Chapter 1: The Crash

I pull out into the intersection the moment the signal turns green, but I don't see the black Fortuner bearing down on me until it's too late. The mammoth vehicle smashes into the driver's side of my little i20, propelling my car across the width of Linking Road in what feels like slow motion.

They say your whole life flashes before you when you're facing the possibility of death. But for me, it isn't my full history on replay, it's only my reinvented life — the one that began eight months ago. The faces of all the new people who've come and gone in this short time flash by in rapid sequence, their expressions solemn and detached. Vandana. Jaya. Sunaina. Nikhil. Karan. Cheryl. Aditi. Jai. Chetan.

Chetan. Chetan. Chetan.

The car stops spinning. My knees knock against each other with violent force — the kind of knocking that your body produces when your body has decided, independently of your brain, that survival is: uncertain. My back spasms. A sharp pain shoots from my lower spine to a spot behind my left ear that I didn't know existed until this moment, the moment when your body catalogues every nerve ending it possesses because every nerve ending might be the last one to fire.

I groan and survey the damage around me. The windshield has disintegrated into a thousand tiny green pebbles that occupy my lap, the front seat, the floor, the pavement outside. The pebbles are warm. This surprises me — you'd expect shattered glass to be cold, clinical, but these pebbles carry the heat of the engine, the heat of the January Mumbai evening, the heat of a life that was moving at sixty kilometres per hour until three seconds ago.

Why didn't the airbag deploy? You count on something — or someone — to protect you, but then when you need it most, it's not there. Just like the people who paraded through my consciousness at the moment of impact. Just like Harsh, who'd promised till-death-do-us-part and then did us part at the twenty-seven-year mark, which was: not death, but felt like it.

The smell of petrol reaches me. Sharp, chemical, the smell that says: get out of the car, Madhuri. The smell that your lizard brain processes faster than language. I try the door handle. It doesn't move. The driver's side is crushed inward — the metal crumpled like the aluminium foil my mother used to wrap rotis in, the rotis she'd send with me on the Rajdhani when I'd travel from Lucknow to Mumbai in the early years of my marriage, before Harsh decided that his mother's rotis were superior and that my mother's aluminium-wrapped love was: insufficient.

I can't worry about them now. All I can do is contemplate the wreck that is my car, the wreck that is my life.

Someone is shouting. Hindi and Marathi mixing in the particular Mumbai way — "Madam! Madam, theek ho? Ambulance bulao koi!" A face appears at the passenger window. Young, moustached, wearing a Zomato delivery jacket. His eyes are wide with the specific panic of a person who has witnessed an accident and is calculating whether he should stay (moral obligation) or leave (the police will take his statement and his entire evening).

"Main theek hoon," I say, which is: a lie. I am not fine. My left arm is producing a sensation that I can only describe as: hot wrongness. But I've been telling people I'm fine for eight months now — fine after the divorce, fine after selling the Juhu flat, fine after my son Karan stopped returning my calls for three weeks — and the muscle memory of the lie is stronger than the pain.

The Zomato boy — man, really, he's probably twenty-five, but everyone under thirty looks like a boy to me now, this being one of the gifts of turning fifty — reaches through the broken passenger window and tries the inner handle. The door opens. He extends his hand.

I take it. His palm is rough, calloused — a hand that grips motorcycle handlebars twelve hours a day in Mumbai traffic, the traffic that I'd just been navigating with the particular caution of a woman who'd moved back to this city after twenty-three years in Lucknow and still hadn't recalibrated her reflexes for the specific violence of Mumbai roads.

"Hospital jaana padega, madam. Aapka haath —" He stops. He's looking at my left arm, which I now look at too, and we both see: the angle is wrong. The forearm is producing a shape that forearms are not designed to produce. The shape that says: broken.

"Haan," I say. "Hospital."

He helps me out of the car. I stand on Linking Road, surrounded by green glass pebbles that crunch under my chappals — I'd been wearing chappals because I'd been driving to the gym, my gym, Seaside Fitness in Bandra, where I'd been going every day for eight months because the gym was the only place where I could be: someone other than Madhuri Khanna, divorced woman, failed wife, mother of a son who preferred his father.

At the gym, I was just Mar. The woman in the 6 PM yoga class. The woman who'd tried hip-hop at fifty and hadn't died of embarrassment (though she'd come close). The woman who'd made friends — acquaintances, really, the distinction mattering more than I'd understood before this year — with people who didn't know about the divorce, the flat sale, the nights I'd eaten dal-chawal alone in my rented Bandra apartment while watching re-runs of Sarabhai vs Sarabhai because the laugh track made the silence bearable.

The Fortuner driver emerges. A man in his forties, white kurta, gold watch — the uniform of a certain kind of Mumbai money. He's on his phone. Not calling an ambulance. Calling someone else. Probably a lawyer. Probably deciding whether a fifty-year-old woman in chappals and gym clothes is the kind of person who sues or the kind who settles.

I am neither. I am the kind who stands on broken glass and thinks: eight months ago, I didn't know any of these people. Vandana. Jaya. Sunaina. Chetan. Eight months ago, I was sitting in a lawyer's office in Lucknow signing papers that ended twenty-seven years, and the lawyer's secretary had offered me chai in a paper cup, and the chai had been: terrible, and I'd thought: this is what the end of a marriage tastes like. Weak chai in a paper cup with too much sugar.

The ambulance arrives. The paramedic — a woman, young, efficient, her dupatta pinned practically under her medical coat — examines my arm and says what I already know.

"Fracture hai. Wrist ke upar. X-ray karwana padega, but —" She pauses. She's seen the tears. Not pain-tears (though there is pain). Life-tears. The tears that come when your body, having been jolted out of its eight-month project of reinvention, decides to cry for all the things it's been too busy reinventing to cry about.

"Theek ho jaayega, madam," she says. Softly. The softness of a medical professional who's learned that sometimes patients cry about more than the injury.

"Haan," I say. "Theek ho jaayega."

I don't believe it. But I've been saying it for eight months, and the repetition has given the words a weight that's almost — almost — indistinguishable from truth.

The ambulance doors close. The siren starts. And I think: I should call someone. But who? Harsh is in Lucknow with his new life. Karan is in Pune, being twenty-four and angry. My parents are in Lucknow, elderly, and a phone call about a car accident would produce: panic, prayers, and my father catching the next Rajdhani, which is exactly what I don't need.

So I think about calling Chetan. The man whose name my brain repeated three times at the moment of impact, the repetition being: significant, the significance being: something I'll have to examine later, when my arm isn't broken and my car isn't destroyed and my reinvented life isn't lying in green glass pebbles on Linking Road.

I don't call him. I close my eyes and let the ambulance carry me toward whatever comes next.

EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER