They locked the flat at half past eleven.
Patna in the late morning was glare and dust and horns. An auto to the maidan side, then walking because Puja said their legs needed to remember they were for streets, not only for a mattress. Fraser Road traffic. A stall. Sugarcane juice Raja bought because his hands needed a job. Vivek drank too fast and coughed. Sanjay actually tasted his.
Puja walked ahead, restless, alive, a plain shirt over the body they had wrecked, looking back only to say, “Bhaiya, if you brood in public I will pinch you.”
She pinched him anyway.
They cut across Gandhi Maidan because that was the meeting point she had chosen—open, ordinary, full of other people’s lives. Families. Vendors. A kite failing in the sky. The museum dome far across the field.
They saw them under the tree before the benches were even close.
Sonam lifted a hand. Akriti took off her sunglasses. Puja did not slow down. She walked straight in and the hug happened in a tangle—Puja, Sonam, Akriti first, tight, the kind of hug that had years in it.
Then the boys.
Sonam went to Raja without thinking, the way you go to someone who used to wait outside your tuition. Raja’s arms came up late and careful. She still called it into his shoulder, automatic:
“Hi, Bhaiya.”
Akriti hugged Vivek harder than Vivek was ready for. She thumped his back once, like a warning and a welcome.
“You look older. It’s annoying.”
“You look the same,” Vivek said, and then did not know what to do with his hands.
Sanjay got Puja last, though Puja had already hugged the girls. She stepped into him in front of everybody, chin bumping his collarbone.
“Bhaiya. You walked like your feet hurt.”
“I’m fine.”
“Liar.”
Six people. Three pairs that the field already understood: Sanjay and Puja, Vivek and Akriti, Raja and Sonam. Younger sisters. Older brothers. The words sat on the air before anyone had to explain them.
They walked.
Gandhi Maidan in late morning was dust, vendors, a kite stuck in a tree, a child running after nothing. They drifted along the inner path in a loose clump, not a parade.
Sonam bumped Raja’s arm with her bottle.
“Bhaiya, when is your office closed for Diwali.”
“Twenty-third I can leave. Train is the problem.”
“Same,” Sanjay said. “If we don’t book this week we’ll be standing in the aisle with thalis on our heads.”
Akriti looked at Vivek.
“You still coming home or is the job eating you.”
“I’m coming. I have to see if the house still has my name on a cupboard.”
“It does. Mummy uses it for pickles. You’re not winning that fight.”
Puja laughed, light, too light. Sanjay heard the extra brightness and filed it.
Sonam talked about internals, a paper she had already written twice in her head, a professor who hated late PDFs. Akriti had a practical and a train she had not booked either. The boys asked the questions men ask when they left college and still feel guilty about it.
Raja: “Exam date, Sonam. Don’t say ‘soon’ like that’s a calendar.”
“Eighteenth. Then I’m free until the next disaster.”
“Sleep. Eat. Don’t live on chai.”
