He woke, as he did most days, a few minutes before his four o'clock alarm — his body long since trained out of needing the sound at all.

The city at four in the morning was the only version of Mumbai he genuinely loved without complication — empty roads, cool air that hadn't yet been claimed by the day's heat, the particular silence of a place that hadn't started performing itself yet. He ran the same route he always ran, the same six kilometres along the same stretch of road, not because the route offered anything new but because the sameness was, itself, the point. There was very little in his life he allowed to be unpredictable. This hour was one of the few places he let his mind simply run alongside his body without demanding anything of either.