pushed his hand through his hair again, harder this time, ruining the careful shape of it. “Ma, you can’t keep doing this. Every time we call, you and Dad decide it means there’s enough time to plan my whole life.”

Whatever his mother said made his jaw tighten.

“No,” he said, softer. “There isn’t anyone.”

Uzair stopped breathing for a second.

Jaskirat turned slightly, showing more of his face. The controlled captain from the press room had been replaced by a man fighting to keep his voice low. There was affection there, yes, and exhaustion, and the particular helplessness of an adult reduced to pleading.

“Ma, if there was someone, I would tell you,” he said.

Another pause, his expression flickered. “No, I don’t mean—” He stopped, swallowed, and tried again. “I’m just saying you have to understand I don’t want this right now.”

Uzair knew that line.

He had said versions of it to Ulfat bhabi so often the words might as well have been stitched into his tongue. Not right now. Work is too busy. I’m traveling too much. It would not be fair to anyone. Who would marry a man who lives out of suitcases? He had said it with humor to Ulfat and, before the silence, with sharper impatience to Rehman. He had built whole walls out of practical excuses to avoid confessions.

On the phone, Jaskirat’s mother said something Uzair could not hear, but he could guess from the way Jaskirat’s face pinched.

“I know I’m past thirty,” Jaskirat said. “Thank you. I had forgotten, actually. Good thing everyone keeps reminding me.”

Despite himself, Uzair almost smiled.

Then Jaskirat’s mouth twisted.

“No, Ma. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying never. I’m saying not now.”

Another pause. Longer.

His voice dropped. “Please don’t cry.”

No, he thought. No, he was projecting. There was no way Jaskirat Singh Rangi, the man an entire country had made into its clean-jawed fantasy of masculine certainty, was standing in a tournament hallway giving the same evasive answers Uzair had been giving his family for years. This was ridiculous. Plenty of men did not want arranged marriage pressure. Plenty of famous athletes avoided commitment because marriage complicated branding, scheduling, privacy, ego, whatever else lived in the machinery of fame. Not every refusal was a secret.

And yet.

Uzair knew better than most that the world’s idea of manliness had very little to do with who a man wanted when the lights went out. People had looked at him for years and missed it completely. His colleagues saw the presenter who could charm entire rooms for a living. Ulfat could read his hunger, exhaustion, and sadness from one badly angled FaceTime call and still never found her way to that truth. Even Rehman had only known once Uzair had been foolish or tired or honest enough to let it reach him.

Jaskirat rubbed a hand over his face. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter.

“Ma, listen to me. There isn’t a girl. There isn’t anyone you can call or meet or approve. I just need you to let this go for now.”

The silence after that was heavy enough for Uzair to feel it from several feet away, and then Jaskirat turned his head.

His eyes found Uzair.

For one terrible second, neither of them moved. Jaskirat’s hand stayed at his ear, phone pressed against his skin, while Uzair stood half in the open, suddenly aware of every visible part of himself. The press badge around his neck. The notebook in his hand. The fact that he had no believable reason to be there.

Jaskirat’s face changed, and Uzair knew that look before he could even name it. The sudden shuttering of the eyes, the mouth going still, the body locking down because panic had arrived too quickly to be shown. He had seen it in mirrors after Rehman looked at him like the person in front of him was someone he no longer knew.

“Ma,” Jaskirat said slowly, still looking at Uzair. “I have to go.”

Uzair could hear his own pulse.

“Yes. I’ll call later.” A pause. “I said later. Please. Okay. Bye.”

He lowered the phone.

The hallway seemed too narrow now.

Uzair realized, with rapidly dawning horror, exactly how bad this looked. If he was right about what he had just walked in on, then he was not simply a journalist who had overheard a private family argument. He was a member of the press who had already proved, in front of an entire room, that BCCI restrictions did not particularly move him. He had stumbled onto a conversation full of implied meanings, the sort someone like Uzair could read into.

He needed to disarm this. Walking away would be worse, an admission that he had heard enough to matter. Uzair’s mind, used to producing coherent questions on deadline, offered him one solution.

He reached into the inside pocket of his blazer, pulled out his notebook, and flipped it open so quickly the pages bent under his thumb. Jaskirat watched him in silence as Uzair found a blank page, tore it out badly, and stepped forward with what he hoped was a harmless expression. It was probably, in reality, the face of a man committing a social crime.

