Poverty is not a condition. It is a war.
And like all wars, it doesn't kill you all at once. It kills you in installments — a missed meal here, a skipped medication there, a dignity surrendered at the counter of a pharmacy where the man behind the glass looks at your crumpled notes and counts them twice because he doesn't believe someone could offer so little for something so necessary.
Arjun was losing the war.
Three weeks after his hours were cut, the mathematics of his life had become a slow-motion catastrophe. He sat at the kitchen table at midnight — the only time the house was quiet enough to think — and stared at the numbers in his notebook.
Not the blue notebook. Not Meera's notebook. A different one — older, uglier, filled with columns of figures that told the story of a family drowning in increments.
Income: ₹4,500/month
Rent: ₹3,000
Mother's medication: ₹2,000
Priya's school fees: ₹800
Food: ₹1,500 (minimum)
Bus fare: ₹600
Total needed: ₹7,900
Deficit: ₹3,400
Three thousand four hundred rupees. The gap between survival and collapse. A number that would mean nothing to most people — the cost of a dinner at a nice restaurant, a pair of decent shoes, a movie ticket for a family of four.
For Arjun, it was an abyss.
He had tried everything. He had asked Banerjee for extra shifts — none available. He had applied to six other warehouses — no openings. He had offered to work weekends at Ramu's tea stall — Ramu couldn't afford to hire anyone. He had considered dropping his evening classes to work full-time, but without the engineering degree, his future earnings would plateau at warehouse wages forever, and forever was a long time to be poor.
He was trapped.
The walls of the small room pressed inward. The fan creaked overhead — a metronome counting down to something he couldn't name. His mother coughed in her sleep — a wet, rattling sound that had been getting worse. Dr. Sen had said she needed a new medication. The new medication cost three thousand rupees a month.
Three thousand rupees.
He didn't have three thousand rupees.
He didn't have three hundred.
Arjun pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw colors — red, white, the black of pressure against retinas. He breathed through his mouth because breathing through his nose would mean smelling the damp walls, the old mattresses, the stale air of a room that was slowly suffocating its occupants.
Think. You're an engineer. Engineers solve problems. This is just another problem. Variables and constraints. Input and output. Find the solution.
But some problems didn't have solutions. Some problems were just walls — high, thick, endless — and no amount of engineering could bring them down.
His phone buzzed. Meera.
"Can't sleep. Tell me something beautiful."
He stared at the message. His thumbs hovered over the keyboard. A hundred honest answers formed and dissolved.
I can't afford your mother's medication.
I can't feed my family.
I'm failing. I'm drowning. I'm falling apart in ways I can't show you because if you see me break, you'll try to fix me, and I can't be fixed, Meera. I can only be endured.
He typed none of these.
"The stars are out tonight. I can see three from my window. I named them after you."
"All three?"
"All three. The bright one is your laugh. The small one is the way you tuck your hair behind your ear when you're reading. The faint one is the look you gave me the first day in the rain."
A long pause. Then:
"Arjun Malhotra, you are dangerously poetic for a man who claims to hate Neruda."
"I don't hate Neruda. I hate that Neruda was right."
"About what?"
"About love being so short and forgetting being so long."
Another pause. Longer.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm looking at stars named after you. How could I not be okay?"
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have tonight."
"Arjun..."
"Goodnight, Meera. I love you."
He turned off the phone before she could reply. Set it face-down on the floor. Closed the notebook full of numbers.
Lay down on his mattress.
Stared at the ceiling.
The fan creaked.
His mother coughed.
Somewhere outside, a train passed — its horn cutting through the night like a scream that nobody acknowledged because screams were just part of the soundtrack in neighborhoods like this.
Arjun didn't sleep.
He couldn't afford to.
Sleep was for people whose numbers added up.
The next morning, Rajan found him at the university canteen, sitting in front of untouched tea. This was alarming. Arjun never left tea untouched. Tea was sacred. Tea was currency. Untouched tea was a symptom of catastrophic internal failure.
"Talk to me," Rajan said, sitting down heavily across from him.
"About what?"
"About why you look like someone extracted your soul through your nostrils." Rajan leaned forward. "And don't say you're fine. You say you're fine the way other people say I'm having a stroke — technically communicative but deeply unconvincing."
Arjun was quiet for a long moment. Then, because Rajan was the only person in his life who wouldn't flinch at the truth:
"My hours got cut. Three weeks ago."
Rajan's expression shifted. The humor drained. What replaced it was the focused intensity of a man who understood poverty not as a concept but as a lived experience — the daily negotiation, the constant triage, the exhausting performance of normalcy.
"How bad?"
"Half income. Mother needs new medication I can't afford. Rent is due in ten days." Arjun paused. "I've applied everywhere. Nothing."
