The bus, once her heart rate returned to something resembling normal, turned out to be exactly the kind of vehicle two years of careful saving could afford: a state transport special with a ceiling fan that rotated at the speed of continental drift and a seat cushion that had given up all pretense of cushioning sometime during the previous decade.

Ananya didn't care. She had a window seat, a phone with forty percent battery she was rationing like a war resource, and a binder in her lap that she opened, briefly, checked, and closed again, as if confirming it hadn't evaporated during the eleven-minute lunch that now felt like it had happened in a different lifetime.

"First time?" said the woman in the aisle seat, an older lady with a steel tiffin box balanced on her knees and the specific unhurried curiosity of someone who had clearly decided the entire eleven-hour journey would be more interesting with a conversation partner.

"First time doing what?"

"Running away. You have the look."

Ananya laughed, startled, and then, because there was something disarming about being read so accurately by a total stranger, found herself telling this woman — whose name turned out to be Sunanda Auntie, en route to visit a granddaughter in Mumbai — an abbreviated, sanitized version of the truth: a concert, a family that wouldn't approve, a plan two years in the making.

"Good," Sunanda Auntie said, with the finality of someone passing judgment on a matter she considered thoroughly settled. "Everyone should run toward something at least once before they're too old to enjoy it properly. I ran toward a man in 1987. Terrible decision, as it turned out, but I don't regret the running. Only the man."

"What happened to him?"

"Turned out to be exactly as unremarkable as everyone warned me he'd be. But I'll tell you something, beta — even a bad decision made loudly teaches you more about yourself than a good decision made quietly ever will. I learned I was the kind of woman who could get on a train for a man I barely knew. That knowledge served me well later, when I needed to leave a marriage that wasn't working and everyone told me I was too old and too settled to start over. I already knew I had it in me. 1987 taught me that, even though the man himself wasn't worth the ticket."

"That's either the wisest or most alarming thing anyone's told me today."

"Probably both," Sunanda Auntie said, unwrapping a stack of parathas from the tiffin box with the brisk efficiency of a woman who traveled prepared for any eventuality, including apparently feeding strangers. "Eat something. You look like you're about to talk yourself out of your own adventure through sheer nervous energy, and that would be a waste of a perfectly good escape."

Ananya ate the paratha, which was, unreasonably, one of the best things she'd eaten in months, and felt something in her chest unknot slightly at the specific, uncomplicated kindness of a stranger who expected nothing from her except good company for the length of a bus ride.

Across the aisle, a college-aged boy with headphones around his neck perked up at the word "concert" with the specific radar of someone who'd clocked a fellow traveler in obsession. "Which show?"

"NEON PULSE. Anniversary tour. Mumbai."

He made a sound Ananya recognized instantly — the particular strangled noise of a fan encountering another fan in the wild — and spent the next forty minutes trading opinions with her about setlists, comeback eras, and the ongoing, deeply contested fandom debate about whether the group's third album or fifth album represented their creative peak (fifth, obviously, though he made a reasonably compelling case for third that she chose not to fully engage with, out of politeness).

"My favorite thing," he said, somewhere in the middle of an increasingly passionate defense of a bridge in track seven, "is that the lead vocalist never seems to want the attention the way the others do. Have you noticed that? Every interview, the questions go to everyone else first, and he just sort of exists at the edge of the frame until someone asks him something direct. Then he says something so quietly devastating you forget the other six members were even there."

"I've noticed," Ananya said, with more feeling than she meant to reveal.

"I think that's why the fandom loves him so specifically. He doesn't perform being loved. He just is, and lets you find your own way to it." The boy shrugged, entirely unaware of how close his casual analysis had landed to a truth Ananya herself hadn't fully articulated even to herself. "Anyway. Third album peak. Fight me."

"Fifth album," Ananya said. "Politely declining the fight, but firmly."

Sunanda Auntie, listening to the exchange with the amused detachment of someone twice their age observing a species she found endlessly entertaining, simply shook her head and offered them both another paratha, which neither of them refused.

"In my day," she said, once the debate had finally exhausted itself somewhere around a contested bridge in track eleven, "we had to write letters to fan clubs and wait six weeks for a reply that was usually just a photocopied thank-you note. You young people have it very easy, being obsessed instantaneously, from your pockets, at all hours."

"It doesn't feel easy," Ananya admitted. "It feels like a full-time unpaid job some days. Tracking comebacks, translating lyrics, defending him in comment sections against people who've clearly never listened past the title track."

"Ah, but you chose that job. That's the difference. Most full-time jobs choose you." Sunanda Auntie considered this with the specific satisfaction of a woman pleased with her own wisdom. "I think that's why the running-toward-something matters so much, beta. Half of life is obligations you didn't pick. If you're lucky, you get one or two things you picked entirely for yourself, with nobody's permission. Guard those carefully. They don't come along often."

"I've been guarding this one for two years," Ananya said. "Practically welded it shut."

"Then you're already ahead of most people. Most people never even manage that much."

