Chapter 4: Sadak par Safar — Present Day

The drive from Pune to Goa was approximately ten hours if you took the NH48, which Balli insisted on because Balli believed that national highways were the arteries of civilization and that smaller roads were the capillaries of chaos.

We left at five in the morning. The city was still waking — the streetlights orange against the pre-dawn grey, the early walkers moving through Koregaon Park with the particular determination of people who had made a commitment to their health and were going to honour it regardless of how their bodies felt about the matter. Nandini was at the gate, wearing the cream-coloured shawl she wore on cold mornings, holding a thermos of chai and a tiffin box that she handed to me through the car window with the instruction: "Poha. Eat it before Shirwal. After Shirwal the roads get bad and you'll spill it."

She had also packed food for Balli — a separate tiffin, labelled in her neat handwriting: "Balli — aloo parantha + achaar. Do NOT share with Farhan, he has his own."

Balli took the tiffin with the expression of a man who had been deeply and correctly loved by someone who was not his wife, and who found this simultaneously touching and slightly competitive with his wife's own tiffin-packing abilities.

"Paramjeet packed me two paranthas," he said, opening his bag to reveal a foil-wrapped package. "And Nandini's packed me two more. I now have four paranthas. This is either generosity or a conspiracy to give me a heart attack."

"Eat Nandini's first. The parantha is still warm."

"If I eat Nandini's first, Paramjeet will know. She always knows. She has a sixth sense for parantha betrayal."

We drove south. The Pune-Satara highway unfolded — the ghats rising on either side, the Western Ghats in their early-morning aspect: dark green, misted, the kind of landscape that looked like it had been painted by someone who understood that beauty was not about precision but about suggestion. The fog sat in the valleys like cotton in a jewellery box, and above it, the peaks were sharp against a sky that was transitioning from grey to blue with the gradual confidence of a thing that happened every day and didn't need to rush.

Balli drove. Balli always drove. He drove the way he ate — with total commitment, both hands on the wheel, eyes forward, the posture of a man who took the responsibility of piloting two tonnes of metal through space seriously and regarded my driving — which he had once described as "impressionistic" — as a threat to public safety.

For the first hour, we talked about nothing. The cricket — India's recent collapse in the second innings at Adelaide, which Balli took as a personal affront. The weather — unseasonably warm for March, the monsoon predictions, the particular anxiety of a country whose agriculture and economy depended on rain and whose rain depended on oceanic patterns that no one could fully predict. Paramjeet's yoga — the foot-behind-the-head achievement and its social deployment.

Then, somewhere past Satara, as the road began its descent through the Amboli ghat and the landscape shifted from plateau to coastal — the vegetation thickening, the air warming, the first hints of Goa's tropical lushness appearing in the roadside trees — Balli said: "I have prostate cancer."

The words landed in the car the way a stone lands in still water — with a splash that was over quickly and ripples that kept going.

I said nothing for approximately eight seconds. I know this because I counted. I counted because counting was what I did when the world delivered information that my brain needed time to process — a habit I'd developed in 1984, when the information being delivered was so terrible that counting was the only thing that stood between processing and collapse.

"How long have you known?" I said.

"Four months."

"Four months. You've known for four months and you didn't tell me."

"I didn't tell anyone. Except Paramjeet. And the doctors. And Paramjeet told the children, who told their spouses, who told their in-laws. So essentially everyone knows except you, which Paramjeet pointed out was 'cruel and unnecessary secrecy' and which I maintained was 'giving my best friend the gift of four months of not worrying.'"

"That's not a gift. That's a crime."

"It's a slow-growing cancer, Farhan. The doctors say I have years. Possibly decades. The prostate is — apparently — the most polite organ in the body. Even its cancers are well-mannered. They grow slowly, they respond to treatment, and they give you plenty of warning before they become serious."

"You're comparing your cancer to a well-mannered guest."

"I'm contextualizing. The doctors said the prognosis is excellent. Ninety-plus percent survival rate for the stage I'm at. I'm on hormone therapy. The side effects are — " He paused. The pause was not strategic. It was the pause of a man who was about to describe something that embarrassed him more than the cancer itself. "The side effects include hot flashes. I am a sixty-year-old Sikh man who is experiencing hot flashes. Paramjeet says it's karma for every time I dismissed her menopause symptoms as 'theatrical.'"

"Balli."

"I'm fine. I promise you, I'm fine. The treatment is working. The numbers are good. The only real change is that I now understand why women in our mothers' generation fanned themselves constantly, and I have developed a new and profound respect for menopause."

I wanted to pull the car over. I wanted to stop the vehicle and look at my best friend — the man who had been beside me for forty-three years, through Amritsar and Pune and 1984 and marriages and divorces and children and Madan's recurring crises and every single thing that constituted a life — and tell him that the idea of a world without him was not a thing I could process, not even with counting.

