The neighbourhood hadn't changed.
That was the first thing Vikram noticed as the auto rickshaw rattled down the familiar lane at half past six in the evening. The same broken stretch of road near the turning that the municipality had been promising to fix since before he left — still broken, still ignored. The old Peepal tree at the corner still leaning at that stubborn angle like it was daring the Jharkhand wind to try harder. Old Mahto ji next door had finally repainted his boundary wall. Yellow. Vikram had always thought it would look better yellow.
Five years.
He'd crossed four active conflict zones, stood in rooms where the air tasted like copper and burning plastic, slept in open terrain with one eye on the treeline for months without rest. He had been shot, buried under rubble, driven over roads that weren't roads through countries that barely existed on maps anymore. He had shaken hands with generals and warlords and ministers who all wore the same hollowed eyes underneath different uniforms.
And yet nothing — nothing — had disoriented him quite like how ordinary this lane looked.
The evening light of Ranchi fell the way it always did in October — gold and unhurried, catching the dust in the air and turning it into something almost beautiful. Somewhere nearby someone was frying onions. A pressure cooker whistled two houses down. Children were playing cricket in the small ground at the end of the lane, arguing loudly about whether a shot had been a six or a catch.
Like the world had simply waited for him.
Bilkul nahi badla, he thought. Not one bit.
The auto stopped at the gate.
Vikram sat for a moment longer than necessary. Through the bars he could see the house — warm light pressing through the curtains of the sitting room. The tulsi plant by the front step in its familiar clay pot, slightly overgrown, which meant nobody had trimmed it while he was gone. A pair of small chappals lying sideways on the path to the door — pink, scuffed at the toes, one still wobbling faintly as though recently abandoned.
He exhaled.
I'm home.
He paid the auto driver, pulled his single worn duffel from the seat — a man who had spent five years in the field learned to travel light — and pushed the gate open.
He was three steps up the path when the front door burst open.
"Papa!"
He had exactly zero time to prepare before something small and unstoppable collided with his chest at full speed.
Vikram staggered — actually staggered — which was something no enemy combatant had ever managed. Small arms locked around his neck with a grip that would have earned respect from his old unit. He caught her on instinct, one arm sweeping under her, his duffel dropping forgotten to the ground.
"Aagaye aagaye aap aagaye—"
"Aa gaya," he said. His voice came out rougher than he intended. He cleared his throat. "Aa gaya, Sia."
She pulled back just far enough to look at him — eight years old, her mother's large eyes, his stubborn jaw, an expression of furious joy that was far too enormous for her small face. She grabbed his cheeks with both hands and squeezed without mercy.
"You look old," she announced.
"Thank you."
"Like really old, Papa—"
"Very kind of you."
"—Mummy said I shouldn't say it but—"
"Your mother is a wise woman."
"—you have grey here now—" she poked his temple "—and here—" she attacked his beard "—and your eyes look tired, like how my teacher looks every Monday except you look like that all the time probably—"
Vikram looked over her head.
His wife was standing in the doorway.
She hadn't come down the steps. Just standing there with her arms loosely crossed and that expression — the one she'd never needed to explain in twenty years of marriage. The one that said you stubborn foolish man, you actually came back.
"She woke up at five this morning," his wife said. "Five, Vikram."
"I had to prepare," Sia said, with enormous dignity, from her position still wrapped around his neck.
"You reorganised the entire kitchen."
"I improved it."
"The dals are where the mugs should be."
"Aesthetically improved it."
Vikram's face did something it hadn't done in a long time. It took him a moment to identify the sensation.
He was smiling.
He walked to the doorway. His wife uncrossed her arms. He pulled her in with his free arm — Sia happily squished between them, completely unbothered, narrating something about the neighbour's dog — and stood there on the front step of his house in the gold October light of Ranchi and said nothing at all.
Because nothing needed saying.
Five years.
He was home.
Dinner was supposed to be simple.
His wife had made his favourite — she never admitted to planning these things but the evidence was always overwhelming — and Sia had appointed herself official assistant, which in practice meant sitting on the kitchen counter narrating the complete history of the last five years at a velocity that suggested she had been saving it all up specifically for this moment.
"—and my coach said I have the fastest kick in the whole under-10 batch which I already knew obviously—"
"Obviously," Vikram agreed, arranging plates on the dining table.
