Chapter 12: Suryansh

# Chapter 12: Suryansh

## The Jaipur Story

The nightmare came on a Tuesday, as it usually did.

Not every Tuesday. Not on a schedule. But with a frequency that his mind tracked even when his conscious self refused to — once every ten to fourteen days, arriving between 0200 and 0300, the hour when the body's defences were lowest and memory had unrestricted access to the rooms you kept locked.

He was back in the Jaipur old city. The street was narrow — four feet wide, flanked by sandstone walls that rose three storeys, the ancient haveli district where families had lived for generations in houses that were older than the country. The riot had started at the vegetable market — something about a rumour, a WhatsApp forward, the particular alchemy of heat and unemployment and religious tension that could turn a weekday afternoon into a war zone.

His unit had been deployed at 1400 hours. Twelve men, lathis, tear gas, the standard riot-control kit that was designed for crowd dispersal and was approximately as useful as an umbrella in a cyclone when the crowd had decided that dispersal was not on the agenda.

The street. The narrow street. A boy — fifteen, maybe sixteen — running toward them with a brick in his hand and terror in his eyes. The terror of someone who was in too deep to get out, who had been swept up in something larger than himself and was now performing a role that had been assigned by the mob's momentum rather than his own choice.

Suryansh had stepped forward. Standard procedure: voice command, warning, escalation protocol. "Ruk. STOP." The boy hadn't stopped. The brick had left his hand. And then —

He woke up. The ceiling of his Coonoor room. The faint yellow glow of Bahadur's kennel light through the window. The smell of eucalyptus. The sound of his own breathing, rapid and shallow, the body still processing the chemicals that the dream had released.

He lay still. Counted backwards from one hundred. A technique the army psychologist had taught him — not because counting did anything physiological, but because it gave the conscious mind a task, a ladder to climb out of the pit that the unconscious had dug.

Seventy-three. Seventy-two. Seventy-one.

The boy's name was Imran. Suryansh knew this because the FIR had recorded it. Imran Ahmed, age sixteen, Class 11, Government Senior Secondary School, Jaipur. Son of a vegetable vendor. No criminal record. No political affiliations. Just a boy on a Tuesday afternoon who had been in the wrong street at the wrong time with a brick in his hand.

The brick had hit Suryansh's shoulder. The pain had been secondary — armour absorbed most of it. What happened next was the part that the nightmare replayed with forensic precision.

Suryansh had tackled the boy. Standard takedown. But the street was narrow and the crowd behind them was pressing forward and someone — he never identified who — had thrown a glass bottle that shattered against the wall next to his head. The glass hit Imran. A shard, three inches long, entered the boy's left arm above the elbow.

Blood. More blood than made sense for a three-inch wound, but the glass had nicked the brachial artery, and arterial blood doesn't seep — it pulses. Suryansh had applied pressure. Had shouted for the medic. Had held a sixteen-year-old boy's arm while the boy screamed and the crowd roared and the narrow street smelled of tear gas and blood and the particular acrid stench of a situation that had lost all its boundaries.

Imran survived. The artery was repaired at SMS Hospital. He was discharged in four days. The FIR was filed, processed, and buried in the system with the efficiency that Jaipur's courts applied to riot cases — which is to say, it would surface again in approximately 2034, by which time everyone involved would have forgotten the details or died.

But Suryansh had been in the hospital too. Not for the shoulder — for the leg. In the chaos after Imran's injury, a second wave of the crowd had surged forward. Suryansh had been knocked down. Someone had stomped on his left leg — he never saw who — and the femur had cracked with a sound he would hear for the rest of his life. A wet, decisive snap, like a green branch breaking.

Three weeks in the hospital. A titanium rod. A psych evaluation that he had passed by the simple strategy of answering every question with the calm, measured responses that the evaluator was clearly looking for, rather than the truth, which was that he replayed the narrow street every fourteen days and could not look at a glass bottle without his pulse rate increasing.

The transfer to Coonoor had been framed as operational — the K9 posting, the smuggling situation, the need for a specialist. But Suryansh understood institutional language well enough to read the subtext: We're moving you somewhere quiet before you become a liability.

