The village smelled of sun-baked earth and turmeric smoke. Midday heat lay over every roof like a second skin; even the mango trees seemed to sigh. But for Radha, heat had become a different thing—an urgency that pressed at the edges of her life, a reckoning that would not wait for the monsoon. 1. Return and Rupture Radha arrived in the village after three years in the city. She had promised her mother she’d come back when the fields needed her father’s plough again. What met her was not only the familiar lane of cracked stone and the charpoy under the neem, but a village altered by small betrayals: the schoolroom closed, the water pump a rusty relic, and an uneasy hush around the banyan where men used to argue and laugh. Her brother, Arjun, met her at the gate—his jaw hard, his eyes full of secrets.