Returning home is never a return — it is a reassessment.

Ganga Market had not forgotten her. It had merely refined its memory, sharpened it into something more useful for keeping her out. Jobs demanded documents before dignity; forms had no box for what she had become, and clerks enjoyed, a little too visibly, telling her so. Faces stiffened before words were even spoken. Some saw a spectacle. Others, a curse, and crossed the road with the particular haste of people avoiding bad luck rather than a person.

Hunger became punctual, arriving each evening exactly on time, the one appointment no one had cancelled on her.

So she returned to the only economy that had ever accepted her body without interrogation.

Beneath the dead clock tower — its hands stopped at some forgotten hour, time frozen, mercy stalled along with it — she stood. Night after night, under a bulb that buzzed rather than shone, she sold hours of herself. Not pleasure. Not intimacy. Only endurance, priced by the half-hour.

Then, one night thick with the smell of rain not yet fallen, a car stopped.

Drunk. Impatient. A voice that called out to her in a tone almost familiar, wrapped around an unfamiliar slur, the way a hand might be wrapped around a stone before it's thrown. Something in the cadence snagged at her, briefly, the way a name half-remembered snags at the tongue — and then let go.

He did not recognise her. She did not recognise him either. Not fully. Not in any way she could have named aloud.

She followed him nonetheless