“Ananya walked out of the building into Gurugram. The evening. The smog was there — it was always there, the permanent, grey, particulate-matter companion of every Gurugram evening — but the sky above the smog, if you looked up, which most people in Gurugram did not because looking up in Gurugram showed you construction cranes and half-built towers and the specific, unfinished, always-becoming skyline of a city that was a metaphor for every person who had ever been in progress — the sky above the smog was orange. Sunset. The kind of sunset that Gurugram produced accidentally, the pollutants scattering the light into colours that clean air could not produce, the beautiful byproduct of a damaged atmosphere.”