Riya Chowdhury 1 The desert had its own kind of silence—thick, stretched thin across salt plains like an invisible cloth drawn over the earth, humming just below the level of human hearing. In the small town of Khavda, where every house was painted with fading lime and the wind carried more memory than sand, seventeen-year-old Payel Deshmukh sat cross-legged on her rooftop, her telescope tilted toward the night. She knew the names of the stars like old friends—Betelgeuse, Rigel, Vega, and Altair—and she whispered them under her breath like prayers. The townspeople called her “Tārāwali Ladki,” the star girl who…