"What about that startup incubator? The one Dr. Basu mentioned? If your water purification project gets selected —"
"The incubator needs a working prototype. A prototype needs components. Components need money." The circular logic of poverty. Every door required a key that was locked behind another door. "I'm stuck, Rajan."
Rajan was quiet. He picked up Arjun's untouched tea, took a sip — a violation of boundary that somehow felt like solidarity — and set it back down.
"I have some saved," he said carefully. "Not much. Maybe two thousand —"
"No."
"Arjun —"
"No. You earn less than I do. You send money to your parents in Malda. You eat one meal a day to save bus fare." Arjun's voice was firm. Not harsh — firm. The firmness of a man whose pride was the last structural support in a building that was collapsing. "I won't take your money."
"It's not charity. It's —"
"I know what it is. And I love you for offering. But no."
They sat in silence. The canteen buzzed around them — students laughing, arguing, living the university life that existed in a parallel universe from the one Arjun inhabited.
"Does Meera know?" Rajan asked quietly.
The silence that followed was its own answer.
"Arjun. She should know."
"If she knows, she'll try to help. Her father runs a small bookshop. They're not rich. She'll offer money they can't spare, and I'll have to refuse, and it'll become a fight, and I won't —" He stopped. Swallowed. "I won't let my poverty become her problem."
"Your poverty is already her problem. She just doesn't know it yet. And when she finds out — not the poverty, the hiding — that's what will hurt her."
"I'll figure it out."
"When?"
"Soon."
"That's what drowning people say right before they go under, bhai."
Arjun looked at him. Rajan looked back. The unspoken conversation between them was longer and more honest than the spoken one — two men who understood that the world was designed by the comfortable for the comfortable, and everyone else was just surviving in the margins.
"I'll figure it out," Arjun repeated.
Rajan nodded. Not because he believed it, but because sometimes friendship meant accepting the lie and standing close enough to catch someone when it broke.
That afternoon, Arjun made a decision.
It was a small decision — the kind that seemed insignificant in the moment but would later reveal itself as a hinge on which everything turned.
He went to see Dr. Basu.
Professor Arun Basu was the head of the Environmental Engineering department — a thin, precise man with wire-rimmed glasses and the demeanor of someone who found human interaction mildly inconvenient but tolerated it for professional reasons. He was also, by all accounts, brilliant. His research on low-cost water filtration had been cited in international journals. His students feared him. His colleagues respected him. His tea was terrible.
"Malhotra." Dr. Basu looked up from a stack of research papers as Arjun knocked on his office door. "Office hours are Thursday."
"I know, sir. This couldn't wait."
Basu studied him for a moment, then gestured to the chair across his desk. Arjun sat.
"The water purification project," Arjun began. "You said it had potential."
"I said the concept had potential. The execution needs work. Your filtration rate is insufficient, your material costs are too high, and your prototype exists only on paper." Basu removed his glasses. Cleaned them. Put them back — a gesture that, unlike Deepak Sharma's version, carried zero emotional weight and maximum academic precision. "Why?"
"There's an innovation grant. The Sengupta Foundation. They fund environmental engineering projects with social applications. The deadline is six weeks away."
"I'm aware of the grant. The competition is national. You'd be competing against IIT students with fully funded labs."
"I know."
"Your prototype doesn't exist."
"I'll build it."
"With what resources?"
"I'll find resources."
Basu leaned back. The chair creaked. Outside the window, the campus was golden with late afternoon light. Students moved across the courtyard in groups — laughing, complaining, carrying the beautiful burden of being young and unaware of how much the world would cost them.
"The grant is fifty thousand rupees," Basu said. "Plus mentorship, lab access, and potential commercial development support."
Fifty thousand rupees.
The number landed in Arjun's chest like a heartbeat restarting. Fifty thousand would cover his mother's medication for months. It would pay rent. It would buy Priya's school supplies. It would bridge the gap — not forever, but long enough for him to graduate, find a real job, build the life he had promised himself and Meera and her father.
"I need your guidance, sir," Arjun said. "I can redesign the filtration mechanism. I can source materials cheaply. But I need access to the university lab. And I need someone to vouch for my application."
Basu was quiet for a long time. The clock on his wall ticked with the mechanical indifference of an object that didn't care about human desperation.
"Your application will need to be exceptional," Basu said finally. "Not good. Not impressive. Exceptional. The Sengupta Foundation receives three hundred submissions. They fund five."
"I understand."
"Do you? Because exceptional means sixteen-hour days. It means redesigning your entire filtration system. It means building a working prototype from scratch with materials you can barely afford. It means doing all of this while attending classes, working at your warehouse, and maintaining the academic performance required to remain enrolled."
Basu paused. His eyes — sharp, analytical, devoid of sentimentality — locked onto Arjun's.
"It means sacrificing everything for something that might not work."
