The bus climbed the last ghat road into Jog a little after four in the evening, and Rohan pressed his forehead to the window the way he had done as a boy, though he was twenty-one now and told himself he was too old for it.
Ten years. He had counted them on the drive from Shivamogga, the way one counts steps on a staircase one has not climbed in a long time, unsure if the count will still be true.
The clouds sat low over the valley, the way they always did before the rain arrived properly, and somewhere beneath them the Sharavathi was falling four hundred feet into a gorge that never seemed to make peace with the noise of its own falling. He remembered that sound before he remembered almost anything else about this place — a sound that did not stop, not at night, not in the dry months, not ever.
He had been five when his father, transferred from Mysore, brought the family to this small hill town for a posting that was meant to last two years and stretched, unexpectedly, into six. He had been eleven when his father was transferred again, this time to a city so far away that Jog became, almost overnight, a place that existed only in memory.
He had not come back. Not once. Not for ten years.
He was coming back now for one reason, and he said the reason to himself again as the bus slowed at the stand: he wanted to see the man who had made those six years the best six years of his life.
He did not yet know that the town would not make this easy for him.