“It was after 10 PM when Rahul left. The lane from Suresh's house to the main road was narrow — barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast, flanked on both sides by the back walls of residential buildings, the kind of lane that exists in every Indian housing colony: too narrow for cars, too dark for comfort, too familiar for fear. Rahul had walked this lane a hundred times. He knew every pothole, every jutting brick, every point where the single functioning streetlight created a pool of yellow and the rest was shadow.”