Chapter 1 — How Pacts Are Made

Five years ago. Rishikesh. October.The thing about Rishikesh in October was the light.Not the Ganga, not the ghats, not the ashrams or the bridge or the official sacred geography of the place — those were real and important, but they were the things you saw in photographs. The light was the thing you only understood by being there: the specific amber quality of the October sun dropping behind the hills, the way it turned the river silver and then gold and then a colour that had no name, the way it made everything it touched look like it was happening for the last time.Aanya Sharma had come to Rishikesh because her college best friend Riya had gotten engaged and Riya's bachelorette trip had been planned and cancelled three times and finally reduced, through attrition and budget constraints, to Aanya and Riya in a guesthouse near Laxman Jhula for four days in October, which was how Aanya ended up at Shiv Café on a Tuesday afternoon, reading, while Riya called her mother.Kabir Malhotra had come to Rishikesh because he was an architecture student who had read too much Laurie Baker and needed to see buildings that were old enough to have opinions, and because his college had given him a week's break, and because he had seventy-two hours in which he was not due anywhere and he had the specific restlessness of a twenty-two-year-old who had not yet learned how to be still.He sat at the counter because all the tables were taken.She was at the window table with a dog-eared copy of The God of Small Things and a plate of brown bread toast she was eating without tasting, absorbed.