Shadows of Dharavi

6834 words

The fluorescent bulb above Priya Kapoor flickered like a dying moth, casting jagged shadows across the sterile white walls of the basement room in Dharavi. She stood stiff, her leather jacket damp with sweat, the air thick with the tang of antiseptic and something sourer—fear, maybe, or desperation. The scarred man who’d let her in, the one who called himself Kunal, leaned against a steel table cluttered with vials and wires, his eyes narrow and unblinking. He hadn’t bought her story yet, not fully. She could feel it in the way his gaze kept darting to the door, to the hallway beyond where footsteps echoed intermittently, heavy and deliberate. “You want a memory, haan?” Kunal rasped, scratching at the puckered scar that ran from his jaw to his ear. His voice was gravel, chewed up by years of cheap beedis and cheaper whiskey. “Not just any memory, you said. Something… khas. Special. But you don’t look like the type who needs to buy happiness, memsaab. So what’s your game?” Priya forced her jaw to unclench, her fingers twitching at her side, inches from the service pistol tucked beneath her jacket. She couldn’t draw it—not yet. Not without blowing her cover. She’d told him she was a buyer, a desperate soul looking for a stolen piece of her past, someone who’d...