Arjun thought about his mother coughing in the dark. About Priya studying by desk lamp. About Meera reading Tagore on stone steps, trusting him with a future he couldn't guarantee.
"I'm already sacrificing everything, sir," he said. "At least this way, it's for something."
Basu stared at him for another long moment. Then, slowly, he nodded.
"Come Thursday. Bring your revised calculations. I'll review them." He picked up his pen — conversation over. "And Malhotra?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Don't waste my time. I have very little patience for wasted time."
"Understood, sir."
Arjun stood. Walked to the door. Paused.
"Thank you, Professor."
Basu didn't look up. "Don't thank me. Thank me when you win."
When. Not if.
Arjun left the office with the word ringing in his ears like a bell. When. A small word. Two letters short of where. A universe away from never.
When.
For the first time in weeks, the numbers in his head rearranged themselves into something that almost looked like hope.
He told Meera that evening.
Not about the money problems — he still couldn't bring himself to open that door. But about the grant. About the project. About the possibility of fifty thousand rupees and everything it could mean.
Her reaction was exactly what he needed and exactly what he didn't deserve.
"Arjun, that's incredible." She grabbed his arm, her eyes blazing with the fierce, uncomplicated joy of someone who believed in him more than he believed in himself. "You can do this. Your design is brilliant. Dr. Basu knows it. I know it."
"The competition is national. IIT students —"
"IIT students have labs and funding. You have desperation and genius." She grinned. "Desperation and genius built the entire modern world. Every invention that matters came from someone who needed it badly enough to create it."
He looked at her. The evening light was doing the thing again — turning her ordinary kurta into something luminous, catching the gold in her eyes, making her look like a painting from a future he wasn't sure he'd reach.
"You really believe I can win?"
"I believe you can do anything." She said it simply, without drama, without qualification. The way people state the weather or the time. A fact. Obvious. Inarguable.
Something cracked inside him. The same wall that had crumbled when she first said she loved him — rebuilt carefully over weeks of financial terror — cracked again. Not fully. Just a fissure. Just enough for light to get through.
"I need to work on the prototype every night," he said. "For the next six weeks. That means less time on the steps. Less tea. Less —"
"Less Neruda arguments?"
"Unfortunately, yes."
She pretended to consider this. Tapped her chin. Furrowed her brow.
"I accept your terms," she said finally. "On one condition."
"What?"
"I help."
"You're a literature student."
"And you're an almost-engineer who quotes Faiz. We're both operating outside our disciplines." She squeezed his hand. "I can't build filters, but I can research. I can write your grant application. I can proofread, organize, bring you food so you don't starve in the lab." She paused. "I can be there, Arjun. Let me be there."
Let me be there.
Four words. Simple. Revolutionary.
For a man who had spent six years carrying everything alone — who had built his identity around the solitary act of endurance — the offer was both gift and threat. Accepting it meant admitting he couldn't do this alone. Admitting he needed someone. Admitting that the walls he'd built around himself weren't strength — they were prison.
He looked at Meera.
She looked back.
Patient. Fierce. Immovable.
"Okay," he said.
She smiled. The kind of smile that wars were fought for. The kind that could rebuild cities.
"Okay," she echoed.
That night, Arjun sat in the university lab for the first time. It was small, poorly equipped, and smelled of chemicals and ambition. He spread his calculations across the workbench — pages of equations, diagrams, material specifications. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead. The building was empty. The silence was profound.
He picked up a pencil.
And began.
Three floors above, in the university's administrative office, a man in an expensive suit was reviewing the enrollment records of one Arjun Malhotra. The man — thin, precise, forgettable — copied the information into a leather-bound notebook, made a phone call, and left.
Saxena walked through the empty campus with the unhurried stride of a man performing a routine task.
He reached the parking lot. Got into a black SUV. The driver — silent, professional — started the engine.
Saxena dialed.
"Sir. He's applying for the Sengupta Foundation grant. Water purification project."
On the other end, Vikram Singh Rathore was silent for five seconds. When he spoke, his voice carried the precise calmness of a surgeon selecting an instrument.
"Which foundation board member does the Rathore Group have dinner with next week?"
"Mr. Sengupta himself, sir. Thursday evening. Your regular table at the Bengal Club."
Another silence. Shorter this time.
"Good," Vikram said. "Let the boy build his little project. Let him pour everything into it." A pause. "Hope is heaviest right before you drop it."
The line went dead.
The SUV pulled out of the parking lot.
The campus was dark.
And in the basement lab, under buzzing fluorescent light, Arjun Malhotra worked on a prototype that would never be funded — not because it wasn't brilliant, but because brilliance, in a world owned by men like Vikram, was just another thing that could be bought, broken, and buried.
He didn't know this yet.
He was still building.
Still hoping.
Still counting stars named after a girl who loved him.
The clock on the lab wall ticked.
And the fracture — quiet, invisible, patient — widened by another inch.