The gate clicked shut behind the last of them, and for a moment the four of us just stood there in the sudden quiet, surrounded by boxes that looked significantly less charming now that we were the ones responsible for unpacking them.
Shilpa clapped her hands once, sharp, like a general calling a meeting to order.
"Toh," she said, eyes gleaming with the terrifying energy of a woman who has just eaten a full meal and now wants to conquer a building. "Aaj raat se pehle yeh poora ghar set ho jaana chahiye. Hamara sweet apartment, hamari raaton raat ki mehnat."
("This whole house needs to be set up before tonight. Our sweet apartment, made with one night's hard work.")
She turned to me, grinning, hands already on her hips in warrior stance.
"Ready guys? Kas lo tumhari kamar."
("Ready, guys? Tighten your belts.")
"That's not even correct grammar," I muttered.
"Neither is your business plan, but here we are," she shot back, already dragging a box marked KITCHEN toward the kitchen with the single-minded fury of a woman on a deadline.
I looked at Neelam. Neelam looked at me. Neither of us said anything, because there was, genuinely, nothing to say to that.
We got to work.
What followed was three hours of organized chaos. Boxes ripped open, paper wrapping scattered like confetti from a celebration nobody planned, furniture dragged, argued over, dragged again in the opposite direction because apparently the first arrangement was "an insult to natural light," according to Shilpa. Kitchen shelves filled with steel containers that clanged like temple bells every time someone opened a cupboard too fast. Neelam humming under her breath while hanging curtains, occasionally breaking into actual song when she thought no one was listening. I wasn't listening. I was very obviously listening.
There's a particular kind of focus that excitement gives you, the kind that makes three hours disappear like thirty minutes. Nobody checked the time. Nobody complained about the ache building in their shoulders. We were building something, and buildings, real ones or the metaphorical kind, have a way of making tired people forget they're tired.
Somewhere outside, faint and rhythmic, a temple bell began to ring, the opening notes of the evening aarti drifting up through the open window along with the smell of someone's cooking dinner two floors down. We paused, all four of us, mid-task, and looked around.
The apartment looked back at us. Fully arranged. Sofas in their sideways-not-diagonal glory. Curtains hung slightly crooked in a way Shilpa swore was "intentional." Kitchen stocked. Boxes gone, folded flat and stacked by the door like the bones of the day we'd just survived.
It didn't look like a real estate transaction anymore. It looked like a home.
Nobody said anything grand about it. Nobody needed to.
"Bas," Shilpa said softly, wiping her hands on her dupatta. ("Done.")
We showered in shifts, ate a quiet, simple dinner standing half in the kitchen because nobody had the energy to properly set the table, and by unspoken agreement, decided against turning on the television or unpacking one more box or doing anything even resembling productive.
Sleep pulled at all of us the way gravity pulls at things that have finally, finally stopped fighting it.
I lay there in the dark of our new top-floor bedroom, the city glittering faintly through the window, half a crore poorer and infinitely richer in the ways that don't show up on paper, and thought, right before sleep took me under: worth it.
Every single rupee.