Fifty-four. Fifty-three. Fifty-two.

He sat up. The clock on his phone showed 0303. Sleep would not return — it never did after the nightmare. He put on a sweatshirt and his running shoes and stepped onto the verandah.

The Coonoor night was vast and cold and indifferent to his pain. The stars were extraordinary — more visible here than anywhere he had been, including the Rajasthan desert, because the air was clean and the light pollution was negligible and the altitude put you closer to the sky by two thousand metres. The Milky Way stretched overhead like a river of light, and Suryansh stood on his verandah and looked at it and breathed.

Bahadur heard him from the kennel and gave a single, low whine — not alarm, but inquiry. Are you okay? Do you need me?

"I'm fine, bhai," Suryansh said softly. "Go back to sleep."

A sound from next door. The creak of a window opening. Swathi's face appeared — sleep-tousled, wearing what looked like an oversized t-shirt, blinking in the darkness.

"Suryansh? Are you okay? I heard — something."

He must have made a sound during the nightmare. The walls between these old houses were not thick. "Fine. Sorry to wake you."

"You didn't wake me. I was working. The vendor spreadsheet is — never mind." She paused. "Are you sure you're okay?"

He could lie. He was good at lying about this — the psych evaluation had proved that. But something about the hour, and the cold, and the stars, and the fact that she was leaning out of a window with sleep in her eyes and genuine concern in her voice, made the lie harder to construct.

"Bad dream," he said. "It happens sometimes."

She was quiet for a moment. He expected the questions: What about? Are you talking to someone? Have you tried meditation? The well-meaning interrogation that people deployed when confronted with another person's darkness, because questions felt like help even when they were just noise.

But Swathi didn't ask questions. Instead, she said: "Hold on."

She disappeared from the window. A minute later, he heard her back door open, and then she was at the stone wall that separated their properties, holding two steel tumblers. Steam rose from them into the cold air.

"Filter coffee," she said. "I made it an hour ago. It's still hot."

She handed one tumbler over the wall. Their fingers touched — hers warm from the steel, his cold from the night air. The contact lasted less than a second but carried a charge that had nothing to do with temperature.

He took the tumbler. The coffee was good — not Selvam-at-Quality-Restaurant good, but honest, strong, made by someone who had learned the proportions from a mother or a grandmother and didn't overthink them.

They stood on opposite sides of the stone wall, drinking coffee at 3 AM under the Milky Way, and Swathi did not ask about the dream. She talked, instead, about the festival — the Thenral meeting, the venue layout she was redesigning for the third time, the vendor who had promised organic jaggery and then delivered regular jaggery with organic labels, the sound contractor who had finally arrived from Coimbatore and turned out to be deaf in one ear, which she felt was either ironic or poetic or both.

She talked, and the talking was not empty. It was deliberate. She was filling the 3 AM silence with her own life — her stresses, her small triumphs, her anxieties — and in doing so, she was giving him something he hadn't known he needed: the sound of someone else's ordinary problems, warm and specific and entirely divorced from narrow streets and breaking bones.

They finished the coffee. She took the tumblers.

"Thank you," he said.

"It's just coffee."

"It's not just coffee."

She looked at him over the wall. The starlight caught her face — the line of her jaw, the curve of her collarbone where the t-shirt hung loose, the dark eyes that held more than they gave away. For a moment, the distance between them was measured not in stone walls but in breath.

"Goodnight, Suryansh."

"Goodnight."

She went inside. The window closed. The kitchen light that she had left on went dark.

He stood on the verandah for another ten minutes, until the coffee's warmth had faded and the cold had returned to his fingers. Then he went back to bed.

He did not dream again.

In the morning, on his way to the station, he stopped at a hardware store and bought a new gasket for a pressure cooker — the same brand, the one with "violent tendencies." He left it on her doorstep without a note.

When he arrived at the station, Dhananjayan handed him a coffee and said, "You look rested, sir."

"I slept well," Suryansh said, and this time, for the first time in months, the lie was only a half-lie.