The monsoon of her seventeenth year did not arrive with the romantic, earthy scent of wet soil; it came with the suffocating stench of overflowing drains, damp concrete, and rotting wood.

Khwahish was seventeen now. There was no cake, no singing, no warm hugs in the back of a silver Maruti Suzuki. She only knew she had reached the milestone because she had painstakingly counted the days, scratching tiny, invisible tally marks onto the peeling plaster of the storage room wall behind her thin, mildewed mattress.