“I close my eyes. The car moves. The Hyderabad night slides past the windows—streetlights, buildings, the occasional auto-rickshaw weaving through traffic with the casual immortality of a vehicle that has survived worse—and I think: I was supposed to die tonight. And then I think: I did not. And the space between those two thoughts is narrow and dark and uncertain, and I do not know what lives there, but I am, for the first time in six months, curious enough to find out.”