Alright, I'll start Ch. 1 — "Chennai Nights" — with the tone, pacing, and
The heat never really left Chennai, even after sunset. It just stopped being an oven and became a sauna. Arjun stepped out of the bus, tugging his faded backpack higher on his shoulder. His office shirt stuck to his back; the fabric had given up the fight hours ago.
Besant Nagar still buzzed despite the late hour — the sound of scooters whining through traffic, chai vendors clanging steel tumblers, the salty tang of Marina Beach's breeze crawling inland. Neon boards flickered in Tamil and English, each one screaming louder than the other: "A1 PAROTTA KADAI," "SUPER STAR MOBILES," "ARUN ICECREAMS."
Thirty-two years on this planet and his Friday nights still looked like this — walking home alone past the same streets, dodging the same potholes, thinking about the same things.
Namely: how the hell he still didn't have a girlfriend.
It wasn't like he was a monk. He had friends. He wasn't bad looking, if the occasional auntie's matchmaking attempts were to be believed. But somehow, romance had been the one department life never bothered to send him an appointment letter for.
"Maybe I should put it on my resume," he muttered, weaving between two parked autos. "Skills: Microsoft Excel, mild sarcasm, chronic singledom."
The street was crowded with the after-dinner rush. Families eating ice cream under flickering streetlights, students sipping bubble tea like it was liquid gold, a couple in their twenties sharing headphones. He looked away.
Arjun's escape from thinking too much was usually cinema. His flat in Thiruvanmiyur had a TV, a cheap soundbar, and a hard drive crammed with everything from Rajinikanth's swagger to Christopher Nolan's convoluted timelines. He loved the antiheroes — the men who didn't fit into neat little boxes of "good" or "evil." Yash in KGF. Prabhas in Salaar. Kamal Haasan's Vikram. They made choices without caring about anyone's morality checklist.
And on bad days, he liked to imagine he was one of them.
A scooter zipped past so close it almost shaved off his elbow. He cursed in Tamil and kept walking. The breeze from the coast carried the smell of roasting corn and fried bajji. Somewhere down the road, a drummer group was performing for Ganesha Chaturthi celebrations, the beats deep and urgent.
Then something caught his eye.
Above the buildings, the sky was… wrong.
It wasn't the regular Chennai light pollution haze. This was a slow ripple, like heat waves over asphalt, except it was green and blue, shimmering in ribbons. It stretched across the horizon toward the beach, pulsing faintly.
He stopped in the middle of the pavement, nearly getting bumped by a man carrying sugarcane juice crates.
"What the hell…"
People noticed it too. Phones went up. Someone shouted to their friend in Tamil about aurora borealis.
Arjun had never seen the real thing except in travel shows. This wasn't it. This was sharper, unnatural, like the sky was a giant sheet of glass and someone had cracked it from the other side.
A pulse of pressure hit his chest. It wasn't wind. It was inside him, in his bones. His vision swam.
Somewhere in the back of his head, a completely inappropriate line surfaced — from The Dark Knight:
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
"Figures," he thought weakly, "I don't even have a love story, and I'm already jumping to the third act."
The lights twisted, spiraled, and in one blinding flash, the street disappeared.