It was, she thought, watching the Maharashtra countryside blur past the window in the specific golden light of late afternoon, the first time in longer than she could remember that she'd talked about the thing she loved most without the small, automatic bracing for judgment that usually accompanied it at home. Nobody on this bus knew her as the good daughter, the easy one, the anchor. She was just a girl with a ticket and an opinion about a fifth album, and it turned out that was a considerably lighter thing to be.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Meher: did you actually do it??? tell me you're on the bus

On the bus, she typed back. Karthik described his car FOUR TIMES. I have never felt more justified in a life decision.

LEGEND. text me the second you're inside the stadium. i need updates. i need PHOTOS. i need to live vicariously through your reckless streak because mine is currently limited to buying concert merch i can't afford.

Will report back. Currently rationing battery like it's the apocalypse.

Respect the hustle. GO GET YOUR MAN (platonically, from 200 feet away, through a barricade, as the law and several restraining orders require)

Somewhere around hour two, the bus had stopped at a roadside chai stall for what the driver announced would be "ten minutes" and delivered, twenty-five minutes later, and Ananya had used the time to walk the length of the gravel lot, phone held up to the fading signal, texting Priya for the first time in longer than either of them would have admitted to keeping count of.

Ananya: don't tell mom and papa but i'm on a bus. going to a concert. it's a long story.

The reply took almost ten minutes, long enough that Ananya had started to regret sending it at all.

Priya: a concert or A Concert

Ananya: the second one. i've been saving for two years. i didn't tell anyone.

Priya: two years???? ananya.

Priya: i'm not going to lecture you. god knows i'm the last person in this family with the right to. i just want you to be careful, and i want you to text me when you get there, and i want you to know that whatever happens, i'm glad you're doing something for yourself for once. you've spent three years being the version of you that keeps everyone calm. i've watched it from a distance and it's broken my heart a little, honestly, watching you disappear into being easy.

Ananya had read that message four times, standing in a gravel lot two hundred kilometers from home, feeling something in her chest crack open that she hadn't realized was sealed shut until that exact moment.

Ananya: i miss you. i don't say that enough.

Priya: i miss you too. text me from the stadium. and eat something, you get cranky when you skip meals, i remember.

She'd bought a packet of biscuits from the chai stall on the strength of that last text alone, and had eaten exactly two of them before the bus lurched back onto the road, carrying her deeper into a night that had no idea yet how completely it was about to rearrange itself.

She thought, watching the gravel lot shrink in the side mirror, about how strange it was that the two most honest conversations she'd had in months — Sunanda Auntie's blunt philosophy about chosen things, Priya's unexpected tenderness over text — had both happened today, hours after she'd spent a lunch performing carefully rehearsed pleasantness for a man whose mother had graded her water-pouring technique. It was as if the act of leaving had cracked something loose in the air around her, made honesty easier to come by simply because she'd stopped bracing against it.

She typed one more message before her battery dropped below the threshold she'd promised herself she wouldn't cross before Mumbai — not to Meher, not to Priya, but to herself, a note in an app she never used for anything except grocery lists and half-finished essay outlines. Remember this feeling. The one where nobody in this vehicle needs anything from you except good company. Try to keep some version of it after tonight, whatever happens.

She didn't know yet how directly that small, private wish was about to be tested, or how completely the man currently yelping behind a cluster of neem trees a few kilometers up the road was about to become the reason she kept it.

Ananya was still laughing at Meher's text when the bus's engine made its first ominous sound — a low, grinding cough that cut through the ambient chatter like a held breath — somewhere around hour three, on a road with more goats on it than streetlights.

"Everybody out," the driver announced, twenty minutes later, with the weary calm of a man for whom this was, evidently, Tuesday. "Radiator. Maybe one hour. Maybe more."

Ananya stood on the roadside as the light started to fade, surrounded by Sunanda Auntie's aggrieved commentary on state transport maintenance standards, the college boy already re-litigating the fifth-album debate with a new audience, and a stretch of dry red Maharashtra countryside that did not appear on any map she'd consulted before leaving, and did the math.

One hour lost here put her arrival in Mumbai at a time that made the whole plan collapse like a poorly reinforced bridge. Ninety minutes, and she'd be cutting the concert entry window dangerously close. Two hours, and the two years of saving, the window she'd cased for days, the binder currently digging into her ribs through her bag — all of it would have been for a bus ride to nowhere, ending in a village she couldn't have located on a map five minutes ago.

She was still doing the math, badly, running increasingly desperate scenarios involving hitchhiking and prayer, when she heard the yelp.

It came from behind a cluster of neem trees a little way off the road — a short, sharp, extremely undignified sound, followed by a string of muttered syllables in a language she was fairly sure was Korean, though her only frame of reference for Korean was several thousand hours of very specific media consumption she'd never admit to Karthik's entire extended family.

Curiosity, and the fact that anything was more interesting than recalculating bus schedules for the fourth time in ten minutes, pulled her toward the trees, her math abandoned mid-equation, her entire two-year plan about to collapse and rebuild itself into something she had absolutely no schedule for at all.