“Sorry,” Uzair said, holding out the paper. “My nephew asked me to get your autograph.” He laughed once, awkwardly enough that he wanted to leave his own body. “Big fan. Very serious about cricket. He thinks your sixes are better than Babar Azam’s, which has caused some controversy back home.”

Jaskirat stared at the paper, then at him. “You’re asking for my autograph?”

“For my nephew,” Uzair said quickly. Too quickly, probably. “I was trying to find the press lounge, then I saw you, and I thought I should ask here rather than in some crowded stadium.”

As lies went, it was not his worst. It had the benefit of being mostly true, if one ignored the part where he had not so much seen Jaskirat as accidentally wandered into the emotional blast radius of his family life. Uzair kept the paper held out between them and tried to look like a normal journalist fulfilling a sweet request for a child, not a man silently begging the Indian captain to accept this offering and let them both escape the hallway with whatever dignity remained.

For another second, Jaskirat only looked at him. Then amusement moved faintly across his face, just enough for Uzair to notice.

“The same journalist who just asked me about eleven years of India’s failure wants my signature?”

Uzair blinked. “Again, it’s for my nephew.”

Jaskirat’s expression eased by a fraction, and Uzair felt a small, humiliating wave of relief. Good. Excellent. He was buying it. Or at least willing to pretend he was buying it, which Uzair would absolutely accept at this stage of his professional and moral decline.

Then the public self slid back into place.

“Fine,” Jaskirat said, taking the page and pen from him without letting their fingers touch. He turned slightly, using the wall as a surface. “Name?”

“Naieem,” Uzair said. “N-A-I-E-E-M.”

Jaskirat began writing, and Uzair heard himself keep talking. “He really does like your batting. I mean, he likes cricket generally, but with you he’s become very opinionated. Watches clips on a tablet and then explains strike rotation to all his friends. He won a hundred-meter dash recently, so now we all have to behave like the Olympics are calling.”

“That is good,” Jaskirat said, his pen moving across the page.

“Yes. Very fast child. Terrible at maths, but fast.”

The corner of Jaskirat’s mouth moved again, and Uzair held onto that. “He’ll be unbearable when he gets this,” he added. “So thank you in advance for making me seem a little bit cooler in front of my nephew.”

Jaskirat finished the autograph but did not hand it over immediately. He looked at the page first, then at Uzair, his voice calm, “You’re a good journalist, Mr. Baloch.”

Uzair went still.

“Your question earlier was needed,” Jaskirat continued. “People may not like it, but it was needed.” The formal address sat between them with careful purpose. “I appreciate genuine journalism. I hope I can trust it enough to know that the conversation you just heard will not become part of the same story.”

Uzair felt the humor leave his face. “You can.” He added, quieter this time. “I won’t say a thing,”

For the first time since the phone call ended, Jaskirat’s expression softened before he could stop it, the careful control giving way to a rawness. He held out the paper, and Uzair reached for it.

Their hands touched, not even for a full second. Just Jaskirat’s fingers brushing his as the autograph passed between them. It should have been nothing, the kind of accidental contact that happened a dozen times a day in crowded corridors, but Uzair had already thought him into a shape: captain, star, nation’s favorite son, a man polished into myth by cameras and family expectations and his own discipline.

The touch betrayed that version of him. Jaskirat’s fingers were warm, and for the smallest moment, they did not pull away as quickly as they should have. It was hesitation, maybe. Surprise. Maybe only Uzair imagining meaning because he had walked into a private wound and wanted recognition for softening the damage. Still, something passed through that brief contact that did not belong an interaction between a journalist and a sportsman.

Uzair took the paper. “Thank you.”

Jaskirat nodded once, smaller and wearier than the controlled little acknowledgment he had given after the press conference question.

Uzair looked away first. He folded the autograph carefully, slipped it into his notebook, and stepped back. “I should find the press lounge.”

An almost smile touched Jaskirat’s face. “You are going the wrong way.”

Uzair closed his eyes for half a second. “Of course I am.”

“Left at the end,” Jaskirat said. “Then straight.”

“Left as in your left or my left?”

“Just regular left, Mr. Baloch.”

Uzair opened his eyes, and Jaskirat looked almost amused now.

“Left,” Uzair repeated. “Then straight.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

He turned before he could say anything worse, walked down the hallway with as much dignity as a man lost in a media center could manage, and made the left at the end without looking back. Only when he turned the corner did he exhale.

His phone rang immediately.

Uzair answered. “Hello.”

“Where the hell are you?” Meera demanded.

He looked down at the folded piece of paper tucked between the pages of his notebook, then back at the empty corridor ahead of him.