Episode 28: The White Tent

Bahadurgarh, Haryana · 2026

“There you are.”

Khushi came out of the crowd the way Khushi appeared everywhere — fast, already mid-sentence, her arm through Gopina’s before Gopina had turned around.

“I’ve been looking for you for twenty minutes. Come. The tent’s empty and there’s real food. Not mela food. Come come come.”

“I should —”

“You should eat something that wasn’t fried eleven hours ago. Come.”

Gopina looked back. Ahan was already standing, someone calling his name from the announcer’s platform. He lifted one hand — the smallest wave, half a second — and turned.

Khushi pulled her through the crowd, past the bonfire, past the DJ truck that was now on its third song in four hours, to a white tent behind the temple. A man in a Modi Tiles polo shirt stood at the flap. He stepped aside when he saw Khushi.

Inside: folding chairs, a table with covered dishes, a light running off a battery.

“My mother was here all afternoon,” Khushi said, lifting a lid off a dish. “She’s gone to the temple committee meeting. They fight about the same three things every year. Sit. Eat.”

Gopina sat. The chair had a cushion. The table had a cloth. The water bottles were the kind not sold in Bahadurgarh.

She ate, and Khushi talked about the buffalo and the announcer and her mother’s opinion of the mela committee, which was apparently the same opinion she held of the district tax office and the weather: that all three could be improved if people simply did what she said.

Outside the tent flap, the mela went on without them.

· · ·

She walked home at ten. The temple road was emptying out. Boleros pulling away one by one, headlights cutting the dust. The DJ trucks had been shut off at nine-thirty by order of the temple committee, and the quiet after them was the kind you don’t notice until the noise stops.

The factory whistle blew. Ten o’clock. Shift change.

Gopina kept walking. She had her notebook in one hand, the pen cap still missing from hours ago, and in the notebook she had three photos, two quotes, and a paragraph Mohit would run without reading twice.

She also had rope burn on both palms and the name the announcer had called Ahan at his naming ceremony, which he had finally told her only after she’d promised not to print it.

She had not promised not to remember it.

The whistle faded. She walked home.