Ishita Anand 1 The boxes were still stacked haphazardly in Tara Mehra’s living room, their cardboard edges curling slightly from the humidity of a late-August evening in Hyderabad. She’d spent the whole day unpacking—kitchen first, then her books, then her sketchbooks and pencils—yet the apartment still felt like a halfway house between strangers. From the balcony, she could see the crowded lanes of Banjara Hills curling away into the distance, car headlights already threading the roads as the day’s last sunlight gave way to neon. The air was heavy with the smell of rain that hadn’t yet fallen, and somewhere…