"—and Kavya didi came to watch once but she kept critiquing my form in front of everyone which was embarrassing but she was also right which was even more embarrassing—"
Vikram glanced toward the kitchen doorway. "Kavya nahi aayi?"
His wife looked up briefly from the stove. "Training camp. Nationals are in six weeks." A small pause. A quieter smile. "She didn't want to miss your return. I told her you'd understand."
He would. He did.
That was exactly who Kavya was — the kind of person who showed up to everything and never let showing up become an excuse to fall behind. He had watched her build that quality in herself since she was twelve years old, stubbornly, without anyone asking her to. He was proud of her in a way he'd never quite found the right words for.
He'd tell her when she came home.
He set the last bowl on the table.
"—and also," Sia continued, completely undeterred, "I am personally convinced that Sharma uncle's cat is a spy because it watches our house too much and I have been keeping notes in a notebook—"
"You've been keeping notes."
"Documented evidence, Papa. I am not unreasonable."
His wife caught his eye across the kitchen counter. Mouthed something that looked suspiciously like bilkul tum par gayi hai.
Vikram opened his mouth to contest that firmly.
The window above the dining table exploded inward.
Glass sprayed across the tablecloth in a glittering arc and Vikram's body recognised the shape of the thing tumbling through the air before his mind had finished processing it — the cylindrical weight, the tail fins, the specific geometry of something that had no business being inside a home—
RPG.
He turned. Half a second. Not enough.
The world became white light and a pressure that wasn't sound but lived where sound should be and then—
Silence.
Not peaceful silence.
The kind that rings.
Vikram was on his back. He did not remember falling. The ceiling above him was wrong — a ragged hole torn open to the darkening Ranchi sky, edges smoking and black. Debris pressed into his spine. He couldn't identify it and didn't try.
His ears were screaming at a frequency that felt like it was inside his skull rather than outside it.
Utho.
He tried his right arm. It moved. Slowly. Everything felt underwater — distant, muffled, happening to someone slightly beside him.
Utho. Abhi.
He rolled. Got one knee under himself. The world tilted badly and he caught himself on his palm against the floor — hot rubble, something sharp, he registered neither — and waited one breath for the horizon to steady.
The dining room was unrecognisable.
The table was gone in any practical sense. The food, the plates, the careful ordinary warmth of twenty minutes ago — shredded and burning in scattered pieces across the floor. Smoke moved thick and purposeful toward the hole in the ceiling. One curtain was still hanging, half-aflame, swaying in the evening air coming through the destroyed window.
He crawled.
His legs were not cooperating yet so he crawled, pulling himself forward through the debris, past something that had been a chair, past fragments of things he half-recognised — a steel katori, a dupatta, the edge of a photograph frame with the photograph gone.
He found his wife near the far wall.
The world became very quiet then. Quieter than the ringing. Quieter than the smoke and the crackling of things burning.
He gathered her toward him. Sat with her for a moment he would never be able to measure — not in seconds, not in anything. His hand found her face. His throat sealed completely shut.
Sia.
He turned. Searched. Called her name — he felt the shape of it leaving his throat but heard nothing through the ringing.
He moved through the burning wreckage on his hands and knees, lifting debris, pushing aside smouldering fragments. The kitchen doorway. The overturned counter. The spot near the kitchen entrance where she had been sitting just minutes ago telling him she was not unreasonable.
No small body.
No sound.
Nothing.
Until his fingers closed around something on the floor near the base of the wall.
He already knew before he opened his hand.
Pink elastic. A small white daisy threaded carefully through it. He had seen it in her hair when she came flying through the front door and hit him like a force of nature. He had felt it against his cheek when she grabbed his face with both hands and told him he looked old.
Vikram sat in the burning wreckage of his home with debris in his hair and blood on his hands and stared at a small pink hairband in his palm.
And something in him — something that had endured wars and wounds and twenty years of things that should have broken him — came completely, silently undone.
A kilometre down the road, a cab door opened.
A girl stepped out, phone already in hand, a training bag over one shoulder.
She smelled the smoke before she saw it — thick and dark, rising against the evening sky in the direction of—
Her bag hit the ground.
Kavya ran.
END OF CHAPTER 1