Amit Bhattacharya 1 I arrived in Pune on a Thursday morning, the kind of morning where the sun rises reluctantly, peeking through gauzy clouds like a child waking from sleep. The railway station buzzed with quiet urgency—porters dragging luggage, chai vendors chanting their rhythmic calls, mothers herding children in half-sleep, and the occasional clatter of metal from the stalls that never really closed the night before. I stepped out with a small suitcase, a laptop bag, and a mind still echoing with boardroom jargon and Slack pings. After seven years in a Bengaluru tech firm, I had resigned with no…
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The train jerked to a halt at a nameless station nestled between dense sal groves and silent hills. Ananya Sinha stepped down cautiously, dragging her suitcase over the uneven platform. The dusty signboard above her head read, barely legibly: Kandara Halt. The air smelled of wet earth, turmeric, and smoke — familiar yet strange. She glanced at her phone. No signal. Typical. A rusted jeep waited near the exit, just as the letter from Kandara Panchayat Samiti had described. Painted in faded green, it bore the name: “Kandara Gramin Vikas Kendra.” The driver, a leathery man with sunken eyes and…