But Balli was driving. And Balli didn't stop driving for emotional revelations. Balli processed emotion the way he processed food: steadily, thoroughly, while in motion.

"Nandini knows," I said. It was a statement, not a question. Nandini's look at the gate — the look that said he hasn't told you yet but he should have and when he does, be kind — made sense now.

"Paramjeet told her. I told Paramjeet not to, but Paramjeet and Nandini have their own communication channel that operates independently of our wishes. It's like a parallel intelligence network. We are merely the subjects of their surveillance."

"Are you scared?"

Another pause. This one was the longest yet. The road curved through a section where the ghats were particularly dramatic — the cliff falling away on the left, the valley below green and misted, the kind of view that in a film would accompany a moment of revelation but in life accompanied a sixty-year-old man trying to find the right words for whether he was afraid of dying.

"Not of the cancer," he said finally. "The cancer is a math problem. There are numbers and probabilities and treatments and the numbers and probabilities are in my favour. I'm scared of — " He adjusted the rearview mirror, which did not need adjusting, the gesture of a man who needed his hands to do something while his mouth did the difficult work. "I'm scared of not finishing."

"Finishing what?"

"Everything. Anything. The things I wanted to do. The person I wanted to be. Paramjeet and I were going to travel — she wants to see Kashmir, and I promised her, and we haven't gone. And the kids — Ranjit is in Melbourne and I haven't been, and Simran's baby is due in July and I want to be there, and there's — " He stopped. Took a breath. "There's a version of my life where I get all of it. And there's a version where I don't. And the cancer — even slow, even polite, even well-mannered — is a reminder that the second version exists."

"You'll get all of it," I said. "You'll see Kashmir. You'll go to Melbourne. You'll hold Simran's baby. You'll outlive all of us through sheer stubbornness."

"Stubbornness is Paramjeet's department. I'm the flexible one."

"You are the least flexible human being I have ever met. You've been driving in the right lane for forty-three years. You have never once changed lanes."

"The right lane is the correct lane. The left lane is for people who are in a hurry to die."

We drove on. The ghats gave way to the coastal plain. The air changed — heavier, saltier, the particular atmosphere of the Konkan coast where the Western Ghats met the Arabian Sea and the landscape decided that subtlety was overrated. Coconut palms appeared — first a few, then many, then everywhere, their fronds moving in the coastal breeze with the particular laziness of trees that existed in a perpetual state of relaxation.

We crossed into Goa at noon. The border was unmarked — a sign, a toll booth, and the sudden shift in vegetation and vibe that told you that you had left Maharashtra's earnest industriousness and entered Goa's particular brand of cheerful indifference. The buildings were different — Portuguese-influenced, colour-washed in yellows and blues and the particular terracotta that looked like it had been borrowed from a Mediterranean village and adapted for tropical humidity.

"Where exactly in Anjuna?" I asked.

"Firoz said near the flea market. A shack called 'Shanti Shanti.' Which is either a double benediction or a stutter."

"And Madan was — what? Living there?"

"Drinking there. Possibly sleeping there. Firoz was vague, which means it's worse than he described, which means it's bad."

We drove through Mapusa — the market town that served as Goa's commercial heart, the streets crowded with buses and scooters and the particular chaos of a small city that handled traffic the way a juggler handled too many balls: with optimism and frequent drops. Past Mapusa, the road narrowed. We climbed through Vagator, descended toward Anjuna, and the landscape became the Goa of postcards and Instagram — red laterite cliffs, coconut groves, the glimpse of sea between the trees, the particular blue of the Arabian Sea that was not blue but a colour that existed only where the sky met warm water and both decided to show off.

Shanti Shanti was at the end of a dirt road, past a grove of coconut palms, on a stretch of beach that was too rocky for tourists and too remote for the upscale beach clubs that had colonized the better stretches of Anjuna's coastline. It was — I use the word generously — a shack. A structure made of bamboo and tarpaulin and the particular optimism of a builder who believed that structural integrity was a state of mind. A hand-painted sign read "SHANTI SHANTI — Peace & Cold Beer" in English and "Shanti Shanti — Shanti ane Thanda Beer" in Konkani, which I appreciated for its bilingual commitment to lowered expectations.

We parked. Got out. The air hit me — salt and fish and coconut oil and the faint sweetness of feni, the cashew liquor that was Goa's contribution to the world's collection of spirits and that smelled, at close range, like ambition's funeral.

"Ready?" Balli said.

"No."

"Good. Let's go."

We walked toward Shanti Shanti, where my brother was waiting in whatever condition "worse than usual" meant, and the sea glittered behind the shack like a promise that the world could be beautiful even when the people in it were breaking.