Prologue: Pune Junction

The megaphone was Arthur Uncle's idea.

Kiran Patil was standing at the top of the escalator at Pune Junction railway station, her duffel bag cutting into her shoulder, her phone buzzing in her hand, and her heart doing that stupid thing it does when you've made a decision you know is wrong but you're too proud to unmake it. The Deccan Queen to Mumbai was delayed by twelve minutes — Indian Railways' gift to people who need extra time to reconsider their life choices.

She could hear the chaos below. Platform 1 was its usual cathedral of noise — vendors selling vada pav and cutting chai, families with more luggage than sense, a child crying with the particular determination of someone who has been told "no" and refuses to accept the ruling. The departure board flickered: MUMBAI CSMT — 17:10 — DELAYED — 17:22.

Twelve minutes. Twelve minutes to get on a train and leave Pune and start over in Mumbai, where nobody knew her as Kiran-who-dropped-out or Kiran-who-works-at-the-market or Kiran-whose-mother-left. Mumbai didn't care about your past. Mumbai only cared about whether you could survive its rent.

Her phone buzzed again. Ria.

She swiped to answer. "I'm not on the train yet. It's delayed."

"Don't get on it." Ria's voice was doing that thing where it tried to be calm but was actually vibrating with the frequency of someone who has news that cannot be contained. "Omkar's on his way. He's coming for you. He asked me to give you this message —"

But Kiran didn't hear the message. Something else drowned it out.

It came through a megaphone — the old kind, the dented brass one that Arun Uncle kept in his shop for no reason anyone had ever understood until this exact moment. The voice was unmistakable. Deep, slightly hoarse, with that particular quality that educated Pune boys have when they're trying to sound casual but are actually terrified.

"KIRAN. KIRAN PATIL. RUKO. MAIN AA RAHA HOON."

Wait. I'm coming.

She scanned the station. Past the ticket counters. Past the magazine stall. Past the family of six trying to fit through a single turnstile. And there — pressed against the barrier, megaphone in hand, hair a mess, shirt untucked, looking like a man who had sprinted from Koregaon Park to Pune Junction on foot — was Omkar Kulkarni.

Behind him, like a Greek chorus in salwar kameez, stood Neeta Aunty, Gauri, and Lata — whistling, clapping, and making enough noise to qualify as a public disturbance.

"MUJHE TUJHSE PYAAR HAI, KIRAN PATIL," he shouted into the megaphone, and the entire station — every chai-wallah, every coolie, every aunty with a tiffin box — turned to look. "PLEASE. WAPAS AA."

I love you. Please. Come back.

Someone let him through the barrier. The cheering got louder. A group of college boys started filming on their phones. An elderly gentleman in a Gandhi topi applauded. A chai-wallah raised his steel cup in salute.

So fucking embarrassing. She was so going to kill him.

And then she ran. She ran, as fast as that stupidly heavy duffel bag would allow, into the arms of Omkar Kulkarni — the chai-cart wallah, the book nerd, the man who had looked at Kiran Patil and seen not a dropout or a market girl or a daughter whose mother left, but a woman worth chasing through a railway station with a borrowed megaphone and zero dignity.

But that's the end of the story. Let me take you back to the beginning. To a December evening in Pune, when Kiran rang the doorbell of her father's house and everything that followed — the books, the chai, the fights, the falling — began with a single, furious thought:

Fucking men. All the fucking same.