The door to the apartment in Mayur Vihar opened with the familiar, grating creak that usually made Meera grind her teeth. I need to call the carpenter, she would normally think. Efficiency failure. Today, she just listened to the sound. It was a textured sound. A sound that had welcomed her home for thirty years. A sound that would one day stop. "Meera?" Her mother's voice floated from the kitchen, accompanied by the hiss of a pressure cooker. "You're early? I haven't made the rotis yet." Meera walked into the kitchen. The air was thick with the smell of burnt cumin and old grief. Her mother, Mrs. Taneja, was standing by the stove. She looked smaller today. The humidity had frizzed her dyed hair, revealing the stark white roots underneath—the timeline of her aging that Meera usually tried to ignore.